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...
A Blink of the Screen is a collection of 32 pieces of short fiction by Terry Pratchett. The oldest story, The Hades Business, dates from 1963, when STP was 13, and the newest, Sir Joshua Easement: A Biographical Note, is from 2010/2011. The shortest piece in this collection...
Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve is a park/forest in the center of San Francisco.
Since it’s right between Twin Peaks and Golden Gate Park, visitors to San Francisco often ignore it. Even a local friend recently asked me about this new-to-her park, which was a good reminder t...
The Correspondent is an epistolary novel, which means it is a story written in the form of correspondance.. It is narrated through the letters and emails to and from the retired, reclusive courthouse clerk Sybil van Antwerp.
The book has a few main storylines about Sybil’s ...
I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s books since 2017, when a friend recommended Little Brother. Little Brother was indeed right up my alley, so I’ve been reading many of Cory’s works since, often through his Kickstarter campaigns. Since 2022 he’s written a string of non-ficti...
I first spotted Dungeon Crawler Carl (DCC) in bookstores in the early 2020s, and started seeing more and more of it over the years, while also getting recommendations for it from friends. The DCC LitRPG series consists of 8 books so far, and will likely finish at around 10 ...
This is the second - and so far last - book about a private investigator in a Southern Californian coastal town. The books are based on a TV-series starring Kristen Bell, and are set between the Veronica Mars movie and its 2019 revival season. Mr. Kiss and Tell follows a fe...
Lawrence Lessig is a well-known Harvard Law professor, digital rights pioneer, and founding board member of Creative Commons. He’s written a number of books on the subject of digital rights, and 2004’s Free Culture covers the history, the early-2000s landscape, and the pote...
Aan het einde van de oorlog (“At the End of the War”) is a historical novel by Bert Natter set during a single day near the end of World War II in and around a Nazi concentration camp. It won several literary prizes in the Netherlands, and is only available in Dutch for now...
The Veronica Mars TV show, about a teenage private eye in a SoCal town, ran from 2004-2007, and was the first major role for Kristen Bell. A feature film (that really felt like a double-episode of the show) was released in 2014, and there was a final season in 2019. Between...
Tooth and Nail is the third book in the Mutants and Modified series that takes inspiration from classic fairy tales but then puts them in a late Victorian steampunk era. The result is fast-paced YA pulp, but I enjoyed the books so far.
In Tooth & Nail, we follow Aurelia...
A friend casually mentioned that a good friend of hers had written a book that I might like, and that’s how I ended up reading The Humem State. It explores how our online presences (what Brook calls Extended Presence, or EP) are evolving into independent representations of ...
Open Heart, located at the Bay End of The PIER, welcomes all guests to PIER 39. Hand-painted by local artist Patrick Dintino. Open Heart symbolizes the openness of our city’s heart, as well as the idea of falling in love with and leaving your heart in San Francisco. The sc...
Hogfather is the 20th book in Pratchett’s Discworld series, which means that by now the main characters and races in the world, as well as its mythology, have been well established. Hogswatch is Discworld’s version of Christmas, and Hogfather is its equivalent of Santa Clau...
The Murderbot Diaries is a sci-fi book series about a socially anxious security android that protects an expanding group of humans as it uncovers conspiracies and fights evil corporations. As the series progresses, Murderbot’s identity emerges and evolves.
In this 7th book ...
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