Open Socrates, Agnes Callard

 

Open Socrates:  The case for a philosophical life by Agnes Callard

Started: March 8, 2025
Completed: March 15, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

Talking about raising children, "Every time I approach my kids and am in a corrective mood to nudge them towards what I see as a superior way of living, I feel as though I've walked on the the stage of a play where the characters were given their direction at some previous time by some previous person.  Sometimes it amazes me--how could it be that I missed my chance to give my instructions given that I've been around since the minute that they were born?"

This book completely changes the way I have looked at Socrates.  I bought a copy and I'm reading it again and marking passages.

The Witch’s Heart, Genevieve Gornichec

 

The Witch's Heart by Genevieve Gornichec

Started: March 25, 2025
Completed: March 30, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I really enjoyed this retelling of a Nordic myth.  It is hard to make me like the Nordic gods and so it was good that this book didn't do that!  I like the story behind the creatures in the book and it is hard for me to look away from Loki.

The Anxious Generation, Jonathon Haidt

 

The Anxious Generation:  How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness by Jonathan Haidt

Started: March 23, 2025
Completed: DNF
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

The research presented was great.  The solution (free range kids) was not.  Free range kids may work in a rural environment, but I think it is a real challenge in an urban or even suburban environment.  Crime has come down and we probably don't need the detailed helicopter style parenting, but part of the way that free range worked was because neighbors were empowered to help raising children.  Now, however, neighbors may not even be home and I remember from being a key latch kid that the responsibility devolved onto the oldest sibling--not a good arrangement (that sibling becomes a substitute for parents, not another kid).  Excellent perspective and a good broad solution, but the details need some serious work.

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

 

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Started: March 16, 2025
Completed: March 23, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I have heard many good things about Sally Rooney, but I was not thrilled with Normal People.  I guess I am a bit of a prude because I found the amount and descriptions of sex to be a lot and rather graphic.  On the other hand, as the book unwound the need for the sex scenes with their similarities and differences did feel important to the book.  The foreshadowing was excellent and the writing was very good.  The ability to view several different character flaws through the lens of different characters (both internally and externally) was very well done.  I'm a weirdo and I wish that there had been more chess, but I get that it was a means, not an end.

Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee

 

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

Started: March 15, 2025
Completed: March 16, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: I cannot remember how I came across this book, but it has been on my To Be Read audio book list for quite a while.

Review:

I enjoyed this book.  It was an odd combination of romance and adventure which was not fully part of either.  This was an interesting way to look at the start of a new profession.  Sort of a journey woman thing, but also a look at adventure that comes from a challenging profession.

A Man On The Moon, Andrew Chaikin

 

A Man On The Moon:  The voyages of the Apollo astronauts by Andrew Chaikin

Started: February 14, 2025
Completed: February 22, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

This was a good walk through the history of the Apollo program.  A lot of this was familiar to me, but it included details I had not heard before.  One thing that always catches me off guard was that Ed White was one of the three astronauts who died in the fire on the pad.

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir

 

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Started: December 6, 2024
Completed: March 14, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

Wow, what a great book.  This has everything that I'm looking for in a Science Fiction novel.  Some real science, character development, aliens, just everything.  The book was very well written and extremely engaging.  The audio book is completely worth it--Ray Porter is awesome (I love him also in the Bobiverse books).  Cannot recommend this highly enough.

The Forever War, Nick Bryant

 

The Forever War:  America's Unending Conflict With Itself by Nick Bryant

Started: March 2, 2025
Completed: March 8, 2025
Recommendation: Mild recommendation
Recommended By: I think that this came via The Guardian, but I cannot find a review from them, so I'm not sure how I stumbled across it.

Review:

I really thought that this was going to be about January 6th, the cover fooled me, mea culpa.  I am very familiar with the history that was reviewed in this book and I found only one memorable quotation:  America does not need to learn how to live with civil war, America needs to learn how to live with civil peace (or something like that...I listened to the book and I did not jot down the quotation as I heard it because I have a bit of a life today).  Aside from that, this is American history fairly well recounted with a focus on contentious issues (slavery, abortion, etc.)  I just really spent too much time on the book as it was mostly a retelling of history with which I was already familiar.

The Most Powerful Court in the World, Stuart Banner

 

The Most Powerful Court in the World:  A history of the Supreme Court of the United States by Stuart Banner

Started: February 28, 2025
Completed: DNF
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I did not check when I started, but Stuart Banner is a member of the Federalist Society.  I knew something was off as I started reading the book because the first step was to normalize politicization of the Supreme Court.  It worried me as it started, but as the book went on it became an apologist for such things as Dred Scott (bad decision, but Tawney was a pretty good guy).  As I was listening to the book after about a quarter of the way through things added up and I checked to see if Banner was a member of the Federalist Society.  Sure enough, he was.  So I started this book thinking that I was getting a historian's perspective and I realized that I was getting a right twist on everything.  Really threw me off coming from a UCLA professor in good standing.

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood

 

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Started: February 26, 2025
Completed: February 28, 2025
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By: Booker Prize committee

Review:

As I have read more Booker Prize winners, I've come to understand that the committee has a long standing favoritism for blood, gore, and torture.  This particular book only falls short on the torture angle (though there is a fair amount of emotional distress and general angst).  I think I am going to use the Booker Prize as an indicator of a book I do not want to read.

The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker

 

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

Started: February 23, 2025
Completed: February 25, 2025
Recommendation: Mild recommendation
Recommended By: The Booker Prize folks

Review:

You cannot get a Booker Prize unless there is some horror in your book.  That is just the truth.  This book is about the horror of women surviving the sack of their city (in this case in and around Troy).  It is pretty horrible.  Lots and lots of blood and gore as well as serial rape.  Not a fun read.  Well written

The Strategists, Phillips Payson O'Brien

 

The Strategists:  Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Hitler how war made them and how they made war by Phillips Payson O'Brien

Started: January 24, 2025
Completed: February 2, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By:  This probably came to me through The Atlantic magazine where O'Brien is a frequent contributor

Review:

This book is neither history nor biography.  It looks at the development of strategic thinking of the major leaders during World War II.  To some extent it is amazing what we now know of how they thought.  It was also interesting to see what drove their thinking.  I cannot say that this will change my thinking (I don't operate on a global scale), but it was interesting to see how failure functioned and how success required deference.

Someone Like Us, Dinaw Mengestu

 

Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu

Started: January 13, 2025
Completed: January 20, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: I'm sure I read a review someplace, but I cannot remember where.

Review:

This is an oddly introspective book which is reminiscent of MC Escher's drawing of hands drawing hands:

There is also a playfulness with both tense and location.  This book is interesting in other ways as it looks at death from several different angles.  At one point, the narrator is told how to lie:  basically, use Steve Bannon's approach of "flooding the zone" with extraneous information so that it is difficult to tell what is the lie and what isn't and basically distracts the questioner from the question that was asked.  It was shocking to realize that this is what my own children did (I cannot count the number of times I pointed out that they had provided a lot of information without actually answering the question I had asked).  It must be a cultural thing that is common in many cultures, but seems to be lacking in American culture (or maybe it is simply lacking in my friend circle).

Night Watch, Jayne Anne Phillips

 

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

Started: January 14, 2025
Completed: January 19, 2025
Recommendation:  Not Recommended
Recommended By: The Pulitzer Prize Committee

Review:

Why is torture so important to prize winning novels?  This book had horrifying descriptions of systemic abuse.  I don't know what to say.  The prose was excellent, the character development was good, the plot was a little bit easy to see, but, on the other hand, there were good and reasonable twists.  I just couldn't get over the torture and will always remember this book with a chill.

The Cost of Free Land, Rebecca Clarren

 

The Cost of Free Land:  Jews, Lakota, and an American inheritance by Rebecca Clarren

Started: January 13, 2025
Completed: January 13, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

This is a great look at how native Americans were pushed back from their land and how others benefitted.  More importantly, this is also a good book about how to try to heal the impact of that loss for the Lakota.  I have had the good fortune of meeting one of the decedents of Red Cloud and I have seen first hand the impact of native American disenfranchisement.  Clarren does  a good job of capturing the impact from a white person's point of view and also has done some deep soul searching to try and figure out how to make amends.  Truly a good book that is actually doing good.

The Anthropologists, Ayşegül Savaş

 

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

Started: January 13, 2025

Completed: January 13, 2025

Recommendation: Not recommended

Recommended By: Barack Obama

Review:

I dunno.  I guess that this book was supposed to be a character study and I just did not find it interesting.  The characters seemed flat and I simply did not care what happened to them.  Their lives seemed banal and maybe that was the point, but I really don't know.  It is hard to walk away from this book thinking anything but that this was sort of someone writing a book about what was just sort of happening nearby (person, woman, camera, etc.)  Maybe the problem isn't the book, it is that I'm too thick to get it.  It felt like modern art.  Something that almost anyone could write, but was somehow raised up on a pedestal.

The Hunger of the Gods, John Gwynne

 

The Hunger of the Gods by John Gwynne is the next book in the Bloodsworn Saga

Started: January 3, 2025
Completed: January 12, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

This book feels like a Norse saga.  Without the detailed torture scenes this book would be highly recommended despite the violence.  The world building is excellent and it feels like, despite the high level of detail, no detail is unnecessary.  This is a large book, but it does not feel like anything is wasted.  The book is tight and thorough...maybe after reading subsequent books, I'll fell like the torture scenes are important (some people feel that way about books like Pierce Brown's Red Rising Saga, I just don't).

The Weight of Nature, Clayton Page Aldern

 

The Weight of Nature:  How a changing climate changes our brains by Clayton Page Aldern

Started: January 2, 2025
Completed: January 3, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommend
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

It is striking the way that the weather, environment, and even the sounds of nature impact humans.  I was aware of the physical risks of higher temperatures, but did not understand or properly consider the impact of all the other components of the environment and how those affect mental state, not just the physical ability to live.

Question 7, Richard Flanagan

 

Question 7, Richard Flanagan

Started: December 30, 2024
Completed: January 2, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: I cannot remember

Review:

This was an odd book in many ways.  The most striking thing was the odd use of tense which handled both being dead and being alive.  It was difficult to pick up on unsaid, but implied Australian/Tasmanian understandings.