The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity Steven Strogatz I have the highest opinion of  Steven H. Strogatz , and I generally enjoy pop math books. (For instance, see my reviews of  Ben Orlin 's books.) But somehow  The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity  disappointed me. In it  Strogatz  trots out the classics. I've seen all this before, and mostly I've seen it done better. For instance, there was a chapter on Mobius strips. We did this in my grade school math classes, and  Strogatz  offered no new insights. He also had a chapter on infinities, ending with the classic  Cantor  diagonal theorem. Cantor's Diagonal Theorem regularly makes mathematician's lists of best theorems of all-time. (Yes, mathematicians make such lists. See, for instance,  this one , which has it at number 22.) It is a beautiful proof of a startling and deeply weird conclusion. If you can read Cantor's Diagonal Theorem without...

The Nightmare Stacks Charles Stross, Gideon Emery (narrator) You already know the vampire sorcerer -- you met him in  The Rhesus Chart . He is Dr Alex Schwartz, who, until he caught a wee case of vampirism, worked in a quantitative analysis group at a major bank in the City of London. Since then he's become an agent of Her Majesty's Occult Secret Services, AKA The Laundry, where he has been learning about computational demonology -- sorcery. The Fairy Princess is not yet familiar to you. She is Agent First of Spies and Liars of the Morningstar Empire, but we will just call her Cassie. (Actually, Cassie and Agent First are not quite the same person, but it would spoil too much to explain. Read it!) Charles Stross 's  Laundry Files  is my all-time favorite Science Fiction series, and  The Nightmare Stacks  might be my favorite novel in the series (difficult choice, that). This novel is the first real "we're not in Kansas anymore" moment in the series. On his blo...

The Creeping Shadow Jonathan Stroud The Creeping Shadow  is book 4 of 5 in  Jonathan Stroud 's  Lockwood & Co  series. In these books some unknown event about 50 years ago caused ghosts to begin appearing all over England. The ghosts are dangerous -- if they touch you you die. When I say "unknown event", I mean that as of book 4, it's still unknown. I suspect that we will find out what it was before the end of book 5. Adults can't perceive the ghosts, but children and teenagers can. (OK, yeah. That's a transparent ploy to justify a Young Adult series.) Thus we have psychic investigation agencies in which children are employed to find and get rid of the ghosts. Most of these agencies are big companies -- the two biggest being the Fittes and Rotwell agencies. But the smallest agency in London -- four employees, is Lockwood & Co. The four are Anthony Lock, George Cubbins, Holly Munro, and our first-person narrator Lucy Carlyle. Or they were, until the end...

The Golden Compass Philip Pullman Philip Pullman 's  The Golden Compass  was one of the first audiobooks I listened to after joining Audible in 2004. I followed it not long after with  The Subtle Knife  and  The Amber Spyglass , and subsequently with every other published book by  Pullman  I could get my hands on. The novels of  His Dark Materials  are both exceptionally good books and exceptionally good audiobooks. The Listening Library audiobooks are full-cast productions. The Golden Compass  takes place in a fantasy world that resembles our Earth in some respects -- for instance, there is a university called Oxford -- and is different in others. For instance, every person has a daemon -- a soul. The daemon is a talking animal. A person must remain close to his or her daemon -- to separate by more than a few yards causes both great distress. The daemons of children are changeable in form, but those of adults are fixed. For instance, Ly...

Paladin's Strength T. Kingfisher We met Istvhan in  Paladin's Grace . He's a paladin of the defunct Saint of Steel. So, like all the Saint of Steel's paladins, he's a berserker who used to make mayhem at the direction of the Saint, but then his god died and he went through an experience so traumatic that only a few of the paladins survived. Istvhan's deal is that he's BIG. That's the first thing that anyone notices when they meet him. Clara is new. She used to be a lay sister of the convent of St Ursa. The convent was burned a month ago and all the nuns kidnapped. Clara was released because she was sick -- dying, her captors thought. Clara has a secret. I won't spoil it, but you will find out what it is at the 26% point, and you'll already have guessed it before that. Like Istvhan, Clara is a big person. The story begins with an unusual meet-cute: Clara is given to Istvhan as a slave. Now, because the novel is told both from Clara and Istvhan...

Searching for Dragons Patricia C. Wrede In her Introduction to  Searching for Dragons ,  Patricia C. Wrede  tells us that she started the  Enchanted Forest  series by writing the last book,  Talking to Dragons . That book starts with a mention of the hero's mother. Then  Jane Yolen  came along and asked her for a children's story something like  Talking .  Wrede  responded by writing a prequel to  Talking  -- the hero of that prequel,  Dealing with Dragons , was Cimorene, the mother of the hero of  Talking .  Yolen  eventually convinced  Wrede  to fill in the gaps between  Dealing  and  Talking  -- that took two novels,  Searching for Dragons  and  Calling on Dragons . Thus,  Searching  was written literally as filler, and, I'm sad to say, it shows. The most surprising thing about  Searching , though, is that despite its meandering plot, it man...

In the Lives of Puppets T.J. Klune I finished  T.J. Klune 's  In the Lives of Puppets  with a deep sense of satisfaction -- "Thank God, that's over!" I picked up the book because someone reviewed it as deeply weird, and I like books that weird me out. (This one did not.) Also, I noticed that it had been nominated for a whole bunch of Fantasy and Science Fiction awards. In the Lives of Puppets  is a completely unbelievable novel set in a postapocalyptic world that will strain your suspension of disbelief muscles to the breaking point. (Or, at least, it did mine.) It seemed obvious to me that  Klune  has no intention of being believed, not even in the way one might believe  The Lord of the Rings . The characters are there to teach you lessons about humanity and love. That doesn't sound so bad, but the lessons are naive and the presentation clumsy. There was one thing I liked -- well, two things. As is common in stories of this type, our hero Vic has two ...

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't Jim Collins James C. Collins 's  Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't  is a report of a research study ostensibly designed to find out how a company becomes great. Here's the research design:  Collins  and his research group did a massive survey of the business literature. They combed it for companies that met their "good-to-great" criteria, which, somewhat condensed, were 1. The company shows a pattern of “good” performance punctuated by a transition point, after which it shifts to “great” performance. 2. The good-to-great performance pattern must be a company shift, not an industry event. 3. At the transition point, the company must have been an established, ongoing company, not a start-up. 4. The transition point had to occur before 1985 so that we would have enough data to assess the sustainability of the transition. 5. Whatever the year of transition, the co...

The Hollow Boy Jonathan Stroud The Lockwood agency consists of three agents: Anthony Lockwood, George Cubbins, and our first-person narrator Lucy Carlyle. It has been obvious from the beginning of  the series  that Lucy has a bit of a crush on Lockwood -- because she's the narrator, we hear her thoughts about Lockwood's handsomeness and dashing appearance first-hand. (This is in contrast with poor George, who is always presented as a bit grubby and icky, even though his intelligence as an analyst is behind much of the agency's success.) As  The Hollow Boy  begins, there is a massive outbreak of psychic nastiness in Chelsea. DEPRAC (that's Department of Psychic Research and Control, the government organization charged with dealing with ghosts) is quite unable to control it, and has hired hundreds of agents from private psychic control agencies to deal with Chelsea. They are making no progress at all -- the problem is that no one has a clue what the cause of the outbre...

Escape from Yokai Land Charles Stross Escape from Yokai Land: A Laundry Files Novella  immediately follows  The Rhesus Chart , novel 5 in  Charles Stross 's  Laundry Files , and takes place contemporaneously with novel 6,  The Annihilation Score .  The Rhesus Chart  ended with the Vampire Apocalypse, in which the New Annex was attacked by a vampire sorcerer who was defeated, but in the process took down several senior Laundry personnel, including Bob Howard's old boss Angleton. Angleton was host to the Hungry Ghost known as the Eater of Souls. In  The Fuller Memorandum  Bob had become entangled with the Eater of Souls. When Angleton departed this plane of existence the Eater of Souls stuck around, adopting Bob as his new host. Consequently Bob is Angleton's successor, both in his formal organizational role and his capacity as a powerful Laundry sorcerer. It turns out Angleton was keeping a lid on many dangerous situations all round the world....

Pinquickle's Folly R.A. Salvatore Pinquickle's Folly: The Buccaneers  is the first novel in a new fantasy series by  R.A. Salvatore . Therefore it has two jobs: introduce new interesting characters and their world and tell a story about them, and also solve the Act One problem for the series as a whole. I confess that before  Pinquickle's Folly  I had never read anything by  Salvatore . But it was immediately apparent that this was not his first rodeo. Thus, for me,  Pinquickle's Folly  was an unusual combination of two pleasures: that of recognizing that I had put myself in safe, experienced hands, and that of a new (to me) voice.  Pinquickle's Folly  takes place in the world of  Salvatore 's  DemonWars Saga  -- a useful thing to know if you want to find maps. The principal characters of  Pinquickle's Folly , pictured on the cover, are the Xoconai sailor Quauh (pronounced Coo-wow or Coo-ah) and the  powrie  sail...

Competing for the Future Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad In 2000 I had been a professor of Molecular Biology for ten years. Although things were going well, I felt that I had fallen into an intellectual rut. So I decided to enter an "Executive MBA Program". "Executive" in this context just means that the students in the program are full-time employed managers and remain that while in the program. I argued that as a professor running a lab I was effectively in middle management, and they bought it! It was one of the best things I ever did. I thought that there I would meet people who I would never meet as a prof, and I was right. Furthermore, many of them were very smart and capable people. My fellow students were without question the best part of the experience. Aware of my ignorance of business, I essentially put on my reading list every book any professor mentioned. And thus I came to read  Gary Hamel  and  C.K. Prahalad 's  Competing for the Future . Most of these ...

Bellwether Connie Willis I admire  Connie Willis  -- she's a great science fiction writer. I particularly like the way she manages to be light-hearted about very serious subjects. Her  Oxford Time Travel  books are probably my favorites, from the very serious  Doomsday Book  to the resolutely tongue-in-cheek  To Say Nothing of the Dog . But this one,  Bellwether  (which, to be clear, is not an Oxford Time Travel book), just doesn't work for me. I don't know what makes a thing funny. Obviously surprise is an element of a good joke -- that's why we speak of punch lines. But it is not surprise in the straightforward way. There are Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoons I still find funny, even though I have them memorized almost frame-by-frame. Somehow Daffy shouting "Duck Season -- Fire!" never gets old for me, even though I know it's coming. There's a sort of intellectual surprise that never goes away. Things like this lead to what I call  iconic...

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands Heather Fawcett Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands  is the second book in  Heather Fawcett 's  Emily Wilde  series. (It is currently the last, but we are informed at the end that a third is on its way. I will certainly read it.) My first insight into Emily Wilde's real nature occurred early in  Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries . A changeling has taken up residence in the home of Mord and Aslaug Samson, endangering them and their village. Emily climbs up to the changeling's lair and interrogates it. She is cold and cruel and terrifyingly effective. Emily Wilde is no curmudgeonly professor with a heart of gold -- she's a curmudgeonly professor with a heart of silicon. I don't know if I would like Emily Wilde if I knew her in the real world, but as the hero of a fantasy novel, I love her. Since  Encyclopaedia  Emily has gotten tenure at Cambridge University. She has also acquired a proposal of marriage from fello...

The Dagger in the Desk Jonathan Stroud In 2014 I read and enjoyed  The Screaming Staircase  and  The Whispering Skull , the first two books in  Jonathan Stroud 's  Lockwood & Co  series. I halted there because those were the only existing books in the series at the time. By the time  The Hollow Boy  appeared in 2015 I had forgotten about my intention to continue. Recently I was reminded of it and thought to proceed. The problem, of course, was that it had been ten years since I read  Lockwood & Co  and I had forgotten most of it. But then I noticed this little story. Published in 2013, it seems to have been intended as promotion for  The Hollow Boy . I say that because it ends with a preview of  The Hollow Boy . This was precisely what I needed.  The Dagger in the Desk  is a short story that reminds the reader who Lockwood, Lucy, and Georgie are, what they do, and what their abilities are. The story is followe...