After discovering and loving Scott Hawkins’s first novel earlier this year, I was excited to see what he had cooked up for his new novel. Blacktail is a fable in which the titular character, a powerful and intrepid half-wolf, suffers a series of personal tragedies at the hands of the “two-legs” (humans). Humans are taking […]
Summary: Sherry Turkle’s Artificial Intimacy is an examination of how relationships between humans and artificial intelligence systems are reshaping our social world. Turkle doesn’t argue that people should abstain from AI use altogether, but she takes a strong position against human-AI relationships, which she characterizes as the point at which we “take a thing as […]
Ilona Andrews’s This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is a portal fantasy about a 21st-century woman named Maggie who goes to sleep one night and inexplicably wakes up in the kingdom of Rellas, the setting of her favorite fantasy series. Having read the unfinished series obsessively while she waited for the third novel to be […]
If someone pressed me to name just one film as my all-time favorite, I would probably choose The Princess Bride. Some of my most treasured childhood memories include watching the movie over and over and quoting it with family and friends. To this day, lines from the film or echoes of Mark Knopfler’s gorgeous soundtrack […]
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. Jonathan Tepper’s Shooting Up is a memoir of Tepper’s boyhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Tepper’s parents were American missionaries who traveled to Spain in the 1980s and founded a small drug rehabilitation community that eventually expanded and […]
Summary: Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson’s The 12 Levers is the end product of an extensive research project aimed at identifying the best psychological tools for improving human life. The book distills a massive amount of information from self-help and psychotherapy into “12 Levers” that we can pull to cope, heal, learn, grow, and reduce […]
Summary: Natalie Y. Gutiérrez’s The Pain We Carry is a guide for people of color who are struggling with complex posttraumatic stress disorder. Gutiérrez organizes the book around a “Cultural Empowerment Approach” and names four cultural legacy burdens: racism, patriarchy, materialism, and individualism. She also outlines four “empowerment steps” that readers can take to address […]
Note: This post is a departure from my usual book review format. It was written when I first read No Bad Parts back in 2024, but I am only just now getting around to publishing it. I hope you enjoy! Cast of Characters: Manager (MN): an intellectual, age 36 Firefighter (FF): a skeptic, age 36 […]
My wife is a librarian, so one of her great joys is finding new books to recommend to people. And she’s damned good at it. She reads widely and has developed a canny ability to internalize someone’s preferences and point them in the direction of something new that they will most likely enjoy. Usually her […]
Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a novel about a nightmare road trip across America. The protagonist is Abbott, an anxious, 26-year-old Lyft driver who spends his free time as a small-time streamer. The story starts when Abbott meets Ether, a voluble young woman who offers him $200,000 […]