Review

** Press president, buried by press ** This biography makes you root for Harding as a person more than most presidents. The author’s core project—rehabilitating a reputation long distorted by headlines rather than historians—largely works. It helps that the scandals that came to define him erupted after his death and never actually involved him. Yet for a century the narrative stuck, a reminder that journalism can outshine history, whether for good or ill. ...

Will of the Many Worlds James Islington has always been good at magical machinery—plots that lock cleanly into place, timelines that click. The Licanius Trilogy proved he could design a system. What it didn’t always deliver was texture. The Strength of the Few does. The edges are sharper, the characters less muted, and the whole thing moves with a confidence that suggests Islington has found his register. The premise leans closer to Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter than to traditional fantasy. The book treats reality like a set of adjoining rooms, each with its own moral pressure. ...

What a phrase! But upon purchasing the book i realize it’s awfully short. Then i discover the title’s provenance: not the author. The writing style is awfully hurried. Listicles and factoids later, this pattern matches to the disappointing genre of: (i was bad at this then got therapy which helped so now im writing a book about it) Christian anecdotes don’t help. By chapter two i’m out. Let’s try the teacher dallas willard rather than his acolyte.

** Incomplete Selves Across Time ** My read of Amber Spyglass 20 years ago was less a story and more an involuntary life timestamp. I remember where I was when I finished it: a long, uninterrupted binge read, the kind of marathon read that leaves you emptied out and unsure what to name the feeling. The book left a residue of longing—emotional but not easily mapped to words. In deference to Pullman’s ability, The Rose Field is story I considered taking vacation to finish, but the ambient velocity of the AI world makes such indulgence unrealistic. Pullman writes about metamorphosis through loss; The image of torn rose fields lingers because it mirrors something real: the sense that progress often shears away pieces you meant to keep. Pullman’s trilogy is nominally about worlds in collision, but its deeper target is identity across discontinuities. Reading it brings the question: who was I, and who am I now? ...

** Instant Noodles in Space ** Ocean’s Godori and Teo’s Durumi imagine a near future where Koreans have taken over space and brought their culture with them. The mood is familiar to anybody that has seen Firefly. High-functioning angst. Tight crews. Long pauses between sentences. It’s less space opera than K-drama with airlocks. During Ocean’s Godori, I kept thinking of the rise and fall of Sanctuary moon from Murderbot, as the series (and fictional series) lean on worn components. The villain in Durumi is a familiar type: technological genius, convinced on merging consciousness, indifferent to the people who have to die to make it happen. I guess evil Ilya Sutskever is a trope. ...

Milquetoast Time Travel Sea of Tranquility reads like an extension of a Chiang short story—minus Chiang’s good-natured acceptance of the inexplicable. It’s all premise, little awe. For me at least, the “casual time travel” genre is already familiar. Tranquility is closer to Blackout/All Clear than Cloud Atlas. The problem isn’t prose but premise: if time travel were possible, would society’s first instinct really be “historical research?” The novel gestures vaguely toward the simulation hypothesis, with the logic of: “there’s something we can’t understand, therefore we live in a simulation.” If that were how science worked, we’d have proven the simulation theory already. ...

** The History Scholar Who Lost History ** There are few presidents whose stories read like tragedies: Lincoln, Nixon, LBJ. Woodrow Wilson is one of them. What should have been his culminating achievement died on the vine, and for his impact on history, he died with it. Wilson’s arc—from lawyer to immensely successful academic to successful politician—commands respect. He stands with Obama in a field of the most academic presidents. His legislative record before WWI is something history usually forgets, as is his vision of the president as prime minister. Cooper’s biography does a great job detailing just how much America tried to stay out of WWI, and how Wilson is much less passive than biographies from Theodore Roosevelt’s perspective make him out to be. ...

** Yearning for Anarchy ** “Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” * It took two attempts to get through The Dispossessed. To be honest, the pacing drags, and switching between narrative arcs across chapters is jarring—especially in audio. But beneath the uneven rhythm lies something rare in science fiction: an attempt to realize in narrative form a society organized on different moral terms. ...

The Short Microcosm War The Short Victorious War isn’t the best Honor Harrington novel, but it’s the most representative—an attempt at Clausewitz in space, with bureaucratic infighting and political vanity, where the reader can safely predict the ending. Weber’s focus on Haven’s mid-level politics isn’t the sharpest, but the sheer scope of topics that he sets up or attempts to touch on in exposition is impressive. Battles are lopsided by design; Honor always fights with a few hidden advantages. It works, but predictability dulls the edge. Young, the antagonist, is pure caricature. ...

A TikTok feed in book form—flashy, shallow, instantly forgettable. Unoriginal but entertaining.