book

Rated The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives 8/10

I have a real weakness for pop math books and this is a great example - brightly written, easy to understand, but gets the wheels turning nicely in your head. <br/><br/>Goes in some depth into the history of probability and statistics, including brief sketches of the mathematicians who pioneered these fields of study, and the role of statistics as part of the history of science.<br/><br/>A surprisingly excellent companion piece to "Twilight of the Elites," which I just read, because it undermines the idea that success or failure is a perfect measure of merit, and investigates our tendency to see patterns and cause and effect and discount chance and luck.<br/><br/>A very smart, fun book.

Rated The Devils 10/10

Amazing and intoxicating big fat weird brutal imaginative gory fantasy novel. Huge (I had to read it sitting at a table). Joe Abercrombie is back!

Wants to read The Left Hand of Darkness

Wants to read Manhunt

Wants to read Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-Playing Games

Rated Twist: A Novel 8/10

Wants to read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Wants to read Carpe Jugulum

Finished reading Breaking Hel

Wants to read Fox

Wants to read All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Wants to read She Who Became the Sun

Rated Beyond the Fringe: An Arcana Imperii Collection 10/10

Rated The Mothers 8/10

A terrific, sad book, told simply and well. The Mothers of the title are the older women of a Black church in Southern California, who appear only occasionally in person and narrate the book with a collective, weirdly omniscient voice. The title also, though, refers to the absent mothers who haunt the book’s main characters - Nadia, who lost her mother to a suicide, and Aubrey, who fled her home to escape her mother’s abusive boyfriend. It’s a very compassionate story to its characters and a quick, propulsive read.

Wants to read The Black Arrow

Rated Children of Time 9/10

Bit disappointed by the end, but I would die for those spiders

Rated Bestseller 8/10

Yet another great one in the series.

Rated The Clocks 6/10

Rated Three Act Tragedy 6/10

Rated White Noise 4/10

Wants to read Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices

Wants to read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Rated Jane, Unlimited 6/10

Fun and a little slapdash - a young woman’s visit to a weird house is the setup to five increasingly outlandish potential stories, each of which builds on the previous ones. All together it’s clever but doesn’t quite amount to a novel.

Wants to read The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Rated We're Going to Need More Wine 8/10

A really interesting personal story. It hits all of the beats of the celebrity show biz autobio - here’s my childhood, here’s how I got into the business, here’s my romantic misfires and my current family life, here’s the namedrops and anecdotes of the challenges of fame, here’s me and my personality and idiosyncrasies, all in a chummy breezy tone. But through all of this Union is unusually frank about it all and very intentionally delivering a sharp analysis of race and of being a Black woman in an industry - and a world, really - that often devalues Black women. She’s much more interested here in using her platform to talk about serious stuff than ingratiating herself.