Brian's Winter Gary Paulsen Hatchet  ends as follows. Brian, having survived almost two months after crashing in a lake in the Canadian forest, is hit by a tornado. He suffers little harm, but the tail of the airplane, which until now has been completely underwater, is exposed. This allows Brian to enter the still mostly submerged airplane and pull out the survival kit. Although Brian didn't know this when he went after it, the survival kit contains an emergency transmitter. Brian switches it on. Mere hours later a float plane shows up, lands on Brian's lake, and rescues him. Reading that now, I can't help think to myself, " Deus ex machina ". But, to be honest, it didn't bother me even slightly when I read  Hatchet . If we were going to get Brian out of his fix, this seemed an entirely reasonable way to do it. Of course the survival kit would contain an emergency transmitter, probably it would be designed to survive a crash and submersion. (A fragile emer

The Sand Reckoner Archimedes, Thomas Heath (translator) I was honestly disappointed by  The Sand-Reckoner . The argument made here is almost trivial. Now, you will protest, "But to make it at that time was genius!" Perhaps. But I am familiar with some of Archimedes' other works, and this, by comparison, is nothing to write home about. Also, it is very annoying that this edition is not typeset correctly. In particular, superscripts are not set as superscripts, so that one cannot see in the familiar way that (100,000,000)2 really means 100,000,000 squared. One figures it out quickly enough, however, but why this unnecessary impediment to understanding? Amazon review Goodreads review  

Nine Liars Maureen Johnson I will begin with a confession: I don't really like murder mystery novels. What I mean by that is, I don't like them more than any other type of novel. When I read a mystery, I read it as I would any other novel -- that is, as a story, with characters and a plot. The mystery is only interesting to me as the plot of this particular novel. I don't care if the author follows the strangely arbitrary rules that mysteries are supposed to adhere to. (Some of them, indeed, I find tiresome, such as the scene in the end where the sleuth gathers all the possible suspects in a room together and reveals all. I will never forgive  Agatha Christie  for inflicting that monstrosity on us.) The mystery to me is no more than a plot. I want it to be a good plot -- I don't really care if it's a good mystery, in the way that mystery fanatics judge such things. I do, however, like certain mystery novels. That includes  Maureen Johnson 's  Truly Devious serie

Children of Time Adrian Tschaikovsky ** spoiler alert **  Children of Time  unfolds in two threads. As the publisher's blurb suggests, "Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive." The two threads concern the two civilizations in question, which are, not to put too fine a point on it, humans and spiders. The humans are very human: petty, fractious, selfish, and stupid. To call them a "civilization" is flattery. As for the spiders, although they are not explicitly described as spiders in the blurb, they are described thus But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. These words are clearly the writing of a human chauvinist. The spiders are "disastrous" onl

The Checklist Manifesto Atul Gawande I completed my business degree in 2001. For many years thereafter I belonged to a business book club, as a way of keeping in touch with friends from biz school. I don't like business books -- most of them combine the worst aspects of the self-help literature with moral depravity -- but thanks to this book club, I have read quite a few.  The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right  is better than most business books. I thought when I began it that I knew what it was about. A factoid often bandied about in both business school and medical school is that most surgeons refuse to use checklists, even though they have been proven to result in better outcomes.  Atul Gawande  is a surgeon, so I expected this to be a book scolding people for not using checklists. Although there is some of that, it is not the main thing I learned. When he began trying to use checklists,  Atul Gawande  wrote his own. And they stunk. They were awful, and not helpful to

Cannery Row John Steinbeck I read  Cannery Row  for the first time at the beginning of my teens -- I'm guessing I was thirteen years old, but who knows?  Cannery Row  and the sequel  Sweet Thursday  became two of my favorite comfort reads. I read them over and over in high school. I just bought them for kindle and am planning to revisit and see how much difference 50 years perspective makes. If you're used to such  John Steinbeck  classics as  The Grapes of Wrath  or  Of Mice and Men , you may find  Cannery Row  and  Sweet Thursday  surprising. They are far more upbeat and fun than most of  Steinbeck 's other works. The characters are still the lowlifes of his other works, but the stories are more about their joys than their sorrows. I just finished the reread. It is always a scary thing to do, to read an old favorite after fifty years. That is especially true when it was written in the first half of the twentieth century. We definitely raise an eyebrow. However, I was plea

A Spell for Chameleon Piers Anthony ** spoiler alert **  I'm not sure when I read this -- the 1995 date I've entered is just a guess. It was the first  Piers Anthony  novel I read. It was imaginative and somewhat fun, but I was put off by the casual sexism. I went on to read other  Anthony  works, and that never goes away. Whenever a female character walks on stage,  Anthony  dissects her physical attractiveness, in anatomical detail. He cannot apparently imagine a female character without discussing how sexually attractive she is. The title character of  A Spell for Chameleon , Chameleon, is a woman whose magic (everyone in Xanth is magic) is that she waxes and wanes in intelligence and beauty over the course of a monthly cycle. Intelligence and beauty are out of phase, so that when she is highly intelligent she is ugly, and when she is beautiful she is so stupid as to be barely capable of coherent speech. Our hero Bink, when he figures this out, describes her as the Perfect W

The River Gary Paulsen Gary Paulsen  explains that he wrote  The River  because it was demanded of him I received literally thousands of letters (sometimes fifty or sixty a day) from readers interested in Brian, who did not want him to end with Hatchet. In response  Paulsen  contrived this story of Brian's further adventures in the Canadian wilderness. I say "contrived" because that's the way it feels. Both the excuse for getting Brian back into the wilderness and the event that leaves him "with a wounded partner and a long river to navigate", as the publisher's blurb summarizes it -- both of them feel contrived. In fact, fairly early in the book there is a point where Brian looks at what he and his partner Derek are doing and thinks, "It was all wrong." Well, that feeling of Brian's is essentially my feeling about this whole story. Now, I will say, I still enjoyed it quite a lot. All fiction is contrivance, and  The River  is certainly bet

Network Effect Martha Wells Network Effect  is the fifth book in  the Murderbot Diaries . But it is the first full-length novel -- the previous four books were delicious little bite-size novellas. This one, in contrast, is a full-sized Thanksgiving dinner. All  the Murderbot books  have dazzlingly complex action plots. That's partly because they are told by Murderbot herself. As a SecBot, Murderbot can pay attention to multiple things at the same time. What's more, she (on pronouns, see  my review of All Systems Red ) routinely has a small army of drones reporting from every nearby location, and some not so nearby. She has millisecond responses and can follow the details of a fight with better time resolution than a slo-mo movie camera. She offers author  Martha Wells  an interesting and conveniently flexible combination of the first-person and omniscient narrator perspectives. Murderbot usually knows everything that's going on. (Except inside other people's heads. But

Moment 11 - The Big Straw Hamper Thingy Job –  London, Violet Night 2019 Ben Aaronovitch Moments are one of the greatest innovations of  Ben Aaronovitch 's  Rivers of London series . They are very short, and originally were not stories at all. A typical moment simply presents a specific character at some place and moment in time. They are, in my opinion, a brilliant idea, although a more traditional reader might miss the lack of the usual story trappings such as a plot.  Aaronovitch  has not felt compelled to stick rigorously to this idea, which is a good thing, I think. A few moments are actually stories. Christmas seems to bring that out in  Aaronovitch . See, for instance  Moment 09 -- Foxes for Christmas , which is unquestionably a Christmas story. And today we have a new moment, number 11 by my unofficial reckoning, which is also a story.  Read it here. This one describes an operation by the foxes. Unusally, Nightingale shows up. This is, to my knowledge, the first time that N

archy and mehitabel Don Marquis I first read  Archy and Mehitabel  as a high-school student. My aunt from New York City, Aunt Althea, who always knew the hottest new books, recommended it to my family, and it went through us like a Covid outbreak, but with far more pleasing results. (I am not sure what brought  A&M  to Aunt Althea's attention, as it was published in 1916.) The premise of  A&M  is that  Don Marquis  hears the sound of typing from his office one night. He checks it out and finds that a cockroach is operating the typewriter by climbing up on the carriage and leaping head-first onto the keys. (By the way, I am old enough to have used mechanical typewriters, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, this would not work. So, I have the unpleasant duty of informing you that  A&M  is fiction.)  A&M  consists of these missives from the cockroach, who calls himself Archy. In addition, there are pen and ink drawings (presumably by  Marquis ) to illustrate mo

Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver You already know that  Demon Copperhead  by  Barbara Kingsolver  is a retelling of  David Copperfield  by  Charles Dickens . Indeed, it is so faithful a retelling that, if the publisher had not already spilled the beans, I would feel compelled to mark this review a spoiler because of mentioning  David Copperfield . If you have read  David Copperfield  at all recently, then you will recognize the characters and the major plot points as you read  Demon Copperhead . (I last read  David Copperfield  when I was a kid in the late 1960s, so I was blessedly free from this detailed anticipation as I read  Demon Copperhead . I did, however, check out the Wikipedia plot summary of  David Copperfield  on finishing  Demon Copperhead , so I'm up to speed on both plot outlines.) And this, I say, is absolutely fine! If you're going to steal, by all means, steal from the best! I am completely in earnest about that. Good stories get retold, and they should.  W

Momo Michael Ende I was seriously disappointed by  Momo . Usually my tastes are not that different from the tastes of the world. If everyone likes a book, I will probably like it. That's all the more true because I like books. I didn't like this one. It felt to me that, under its thin story, it was really just a sermon -- a book telling me how I ought to think and act. I don't like books that preach at me. I like them even less when I disagree with what they're preaching. I LIKE my computers and microwave oven and iPad and digital clocks and kindle. I believe that time is precious, and that time-saving conveniences and time management are GOOD things. So, that's two strikes against  Momo . Strike 3 is that  Momo  is boring. By that I mean both the book and the character. It felt to me like it was trying to be  The Little Prince  and missing by miles. Undoubtedly my failure to like  Momo  is a sign of serious moral failings, of a lack of intelligence, or discernment.

The Magicians Lev Grossman I read  The Magicians  11 years ago (21-Dec-2011). Actually I listened to the audiobook for the entire series as I worked out every day over the course of a month or two. I know these books are far from universally loved. Indeed, my best friend didn't like them at all. I think I understand why that is. The story is *complicated*. I don't mean that it is complicated in the sense of having a complex plot and lots of things going on, although that is also true. It is morally complicated. You're never quite sure who to root for, or what you want to happen. Indeed, you are usually far from sure that you can cheer for anyone. That begins in this, the first book, with Quentin. Quentin is not a good person. In fact, he's an asshole. It was fairly obvious to me when I began reading that  Lev Grossman 's intention was to give Quentin room for character growth. And that does indeed happen as the series goes on. You may never entirely like Quentin, bu

Hatchet Gary Paulsen I read  Hatchet  for the first time many years ago -- probably 1988, when it became a Newbery Honor book. Not all Newbery books are great, but this one was. Being reminded of it recently, I noticed that it is the first book of  a series of five , most of which I have never read, so I decided to go back to it. Hatchet  is the story of thirteen-year-old Brian Robeson. Brian sets off as a passenger in a single-engine bush plane to visit his father in northern Canada. On the way, the pilot dies in a heart attack. Brian, whom the pilot had been showing how to fly the plane before his heart attack, manages to crash the plane in a lake in the forest. He survives the crash, but then has the problem of surviving until he is rescued. He DOES survive (not a spoiler, since the publisher's blurb tells us that this is a "story of survival"). You would naturally imagine this to be an action-packed story, but it really is not. There are a few exciting moments, most c

Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life Georgina Ferry I picked up this book because I had just read  Bonnie Garmus ' novel  Lessons in Chemistry , about fictional chemist Elizabeth Zott and the difficulties she faces as a woman and a chemist in the late 1950s. Because I have read other books by and about female scientists, I suspected that the picture presented in  Lessons in Chemistry  was not accurate. (To be completely clear -- women in science did and still do face obstacles and unfairness -- anyone who denies it is ignorant or attempting to deceive. But  Garmus  gets most of it wrong.) Dorothy Hodgkin was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. In  Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin ,  Georgina Ferry  writes that Dorothy herself had little patience with the idea that she was disadvantaged as a woman. She vehemently rejected any suggestion that her gender was an obstacle to her progress. For the most part her life story bears this out, and I have tried to show what factors enabled h