I teach Python programming for work, but my reading is largely about world betterment, self improvement, and interesting, insightful, or fun fiction. I pretty much exclusively listen to audiobooks.
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At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training …
Mortality is unsettling. This book was an opportunity to rehearse the end of a life. It was emotional, moving, and sometimes profound.
While reading this book I realized I have so many assumptions about drugs that I've never really questioned. This has definitely given me things to think about, including the simplistic framing of "drugs are bad" when it comes to cocaine, heroine, and even meth and PCP (which I really had assumed were simply bad).
I read the audiobook and I needed to make sure I had space to think while listening. This book was heavy. Eating disorders, violence, addiction, money, gambling, and other traumas.
Kiese's wiring and narrating always keep me engaged. That's partly what made this such an emotional read.
I really enjoyed Omphalos in particular.
Others that I'd listen to again are "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom", "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", and "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling".
The length of the stories was all over the place, which was a bit distracting at times.
I really enjoyed this one. I found myself reflecting on this in between reading (listening) sessions.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, an …
I definitely started confused. I eventually figured out what the story was about and realized that I both need to focus more than many fiction books I read and that most of the details thrown at me were relevant to the narrator but not to the overall story so I didn't need to focus as much as I'd initially thought.
It did eventually become more enjoyable and more understandable so I read until the end and I'm glad I did.
The story will likely stick with me, mostly because I like this sort of "lost in another world" story. If you like Dr. Who maybe you'll like this?
Bloodchild and Other Stories is the only collection of science fiction stories and essays written …
Before this, I'd only read longer novels by Octavia Butler.
These short stories were great. A couple were more gruesome than I expected and each was set in its own interesting reality.
The audiobook was short (each story was very short) and I really enjoyed listening to these stories.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and …
The second book in the Lilith's Brood trilogy, this story takes place years after the …
This book follows Lilith's son, who is half human and half Oankali. He has a foot in both worlds and his journey is very different from Lilith's. I appreciate that this book can be both entertaining and thoughtful. It doesn't force you to think but it does inspire reflection.
There was a lot of useful advice in here that I either hadn't considered, didn't have a name for, or knew about but could definitely use reminding.
I wish I had taken more notes and done more of the exercises in the book. It would be nice to internalize some of these ideas a bit more.
How to Keep House While Drowning will introduce you to six life-changing principles that will revolutionize the way you approach …
Gender, sexuality, climate change, parenting, religion, inter-species symbiosis, inter-species relationships, corporations, governments, communes, and more.
I enjoyed this book, but it did feel like there was a LOT going on sometimes. Occasionally rabbit hole on a particular topic went a bit deeper than felt warranted. For example I appreciated how much gender played a role in this book, but some of the discussions about gender signaling and pronouns felt very lengthy. I imagine if this were made into a movie those discussions wouldn't make the cut and the viewer would simply be expected to pick up on those elements of world building (there would be more showing of how different societies handle gender and less explaining of it).
I also wished some of the characters had a bit more depth at times. At times this felt a bit like a long short story. I still enjoyed it though.
I appreciated …
Gender, sexuality, climate change, parenting, religion, inter-species symbiosis, inter-species relationships, corporations, governments, communes, and more.
I enjoyed this book, but it did feel like there was a LOT going on sometimes. Occasionally rabbit hole on a particular topic went a bit deeper than felt warranted. For example I appreciated how much gender played a role in this book, but some of the discussions about gender signaling and pronouns felt very lengthy. I imagine if this were made into a movie those discussions wouldn't make the cut and the viewer would simply be expected to pick up on those elements of world building (there would be more showing of how different societies handle gender and less explaining of it).
I also wished some of the characters had a bit more depth at times. At times this felt a bit like a long short story. I still enjoyed it though.
I appreciated the reference to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower that was thrown in somewhere: "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change."
I do wish the aliens were more alien (like Octavia Butler's Dawn). That would have made some of the alien-human contact moments much more challenging to write though.
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled …
That was a fun book. The book doesn't answer any questions and that's okay.
It's meta in at least a few ways: three pandemics are referenced, including COVID, and there's an author reflecting on having written about a pandemic while living through one (and Emily St. John Mandel wrote Station Eleven).
"Dry empirical questions are seldom as exciting as political crusades or ringing moral pronouncements, but empirical questions are questions that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well-being of others rather than in exciting our sense of moral superiority for ourselves. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what sounds good and what works. The former may be sufficient for purposes of politics of moral preening but not for the economic advancement of people in general or the poor in particular."
Thomas Sowell is obviously conservative (in at least many ways that we use that word in the US today) and he obviously believes that economic thinking is incredibly important for those interested in the betterment of humans as individuals and humanity as a whole.
As much as I enjoy Freakonomics-like pop economics books, I think this gave me much more to think about.
If you're not …
"Dry empirical questions are seldom as exciting as political crusades or ringing moral pronouncements, but empirical questions are questions that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well-being of others rather than in exciting our sense of moral superiority for ourselves. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what sounds good and what works. The former may be sufficient for purposes of politics of moral preening but not for the economic advancement of people in general or the poor in particular."
Thomas Sowell is obviously conservative (in at least many ways that we use that word in the US today) and he obviously believes that economic thinking is incredibly important for those interested in the betterment of humans as individuals and humanity as a whole.
As much as I enjoy Freakonomics-like pop economics books, I think this gave me much more to think about.
If you're not accustomed to delving into economic conservatism, I highly recommend reading this book and I also highly recommend pacing yourself. Sowell doesn't hide his personal feelings and if you disagree with some of his judgements, try to make sure you don't entirely throw out his line of reasoning along with his conclusions.
If you're a US-style conservative, I highly recommend reading this book as well. This book contains arguments for free trade, open immigration, and creating cultural melting pots. It also includes arguments against NIMBYism.
If you have a big interest in doing right by society as a whole (rather than by your family/nation/tribe/etc) but a very limited background in economics, I think you'll find many of the thought experiments in this book eye-opening.
This had been on my to-read list for years and I'm glad I finally read it.
