Reviews and Comments

An extremely influential work that I should have listed here long ago.

I heard this was very influential for C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Clive Barker. I'm curious to see what's in here, given that it's just over a century old.

This book covers the technology and tradecraft a reporter would need to safely handle leaked data. I've worked in this area since 2009 and this is hands down the best resource I've ever seen - a comprehensive exposition on the methods with lots of easy to follow hands on exercises. I already knew about 80% of what Lee suggests, the things I personally found most valuable were the introduction to Docker Compose, as well as the Aleph and Dangerzone tools. I run a Substack where I publish on similar matters, I'm used to writing for those who've newly developed an urge to dig deeper, and Lee does an excellent job of picking starting points accessible to all, then building on them.

I read this book not long after it was publish, maybe the fall of 2003. I recall it being a good read - the U.S. had pranced into Afghanistan without much of a plan, then blundered into Iraq. I never imagined breaking contact with the irregular forces of Afghanistan would be a humiliating retreat twenty years later, but I had already begun to suspect it would be bad. The lessons in this book had to be relearned the hard way by coalition forces. Asymmetric conflicts are going to be an ongoing problem and it's worth revisiting this one and comparing it to the collective war diary of NATO forces in the country that began twenty years later.

Unger comes up with a lot of intriguing stuff about Russians in New York during the Cold War, but there's a lot of build up in this book and then ... no solid conclusions.

Just getting started on this one.

I don't recall how I discovered Octavia E. Butler twenty years ago but I'm pretty sure I noticed N.K. Jemisin thanks to a review in the Washington Post that compared her work to Butler's Parables books.

The Fifth Season is the beginning of an epic, laying the foundation of a world with a magic system and a hierarchical guild that employs it. A world, like ours, that is changing, changing in ways the humans within it do not expect and may not survive. If you're watching fantasy series via streaming ... the world of The Wheel of Time is probably the best match in terms of feel and scope.

My first exposure to the Eight Verses of Training the Mind was nearly twenty years ago. I'm pretty sure I first read this book well before the listed 2017 publication date, but as it has "New" in the title, I guess it must have been the prior version? I had it in paperback, now it's a Kindle thing. The more time I spend reading parts of it and ignoring the news of the day, the better each day seems.

Languishing in my Kindle queue, I've only read the first two pages just to see what it's like.

I find Bookwyrm to be confusing, this is in my Kindle, not reading yet, but I wanted to update my book list.

This is a sort of bible for various flavors of anti-government extremists in the U.S. I read it for the sake of background - it's ... cheesy ... dated ... lowbrow ... but the serialized structure provides the reader with an engagement ladder that could end in violence.