After avoiding the hit series Dungeon Crawler Carl for a few years, I finally gave in a few months ago and started reading. The first book was published in 2020 and the series now consists of 8 books, in which the survivors of an alien attack on Earth descend into an 18-lev...
After avoiding the hit series Dungeon Crawler Carl for a few years, I finally gave in a few months ago and started reading. The first book was published in 2020 and the series now consists of 8 books, in which the survivors of an alien attack on Earth descend into an 18-lev...
In my quest to read/listen to all of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels in descending order of series popularity/ranking, I just finished Maskerade. It is the 5th book in the 6-book Witches series, and the 18th Discworld novel overall.
In book 4 ([Lords and Ladies][book4]),...
When I happened to be at Union Square recently, I noticed that the Butterflight heart on the southwest corner is gone and have been replaced by Outerlands by artist Gina Teichert.
There isn’t a lot of information about this one, but like all of them… it’s pretty pretty. 😍
I’ve recently wondered multiple times: “How did this book make it onto my reading list?” and this was one such case. When I looked it up, it turned out this was included for free in my Amazon Prime subscription - so that, combined with my lack of attention to its genre, exp...
I’ve recently wondered multiple times: “How did this book make it onto my reading list?” and this was one such case. When I looked it up, it turned out this was included for free in my Amazon Prime subscription - so that, combined with my lack of attention to its genre, exp...
This is the fourth and final book in C.I. Chevron’s Mutants and Modifieds series that reimagines classic fairy tales in a steampunk setting. Like most of the books before it, Pride and Pistons is set in a late 19th-century London that is filled with mechanical inventions an...
While Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld series, he also wrote a decent number of books outside of the Discworld universe. Dodger came out in 2012, after The Long Earth (another non-Discworld book, that I have yet to read) and before Raising Steam. At this stag...
In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger explores how we got to the current state of politics: everything feels intensely political, yet very little changes. He does this by looking at four historical phases:
mass politics (1914-1989, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall) with its...
In general, I’ve been lucky with books that I pretty absent-mindedly add to my reading list. After I really enjoyed watching the Veronica Mars TV show and movie, and listening to the Veronica Mars audiobooks1 earlier this year, this book at a glance seemed like a no-brainer...
I first encountered Florecita Panaderia, in its original location in a Bryant street alley. I’d been walking through the Inner Mission, wanted a pastry, but didn’t feel like Tartine (whose large Manufactory is around the corner). Florecita’s pan dulce was quite good, but som...
Parable of the Talents started showing up in my book recommendations and top X lists regularly in the past year and a half. The book was first published in 1998, and its recent resurgence likely has to do with its narrative: a social and economic collapse of the United Stat...
I first heard of Slaughterhouse-Five back in my teens, when it was on the allowed-reading list for English classes in my Dutch high school. It took me four decades, but I finally got to it. 😅
Based on Vonnegut’s experience as a POW during the bombing of Dresden in WWII, it tells the story of Billy Pilgrim. The book tells of Billy’s war experience, but also of his experience with alien abduction and with time travel to different phases of his own life. Moving non-linearly through Billy’s life, the book mixes war memoir, science fiction, and dark comedy.
As explained in the introduction, Vonnegut struggled for a long time to write Slaughterhouse-Five. I found it an interesting read, and the absurd mixture of styles made it easier to deal with his lived experience and the absurdities of war.
Lords and Ladies is the fourth Discworld novel centered on the Lancre witches, and picks right up after Witches Abroad. In this book, young witch Magrat is preparing to marry King Verence, but Lancre is invaded by elves (the titular lords and ladies). It all reeks of Shakes...
Science fiction short stories are one of my favorite “genres”, especially when they explore an alternative reality where only one or a few aspects of our current reality are changed, such as in this short story by John Scalzi.
The premise is that people can travel back in t...
The Amber Spyglass is the last book in Pullman’s oft-praised His Dark Materials trilogy, and seems to be the most divisive of them. The first book, The Golden Compass, introduced the initial world and its “magic” system, while the second book, The Subtle Knife, expanded int...
Crisis engineering is the practice of navigating high-stakes crises, understanding why complex systems fail, restoring shared clarity, and using disruption as an opportunity for lasting improvement. The book is written by a former government CTO and two former Google SREs1,...
The Moustache is a story about a man who shaves his moustache on a whim one morning, only to have his wife, colleagues and friends insist that he’s never had a moustache. What begins as a small joke ends up with the man spiraling out of control. Remembered trips that apparently never happened, friends that apparently never existed, etc.
The book explores how having one’s own memories denied by others may affect a person’s sanity. In itself this is an interesting concept, and in places the story is a real page-turner. But in other places I found the writing boring and repetitive, like the protagonist repeatedly obsessing over how others might be plotting against him. This could still have been a 3-star read for me, except for the last two pages, where the book suddenly takes a turn that left a bad taste in my mouth.
In my continuing quest to read Pratchett’s Discworld books, starting from the highest rated subseries and working backwards, I am now going through the Witches works and just finished Witches Abroad. There is no Stephen Briggs narration of this one, so I listened to Indira ...
The His Dark Materials trilogy often ranks as one of the greatest young adult and fantasy book series ever written. It’s a coming-of-age story set in a series of parallel universes. The first book (The Golden Compass) follows 12-year-old Lyra in her steampunk-like world whe...
Thanks to NetGalley and Minotaur Books, who provided an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.
After The Correspondent, this is the second epistolary novel I’ve read this year. Is there a 2026 trend that I don’t know about? 🤔 Mother Dearest is told primar...
Bret Hart was an active pro-wrestler from 1978 until his retirement in 2000. He first became famous in WWF (now WWE) as The Hitman, one half of The Hart Foundation, together with Jim The Anvil Neidhart, before becoming one of the promotion’s biggest singles stars.
In this a...
After Yellowface and The Poppy War Trilogy, Babel is the third book by R.F. Kuang that I’ve read. In Babel, a Chinese orphan is brought to 19th-century Oxford to study translation and magical silver-working. As he uncovers the university’s role in British imperialism, he mu...
Expeditionary Force is by now a 19-book series that follows a US soldier (Joe Bishop) when Earth gets pulled into an interstellar conflict. Joe discovers an ancient AI of mysterious origin (which he names Skippy), who is as sarcastic as he is brilliant.
In this first book i...
I first discovered Ian Bogost through his writing about games, shortly after he became “internet famous” for creating Cow Clicker, a satirical Facebook game about… clicking cows. He now writes for The Atlantic and has just published the book The Small Stuff: How to Lead a M...
For most of my life I’ve been a reader. As a child, I would go to the library at least once a week, often twice, and each time I would go home with the maximum number of books I was allowed to check out.
It all started with physical books of course, of the dead tree type, bu...
The Golden Compass has been showing up in my (automated) recommendations for a long time, so I decided to finally read it. It’s the first book of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy, published between 1995 and 2000.
The book follows 11-year-old Lyra, who i...
The Martian Chronicles is a collection of standalone stories about humans colonizing Mars. The stories form a loosely connected multi-year chronicle tracing the arrival of the first expeditions through the eventual abandonment of most human settlements. While the book is cl...
I mostly know David Sedaris from the fact that he once wrote about the Dutch Sinterklaas phenomenon in Six to Eight Black Men, and we have that book in a cabinet, but The Land and Its People is the first book of his I’ve read. As is typical of Sedaris, it’s a collection of ...
Although I discovered Brandon Sanderson’s writing relatively late and still have plenty of his prolific output to explore, I try to limit myself to one of his books per year. That’s because the books in The Stormlight Archive series are all very, very long and tend to disru...
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