Quick Hit Book Reviews

As referenced in some other blog posts, I’m making an effort to refocus and retrain my attention span by shedding certain social media consumption habits and reading more books. I’d promised book reviews for each item as I went, but I figured I do some quick hit book reviews right now just to cover what I read in Q1 of this year. Overall, it was a pretty good mix of different types of literature.

Translation State by Ann Leckie

I got off to a rough start with this one in early 2024 and put it down. Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy aka the Ancillary books are some of my favorite space opera style science fiction in the past decade. Translation State is set in the same universe and fills in some interesting background on one of the most mysterious characters from those books, The Presgar Translators. My expectations were a bit too high, but I jumped back in and plowed through this in January and really enjoyed it once the three intertwined plots started to make more sense as their orbits came closer to each other.

Not Till We Are Lost by Dennis E Taylor

This is the fifth book in the Bobiverse series. If you aren’t familiar, it’s story of a slightly above average IT worker who knows a bit about science who has their consciousness transferred into a Von Newman probe shortly after their unexpected demise. They then set about to explore the galaxy. I can’t even begin to explain the places this series goes. I really enjoy it because it uses an extremely realistic physics model to underpin its hard science fiction. It’s like the antithesis of the Star Trek model of magical science that solves the problem by the end of the episode. This entry in the series was a good bit shorter than the last one and felt like it mostly existed to advance the overarching meta narrative story that Taylor is telling over the course of 10-11 books. However, it did put a large plot point into place that pivots the series in a definitive direction, after book four felt a bit aimless.

The Sprawl Trilogy by William Gibson

Neuromancer represented a massive hole in my cyberpunk library. When I found out that the Ranged Touch podcast on genre fiction was going to be tackling the whole Sprawl Trilogy I knew it was going to be a great time to jump in and read along with them. Gibson’s writing is absolutely fantastic when it comes to being uniquely descriptive of the world and its characters. The guy can just flat out write a kick ass sentence that will stick with you. He’s a very gifted short story writer and that might be why a lot of these three novels feel very much like several short stories strong together. Neuromancer is brilliant and a true classic that everyone ought to read. But I think you can skip Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I don’t think Gibson wanted to write a sequel to Neuromancer and I’ve heard the other two books essentially described as a sequel in two parts. He’s said in interviews that the sequels were part of a publishing contract and the third book was really tough to write. It shows. They still have some sublime writing. I think Count Zero is the more interesting of the two.

Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan

This is one of the few books I come back to periodically and reread. If you watched the Netflix series, please, please read the book. It’s superior is every possible way. That said, the author has expressed some very problematic views in the past few years so if you pick up a copy try and find a used one or borrow it from someone, so you don’t put money in his pocket. With that out of the way, this book is a great cyberpunk adjacent science fiction noir detective story that has some nice twists and turns. The basic premise is what if everyone could have a copy of their mind permanently stored and loaded into a clone of their body or, in many cases, the body of someone that has committed a crime and had their body sold for use? Also what are the implications for society when the ultra-wealthy are functionally immortal and the criminals that orbit them are just as immortal?

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I read this one on and off throughout 2024 and then finally buckled down and finished up the last few chapters, covering the end of Jobs life, back around the beginning of this year. Isaacson does a good job (not a pun) showing all the angles of Job’s personality and it’s not always flattering. It is an extremely good biography that I think most people in my age bracket will appreciate reading. The conclusions you draw and opinions you form about Jobs will really be shaped by your own personal context but also by what you may be looking for in Jobs. For a lot of business types Jobs is the equivalent of the messiah. I think you have to have really skipped a lot of this book to still hold that opinion. I’m going to reserve a lot of my thoughts for another standalone post. However, I will add that in the 10^th anniversary edition Isaacson adds some material and in one part he asks Jobs why he wanted to do the biography. Jobs replies, as he lays dying, that he wanted his kids to know him. If your kids need a biography to know you… well, I can’t imagine the level of regret I’d feel if I ever had the utter those words. If your kids need a biography to know you, then you spent too much time pouring your life into the wrong things.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

This is probably the longest and densest of these books. It covers decades of history of the computer revolution. Honestly, if you are in IT or just love technology you really ought to read this book. It gives an amazing depth and context to the past 75 years of computing. It is so easy to take for granted how far we have come from things like the PDP1 and guys hacking together model railroads to things like the iPad. We wouldn’t have any of the modern Internet without the hackers who dreamed of ways to bend systems and make computers do things no one ever thought possible. This book also makes a wonderful companion to the Jobs biography because it gives massive amounts of historical context to what was happening on the west coast as Jobs and Woz were building computers in a garage with a bunch of other guys who were just as smart. It was just that most of those guys didn’t want to build a business.

How to Work with Almost Anyone by Michael Stanier

There are a lot of THESE types of books out there. I really don’t care for most of them. The big difference here is that I think Stanier genuinely wants to help improve business communication between colleagues. The book still has its gimmick, like all these books do, but I also find that it has very valuable self-inventory exercises at the end of each chapter. Ultimately working on yourself and your own communication skills is going to be how your bridge the gap with coworkers. If you have the choice between this book and others, like Crucial Conversations, I’d highly recommend this one. Also, it’s a relatively short read and doesn’t overstay its welcome like several classics of this genre.