What a great conclusion to the trilogy. This book was definitely the most ambitious of the three; Jemisin succeeded in pulling an awesome, gripping prequel plot line into the story, that helped round out the plot vey nicely.

Lots of story elements that were flung into the first book — and which I thought would remain unanswered questions — were brought together in this conclusion. very satisfying.

The Stone Sky gravitates around the theme of exploitation of the earth and the exploitation of humans. In the first book, it feels jarring that the Earth is referred to as “Evil Earth” and portrayed as vengeful. But, in this book, with the tales of extractive former civilizations, the fury of the Earth feels absolutely warranted, and the punishment it wreaks on humanity makes sense.

The author brings in & plays with themes relating to human justice: climate change, forced labor, luxury, energy, revenge, etc. These themes interact with the characters, with the plot, and with each other, but Jemisin resists the temptation to draw a hard moral line around any one idea or argument. I really like this. It’s left me with lots to think about.

New blog post from me: “A Quote from bell hooks” 📝 world.hey.com/thom/a-qu…

This book was an awesome follow-up to The Fifth Season. Less action-packed, this book goes deeper on the history of the world where the book is set, and goes deeper powers that characters use to control nature (spoilers ahead).

After explaining the life-force that runs through all organic objects, a character refers to the harnessing of this power by an old and ancient name: “magic”. The term is unfamiliar to the other characters.

I thought that introducing the concept of magic this way was a brilliant move by the author. I tend to interpret “magic” as a boring plot crutch for an author that doesn’t have any better ideas, but explaining the mechanics and limitations of the powers first, and then giving it a name, helped return the wonder & mystery to the concept for me.

Another thing I loved about this second book is the growing context that the characters have for their tiny role in a vast history. The ruins of former civilizations did this a bit in the first book, but the presence of ancient beings & forgotten histories really bring color to the story.

I am going to be reading the third book in this trilogy right away! Very excited for the conclusion.

The Fifth Season was extremely dark, but was a great & engaging read. It’s the first in a trilogy, and I’ve already started the second book!

The premise of this book mirrors the premise of Octavia Butler’s Patternist series in several ways: both books start with a class of (mostly) black people with supernatural ability, who are kept in captivity & bred in order to create more powerful offspring. I don’t know if this Slaves As Superhumans allegory is something that came from Butler, or if both Jemisin and Butler are pulling from a deeper mythology - but I’m excited to learn more!

The Patternist series and this book are the only books I’ve read of this “science fantasy” genre — halfway between science fiction and full-blown fantasy. Of the two authors, I think I like Jemisin more. The writing is more digressive, and I found that tough to push through and the beginning, but once I sunk in I came to enjoy the flavor that builds around the characters over the course of the book. I think I also better get what fans of these genres mean when they talk about “world building” - Jemisin does a great job describing a society and culture around the characters.

This is the third third book that I’ve read by Jonathan Franzen. I loved The Corrections and I loved Freedom. I loved Crossroads as well.

I find Franzen’s writing to be extremely cozy - it’s fun and engaging without being theatrical or performative. Very easy to read, and very easy to get lost in the stories and emotions of the characters.

I like that Franzen writes about families… whether you are close with your family or not, most people have lots of emotions about their families… and Franzen is great at capturing those fraught relationships.

I’ve always related to his characters, but the fact that the characters in this book were Christians made their logic, motivation, neuroses, anxiety all that much more relatable to me. I really felt at home reading about the parish and the family.

I highly recommend this book!

I actually read this book back in June. I wanted to spend some time implementing the advice in the book before recommending/reviewing it, so that is why I waited — and why I’m excited to share about it now.

The thing I love the most about this book is that it unites lots of seemingly contradictory pop-health tips and common pieces of advice under the one theory of Circadian rhythms. That might sound a little woo-woo, but the book is really not.

Dr. Panda is famous for being “the blue light guy”; he works in the lab whose research discovered that it’s bad for humans to look at our phones before bed. A lot of the content of this book is around sleep schedule, and how important it is (wow, it is important!!), but there are also sections on how/when to exercise and how/when to eat.

Basically, Dr Panda says that we should do the same things (wake up, exercise, eat our first meal) at the same times every day, and when we do, our body learns these patterns and is able to optimize cell operation in anticipation of this regular schedule. Eating at regular times encourages smooth digestion, exercising at regular times encourages fat burning, etc.

I’ve enjoyed taking a lot of his advice to heart, and I was able to make & stick with a lot of habits. It’s hard to keep a schedule when things get busy, but Dr. Panda also gives a little guidance about what to prioritize, e.g. the most important thing is waking up at the same time every day; not eating for 4 hours before bed is second most important, but you can get away with one cheat day per week. Along these lines, his advice isn’t militant: he suggests finding a schedule that works for you and sticking to it.

This flexible but cohesive guidance has been super valuable to me, and has helped me be more mindful of my habits (and eliminate some bad behaviors- esp. eating right before bed).

It’s very rare that I read any sort of “health” book about diet, exercise, or lifestyle (and I don’t remember how this book made it onto my reading list), but I really enjoyed this book and I think it’s a great “generalist” read for learning more about working together with your body and how to stay healthy.

Part of Sally Rooney’s awesome talent is her ability to make any character relatable by vividly describing their experience & attitudes. And while the characters in her previous novels end up feeling like friends, the characters in this book felt like me. I resonated so deeply with one character in particular, but was able to see myself in all of the characters.

I really like the form that this book takes: the story alternates between two story lines (which eventually converge), with the chapters alternating between the narrative and a transcript of the emails between the two main characters. The narrative chapters are told in the third person, and it feels like the narrator is staying at arms length from the scene: an impartial observer, relaying events, without any insight to the emotional state of the characters. Instead, Rooney describes silences, facial expressions; only that which is seen is written. The email chapters, then, provide a look behind the scenes.

I feel like this imbues the book with the tension & confusion of real life: real humans have no narrator to tell us what someone else is feeling, or what we are feeling. It’s also very gratifying to read the transcribed thoughts of these women: very shy, reserved, not “taking up space” in public, but they are absolutely exploding with big ideas over email. it feels like a cultural commentary on gender expectations? Or maybe just on a type of person.

Relationally, the book is the story of people with low self-esteem trying to be in love. And the takeaway is, it’s extremely hard to be in love, or be loved, if you don’t have any love for yourself.

It was a beautiful read, and it was also more comfy than her other books; there were fewer moments of excruciating awkwardness or emotional pain than in her previous books. There was also a LOT of sex.

Highly recommend.

This definitely the biggest “bang-for-your-buck” book I’ve read all year. I read it in about three hours, but it was funny, surprising, and engaging the whole time. I knew as soon as I started I had to finish it in one day.

Awesome story that captures the feelings & culture that pop up when most social interaction is over Slack/Instant Message. The entire book is set inside several different Slack chats.

Bouncing between reading group chats & reading individual DMs gives a cool energy to the book: a “behind-the-scenes” look at the characters as they play themselves. This is also a big part of the new Sally Rooney book (review forthcoming), and I like the trend.

This book has many of the hallmarks of the postmodern novel: very long, multiple storylines, grotesque concepts softened by absurdist context.

It deviates from the theme, however, in that it is an extremely easy book to read. You need to push in order to make it through 700 pages, sure, but the sentence structure or the vocabulary are all extremely straightforward.

I read most of my books on my iPad these days, but I bought this as a physical book so I could have something to read by the pool. I was absolutely thrilled with it: it’s light, it’s hilarious, and it’s easy to put down and pick back up. It engages you without demanding you pay deep attention.

A fun read, but not a “must read”. There’s not moral, no argument being made, and there’s a refreshing lack of commentary on the lack of moral/argument. It’s just fun.

My one complaint is that it’s 200 pages too long. Like a Charlie Kaufman movie: it’s super fun and introduces fun new concepts, but by the end they’ve been beat to death and I’m begging for it to be over.

This book feels like it was written in the form of a classic whodunnit mystery. There are a bunch of twists and double-twists at the end… in a way that I ultimately found more annoying than satisfying. The First Foundation is supposed be made of advanced scientists, whereas the Second Foundation is supposed to be made of advanced psychologists. So the book is a lot of reverse-psychology, reverse-reverse-psychology, etc., and so on ad nauseam. Some parts were enrapturing, but for the most part… I wasn’t a fan.

The writing in this book was also a lot more…conspicuous than it was in the previous books. In Foundation and Foundation and Empire, the writing was straightforward, timeless, and pulled you into the story. In this book, though, the writing choices were all very in your face… flamboyant adjectives, distracting sentence phrasing, etc. It felt like he was trying to be esoteric and I didn’t like it.

Will still be reading the rest of this series! But I hope it gets back on track.

I enjoyed this book much like I enjoyed the first. it didn’t span timelines as much as the first book did; the line between characters stays more (though not totally) constant through of the book. If the first book was about the forces that work on societies: trade, religion, government, etc., then this book was about the forces that work on individuals: love, friendship, loyalty, fear, insecurity.

I don’t have a lot to say on this one! Like the first one, it was a lot of fun to read.

This is my first foray into Asimov! I’ve been wanting to read the Foundation (and Robot) series, and hearing about the Foundation TV adaptation coming out in September finally got me to open the books.

I am impressed at how timeless the writing in this first book is; it was written in the early 1940s, but you’d never know it unless you looked it up. It could have been written today: there is nothing either in the language or in the references that could be used to date the book at all.

Reading science fiction helps me overcome my otherwise crippling climate change anxiety. I like envisioning civilizations which have overcome & moved beyond our current struggles. It helps me stay hopeful and it keeps me out of my head; I get tunnel-vision, and discouraged, when I forget to imagine how different things can be.

Foundation is great for this purpose, because it starts with a prediction of the fall of a civilization, and a plot to re-establish and rebuild a new civilization after the first one crumbles. After that, it follows the work of the people whose primary job is to persevere through the decline. “Cheery” probably isn’t the right word to describe a book that follows this arc, but I found the book extremely comforting, and a good reminder of the creativity and resilience of humans.

I started getting into comic books around the same time I watched the new Watchmen TV show, so re-reading the graphic novel seemed like the natural thing to do. What a great book! It’s engaging, and dark. What I like most is how each different “masked adventurer” has such a distinct personality, yet the authors do a great job illustrating how any given character’s disposition and experience motivated them to become a superhero. It demonstrates that superheroes aren’t just one kind of person - all kinds of different people want to save the world 🙂.

This book is written in as an extremely long series of atomic scenes, images, and feelings. The narrative grows slowly, as the reader pieces together this fragments into streams of consciousness. This makes the book a quick & easy read, but was clearly done by the author so that the book could be consumed similarly to how readers consume a Twitter feed.

A review my wife read said this book wouldn’t make sense to people who aren’t “extremely online”, and I agree with that. It was written in a language that I know I share with lots of people I know from the internet, but with almost no one I know from places other than the internet.

The author holds the way of being extremely online with the way of being very much rooted in the reality of human life & death. I think one of my favorite touches is how she compares the triviality with which some Very Online people treat living and dying (i.e. apocalypse and/or lack-of-will-to-live jokes) with the emotional shock and metaphysical weight of human birth & death when it’s actually encountered.

This was a good read, but it is probably for a specific audience.

I’m not sure what the difference is between a self-help book and a book on business management; but this book certainly blurs that line. While most of the examples in this book are business scenarios, the underlying advice seems to me to for establishing a personal—not professional—mission.

While most of the insights in this book can be found in other books (7 Habits of Highly Effective People; Atomic Habits), I appreciate the fresh perspective of packaging these insights in the concept of “essentialism”; building your life around only that which is most important to you. It’s a motivating paradigm.

There is lots of media out there on climate change. Documentaries, TED talks, articles, essays. And all sorts of books: political books, meteorological books, social justice & animal rights books, personal books. Fighting climate change is the cause I’ve dedicated my career to, but even I can admit that “climate change”, as a genre, is a glutted one.

If you are to consume one piece of media on climate change, it should be this book. Not Before the Flood or An Inconvenient Truth, not The Uninhabitable Earth or The Sixth Extinction - make it this book. It’s very, very good.

It’s good because it’s an incredible primer: it’s aimed at people who know little or nothing about climate change, and provides a lot of information in an extremely clear manner. It summarizes complex problems and presents them in a straightforward way, without ever misinforming or patronizing the reader.

It’s also good because it has an incredible breadth: it covers the biological, meteorological, legislative, economic, ethical, and engineering challenges that we need to take on. It doesn’t just focus on clean energy, or on food production, or on deforestation: it also covers often over looked but vitally important concepts like cement and steel production (I learned the most in this book in the sections on manufacturing and on commercial transportation).

Thirdly, and maybe most importantly: it’s good because doesn’t allow the reader to walk away with an ending to the story of the human race’s fight on climate change. Every reader wants - and every writer is tempted to give - closure one way or the other: either we’re doomed, or it’s all going to be fine. But both of these paths can be used to excuse inaction: either it’s all going to be ok and I don’t have to do anything, or we’re all doomed so it’s not worth doing anything. Regardless of the ultimate outcome, climate inaction now will lead to greater human suffering, and as such, this inaction is inexcusable. It’s a service to the reader and to the victims of climate disaster, then, that Bill Gates does not invite the reader to sit back and watch it happen by providing an answer. Instead, he makes thoughtful observations and gives actionable advice, and invites the reader to join in.

For the majority of my adult life, my spirituality has had nonviolence at it’s core. Thomas Merton and Leo Tolstoy have influenced me especially… as well as the time I spent living at Jerusalem Farm. But it’s pretty wild that—while I’ve listened to several of his speeches—I’ve never actually read any essays by Martin Luther King, Jr. except for Letter From Birmingham Jail.

But because of my existing background in the philosophy and theology of nonviolence, opening this book felt comfortable and familiar; like sinking into an old arm chair. I found in King one of the things I love most about Merton. His adherence to nonviolence is not constrained by one context or topic; the strong, gentle guidance of nonviolence permeates all his arguments, his assumptions, and every corner of his explanations. It’s imbued in the very language he uses, which makes the book easy to read.

King is also just writes awesome arguments. I always think of him as a civil rights leader and social activist… I spend less time thinking of him as a professor and a pastor. But the latter two vocations are what shine through in Strength To Love- these collected sermons made an awesome companion to my prayer times, and are intellectually rigorous enough to not make me feel like I’m being pandered, patronized, or parroted to.

Reading his sermons gave me a newfound love for Martin Luther King, who until now was a man I respected but never felt like I knew very well. I do feel like I know King better after reading this book… maybe that’s another hallmark of good writing. Anyway; I’m excited to read more.

I was totally enraptured by Arkady Martine’s first novel, A Memory Called Empire, which I read last year. She blew my mind by portraying the culture of the civilization with a depth and richness that I had never seen before in a sci-fi book.

A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel, was just as good… maybe better. It picked a few themes from the first book and ran with them, while bringing in new and interesting conceptual elements. The book is so creative and engrossing; Martine does a phenomenal job of building a complete world, and then creating totally compelling relationships (and political intrigue!) within that world.

The narrative structures—and relationship structures—of this book are an amplified mirror of the patterns in the first book, which aids the exploration of the themes of relationship, belonging, and purpose. It’s a delightful project, and one that’s hard to pull off, but Martine succeeds in expanding (not just recapitulating) her first novel.

I really hope this series keeps going… I will read these books for as long as they come out.

My review of The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa 📚 www.thombehrens.com/books-202…

My review of Futureproof, by Kevin Roose 📚 www.thombehrens.com/books-202…

My review of Exhalation, by Ted Chiang 📚 www.thombehrens.com/books-202…

My review of Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips: www.thombehrens.com/books-202…