Weber’s Charcoal Grilling: The Art of Cooking with Live Fire by Jamie Purviance

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a good book with a lot of useful info if you’re into charcoal grilling and BBQing. It also has a lot of recipes. I’ve tried a few and I found them tasty. Added a bunch to my list of recipes to try. If this were my first BBQ cookbook, I probably would have rated it a 4 or 5. It has beautiful photos of the end result and a dozen recipes by award-winning grillers and pitmasters. But I’ve been spoiled by Meathead’s cookbook. Meathead’s cookbook is incredibly comprehensive and he used to work in the newspaper industry so he’s a wiz at explaining things to the reader. Compared to that book, this one is OK. It’s also a lot less scientific - relying more on hand tests than thermometers.

Golden Son by Pierce Brown

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

To be fair to Mr. Brown, I find it hard to fairly rate second books in a trilogy. They have to both be the middle part of what is essentially one large story split into 3 books (or pdfs or epubs) and also as a standalone book have a beginning, climax, and resolution. So this tends to leave them a little unfulfilling. I’ve noticed (and mentioned in a few reviews) that with most modern trilogies the first book is more of a complete book in order to get the reader hooked into the series. The second one seems to be disappointing because it can’t resolve anything or else there wouldn’t need to be a third book. So this book might have a lower rating than I would rate the trilogy as a whole.

The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was a free giveaway for Tor’s ebook club

This book checks a lot of boxes for me: thriller, science fiction, multiple universes, alternate histories. But I just couldn’t get into it as much as I wanted to. I think it was mostly around the way Stross writes his dialogue. I can’t quite figure out exactly what it is about it, but it just didn’t do it for me.

Buying Time by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Earlier this year I read The Forever War for the first time after having read Starship Troopers. So when there was a Humble Bundle with a bunch of books I didn’t care about, but which had a book by Joe Haldeman, I jumped on the bundle.

Having read these two books, the biggest thing I’ve noticed abut Joe is that he is GREAT at world-building. It doesn’t mean the story suffers, but I almost want to read more to wander around his worlds than I do for the story to continue. What’s the world here? Some scientists invent The Styleman procedure - undergoing this procedure reverses the aging process. As long as you go through it every 10 years, you can remain a perpetual 20-year-old (body-wise). That, by itself, would be a near world. But in order to get the initial financing to setup The Styleman Institute, they wanted to use it to redistribute wealth in the world. The process would cost $1 million dollars and the person who did it would have to give away all their money and posessions to the institute, which would then spread it around various charities. This is also a world where people take pleasure trips out into space and where there are lawless colonies among the asteroids. (And also on Florida)

Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling by Meathead Goldwyn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are literally tons of BBQ cookbooks out there. Why this one? Well, Meathead does something most of them don’t - he backs up his techniques with science. BBQ has existed as long as mankind so a lot of what we do is just father->son or mother->daughter (or some combination of gen 1 to gen 2) and a lot of it is wrong. Humans suck at intuition. So Meathead along with Dr Blonder use science to backup their techniques and ideas. This leads to 2 great benefits.

Race for the Iron Throne: Political and Historical Analysis of “A Game of Thrones” by Steven Attewell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I heard about this book when Steve Attewell appeared on Boars, Gore, and Swords - my favorite Game of Thrones podcast. On that episode he mentioned how both GoT and the books pull from a variety of historical periods, not just dark ages England. The fact that he is a real historian analyzing the books seemed too great to pass up so I got the book.

The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While reading The Lives of Tao I kept having this nagging feeling in my head that there was something familliar aobut this story. Then it hit me, it seems as though Wesley Chu was given the writing prompt, take Scientology and make it into a viable science fiction story: Aliens in people’s bodies responsible for the pain in the world.

Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Weinersmith acknowledges on the last page that he may have ignored notes from PhDs to make a joke work. That said, there’s enough truth in here that every one I’ve shared the section of their degree with has found it really funny. It’s a quick read and a great gift for the science nerd in your life.

The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is like God Is Disappointed in You except each book of the Bible is only 1-2 setences. Like the other book, the humor comes from finding a funny way to express what’s actually in there. I think this book (if you bought the e-book version) makes for a bunch of fun pages to put up on your cubicle or print up in a calendar with one book per month for a few years. But I enjoyed GiDiY more because the extra text allowed the satire to be a bit deeper by being even more truthful to content of the Bible. That said, it was pretty fun to read the entire Bible in about five minutes.