My Reading List

“This was apparently a revolutionary book, back when it was published. It pushed back on the idea that industrial accidents were usually the fault of human error. It advaned the idea that in the world of connected systems, humans simply be expected to understand the ultimate ramifications of…”

“Here’s the bizarre thing about RAG: it basically flips what you thought you understood about AI on its head, and beckons you to understand it more accurately. LLMs are static things. They are trained at a point in time, and cannot be ‘updated’ in the sense that you’re probably thinking. An LLM…”

“ I didn’t review this book right away, and in the meantime, I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry , by the same author. Because of this, it’s hard for me to separate the two books in my head – they’re about very similar themes. Maybe go read that review? A lot of it applies to this as well. ”

“I didn’t write a review for this when I first read it, sometime in 2024. It was recommended by a friend, and I first listened to it on audiobook on a drive to Minneapolis. I knew that I was going to need to re-read it at some point, because there was too much to absorb and – for me – an audiobook…”

“Here’s my problem with this book – it wasn’t a history, it was more of a personal memoir . I was expecting the detailed story of the Kurdish people, but instead I got a story about the author and how he interacted with the Kurds over the course of several decades. The author had some history with…”

“This book lived up to its title – it was a short, competent history of India. That said, it suffers from a problem of any book dealing with ancient history – it can be hard to transition between time periods and know what’s factual and what’s legend. Consider: There’s a period with everything is…”

“Here’s the thing – this is a ‘paint by numbers’ self-help book. I’m trying not to be condescending about it, but this book absolutely fulfills the goal of being a seemingly groundbreaking look into behavioral psychology, but revealing nothing new. It has all the hallmarks of the genre, especially…”

“This is kind of an odd little book. It was first published in 1955, and it’s a guidebook to life, basically. It covers things like personal development, relationships, goal-setting, etc. Lots of basic, obvious stuff, which has been covered in countless books since then, but I wonder how novel this…”

“This is a very light, fun book that profiles 100 famous works from history and why they matter – what larger life lesson can we draw from them. Each work is given a quick summary of both the plot and the lesson. For example, here’s Crime and Punishment (a book I did not care for, incidentally):…”

“This is an incredibly idealistic book that will never be read by anyone who needs to read it to bring its dream about. I thought it was a book about accepting imperfection in one’s own life, a la Four Thousand Weeks . However, it’s really a book about how the entire world should accept less than…”

“This is a…cute, book. That’s the only way I can really characterize it. It’s a small book. Every two-page spread represents one or more logical fallacies. The left page is a description, and the right page is a drawing meant to illustrate the fallacy. The drawings are of anthropomorphized animals….”

“It’s ironic that I haven’t written a review for this book yet (I’m writing these words fully six months after I read the book). This book might have affected my life more than any other. I have recommended it to thousands of people via social media, and dozens of people in multiple countries have…”

“This is a weird one. It’s basically 100 vignettes, theoretically how math and art intersect. But…it didn’t always hit right. I skipped around quite a bit – the book really invites that. Here’s some examples: A discussion of how many guards an art gallery might need if it was shaped a specific way….”

“This is a clear, well-written, comprehensive history of the microchip industry, from its start in the 1940s all the way through to today. First, it’s important to realize that the book (and the world, really) uses a bunch of words to refer to the same thing: Semiconductor Transistor Microchip Chip…”

“This book tries to answer the question: will AI ever be able to emulate human creativity? It never really answers the question, but it’s still very, very interesting. Each chapter covers a different type of creativity: writing, music, art, etc. It’s full of examples and anecdotes about the advances…”

“This is another book to which I gave every chance, but I eventually abandoned because it just never proved its point. The author is apparently quite famous in politically conservative circles. His prior book – Wealth and Poverty – was well-known, and I gather that he had something to do with…”

“I gave this book every chance, I really did. I didn’t abandon it, but I skipped around a lot. It’s purportedly about postmodernism . Or, perhaps about a history of how we ended up postmodern? I wasn’t sure. Each chapter was basically a history of many things, often pop-culture. I would read a…”

“This a classic art coffee table book. It’s huge – 11 x 14, I think, and it weighs maybe 10 pounds? It’s the kind of book you set on your coffee table just to look at. (True story: when I first picked it up at a used bookstore in Minneapolis, I aggravated a back injury, forcing me to withdraw from…”

“I’ve become interested in interactive fiction lately. I found an article about ergodic fiction, and when I defined that word, I found this book, in which the concept was apparently coined. It’s called Cybertext because the word cyber comes from a prefix refering to the control of systems. This in…”

“I’ve used HTMX for a number of years (I currently use it on the very website this review was posted to). As such, this book is preaching to the choir quite a bit. Like a lot of situations with technology, the book exists on two levels: To evangelize the use of HTML (‘hypermedia’) to build…”

“The author of this book is very angry about misconceptions that people have and the fact that they continue to have them. He comes down pretty squarely on the political Right, but he never actually articulates a political position. He’s furious about ‘political correctness.’ He’s also not a fan of…”

“About halfway through this book, it became obvious that it wasn’t a traditional book. I think this is a book clearly designed for a Bible study group. (I don’t remember where I got the book, honestly. I might have picked it up at church somewhere.) Either that, or it’s a promotional tool. It’s…”

“This is a history book that answers the question: what did librarians do to help the war effort during World War II? Well, a lot it turns out. They amassed foreign periodicals and scoured them for intelligence information They captured and cataloged information left behind in German facilities…”

“I tried to read this years ago, but didn’t get too far. It’s a weirdly tough read. I picked it up in an airport on the way home from a conference and tried again. Gibson has an odd writing style. He’s done a lot of world-building, and he uses all sorts of nomenclature and jargon without much…”

“This book caused quite a stir when it was published in 1994. This is the quote that upset a lot of people: The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t one. The author was basically saying that evangelical Christians have stopped thinking rationally about anything. Unfortunately, it was…”

“This is really a coffee table book. I think I got it at Costco, but it’s beautifully bound with a cloth cover. I endeavored to read this, even though it’s not that readable – or even designed/intended to be read at all. I set my timer to one hour, and sat in a chair with nothing but the book….”

“This is a fun, lightweight science fiction novel about an alternate Earth with ‘kaiju’ exist – essentially large monsters, like Godzilla. It’s a lot like Jurassic Park. (‘Kaiju’ is a Japanese word for ‘strange beast.’ It’s become a genre for Japanese monster movies.) The author provides some great…”

“This was a wildly entertaining book, because of both the subject matter and the writing style of the author. The book is about military science, but not weapons. It’s about a bunch of the other, decidedly unglamorous things we do to enable humans to fight wars, and how science is trying to make…”

“This book is a rebuttal (?) to a prior book called The Benedict Option . I haven’t read that book yet. Apparently, The Benedict Option claimed that the world was so fundamentally broken that Christians should just retreat to our own spaces and wait for the end of the world (I assume – that’s the…”

“This is a book that would offend and anger a lot of people. I get that. I read it so I could understand a friend’s point-of-view a little better. I read it at the same time as The Boniface Option which is even more extreme, but I’m calling out the chance of offense here just because of the title….”

“This is a ‘meditation’ book. It’s not an exhaustive look at any subject, but rather it’s a meandering tour of some of the things we have to consider when examine something. And what’s we’re examining here is big: how do we know things, and how to we transmit that knowledge? It’s basically…”

“This was the first of the Fu Manchu novels. It’s over 100 years old, and I’m trying to take that into account when I discuss it. The book is written from the first person perspective of the British Dr. Petrie. On the first page, his friend Nayland Smith shows up at his house and tells him that he’s…”

“This is a lovely overview of the U.S. Intelligence Community by a woman that teaches a course on it at Stanford. In fact, the book reads like a textbook (surprise – it is a textbook ) . Each chapter covers a different aspect of intelligence. For example: Analysis Counterintelligence Covert action…”

“Last year, I had lunch with a friend. She is very much on the Left, politically. I mentioned that I thought Bill Gates was a great humanitarian. She responded in a way that unsettled me (I’m paraphrasing). Sure he gives a way a lot of money, but we really need to examine how the world let someone…”

“This is a British spy novel with a twist. The characters are all from MI5, but they’ve screwed up in one way or another and have been exiled to Slough House (pronounced ‘slaw’), which is a dingy remote office, away from the main MI5 office. They have to spend their days here, as a ‘slow horse,’…”

“I bailed out on this book about a third of the way in because it doesn’t really have a point. The only point is that the author is pissed off and wants to rant about stuff. The author is kind of an Internet personality. He was an editor for Rolling Stone , he has a podcast and a Substack, and last…”

“This was a fun book. It’s not a deep read, but it’s one of those browsable books I kept next to my reading chair for a couple of months. Every day, I’d read a few entries. Like the title suggests, there’s 100 entries, each of which discusses something…secret. Or something that disappeared. Or…”

“Despite the subtitle, this is mostly about government’s usage of consultants. It goes into the history of consulting, and how we ended up with the Big Three consultancies (McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain and Company) and the Big Four accounting firms (Ernst and Young, Deloitte, KPMG,…”

“An interesting book, mainly about addiction. I was a little disappointed with this, because I wanted it to be more about ‘casual’ dopamine, like overeating and spending too much time on our phones. But it goes hard into scary addictions. It starts with (and continually revisits) a guy with a very…”

“This book annoyed the hell out of me. This is another book that doesn’t really describe anything in any objective sense. Rather, it’s a…'meditation’ on something. It comes off feeling indulgent and narcissistic. The writer jumps around. He talks about how he tried to master drawing, then he goes…”

“This is the third Gabriel Allon novel I’ve read (there are presently 23 of them). It was probably the weakest of the three. There’s always an organizational villain. In the other novels , he demonized Israel and the Swiss banking industry. This time it’s the Catholic church – or a faction within…”

“This book was written by Harvard professor as a paean to Utilitarianism. That’s a philosophy that says every decision we make should be designed to provide the greatest possible value to the most people. Pure utilitarianism would be tough to achieve, and that’s conceded in the book: we try to be…”

“I know this is a classic, but I didn’t really enjoy it. It’s the story of an idiot who commits a murder. And when I say ‘idiot,’ that’s not flippant – he’s written that way. The character is a failed student living in Saint Petersburg in the 19th century (I think it was called ‘Petrograd’ back…”

“This was written by the guy who played Dwight from The Office . I’ve never seen that show, but I gather he was funny in it. He’s a practitioner of the Bahá'í faith. He was born into it – his parents were Bahá'í converts. That faith is a lot like universalism – it roughly believes in monotheism, and…”

“Amy Klobuchar is a Democratic senator from Minnesota. I’ve heard good things about her. She’s pretty conservative for a Democrat (a Kennedy Democrat ?), and several people have told me that she and John Thune (one of my state’s senators) are actually good friends, despite being on opposite sides of…”

“This is the story of several things, simultaneously. Most prominently, it’s the story of Percy Fawcett, an explorer from England who ventured into the Amazon twenty-some-odd times. He was utterly convinced there was a lost civilization somewhere therein, which he called ‘Z’ It’s also the story of…”

“This is book two of the Gabriel Allon series, by Daniel Silva. This is another great spy novel – just as good as the first. This one concerns looted Jewish artwork, held in Switzerland. And just as I mentioned that Silva went hard on Israel in The Kill Artist , he goes twice as hard on the Swiss in…”

“This is a very famous book. It was written in 1962, then revised twice by the author, and then reissued on its 50th anniversary with a very long foreword (the author died in 1996). The book describes how science moves forward. According to the author, science exists in ‘paradigms,’ which are ways…”

“This is a pretty simple book. It tells short, chapter-length biographies of 12 people (plus one bonus person). It tries to get at the source of what made each of them special. Some examples: Shirley Temple had a strong bond with her mother who managed her career. She avoided Hollywood child actor…”

“This book is odd but lovable. I can’t imagine how it got written. It’s about Star Wars . But not about any particular aspect of Star Wars . Rather, it’s a meditation about the…ideas (?) of Star Wars ? The book was written right after The Force Awakens was released. That was the first film in the…”

“This is an excellent spy novel. Years ago, I listened to quite a few of Daniel Silva’s novels on CD in the car. I remember really enjoying them, and always wanting to get back to them. I looked up the Gabriel Allon series (his most successful series), and found the first title in it (this one)….”

“I bought this because I want to get better at explaining things. It was…okay? What’s sad, is that finished it a couple weeks ago, and I honestly can’t remember anything about it worth writing. I do remember it being quite basic. It has a lot of examples as well, which I was nice. But, seriously,…”

“This is a sort of snarky book, but still very well-written. The author is tired of clichés that he believes the political Left has ‘captured,’ but which he believes are simply not true. He spends the book deconstructing them. Some of the clichés the author is upset about (written in the form of…”

“This is a role-playing game. I don’t really play role-playing games. I just read RPG rulebooks for fun. There’s probably some deep psychological reason for this – something about putting rules around imagination. No idea. (Watch this video some time: Theoretical Gamers VS Practical Gamers ) (Also,…”

“This is two things: the story of for-profit spying in general, and the specific story of the ‘ Steele Dossier ’ that was compiled on Donald Trump prior to the 2016 election. As for the the general story, it’s a look at how investigative journalists often turn into spies-for-hire; essentially,…”

“This is a tiny, tiny book – just 36 pages. Seriously, most comic books are longer than this book I gather that the author is a bit of a book mill (so, a bit like the guy behind Crystal Clear Communication ). She makes the point a couple of times that she quit her job full-time, and she’s published…”

“This book is a tough one to read, for a few reasons. First, the dialog and descriptions are…lyrical? Pretentious? Long-winded? I don’t know how to describe it, but the author would never say something in one word if he could use 37 words instead. It’s like he knew he was writing a Very Important…”

“This is a book that describes the U.S. intelligence community so that spy novel writers can describe it more accurately. Note the subtitle: How to Write Spy Novels, TV Shows and Movies Accurately and Not Be Laughed at by Real-Life Spies The book delivers on what it says – it’s a very stark…”

“This is a book that I probably read for the wrong reasons, and a book that I was ultimately unsatisfied with. But in the book’s defense, it could never succeed at what I wanted from it. This is a book that asks the question: What do we do with the art of monstrous men? That question above was…”

“Much is made of the title and implied angle of this book, but – to be clear – this is a solid, comprehensive biography of Abraham Lincoln. The purported angle is this: once elected president, Abraham Lincoln appointed his main rivals for the office to important positions in his administration….”

“This is a book about a poem. It follows a book-hunter in the 15th century named Poggio, while he manages to save the last remaining copy of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, which is an explanation of Epicurean philosophy. The poem makes lot of secular claims. In the middle of the book, they’re…”

“This is literally a textbook – the author says much at the beginning. He’s a professor at the University of Michigan, and he writes about how a friend asked him to resurrect a course on statistical modeling. That course became this book. Models are ways of thinking and analyzing a subject. It’s a…”

“This is an authorized history of the LEGO company . Emphasis there because this is less about LEGO the toy . It’s largely a history of the business of LEGO. And it’s very authorized. Throughout the book are sidebars from Kjeld Kristiansen, who until recently was the head of the company. He is the…”

“This is a book in favor of intelligent design – of the idea of creationism – which I’ve historically been very skeptical of. The promise is right there in the title: Darwinism, or naturalistic evolution, is at odds with Christianity and must be ‘defeated.’ The author is a law professor at at UC…”

“This is sort of a biography, but more of a coffee table book. It’s a collection of photos of the life of Marshall Mathers (Eminem), interspersed with recollections of his life. It’s actually quite good. He starts by talking about the death of Proof in 2006, who is a rapper I had never heard of. His…”

“This book started so well, but then it got way more in-depth than I wanted to get, and it ultimately lost me. This is a book about how computers work. Literally how the computer thinks. The author starts off with basic codes, like Morse Code, explaining how more complex concepts can be made from…”

“This is the inside story of The Plame Affair – the revelation that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, allegedly initiated by the Bush White House because Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, had been critical of the administration’s reasoning for starting the Iraq War. The most obvious part of this book is…”

“I bought this book because I’ve come to understand that my career basically resolves around explaining things to people. So, I’m trying to develop that talent, and this book seemed like something short that I could read on a flight home. The only thing I took away from the first half is this: never…”

“This is an anthology of every work of narrative fiction H.P. Lovecraft wrote, in order. (I say ‘narrative fiction’ because he apparently wrote a bunch of poetry that isn’t in this book.) I had always wondered about Lovecraft. I was familiar with ‘Call of Cthulhu,’ the role-playing game. Then a few…”

“i belong to a facebook group called spybrary , which is for people who like spy novels and movies and such. Another member of the group is a guy named Payne Harrison , who I came to understand is a spy novelist. He had mentioned that he was annoyed at a movie called SAS: Red Notice because the…”

“Vaclav Smil is a scientist and policy analyst. His specialty is looking at societal problems and figuring out how science and policy should intersect to make it better. He taught environmental science at the University of Manitoba. Bill Gates has said several times that Smil is one of his favorite…”

“This is a lovely, comprehensive biography of one of the greatest thinkers in history. This is one of the rare biographies I read of someone who lived so long ago that exact records are not available. There is no video footage of Da Vinci’s life. There are no photographs of him. No newspapers quoted…”

“I really tried with this book, but I had to abandon it. This is one of those books that doesn’t really have a point. It’s just a meandering journey through one guy’s love of bookshops around the world. He apparently visited 1,000 of them. I read his Wikipedia page , where I found this: He uses to…”

“I eventually abandoned this book, but I read quite a bit of it. What I came to appreciate is that history of the Middle East and history of the British Empire are wildly intertwined. The British were all over that region, and when they left, they made some attempts to split it up, but then left…”

“This is exactly what it promised – a long, detailed history of libraries, from scrolls in chests to books on the shelves. Libraries really started with the church. They were first repositories of books, and they grew from there. Back in the day, books were expensive because mass printing was in its…”

“First, this is not a standalone novel. It’s part one of three, and it ends completely unfinished. Second, I bought this because of Barack Obama. Seriously – I saw it on the shelf of a book and gaming store in Stockholm, and it had a praise quote from Obama on the cover. I thought, ‘Has a president…”

“I keep buying these Murderbot books for some reason. I tend to get them on Kindle when I travel. They’re short. You can read one in 90 minutes. They remind me all the world of a primetime action show. Every episode has some self-contained story that will never come up again, and every episode moves…”

“This is a solid introduction to GraphQL. The problem is authors have is that GraphQL is a standard, not a technology. So they have to pick and choose how they demonstrate the concepts as opposed to an implementation of it. They do a good job – the chapters are clear, and they eventually move from…”

“This is an odd book. John McPhee is a journalist. I read his book – Draft No. 4 – about writing (I didn’t love it). This is essentially an expansion of a long article McPhee did for The New Yorker . It tells the story of Norton Dodge , who was an economist and professor. He wrote his thesis in the…”

“This is the story of a book – a fictional novel by a classic Greek author – and how it moves through the lives of five people over thousands of years. The book tracks through three time periods. 1400s in Europe. A boy is conscripted into The Ottoman Army to sack Constantinople, and a girl in that…”

“This isn’t so much a book about role-playing games as much as it’s a book about the business of role-playing games. Or, just business in general. It’s the history of D&D and Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), for sure, but from a purely business standpoint. It follows the rise of the company from…”

“This is the second book I’ve read that sort of argues that technology is kind of its own life form. It ‘wants’ to advance, and humans are just the unwitting accomplices. This isn’t…bad. Meaning the book isn’t dystopian or doom and gloom or something. But is does speak to the idea that technology is…”

“This is a role-playing game rulebook. I love to read these, I think because I love to put rules around domains of information, and there’s nothing as amorphous as life itself. (Maybe read this: Are Computers Just Really Expensive Dice? ) The setting is Florence, Italy of the Italian Renaissance –…”

“This is a role-playing game…sort of. It’s a ‘game of letters.’ You and a partner write letters to each other, each playing the role of a soldier in World War 1 and someone the soldier knows back home. So, it’s not a ‘game,’ really. It’s a…meditation? A contemplation? An experience? The mechanics –…”

“I had trouble with this book. It’s an examination of how trends move through cultures and are used to gain status. But, weirdly, it’s almost too basic. The author starts with a long-winded explanation of ‘status’ …which will surprise no one. It’s one of those things we all know, and I’m just not…”

“ Not sure what to do with this book. It’s basically a polemic against the idea that technology can save us from everything. The author is arguing that some solutions are to be found offline. I’m not sure what the point was, honestly. I got about halfway through it before I abandoned. ”

“This is a story of a metro couple from the Bay Area who move back to Iowa to take over the husband’s father’s farm. It’s…depressing, in many ways. Farming is a tough industry, and this couple endures crisis after crisis. There’s no glamour in it. It’s just a tough slog. Example: farming is not…”

“This is an epic historical novel. It covers about 50 years in the life of a 12th century English town called Kingsbridge. It’s not fantasy – there’s no magic, no dragons, etc. The book represents actual life in the Middle Ages. The central conflict is the building of a cathedral in Kingsbridge….”

“This is a role-playing game that – hilariously – provides rules around a ‘televised holiday romance.’ A Hallmark Christmas movie, essentially. I’m sure this is a parody…pretty sure, anyway. The rules are kinda hilarious. Characters have only three attributes: Sweaters, Cocoa, and Cheer. There are…”

“This is a book about how we don’t like reality anymore. We like the illusion of reality. As a society, we’re addicted to farce. It’s almost hilarious that this was written in 2009. If only the author had seen what was coming. He talks about ‘the illusion of literacy,’ by contrasting it against…”

“This book was written by two board game experts, one of which is a professor at the NYU Game Center, which I didn’t even know was a thing. The book breaks down games into patterns – the ‘building blocks’ of the title. It groups them into categories: Game Structure Turn Order and Structure Actions…”

“I had trouble connecting with this book. It describes Grand Prix and rally racing of the 1930s – the ‘Golden Age of Auto Racing,’ this era is called. Racing, especially then, is, by nature, visceral and sensory, and I felt disconnected from it. The central theme is that Hitler and the Nazis used…”

“This is the second of Mark Levin’s books that I’ve read, after Liberty and Tyranny . Levin, of course, is the firebrand right-wing radio show host. He’s considered one of the most aggressive , according to Wikipedia. Like his other book, Levin uses the word ‘Statist’ to describe someone who he…”

“I struggled with this book. I didn’t finish it, but I tried. I even tried to go back and read it in pieces. In fact, I kept it on my reading table for a week, picking it up over and over and try and make some sense of it. (The date on this review is simply the date when I gave up…) Here’s a problem…”

“Matthew Perry is lucky to be alive. In this book, he recounts his story of addiction, from alcohol as a teenager, through to pills as an adult. As the book starts, he’s in rehab, in great pain. Opiates cause constipation, and he’s so constipated that his bowel ruptures. He almost dies. He spends…”

“This is a solid introduction to Christian apologetics. When I started it, I was tempted to dismiss it as lightweight, but then I conceded that I’ve read a lot of apologetics. If you haven’t, this is a really good one to start on. The chapters cover. The rationalism of faith The problem of good and…”

“This is a novel from 1851 designed to reveal the horrors of slavery. And it worked – it caused outrage across the United States and pushed the country toward the Civil War. The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was prompted to write the novel by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which…”

“This is a biography of Anna Wintour, who has been the leader of Vogue for 25 years. She’s more than that now, actually – she’s ‘Artistic Director’ for all of Conde Naste . She’s likely the most famous person in the fashion business. Anna simply decided, at a young age, that she wanted to be the…”

“This is a contemporary novel, which I normally would have no reason to read, but I believe it was recommended to me because of its format. The story is mainly told through ‘found media’ items, interspersed with traditional narrative sections. By ‘found media,’ I mean emails, letters, faxes, texts,…”

“This is a book about the start of the pandemic and how public health officers and departments responded to it. It’s sort of a sequel to The Fifth Risk , which was about how the Trump administration failed to staff critical government departments. I didn’t love it, largely because of Lewis’s writing…”

“This is not a sophisticated book. The author rambles. He tells stories. It jumps back and forth between time and scope. Subjects come and go and you never know what he’s going to talk about next. But this is a fun book. Boehner tells a great story. He swears a lot. He’s a good old boy. He’s met a…”

“Not sure what to do with this book. I abandoned it about 2/3 of the way through, because I felt like I was over my head and wasn’t understanding anything. But, I was determined to ‘break it’ (see this review of an explanation of that term). So, I dove back in, reading the introduction and…”

“This is a weird one. This is both a review of this book, and experiment in reading style and strategy. I decided to try something new with this book: I decided to give it one hour of my time, and see how much I could get out of it. If you search for ‘how to read like a graduate student,’ you’ll…”

“This is a wonderful book that investigates how role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragon’s happened. Not the mechanical history behind it, but rather how they made ‘the elusive shift’ from wargames to a more personal experience. (If you’re looking for a more traditional history, I recommend Of…”

“I have a romantic view of social clubs, especially those in London. I think I get it from James Bond novels. I love the idea of upper class Englishmen having a whisky at ‘the club’ while debating politics or other matters of world importance. This book is a wonderfully readable history of those…”

“It’s tough to review this book. It was written 150 years ago, and I am clearly not the intended audience. It’s a children’s story, which came from a story that the author made up to tell to three young girls one afternoon. To be clear: there’s no real narrative here. The story is basically a fever…”

“This is the long-form story of the collapse of Enron. It was published in 2005, which means some major events were still pending (Ken Lay died suddenly in 2006; Jeff Skilling’s trial also happened in 2006; etc). Here’s the thing with Enron – The company existed in a very weird field of ‘energy…”

“So, here’s the thing – if you know the secret, there’s not much point reading the book. And everyone knows the secret by now – ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has become a common idiom. But back when this was published in Victorian England, no one knew the twist, and it was probably a hell of a surprise in the…”

“Let me start with a couple points: I’m sure the author (who died in 2015) was a wonderful person I’m sure he had great experience with leadership But, holy cats, this book needed an editor. It’s a scattered mess. It’s essentially an end-of-career wrap-up for the author, who worked in the Iowa…”

“This book was recommended by a friend. This friend is a social, religious, and political conservative, with very specific opinions on the separation of genders. I did not want to like this book. But, in the end, I agreed with far more than I disagreed with. The book is very well-written. The first…”

“This is a book about making physical things…do stuff. In a digital world, we tend to think about tech in terms of bits and bytes, but there’s a bunch of physical things that are ‘smart’ as well. How do we move from smart things to ‘enchanted’ things. The author explains: This book is about how to…”

“I like the subjects of Rose George’s books. She writes about the background stuff that we don’t think about. This book is about the global shipping trade. She wrote another entire book about going to the bathroom . I think these subjects are interesting. But I don’t love how she writes about them….”

“This is a tough one to review because I’m very close to it – I know Sam, and he mentions me quite a bit in the book, including a lovely acknowledgment. That said, this book is…aspirational. It’s presenting a goal for how Sam wants the web to be. Sam makes claims in here about what’s happening on…”

“My wife picked this up at an investment advisor’s office. He was giving away to his clients. She asked me to read it. The basic message is this: taxes are very, very low right now. Historically low. So: pay your taxes now . Don’t invest in tax-deferred accounts, because you’ll just have to pay…”

“This is a good and practical book about teaching. It’s meant for school teachers, but I read it for tips on communicating ideas. The title refers to the scope of teaching – there are large-scale strategies to improving teaching across groups. But this book is about small teacher – how to improve…”

“To be clear, this is a course in thinking. And it’s five days. It should be clear from the title, of course, but I wasn’t quite ready for it. There are actually three five-day courses. This isn’t really mentioned anywhere, but it’s clear in the table of contents. The first one is called ‘Insight…”

“This is a book about behavioral economics – why humans make the choices they do, and how they can be persuaded to make other choices. Well, not ‘persuaded’ so much, but rather – wait for it – nudged . A ‘nudge’ is a change to how a choice is framed or presented that causes people to pick an option…”

“I didn’t ‘read’ this so much as I skimmed it, then gave a presentation on it. The book was given to me by the middle school youth leader at Central Church. I’m a coach for the youth group leaders there, and she wanted me to do a training on it. It’s a short book – the 167 pages is even deceptive,…”

“This is a polemic against misinformation. It was written post-Trump, and Trump informs and motivates a lot of it. The author is retaliating against what he sees as the basic corruption of truth. We’ve arrived at a point in society where we can simply deny any truth that we don’t like and limit…”

“One of my daughter’s friends left this in my car after she borrowed it to drive to a Pitbull concert in Omaha. So I read it. Five students get mysteriously pranked into serving detention together. One of them dies from an allergic reaction. Who did it? The format of the book is interesting. Each…”

“Note: I did a much deeper re-read of this book a few years after my first reading. Scroll past the initial review for that deeper dive. This is the story of Pixar, from one of the founders. It reads like a standard business history until the second part, where he gets into some of the specific…”

“This is a book about the state of American education, written by a famous movie director. As he tells it, when he went location scouting for one of his movies, he visited several high schools, and was shocked by the disparities. What followed a couple of years of research, and the result is this…”

“An absolutely fantastic novel. Very, very long, but it never slows down. It’s more Tom Clancy than cyberpunk. A MMOPRG does play a part in the plot, but it’s more about globe-hopping and gunfights than computers. You know how when you read about ransomware attacks from Asia, you think, ‘Man, I wish…”

“This book was written by a physician and medical researcher. I’s a polemic against shady ‘alternative medicine’ practices and health conspiracy theories. To be clear, the author isn’t against more mainstream…alternative (?) stuff – things like chiropractic, essential oils, CBD, etc. What the author…”

“This is the story of one week in 2008 – the week when Lehman Brothers was about to fail, and then almost everything went with it. It was the week that ended with TARP – the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package. And to be clear: this is 600 pages about that one week . It’s a nauseatingly…”

“I absolutely loved this book. It explains the world of contemporary art – who buys it, how it sells, and why it becomes valuable. Lots of books seek to explain things like this, but they think they can do it through anecdotes and vignettes. The books spend each chapter focused on a person. They…”

“Enormously entertaining book about the Beanie Baby craze of the mid and late 90s. The book goes deep into Ty Warner’s backstory. He’s the founder of the company that bears his first name. He’s a man who spent his entire career in ‘plush,’ which is the industry term for stuffed animals. Warner is an…”

“Apparently, no one knew who actually owned The Empire State Building for a period of years, back in the 90s. A Japanese billionaire had bought it at a cheap price, because it was saddled with a really crappy 114-year lease. But he had actually directed his daughter to buy it (he had never even been…”

“Honestly, I didn’t totally get this book. The basic premise is that there are ‘narratives’ that drive economics. There are stories or explanations of things that we believe, and that cause economic things to happen. Some examples, from the book: Sellers can go into panic mode The Gold Standard is…”

“I feel like an idiot for this one, I really do. I’m very curious. I look up stuff all the time, and I even keep track of it all. So, the title of this book made me thinking it was about…I don’t know what? Research? Learning? Satisfying your curiosity? It’s not. This is a mainstream self-help book….”

“I bought this because (1) I loved Broad City , and (2) I have always wanted to drive across country. This is a book of essays and personal reflections from Abbi Jacobson – one of the creators of Broad City while she decided to drive across the country, from New York to Los Angeles. About a third of…”

“This is an interesting look about all the ways we think and process information other than the neurons and synapses in our brains. To be fair, we don’t really think outside the brain, but external stimuli help us process information in ways we don’t often realize. Each chapter covers a way think:…”

“This book explains ‘The Romantic Lie,’ which is a theory proposed by Rene Girard. It says that we’re fooling ourselves when we think we want something just because we do – we actually only want things because we’ve been programmed by other’s to want them. This is what’s known as ‘mimetic desire,’…”

“Robert Caro writes a very particular type of book. He hasn’t written that many, but they were (and are) huge and detailed. He wrote a book called The Power Broker which was a 1,200 biography of the NYC city planner Robert Moses. Caro won a Pulitzer for that. He won another Pulitzer for one of the…”

“I’m going to have to read this book again. Slower, maybe in a group. This is a book of philosophy that attempts to prove, logically, that belief in God is rational, and that atheistic arguments to the contrary are not valid. It’s roughly divided into three parts: Belief in God is rational Science…”

“The author is a physicist, and he attempts to explain how the world really works, meaning what’s is utterly necessary for humans to survive as a species. For example, he explains why we need ammonia. Because we use it to make fertilizer ever since the Haber-Bosch process was established, and…”

“This is the second book of The Murderbot Diaries. Again, it’s a novella – only 149 pages. This picks up right after the first book. In this installment, she (1) helps a group of scientists get some research back, and (2) investigates a very bad episode from her past. In this sense, it’s like a…”

“This was recommended to me by a friend, and a Hacker News thread. It was recommended as a short work of fiction, and it is – it’s a novella, at best. ‘Murderbot’ (a name she gave herself) is a SecUnit – a cyborg security unit, hired to protected a surveying crew on a wilderness planet. Near as I…”

“This is a book about pooping. Not personally, but as a species. How we deal with our poop, around the world. It’s what I call a ‘vignette book.’ Over 10 or so chapters, the author tells disconnected stories that each explain some aspect of the story of poop. Examples: The World Toilet Conference…”

“This book forced me to think about books about wars in general. I think I’ve identified four levels, in descending order of scope. Geopolitical: These books discuss the large-scale political reasons and ramifications of the war. Strategic: These books talk about large battles, and where the…”

“Tiago Forte has been selling an online class with the same title as this book for years. I’ve always wanted to take it, but it was expensive and there’s always a waiting list. So, I was happy to get this book. Now, it’s a good book, but, honestly, this is ‘Getting Things Done’ by another name. And…”

“This is kind of a weird book, because the title makes you feel like it’s going to be a minute-by-minute discussion of the chemical disaster in Bhopal. But, it’s a 400-page book, and you don’t get to the disaster until about page 290. Seriously. It starts with a discussion of insects and pesticides,…”

“At first, I didn’t like this book, but it won me over in the end. At its heart, it’s about confirmation bias – how we defend our positions by acknowledge evidence in favor of them and ignoring or downplaying evidence against them. Galef calls this ‘the soldier mindset,’ because we’re always…”

“This is the first novel in the Young Bond series. It covers James Bond in 1933 when he’s a 13-year-old boy at Eton. The date setting of the novel is actually never mentioned. I was trying to reverse-engineer it based on comments by the characters. Mentions of ‘the war’ had me thinking they were…”

“This book was written 1910. R.A. Torrey was a traveling evangelist. I gather he was one of Dwight Moody’s ministry partners. The book is a treatise on all aspects of the Holy Spirit (defined as the part of God that dwells within the believer after conversion). Example chapters: The Personality of…”

“This is one of those books that I feel like you should read in a group. You should study discuss every chapter. There’s just so much here. The book is about products that require ‘network effects’ to work. Network effects is the concept that some things need more than one person using them to be of…”

“I’m struggling to figure out who this book is for. It’s well-written, interesting, and I enjoyed reading it. But I can’t figure out the intended audience. It’s a narrative discussion about…content. Digital content, specifically. There are only six chapters. The author discusses what content is, how…”

“This is a ‘historical novel.’ It’s sort of fiction, but sort of not. It’s a narrative of history, but apparently quite accurate. The book mainly follows two men: Gaius Marius (a real person ) and Lucius Cornelius Sulla (also a real person ), during the period of 110 - 100BC in Ancient Rome and its…”

“The book is about all the large-scale economic players and theatrics that happen behind the scenes. This is the world of George Soros and Long-Term Capital Management and Bilderberg and Davos and the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the world where billionaires make moves and countermoves that make…”

“The basic idea behind the book is that innovation is incremental, not revolutionary. You make ‘little bets’ that change the status quo slightly, and then iterate on those, rather than wiping the slate clean and starting over. This is not an uncommon theme. I’ve seen idea this in business,…”

“I abandoned this, so I won’t rate it. This book is a set of short chapters (101 of them) which are exercises meant to expand your perception of the world (?). I got through 5-6 of the chapters, but it’s very odd. The exercises are extremely abstract and vaguely spiritual. Some examples: Sit in a…”

“There are ‘epic’ novels, and then there’s this. It’s the history of South Africa, starting in 14,000 BC and ending in 1978. There are 14 chapters, and each chapter handles a different time period. We start about 10,000 years back with cave dwellers wandering the southern part of the continent,…”

“This is a short book that examines the parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15. I read this chapter-by-chapter for a men’s Bible study group. Unfortunately, I lost the main point of it. I remember it being quite good and interesting, but I can’t recall what it was. (I might-re-read at some point,…”

“I didn’t read this all at once – I read it bit by bit, for a men’s Bible study class. So it’s a bit harder to review than normal. The book is a discussion of ‘holiness,’ and how and why should pursue it by reducing the amount of sin in our lives. It explains why we should seek holiness, why that’s…”

“I read this chapter-by-chapter for a men’s Bible study. I don’t quite remember all of it, but the basic idea was to help the reader find some spiritual service position in their church or some other ministry. It took three things into account: Your skillset (‘gifts’) What you like to do…”

“So, it’s tough not to like this book, because Sam Acho is an engaging writer and seems like a lovely person. But the book is unfocused, and doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The title (and subtitle) hint that’s it about letting the world see ‘the real you.’ But the result is really just a bunch of…”

“I’ve read two other books in this series, and they’ve been amazing. This one was…less so. It reminded me of The Phantom Menace , which was a Star Wars movie that was more about political maneuvering than anything else. Someone said ‘it was like watching C-SPAN in space.’ Same thing here. It starts…”

“The book is what it claims to be: a comprehensive history of RAND. The problem is that it’s just not that interesting. RAND (short for ‘Research and Development’) is a company created by the U.S. Air Force. During the Cold War, we were scared that the Russians were winning the military technology…”

“Enormously entertaining history of the Vanderbilt family by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who was a Vanderbilt on his mother’s side. Cornelius ‘Commodore’ Vanderbilt was a self-made man. He started ferrying people on a small boat around New York Harbor and ended up becoming the richest man the world had…”

“A bit of a mixed bag. I feel like the book is geared towards people who know what Christianity is, but need to be convinced of it? It’s not the introduction of Christianity to the completely unknowing that I thought was going to be. The book clearly make some good arguments and some good framing…”

“This is a first-rate political/military thriller. Some backstory: Joel Rosenberg wrote five books in the ‘Last Jihad’ series. Someone gave me book #4 – ‘The Copper Scroll’ – and I loved it . So, now I’m going back and reading the entire series from the start. The series has some controversy. It got…”

“This is a history of Fred Koch and his sons. Fred started what would become Koch Industries. He had four sons: Frederick, who never took much interest in the business, never married, and apparently spoke with the author multiple times to insist he wasn’t gay Charles, who is the mastermind of the…”

“This is a compelling auto-biography. It reads fast and stays interesting. Agassi claims to hate tennis. His father groomed him to be a tennis player, and the stories he tells of his childhood border on abuse. He grew up hating the game. But he dropped out of school in the 9th grade, so that’s all…”

“This is Christian/Conservative spy fiction, if that’s even a thing? It’s perhaps telling that the cover has a praise quote from Rush Limbaugh, and there’s another from Sean Hannity on the inside flap. (The author was on Limbaugh’s payroll earlier in his career, apparently.) This is #4 in a…”

“An interesting look at the world in 1913, before the Great War. The book doesn’t mention the looming war, and that’s kind of the point. It goes city-by-city, discussing what was happening in each, on the eve of World War 1. The result is…interesting. The book paints the picture of the world as a…”

“Fascinating history of the Gucci family and company, from the patriarch and his humble origins as a leatherworker in rural Italy, down through the generations, including the sensational murder which was the focus of the 2021 movie, and then the current disposition of all the players and the destiny…”

“A good overall discussion of A/B testing. More strategic than tactical – this is a book to convince executives to try experimentation, not for marketers to apply it. (Disclaimer: it was written by the founder of Optimizely, which is sort of the company I work for now. We acquired them, then took…”

“A solid look at experimentation, but be aware it’s version conversion-focused. You should get this from the title, but the book only cares about one thing: getting people to fill out a form or press a button, or whatever else constitutes a ‘conversion’ for you. I’m thinking the book was…”

“I liked this book because it’s obvious Dave Grohl wrote it. It clearly wasn’t ghost-written, because the writing can be a little cliched and breathless sometimes, and there’s an authenticity to that. This is not a pure autobiography. It starts off that way, but then drifts into a series of, well,…”

“I didn’t like this. But what bothers me is that I don’t know why I didn’t like it . I am very interested in the subject matter. This should absolutely be a book I like. I have no idea why I couldn’t connect with it, but dreaded picking it up. It’s about a journalist who wanders around the Holy…”

“An excellent look at how metrics can be used poorly to justify bad policies. Either we measure the wrong thing, measure it the wrong way, or – more often than not – game the measurement system so that we look better than we are. Want it to look like your city’s crime rate is going down? Stop taking…”

“A lovely analysis of why stories matter so much to us. the book dissects the concept of ‘story’ into these areas: Author Audience Journey Character World Detail Voice Platform Immersion The author provides lots of examples of each, from both the creative arts and the business world. I’m having…”

“I don’t know what to make of this book. Someone on the Internet recommended it. The point is this: you should row on a rowing machine every single day . The entire book seems to be devoted to convincing you to do this. I row a lot at CrossFit, so I’m not a beginner. Thus, a lot of the book was lost…”

“A lovely little book of short stories by Tom Hanks. The hook is that every story ‘features’ a typewriter in some way (in quotes, because some appearances are brief – Hanks apparently collects old typewriters). Short stories are interesting because there’s no room for plot. They’re very…serial. They…”

“A solid look at how science works, and how the media and the public interpret it. The book can get depressing. Science is not exact. It’s vague, and sometimes not reproducible, and complicated to understand. The media tends to prey on this for headlines and clicks, and the public doesn’t know what…”

“An eclectic introduction to the idea of a knowledge graph. My only gripe is that you have to wait until about halfway through the book to figure out what a knowledge graph is, in specific nuts and bolts. (It’s a bunch of things, enabled by labeling things with RDF.) I’ve always felt that some books…”

“I miss Anthony Bourdain. I miss his voiceovers. He was such a great writer when he was writing for himself to speak. This book is useless to me, but I still loved it. It’s ostensibly a travel guide. There’s a chapter for each country Tony went to in any of his three shows: No Reservations , The…”

“This is the story of the messy end of Sumner Redstone’s life and the struggle for control of his companies: National Amusements, and, by acquisition, Viacom and Paramount. And it really is the story of the end of Redstone’s life. Not even halfway through the book, he turns 60. At about the halfway…”

“Okay, let’s get this out of the way: I didn’t understand 90% of this book. And I don’t think most other people will either. My question is this: can you not understand a book, but still get something out of it? Yes, I think so. To be clear, just because I didn’t understand the entire book, doesn’t…”

“On the plus side, this book had a good explanation of blockchain in the beginning. It also explains the basics of Smart Contracts. But it’s essentially a user manual for a bunch of software tools. A lot of the book is screenshots of UIs. It was hard to ‘zoom out’ and get a longer view of what the…”

“I literally picked up this book because I’ve always been intrigued by The Knowledge, which is the test of city geography that London’s black cab drivers have to pass before they get licensed. It’s considered one of the hardest tests in the world. This book has very little to do with The Knowledge….”

“This is the story of class in America. Specifically the ‘lower’ class. In contrast to the Utopian image of Colonial America, the early years of the country were marked with extreme poverty. Before the slave trade geared up, most of the people sent to the New World were poor white people,…”

“I loved the idea of this book, but the reality was a mess. The problem with documenting the Christmas Truce (an actual event ) is that it’s told largely in legend. It was impromptu and distributed – it happened with no advance notice, and it happened all up and down the Ypres front. As a result,…”

“This is a…polemic. The author is mad. He thinks that ‘the liberal class’ has capitulated to the interests of The Right, corporations, and the military. He never clearly defines ‘the liberal class.’ Or maybe he did and I missed it? I think he just means The Left. If that’s the case, then it’s pretty…”

“The basic gist of this book is that the world is made up of (1) hierarchies, like governments and corporations; and (2) networks, like terror networks, the Freemasons, and old college buddies. We tend to think that power resides in hierarchical networks, but often the power is in the networks….”

“This book is an attempt by Douglas Wilson to convey a ‘theology of work,’ and explain how any work is blessed and sacred. The book is promoted as more of a celebration of working slowly – plodding away at something, rather than trying to rush through it. Wilson is a theologian. He’s very prominent…”

“This is a classic instruction manual that does what it says on the cover – it explains the different ways one might read a book. Specifically, there are four levels: Elementary Reading Inspectional Reading (divided into Skimming or Prereading, and Superficial Reading) Analytical Reading Synoptical…”

“This book absolutely achieves what it sets out to do. It’s a glossy, illustrated love letter about how skyscrapers are built and managed. If that’s what you want, then this is your book. It’s not very deep, but it doesn’t really try to be. The illustrations are well-done and helpful. There are…”

“This is a magisterial history of The Great War. Nothing is left out. The book proceeds down a strict timeline, battle by battle, event by event, mutiny by mutiny. It starts just before, and ends just after. The numbers are staggering – all the numbers. The dead, the wounded, the costs, the number…”

“Wonderful graphic adaption of Fleming’s first novel. It obviously abridges somewhat, but the artwork is unique, and there’s a neat element of ‘floating words’ that represent what Bond is thinking about in a given situation – you’re let inside his head, to all the analytic processes he’s considering…”

“This book explains (it doesn’t ‘claim,’ it just explains) that Black humans are generally better athletes than White humans. It goes deep into the different regions of Africa, and shows how significant portions of athletics are simply dominated by athletes from those regions. In particular, the…”

“A very short book that basically boils down to having some period of God-centered quiet time. Giving it a higher rating because I appreciated that it was short – it had a simple, concise point, and it was just long enough to handle that. Someone else might have tried to pad this out to trade…”

“This is simply the text of David Foster Wallace’s famed commencement speech given at Kenyon College a few years before he took his own life. What’s interesting is the format – it’s a tiny book (the speech is fairly short), and each sentence is on it’s own page. Seriously – an entire page is each…”

“To appreciate this book, I think you need to know who David Steinberg is. I didn’t know who he was. The whole thing didn’t make a lot of sense until I did some research on Steinberg. He’s a Canadian comedian. I was born in 1971, so I didn’t know him because his heyday was the 60s and 70s. He was…”

“This is a fun book. It’s not gonna change your life or anything, but you’ll probably enjoy it if you accept it for what it is. It’s basically a series of short chapters – blog posts, essentially – describing some adventurer, from Charles Lindbergh to Christopher Columbus to Harriet Tubman to…”

“This is a recounting of the First Barbary War. That event is important because it was the first overseas conflict the young United States ever fought in. (From the Marine Corp hymn: ‘From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli…’ The ‘shores of Tripoli’ happened in the First Barbary War.)…”

“This is one of those motivational/inspirational type books. It doesn’t really present a lot of new information, and it’s formatted all funky with weird fonts and colors and stuff (a la Tom Peters), and it’s really short – you can read it in 30 minutes. The goal is to impress upon you that it’s okay…”

“A book which makes a wonderful claim: not everything has to be perfect. We spend our lives thinking we need to get everything organized, but this book argues that often, we just…don’t. An early and establishing example from the book – Two people are asked to find a specific playing card from a…”

“I very much regret not getting the audiobook. It would have been spectacular to listen to the author read this. This is a memoir. It was made out to be more than that because (1) the cover is funky, and (2) it has a lot of pictures of artifacts (?) of McConaughey’s life, but make no mistake – this…”

“A book about how smart people are sometimes very stupid. Sometimes, we can be so smart and analytical that we outsmart ourselves, lose sight of the forest for the trees, and come full-circle back to stupid. One example is Arthur Conan-Doyle, the nominally brilliant author of Sherlock Holmes. He was…”

“This was another book that someone bought me for my birthday as a joke. So, of course, I read it. I’m glad I did. It wasn’t as terrible as I feared (that’s a wildly elitist statement, I know). It’s the story of Bane Morgan, a fighter from the Scottish Highlands in the 1400s, who finds himself drunk…”

“The title is accurate: this is a meditation (an ‘observation’) about making art. It’s not a practical book, it’s just a series of thoughts about the struggle of people who make at to do it in spite of their fears. This is the source of the anecdote about two groups in a pottery class that were…”

“Absolutely stunning novel. I had heard of the book for years. My mother was born in Ethiopia in the 1940s (my grandparents were missionaries from New Zealand), and several people had told me that the story in the novel resembled my mother’s experience there as a child. The book was purchased for me…”

“My neighbor bought me this for my 50th birthday as a joke. Just to spite him, I read it. It’s about what you would expect. It was written in 1962 and it shows. Lots of ‘fellows’ and ‘chums’ and ‘nifty.’ Also, lots of exclamation points and adverbs. No one just ‘runs,’ they always ‘run quickly!’…”

“This is a weird and wonderful book. The author is a private investigator, and it seems he just decided to write a book one day about cases he’s worked on. And the book is really good . Each chapter details a separate case, and goes deep into details. You find that being a corporate PI is not about…”

“I love Steven Johnson. He’s one of my favorite authors. He writes mainly about the history of science and technology. This book is about the history of how we began to live longer. The average lifespan has gone up so much in the last couple of centuries, and what caused that? Here’s the list:…”

“This book is…different. I think you have to be a certain place emotionally and mentally to appreciate it, and I just wasn’t there. Cecily Strong is one of my all-time favorite SNL players. She’s hilarious. I bought this book brand-new, specifically because I wanted to support her. You need to…”

“I read this on a friend’s recommendation. I’m trying to read more fiction. I enjoyed it. It’s a young adult novel, so you get the familiar tropes: adolescent facing a major choice, problems with authority, dark forces swirling in the background, a hopeless romance, etc. But it’s put together well,…”

“A short book that combines evangelism with etymology. The basic premise is that the English word ‘praise’ has seven separate meanings in Hebrew. The Hands of Praise The Fools of Praise The Music of Praise The Expectation of Praise The Posture of Praise The Songs of Praise The Shout of Praise The…”

“This is the definitive history of oil, from the first discovery in the 1850s through the first Gulf War of of the 1990s. It’s a lot – 900-some-odd pages. Not for the faint of heart. I actually brought back in college in the mid-90s, and never finished it. I promised myself I’d get back to it, and…”

“This is a nice, lightweight autobiography of one of the greatest female CrossFit athletes of all time. It’s quite good for what it is – this doesn’t go particularly deep in anything, but if you like CrossFit, there’s a lot here for you. The writing is prone to drama (Rory McKernan – the CrossFit…”

“Wonderful book about the history of D&D and role-playing in general. The author is a journalist, and the book is both an objective history and a personal reflection. The book is…tender, in places. It discusses the subject with clear emotional history and baggage, and I loved it for that. But hidden…”

“I really shudder at the thought of what it took to write this book. There’s just so much here. It’s a comprehensive history of science in the 20th century, and even earlier. The basic idea is that the science seek to converge. There’s a movement in the scientific community to get scientific…”

“Not what I expected. I thought I was getting a technical book with literal strategies for managing and migrating legacy systems. Instead, the book spends a lot of time on organizational politics, change planning, and even developer psychology. I’m not saying this is wrong (the author clearly knows…”

“An interesting book, but also not what the title would suggest – the subtitle anyway. This was not an all-encompassing history of money and finance. The book starts with Jewish moneylenders in Venice, and then goes on to discuss the bond market, the stock market, real estate, etc. It’s basically a…”

“The Cult of the Dead Cow was an early hacker group, formed in the 1980s. This book tells its story over the years and where everyone ended up. It’s…scattered. There are a lot of people, and the scope is large. The book is essentially trying to follow a fractured group of people over 40-some-odd…”

“Hans Rosling is a legend in statistics and health research. He died a few years ago, but his YouTube videos and TED talks live on. He studied health and living trends around the world, and created a unique way to visualize them. His talks usually involve him pointing at bubbles which move around a…”

“I’m not really a Conservative, but I do a fair amount of conservative reading. With that perspective, this is a well-written and thoughtful book. Its basic premise is this: Liberal policies have hurt people, especially the poor. Disadvantaged Americans are no better off than when LBJ’s ‘War on…”