As soon as I saw this in a bookstore, I knew I’d need to read it, and I was happy to find an audiobook through hoopla (even if ew, hoopla). The details of the trial itself weren’t always easy to follow, but it was fascinating to learn more about a historical figure I was only loosely familiar with—and the final part of the book tracing Pétain’s continued significance was especially interesting.

This book is great! I have some quibbles—I found Brueggemann a bit more literal in his exegesis than I would have expected—but I get why this is a classic, and I’ll have to buy a print copy to reference in the future.

As I noted yesterday, I think there’s a lot in here that also appears in the anarchist writing that’s appealed to me lately: refusal of the status quo, skepticism of power, and the audacity to imagine a better world. It’s good stuff.

I felt the same way about this book that I often feel about Graeber’s work: I like where he’s going with things, but I’m not always convinced in the details.

So, the thesis of this book is great, and the last few chapters won me back when I was feeling a bit skeptical. Even with Graeber’s concessions about his data, though, his conclusions sometimes felt tenuous, and I’m not sure we needed the taxonomy of bullshit jobs to get to the conclusions he wanted to draw in the end.

Fun listen! It’s not any kind of deep book, but listening to how The Princess Bride was made is just about as much fun as watching the movie itself, and I enjoyed spening some time listening over the past week or so.

Cory Doctorow has regularly referenced this book (most notably, the anecdote about people letting Mark Zuckerberg win at Catan) several times since reading it himself, so I decided it was time to take a look myself. It was an enjoyable (by which I mean horrifying) read, though I think I would have enjoyed it more if the same stories had been collected as part of a journalistic project rather than as a tell-all memoir.

I’ve been a Star Wars fan for long enough to recognize unnecessary expanded universe material when I hear it, but I’ve also been a Star Wars fan for long enough to know that some of it is actually pretty good.

I’ve known about this book for ages and always wanted to read it because the idea of the Kobayashi Maru is just fun. I was delighted to find an audiobook on the Internet Archive and enjoyed listening to it. James Doohan can only do so many voices (I had trouble telling his Chekov from his Scotty), but I appreciated what he brought to the role, the music and sound effects weren’t bad, and the premise paid off.

Fascinating read! I’m not as interested as the author in his largely geopolitical thesis, but the raw materials he uses to construct that thesis are depressingly fascinating. They could also make up the elements of an Ellulian thesis on the dangers of power, efficiency, and technical systems. It’s harder to use Apple products after reading the book—and it’s a stark reminder of how the world we live in is so different than the world I’d like us to.

I wasn’t sure about this book at first, and I’m not totally sure about it at the end, but there was enough in the middle to mostly win me over. Herron continues to be a cruel narrator with one of the major developments of this book, and the other major development really raises questions about where the series will go from here.

Honestly, I was getting bored of this series, but this story got me back on track! It helps that it features a Project 2025/DOGE-type villain, anticipating our current nonsense. The characters are also as (or more) compelling as usual, and things felt less outlandish than in some of the preceding books.

It’s not my favorite book in the series, but it isn’t bad. There are some interesting plot developments here, but I also feel like Diana Taverner is stuck with the idiot ball from page one, which isn’t as fun as it could be. Won’t stop me from continuing to read, though.

I remembered enjoying this volume, and it lived up to my memory! It’s one of the darker entries in the series, but it’s not as absurd or outright bleak as some of the others. A nice balance that was fun to revisit.

I will be interested to see what the TV adaptation of this book is, since my least favorite books have sometimes been redeemed by the TV adaptation. For the time being, though, I didn’t love this one. It seems to exaggerate all the things about the books I don’t like, and I found the characters especially unsympathetic.

This book impressed me in an unexpected way. When I first read it, I didn’t think much of it. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the TV adaptation was. I see why they moved around scenes they did, gave certain characters more to do, etc.

Coming back to the book, though, I think the TV adaptation opened me up to how good the underlying story could be. I appreciated the cruel wordplay and foreshadowing Herron uses in the beginning of the book, which is horrible and delightful when you already know the end. I like the original takes on some scenes even when I also agree with the changes made in the adaptation.

Another good book in the series. It’s impossible to read these without comparing them to their TV adaptations. I think the adaptation of this one made a number of wise choices in what it cut, what it changed, etc., but there are a couple of original bits that I would have liked to see preserved.

I remembered this book being overly complicated and the TV adaptation being far superior. Revisiting it, though, is shifting my opinion. I think the TV adaptation does a good job of streamlining the story and connecting it to the broader franchise, but even if the original plot is convoluted, I think it’s better than I first gave it credit for. I also continue to appreciate Herron’s writing tics and what they add to the story that you couldn’t so in television.

This was a delight to read. While the Apple TV adaptation is excellent (I can’t help but imagine the book’s characters as the show’s actors), revisiting this reminded me just how good the source material is, too. Herron likes to play with the audience in a way that a TV show can’t capture, and some of the best lines from the adaptation are taken straight from his writing. What a gem.

This wasn’t bad, but I just didn’t find it as interesting as the first. I know the whole series is beloved by many, but I’m wondering if I just like the first novella? I ought to keep going to see if persistence pays off, but I had trouble sticking to this listen, so I think it’s time for a break.

I really like the first novella, and this one isn’t bad, it’s just hard to live up to the strong first start. I’d like to continue working on the series, since I know it’s all well regarded, but I don’t remember many of the details from the first time I tried this, so let’s hope it sticks more this time.

I tend to overthink media, and one thing I’ve been overthinking recently is whether books and radio are more ethical media than television and film, because I understand the former (perhaps naïvely) as involving less waste of resources for the sake of entertainment.

I bring this up not because I’m convinced by the argument (which I haven’t really thought through) but because the second season of Andor had me back on the side of television, because how else could you tell such a great story as that? Here’s the thing, though: This (audio)book had me mulling over the question again, because I might like it more than Andor.

This took a while to get through for a book I enjoyed so much. It has Andor-level grittiness and complex characters and narratives that make it better than a lot of Star Wars stuff. The audiobook’s use of Star Wars music and sound effects is also a big plus. I’ve already checked out the final book in the trilogy so that it’s not another two years before I wrap it up!

This book isn’t the best of the anarchist fiction I’ve read—it feels a bit stilted or maybe even too didactic at points—but it grew on me, and I enjoyed the story a lot. (It’s also not the worst anarchist fiction I’ve read—looking at you, V for Vendetta). Cory Doctorow mentioned Killjoy’s most recent book on his blog, so I’m giving some of her older stuff a try, and so far, I think it’s pretty good.

This is a good book, with a powerful thesis and a great epilogue that ties things together. It isn’t perfect, but I think most of my quibbles are related to the subject matter and the genre. It’s hard to write a book about a contemporary subject of such importance, and I think it’s tricky to write a book that combines history with more of a critical take on the AI ecosystem.

In many ways, this is a great book! It’s well written (and well read), and it made me care about baseball in ways I usually don’t. It’s also an interesting story—a great example of the power of statistics and data science to do cool things.

That last part, though, is why I read it. I expected to be critical of the book’s take, and I wasn’t wrong. It cheerleads attitudes about (data) science that I’m skeptical of, like its supposed superiority in terms of objectivity and rationality. It acknowledges the reduction of human beings into abstractions without ever really being skeptical of it. As cool as the core idea is, it’s also kind of a horror story, and we can see some of its scarier implications a couple of decades later.

This is the third (or fourth, if you count a quote-pulling skim) time I’ve read this book in the past 2ish years, and I do think that I need to give myself more of a break before trying to come back to it again. I really like the audiobook, though, and I’m glad I now own it in mp3 and epub. I also needed the read, since it’s a hopeful one, and I started it when I was in desperate need of something hopeful. I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I did the first few times I read it, but I think that’s from story fatigue—it remains one of my favorite books of all time and one that I will reference over and over again throughout my life, I’m sure.

Okay, yes, I just listened to this a couple of months ago, but I was doing a relisten of the BBC Radio 4 Smiley adaptations, and I wanted to see how this held up reading it where it fits chronologically. It holds up well!

I like this novel a lot. It’s fun to see Smiley being competent in the field, and I appreciate how it complicates Ann without making Smiley the bad guy in the relationship. It’s the fun kind of fanservice, and while I hope this doesn’t go all Tom Clancy in its posthumous franchization, I wouldn’t mind another from Harkaway.