Software engineer from #Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Opinions are my own, not those of my spouse, employer, child, or pets. In fact there are few areas in which we agree.
Interested in #FOSS and #Linux, as well as federated social nonsense like the #Fediverse and #XMPP and #Matrix
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The Ingalls family had fared badly in Plum Creek, Minnesota. They were in debt. Mary …
Man this family moved around a lot.
This was another enjoyable mostly-lighthearted tale about the Ingalls family moving yet again. This time Pa got a job doing payroll for some railroad workers with the intention of claiming a homestead once the work was done.
I still enjoy Pa's optimism in these stories, and the fact that he can build a shanty in less than a day.
Came back to try to finish this series.
The characters are brilliant. Lots of meditation on religion and philosophy. The interplay between the villains is almost as good as between the heroes.
The plotting is good too. Keeps you guessing.
Some of the action is a bit rote. Feels like "studio notes" in some places where the author had to refer to some element in the D&D rules.
Still, definitely an enjoyable read.
Someone on these here internets (I wish I could remember who it was) recommended this one and oh boy was it right up my alley.
The setting is a dark fantasy world after a war in which one culture's gods or "heralds" wiped out the other's. The main character could be right out of a classic cyberpunk story. Down on her luck in her youth she traded her life to one of these heralds for the power to speak to the recently dead, and as the story begins she's waiting for the contract to come due.
In trying to save a man's life she binds him to her shadow and that starts a second ticking clock. Can she find the magic to separate them before one of them consumes the other?
I admit some of the world-building lost me at times. But the characters more than made up for it. …
Someone on these here internets (I wish I could remember who it was) recommended this one and oh boy was it right up my alley.
The setting is a dark fantasy world after a war in which one culture's gods or "heralds" wiped out the other's. The main character could be right out of a classic cyberpunk story. Down on her luck in her youth she traded her life to one of these heralds for the power to speak to the recently dead, and as the story begins she's waiting for the contract to come due.
In trying to save a man's life she binds him to her shadow and that starts a second ticking clock. Can she find the magic to separate them before one of them consumes the other?
I admit some of the world-building lost me at times. But the characters more than made up for it. The main character Karys and her newly attached friend Ferain build a delightful chemistry. Her childhood friend-turned-enemy-turned-friend again and a scholar trying to help solve the mystery round out the crew nicely. Everyone gets a few moments to shine and the interplay between everyone hits just right.
The story is weird and gross and gory and funny and sad. Definitely worth a read.
Ragweed, a young country mouse, leaves his family and travels to the big city, where …
Another read with the kiddo. This series has been really fun!
This is a prequel to "Poppy" featuring the adventures of her boyfriend(?) Ragweed as he leaves home in the country and heads to the big city.
I really enjoyed the way the mouse culture in the city was so different. There's a skateboard punk mouse and lots of characters referring to each other as "dude". I may have used my best Bill & Ted impression when reading the dialogue to the kiddo.
Definitely a fun read. There's some tension with local cats that feels at the same time silly and full of real threat.
Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and …
I can see why this book has the reputation it does. It's very simple and beats you over the head with its main points. If my boss gave me this to read before a giant restructure I'd probably launch it at his head.
That said, some of the bits about overthinking changes and fretting so much over how a change might negatively affect you did resonate with me, and I recognized myself in there, so maybe thinking of this silly tale will help with that.
The whole thing is around 100 pages. Get it from the library, take an hour to read it, try to get from it what you can.
Oh, skip the final "discussion" session. It's short, but it feels like a really bad after-school special about business.
In this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger cuts through the crap to show us …
The latest in a series of "self-help" style books I've gotten from the library this year.
This one had by far the "loosest" prose. Probably because the author started as a blogger rather than an academic. But this style helped the "anecdote interspersed with lessons learned" pattern that these books tend to use feel less stale.
I do think the overall lesson of "you are mortal and therefore can only give so many fucks, so choose carefully what to give a fuck about" is probably more necessary now than ever and I'm so glad I read this one.
Enjoyed this one. Compared to some other nonfiction/self-help-type books I've read recently this one spent way less time on anecdotes and more on actual, actionable advice with examples of how a conversation might go, how it might go wrong, and how to recover. Exactly what I was looking for.
Lifespan (2019, Atria Books)
A lot of the breakthroughs in this book seem too good to be true, and I've read elsewhere that the results discussed are controversial and no one else seems to have reproduced them, which tracks even if it's disappointing.
This book came out in 2019 and makes a few references to a "future pandemic" that raise eyebrows in 2024.
Overall I'm glad I read it, and I hope the author is right about our imminent ability to slow/reverse aging and keep folks healthy and hale into their 100s but I'm not exactly holding my breath.
Like many other people I discovered Martha Wells via the Murderbot series. Until I saw the press for this book I had no idea she was also an accomplished fantasy author. I guess I have more stories to go back and read!
I really loved the characters in this one. This is one of those stories that flips between the Origin Story where everyone meets amidst a crisis and Current Day where they are reunited to face a new crisis. I thought the characters' relationships in the Present Day flowed well from how they met in the Origin Story, and their interactions were both natural and entertaining.
I thought the plot in the Origin Story timeline was more exciting, even if there wasn't much tension since you knew certain characters appear in the Current Day and hence couldn't have died. It's a story of war and defeat and desperation which …
Like many other people I discovered Martha Wells via the Murderbot series. Until I saw the press for this book I had no idea she was also an accomplished fantasy author. I guess I have more stories to go back and read!
I really loved the characters in this one. This is one of those stories that flips between the Origin Story where everyone meets amidst a crisis and Current Day where they are reunited to face a new crisis. I thought the characters' relationships in the Present Day flowed well from how they met in the Origin Story, and their interactions were both natural and entertaining.
I thought the plot in the Origin Story timeline was more exciting, even if there wasn't much tension since you knew certain characters appear in the Current Day and hence couldn't have died. It's a story of war and defeat and desperation which is tough to beat.
The Current Day story line is much thinner and involves mystery and conspiracy but honestly it doesn't feel like much happens so much as you're spending time with these characters as they deal with their current problem.
As far as I know this is a standalone novel but I wouldn't mind seeing more of this setting and these characters.
Pretty breezy and engaging. Some things I'll definitely try to put into practice.
A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, …
I thought this one started off a bit slow and anecdote-heavy which is a complaint I've had about several recent nonfiction books I've read. Fortunately this time those anecdotes were just laying the emotional groundwork for a treatise on how our (humans in general, but particularly humans in wealthier countries) lives are only possible as we know them because of big investments in infrastructure made decades ago.
I appreciated the author's emphasis on needing not just to invest in maintenance of what we have but a hopeful tone about what's possible if we rethink our tendency toward large centralized structures and consider smaller, more localized solutions that can be combined (like a series of smart micro-grids for power that use wind in windy areas or solar in sunny areas but also use storage and interconnects to let those solutions complement and supplement each other).
Picked this up on the recommendation of a friend from work and boy howdy was he right about this one.
It's the first of a trilogy but there seem to be references to other stories with the same character. From what I gather there are short stories that happen before this one, and there's another trilogy later as well. The references didn't leave me lost so much as piqued my interest to go read more.
The main character, Erevis Cale, is a former theif who has sworn himself into the service of Mask, the god of shadows. He has also been faithfully serving for a decade as a butler to a rich family he was originally placed to spy on. Just as he feels his time with them is coming to an end he gets pulled into a plot even darker than the villain himself knows.
This is a fun …
Picked this up on the recommendation of a friend from work and boy howdy was he right about this one.
It's the first of a trilogy but there seem to be references to other stories with the same character. From what I gather there are short stories that happen before this one, and there's another trilogy later as well. The references didn't leave me lost so much as piqued my interest to go read more.
The main character, Erevis Cale, is a former theif who has sworn himself into the service of Mask, the god of shadows. He has also been faithfully serving for a decade as a butler to a rich family he was originally placed to spy on. Just as he feels his time with them is coming to an end he gets pulled into a plot even darker than the villain himself knows.
This is a fun read with some thinky bits on it as well. It's in the Forgotten Realms setting, and came out around when D&D was in its 3rd Edition, so there's a fun game to be played where you can try to guess the characters' classes, what spells they are casting from the descriptions, etm.
This doesn't distract from the plot, which has plenty of adventure and mystery. The interplay between the main characters is where the book really shines. Cale teams up with Riven, another acolyte of Mask with very different ideas of morality, and Jak who is a former Harper and acts as Cale's very own Jiminy Cricket.
I will say that the book ends on one hell of a cliffhanger and the only saving grace is that this trilogy was completed years ago and you can dive right into the next one.
Dear Reader,
I hope, for your sake, that you have not chosen to read this …
Still enjoying reading these with the kiddo.
I thought it was interesting that Count Olaf is barely in this one, and the misery and cruelty mostly come from the situation and the setting, as well as their caretaker, "Sir".
Still, a fun read full of dark humor and a bit more absurdity this time. Already starting on the next one.