Review

**Build an Empire, Were it So Easy ** The Warrior’s apprentice takes a cocky 17 year old Miles as he machinates his way through warring factions to build a mercenary empire. From Miles’ initial failed leap of faith, I felt myself losing connection to both the characters and the world-building as every improbable and sub-optimal move led to spectacularly successful results. Would you jump off a wall too high to safely land knowing that you might break both your legs, just to make a point to a competitor that might not be paying attention? Do you want to read a full novel about somebody dumb enough to make that choice? ...

Skin Deep isn’t always Bad Bill Bryson is like a series lectures from the world’s ultimate science teacher. Like his previous science tome ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ he meanders through interesting facts telling facts about the body, dispelling common myths, and throwing in enough science history anecdotes to keep things interesting. It’s not that I learned very much from the book, but it is eminently snackable, and a reasonable second vantage for some of the topics covered in less skin deep treatments of specific parts of our biological hardware. One myth I do appreciate dispelling is that about cranial size and birth canal – it’s not about our big brains. ...

Placeholder. Great book.

End of the World was Boring The fall of man was multidimensional. Ancestral primates fell out of the trees, then they fell from plant eating to meat eating then they fell from instinct into reason and thus into technology… Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment to an anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future. Dystopia is the easiest form of societal criticism for mediocre writing. Take the flaws of a society, dial them up and add societal repercussions, and voila! You’ve created a dystopian world. Unfortunately this is like trying to build an airplane by scaling up a dragonfly 100x, without a nuanced understanding or at least thesis on the underlying causes of current societal ills it’s easy for a dystopia to feel cardboard. ...

** Overly Entangled ** The chemists of the natural world get short shrift. The paucity of research about fungi belies the fact that there are somewhere between 2.2m and 3.4m fungi species, compared to the 6-10m known plant species, even in the non-motile biology world, plant-centrism abounds. Entangled Life aims to remediate that imbalance, with overly entangled results. Like any discussion of fungi I’ve ever read, the author starts with truffles, a fungi that solves the biological problem of signaling for animals while underground with pungent odors now valued in markets across the globe. ...

Enjoyed this much more than Hail Mary…. I guess if I want science better to go straight for the opinionated source.

politics by a non politician who becomes a politician fed up with politics. good read

** Space Sucks, Science is Fun ** Every science nerd dreams that someday their years of learning esoteric knowledge will pay off. So for many, the real world, void of advanced math and driven by relationships and perception, is a disappointment. Andy Weir’s niche is science-fantasy to fill this gap, a high budget MacGyver where the protagonist can ‘science the shit’ out of any situation. While Hail Mary makes no reference to the Martian, it is a continuation of the same premise. Wise-cracking science geek Ted Lasso finds himself alone in space with enough tools to try hypotheses and find creative solutions. In a separate substory, a competent bureaucracy races against the clock in order to make a last ditch effort to provide assistance from the safe confines of earth. This setup plays to Weir’s strengths: no worldbuilding, no relationships or character development, only science, plot, and wisecracks. ...

Immersion reporting is much better than the regular sort, and it shows in this book. I’ve spent about 4 years houseless, and much of what the author wrote about rings true. more to come

**No Lasting Impression ** It’s harder than expected to write a review of Islington after a few months. I certainly remember the main characters, but like paint after too much mixing, all the characters have bled together into a brown shade of grim determination. With sufficient time travel and interwoven plots, it’s difficult to even tell the books apart. Much of the book is rereading the same story from a new vantage in time, with the reader adding pieces to previous knowledge, rather than navigating a new plot. The extended sequences in a purgatory-like time capsule were my favorite part of the book, if only to escape the steadfast drumbeat of sacrifice, speeches, and pontifications on free will. Overall passable, but didn’t leave an impression. ...