I'm a husband, father, author, cyclist, sailor, travel addict, and Silicon Valley software engineer. I've written 4 books and actively review books on this blog.

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The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories is a short story collection by Walter Jon Williams. The titular story wasn't all the exciting or interesting. I guess what happened between when it was written and today is that global heating became a much bigger problem and famine became a much less problem, and nowadays we understand that the underlying cause (inequality) isn't a technological problem…
The Fortunate Fall was ChatGPT Pro's recommendation after I asked it to find similar novels to There is no Antimemetics Division. I got even more excited when I read Jo Walton's introduction, which praised the book claiming that it deserved to be an important book instead of becoming an obscure piece. At first, the book seemed promising, since it clearly anticipated the rise of the social media…
Slow Gods is Claire North's "science fiction" allegorical novel set in a far future space. I use "science fiction" in quotes because there's really very little science in this novel. It's more like a fantasy novel with science fictional trappings. The premise here is that the FTL travel requires pilots to confront a Lovecraftian type horror during the traverse, to the point where most pilots go…
Do Hard Things has the subtitle that it's about how the conventional idea of toughness is wrong. I picked it up expecting some wishy washy reference to literature like grit (which has long been debunked), and was very surprised when it turned out to actually say a ton of sensible things. (Management books, like parenting books tend not to be sensible) For instance: Authoritarian parenting leads to…
After reading There is no Anti-Memetics Division , I went to ChatGPT Pro and asked for other books like it that I might have missed over the years. It gave me a bunch of books I'd already read, as well as books I'd already bounced off of, but one book that hit was The Gone World , published in 2018 and apparently won a few awards but somehow never got my attention. The book revolves around Shannon…
I’m generally a fan of Walter Jon Williams. His worlds are quite well constructed, and his characters interesting, many quite nuanced. Voice of the Whirlwind is set in his Cyberpunk universe. The protagonist, Steward, is a highly trained super soldier fanatic who’s brought back to life after his Alpha (the original) died. Apparently, the brain backups weren’t made frequently, so he has a memory…
How To Win A Trade War is a breezily written, conversational book about trade economics. At its best, it provides cool statistics about trade that you didn't know. For instance: When the EU dropped barriers to trade in services among its members, it became easier for, say, Polish plumbers to accept contracts in France at lower wages, costing their French competitors work. One study found that…
Our Dollar, Your Problem is Ken Rogoff's book about the dollar's primacy as the global currency. How did it come about? How does the US benefit from its use as the primary currency? And what are the burdens that the US bear because the rest of the world feels obliged to hold such dollar reserves. Ken Rogoff was the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, so he's credible and…
First Light is a book about how the first stars formed, and how they're quite different from our sun and the stars being formed today. I read it on a plane and it was relatively light and didn't keep me from napping when I needed to. The earliest stars were formed when most of the universe was either Hydrogen or Helium. By definition there weren't other elements since those had yet to have been…
I bought There Is No Antimemetics Division thinking that I'd read it on a plane flight, but no such luck! As soon as I got a couple of chapters in, I just had to keep reading until I finished the novel. The book is properly described as a Cthulhu Mythos horror, drawing from the same genre of horror about "unspeakables", "unmentionables", and other types of horror. But it's written by a software…
Going into Frieren Vol 11 I finally got to the point where Macht is killed and the heroes are victorious over a "midas touch" demon as well as Solitar. We then go into an extended time travel sequence where Frieren swaps places with herself from prior to the series beginning (i.e., during the quest to destroy the Demon King), and gets to use her knowledge from the future to help her previous party…
Humble bundle had a collection of Robert Silverberg's books on sale, and I had fond memories of Lord Valentine's Castle , so I bought them and started reading the book I had fond memories of. The book feels a bit cliche now, with an amnesiac protagonist wandering around and then getting picked up by a group of jugglers when he demonstrates talent juggling. Over time, he discovers that he's the…
I kept checking out Frieren - Beyond Journey's End from the library, even though the books are quite slow moving, and sometimes the writer seems to have written himself into a corner. Getting to the end of the "Class 1 Mage" saga, the author seemed to change his mind on having a Battle Royale type reality show face-off and had each candidate interviewed by the master wizardess (who's an elf who…
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest was the last book in the Millenium trilogy that Steig Larsson wrote before he died. The first book in the series was like a locked room mystery (though its setup was unlike any I'd seen). The second book started like a police procedural and ended up being a thriller. This last book started out like an espionage story, ran through the middle like a courtroom…
I hadn't read The Girl Who Played With Fire for so long that it felt like a fresh novel. While the first book introduced us to Lisbeth Salander, this second book is her origin story. It's setup at first as a mystery novel, with a couple (who're introduced to us with sufficient detail to make us care and want to identify with them) who gets murdered early on, along with a character from the first…
The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions showed up in my kindle library, probably because another family member checked it out from the local library. I read it in a handful of days because it was relatively easy to read (no equations), and mostly covered stuff I already knew, from Newton to Einstein to Hubble to the Big Bang Theory. Towards the end of the book, as she discusses the Big Bang…
Philip Pullman rewrites a selection of stories from the Brothers Grimm . These aren't embellishments, as far as I can tell he didn't add any new twists to the original or expand on the story. The tone is "just so", the way fairy tales are written, and each one is at most 5 pages of reading material. He doesn't go into what his selection criteria is (the criteria for the last one is explained,…
From Star to Superstar is a guide for Asian Americans for college applications. While demographic transition is likely to make colleges easier to get into in general, the opposite is true for the elite colleges, which draw from an international pool of students and are generally immune to US demographics. This book acknowledges the unspoken truth of college admissions, which is that Asian boys are…
It's easy for me to be cynical about professional cycling as a sport. When I read that the speed of the current top racers are higher than during the EPO-doping era, I find it hard to believe that the sport is clean. Racing Through the Dark is David Millar's memoir about his cycling career. Like many professional athletes, he graduated high school and proceeded to aim directly for a career as a…
Competitive Cyclist/Backcountry was offering a 2024 Santa Cruz Blur C at $4300 . That in itself was a good deal, but what sealed it was that they offered an upgrade to T-type transmission for $800, and I would get to keep the old non-T-type parts for converting one of my other bikes, which I've been wanting to do for quite some time. I will commend Backcountry for their excellent customer service.…
Frieren - Beyond Journey's End had a premise that I found intriguing, so I checked out 5 digital volumes from the library onto my Kindle Scribe. The graphic novel volume starts with the end of a big adventure = the Elf mage Frieren and her fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. They are hailed as heroes, and part ways. Frieren, being an Elf, does not age or…
More Everything Forever is Adam Becker's critique of the future as touted by our current batch of billionaires --- Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman. These billionaires frequently tout a future of space travel (colonizing Mars), or uploading into cyberspace (immortality) or any number of exotic fantasies rather than solving the immediate problems here on Earth now: poverty, inequality, and climate…
Bicycle technology has evolved significantly since I built my custom touring bike in 2008. Back then, I used medium-reach caliper brakes (57mm) and a triple chainring (24x39x50) with a 9-speed 11-34 cassette. These brakes limited tire clearance to 35mm with fenders. After Avocet closed, quality tires wider than 28mm were scarce, so I rarely exceeded 25mm. When spec'ing a custom Lynskey for my…
I've been using the M5100 rear derailleur and cassette on my touring/commute road bike since the 2021 rebuild after the frame cracked and was replaced under warranty. The 1x philosophy has proved correct: the gear range is wide (I only ran out of high gears trying to hang with a fast pack), there's only one shifter to keep track of, and you never drop the chain because the front derailleur was…
Same as Ever proports to give you an overview of timeless observations about humanity. It makes the point that you can't really predict the future, but the motivations that drive human beings aren't ever going to change and is a better reliable guide to investing or thinking about the future than focusing on news stories. To me, it reads like a collection of platitudes, not backed up by studies or…