Kevin Reale

Last year, I made a mission of trying to find a good science fiction book. After a recommendation from Garnt on the Trash Taste podcast (about 1 hour 10 minutes in), I found out about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. I was sold on the concept of intelligent spiders versus humans but it turned out to be a much deeper story about societal development, the human condition, and artificial intelligence. The story itself about a post-Earth humanity searching for a way to survive isn’t new but the story Tchaikovsky tells in Children of Time was so absorbing that I immediately picked up the sequels Children of Ruin and Children of Memory.

Children of Memory is probably my favorite book in the series and I feel its the story Tchaikovsky wanted to tell from the beginning. The characters are already established and he gets to explore them in this entry in the series. Whereas the stakes are really high in the previous two books, survival of the human race in the first entry and all sentient life in the universe in the second, in this book the stakes have never been lower – and I really loved that. By limiting the stakes to one offshoot colony of struggling humans, we learn more about how the new evolved human society/alliance works and also get insights into how Miranda, Kern, and other characters are continuing to progress. I can’t think of many series that have been able to pull off a stakes deescalation like this while still pushing the plot forward and keeping the reader’s interest.

As with the previous entries in the series, we get a history of how a newly enhanced species evolved. The crows are a great addition to an increasing menagerie of new species – and they present a fascinating guess at how an advanced crow society would work and how weird that would be. As with the spiders and octopuses before them, finding out more about the crows as the story goes on and how humans can communicate and cooperate with them is quite thought provoking when contrasted with normal humans operate (both in the real world and in Tchaikovsky’s world). The crows prove even more mysterious than the octopuses. Something I really liked about the third book was how one off-the-cuff remark about he crows at the beginning of the book develops into a deep philosophical question towards the end.

Tchaikovsky’s style where he presents an intriguing puzzle in the first part of the story, and then proceeds to explain the background of the puzzle in the next part, before weaving both stories together in a very satisfying payoff knot is also a reason I go through these books relatively quickly. This one does it a little differently and it’s really difficult for me to explain how without spoiling the whole book – so I won’t. Suffice to say, it’s a nice reward for those of us who have stuck with the series and have gotten used to Tchaikovsky’s way of telling stories. The story might seem a bit confusing at one point but it works – trust me!

This series was the best find of 2023. I also liked Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir also but what gives the Children of Time series its edge is the incredible word building and character development. On the whole it presents a very optimistic future based on a very pessimistic past – not an original concept in science fiction but it’s the best story based on this premise that I’ve read. It’s been years since I found a series of books that I’ve really liked. As soon as the next entry is released, I’ll be right on it.

To finish off 2021, I decided to complete the 1930s economics trilogy I set out for myself with Hall of Mirrors. The two exceptional examples of politicians who dealt with the Great Depression cited in that book were America’s FDR and Japanese finance minister Takahashi Korekiyo. Richard J. Smethurst’s book, a passion project 20 years in the making, was the only modern English language text I found on the subject of Takahashi. It was cited as a reference in Hall of Mirrors for the “Takahashi’s Revenge” chapter. I thought it would provide an accessible account of one of the 20th century’s great financial minds. As Smethurst points out at the beginning, the book is more than just an economics tome in that it explores the life of an interesting man in an interesting time. Although referred to as Japan’s Keynes, Takahashi implemented his Keynesian policies four years before Keynes published his theories and as a result Japan exited the depression faster than any other economy at the time.

The start of the book gives a breakdown of Takahashi’s family history and his childhood. As the adopted son of an 足軽 or footsoldier family who had recently fallen in status, Takahashi found himself climbing life’s ladder early in his life. At this time Japan was emerging from the Meiji Restoration and making the transition from the samurai era to being a more modern democratically governed and outward looking country. Under his grandmother Kiyoko’s influence, he found work as a temple page which led to a trip to the USA at 14 years of age. He found himself in indentured servitude in America but was able to use the experience to learn English which would be a critical skill throughout his life. The books focuses on his early work in patent laws which put him at the forefront of a more international and open facing Japan that wanted to gain access to Western markets. His attempts to set up an English school in Karatsu put him in contact with similar minded individuals, and leading a Peru mining expedition gave him experience in business dealing with foreigners. Like FDR, he tried his hand at many different opportunities with mixed success. His early days were met with as many disappointments as triumphs but he would bounce back repeatedly because of the connections he had built and his widely recognized skills. During the Russo-Japanese War Takahashi proved an adept negotiator capable of managing relationships to the benefit of his country. To finance the war, Takahashi had to secure funding from overseas with 47% of the war costs being financially backed by investors in the US and the UK.

The Russo-Japanese war shows how Takahashi was a pragmatic nationalist. His main goal throughout his adult life was to better his country and escalate the living standards of his countrymen. Rather than tax the poorer classes of society to balance the budget, Takahashi’s goal was to grow the overall economy through investment and deficit spending. Similar to FDR’s mantra years later of the government having to “spend money when no one else had money left to spend”. He knew that to compete with international heavyweights America and the UK, Japan would have to cooperate with them on their terms. He saw the gold standard was not an end to itself but merely a tool to be used to connect with foreign markets. He definitely did not take slights from these countries lightly – the ban on Japanese immigrants to the USA or the demands that no wartime reparations be sought from Russia – but realized the need to grin and bear it to establish Japan on the world stage. He frequently and publicly denounced the military for their demands for extravagant budgets to fund belligerent behaviour in Manchuria. Takahashi saw a strong potential economic partner in China – and attempts at empire would only cost Japan scarce resources, produce backlash from an increasingly nationalistic China, and unnecessarily antagonize Western powers. In response Takahashi made attempts to curtail military autonomy by removing the army and navy general staffs which reported only to the Emperor – in practice, they didn’t report to anyone. Although by most standards a pacifist Takahashi, as Prime Minister and one of the main proponents of universal suffrage at this time, also believed in free speech and did not ban radical ideologue groups despite pressure from his own administration. At the time, three of five prime ministers in Japan had been assassinated by these groups and such opposition must have proved unpopular.

Takahashi served as Prime Minister of Japan for seven months in 1922 (a short term by even today’s standards). During his term he sought devolution of land taxes and business taxes to local governments who he claimed would be better capable of managing their own distinct and local “sicknesses”, civilian control of the army and their withdrawal of military from Siberia. Interestingly, he criticized businesses for demanding wage cuts for their workers and for blaming low efficiency of their workers which he responded was due to their own lack of imagination when it came to their own capital. He advocated both a graduated income tax to reduce income inequality and universal suffrage. Although he is not seen as a successful Prime Minister, he is renowned as Japan’s 7-term finance minister. His fifth term was in 1931 when he steered Japan out of the world depression. His policies saw radical increases in government spending to stimulate consumer demand, removal of the gold standard, and lowering of interest rates. In 4 years, Japan returned to full employment, 5 years before the US, and recovered more dramatically than any other country over the next ten years except Germany. His frequent attempts to curtail army and navy budgets resulted in his assassination in 1936. The book makes the argument that Takahashi was the last line of defence against Japan’s increasingly prewar militarising government.

Despite some heavy material in a few sections, I really did like this book. Stories about normal people ascending to success are always inspiring and Takahashi himself comes across as quite likable. As someone who has lived in Japan myself there are many reverse parallels that I could see in Takahashi’s early life when it comes to learning the language and making connections with foreigners. I’m very much interested in history also and some of the landmarks I’ve seen in Japan are put into context in this book such as Japan’s huge silk industry in the 1930s. This is also the first time I’ve read about history from Japan’s perspective.  I like to understand the strengths of the people I read about and the book makes the case that Takahashi was successful due to his English ability, his autodidact prowess, his internationalist approach, and outsider rationalism. Takahashi did not receive a mainstream education which led to a very different mindset and outspoken personality compared to his peers. The prevailing Confucian thinking at the time was that Japan was suffering from overconsumption which was morally bad – therefore reductions in spending, increases in interest rates, and individual frugality and saving was good. Takahashi embraced a new line of thinking – although a household is often better off saving money, a country’s economy is better if many households spend money.

My goal with reading about economic history in 2021 was to try and get a broad understanding of how financial markets work and to be able to have an informed opinion of how a country can effectively manage an economic crisis. Right now, I feel that policies of austerity simply have no rational justification. Budget balancing as enforced by European governments through austerity budgets in 2008 and advocated more generally by Ron and Rand Paul and the Tea Party in the USA doesn’t make sense. With regard to the latter, Joe Biden’s autobiography noted an interesting shift in American Republican Party messaging in the 1970s towards cuts in taxes in alignment with their desire to cut funding for social programs. As Joe’s Republican colleague put it, “I’ll be the party of deficits and you can be the party of fiscal responsibility”, a message that resonated with their voters who saw it as both fiscally prudent and fiscally advantageous. So maybe this is something that individual voters find difficult to understand. As Takahashi would point out though, what’s good for a government and what’s good for an individual in terms of budgeting is very different. If you cut off the flow of money, that money doesn’t go somewhere else – it simply ceases to exist and leads to less money in the economy. I recognize there is an argument to be made about where this money can be distributed but that doesn’t seem to be the argument that is being made – at least publicly. It’s more that one side are spenders and the other side are savers.

I realize that I’ve only really looked at the 1930s for examples of economic crises and in 2022, I hope to read more about inflation during the 1970s (happy with any recommendations anyone might have on the subject). I also want to look a bit more at the advocates of Austrian style economics (anti-Keynesian theories) to see what their rationale is and if it extends beyond “messaging that resonates with voters”. At the time of Takahashi and Keynes, most policy makers viewed strict balanced budgeting as a moral necessity. I do wonder if modern Austrian economists and austerity advocates are simply adhering to the same moral reveries of the early 20th century rather than pursuing rational and proven practices.

I’ve been a fan of Dune through David Lynch’s 1984 movie; the miniseries in 2000; and, mostly, through the 2001 game Emperor Battle for Dune. It was one of the first games I played over the internet with my friends and I have a great deal of nostalgic fondness for the story, the world, and its characters. I decided to finally read the book last year before the release of the new movie.

Dune has built up a massive following since its release in 1965. Before Star Wars and Star Trek, Frank Herbert had built a universe set in the future based on a feudal system. It’s an imaginative science fiction novel with elements of kings and queens, battles and alliances, and loyalty and treachery common to the fantasy genre. The Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen, the Spacing Guild, the Imperial Sardaukar, and the Bene Geserit are all separate factions with separate designs on power. That power comes from control of the desert planet Arrakis – the only source of the spice Melange in the known universe. The spice is used for space travel and also acts a psychoactive drug that amplifies awareness and prolongs life. Also, giant sandworms guard this spice! It’s an absorbing universe and everything I had seen so far had led me to believe I would like this book.

50 years on, Dune is still very impressive in scale. Although the world is complex, the story is a simple one. The protagonist of the story, Paul Atreides, is stranded on the desert planet of Arrakis when his family is betrayed and killed by a rival family. From here it feels like a coming of age story. Through exposure to the spice, Paul realizes that the world around him is not the world he thought it was and from here he grows into a leader like his father. Eventually, he evolves into the prophetic Muad’Dib destined to rule the universe before embarking on his revenge in the book’s climax. It’s a very by-the-numbers story with everything after the opening betrayal going off without a hitch.

Paul’s mother, Jessica, acts a secondary protagonist and her thoughts, concerns, decisions and self doubting are all laid out for us to see. For political reasons, she’s the Duke Atreides’ concubine as opposed to his wife. Although she does love the duke, her situation seems precarious. Through the events of the story, and her interactions with the Fremen, and her relationship with her son, she ends up coming to terms with her role in the story and recognizes her own importance. I ended up enjoying this part of the story more than the main plot. As a framing device, Dune is interspersed with quotes from the world’s historical texts collected by the Emperor’s mostly unseen daughter and the relevance of these quotes is tied off in the book’s haunting conclusion. While Jessica is a character living a story, characters like the Emperor’s daughter are only going to be wistfully studying and compiling the feats of the main characters. Let us hope she finds solace in her books because she won’t be doing much else – a rather poignant way of ending of a 600 page story!

I walked out of the Dune 2021 movie before it finished. Right at the point where Paul and his mother are stranded in the desert. In the movie, Paul doesn’t undergo any brutal change in awareness because of the spice and instead teaches his mother “the sandwalk” he learned earlier in the movie to avoid attracting the attention of sandworms. This point in the book was very much a slog anyway and nothing I had seen up till that point led me to believe that it would be any better in the movie. It might have been a mistake to read the book just before the movie – certain ambiguous parts of the book don’t translate well to the silver screen and the massive scale of the book with all its characters is difficult to capture cinematically. Some of my favorite parts in the book are completely omitted in the movie. Doctor Yueh isn’t a fully fleshed out character and the main villain Feyd (played by Sting in the 1984 movie) is completely omitted. I also wasn’t really enamoured with the casting choices in the new movie either or the changes in the story.

The novel Dune offers a visionary glimpse of a bleak future with themes of environmentalism and globalism as relevant today as they were in 1965. The book does do these themes a lot more justice than the recent movie (or the previous movies for that matter). However, my expectations were quite high for this book and while reading it, I felt like I was rereading a story I had already read a hundred times. In some ways, this is true – I did already know the plot – but the problem is that the characters also seem to know what the plot is. Paul’s revenge seems inevitable – the historical quotes, the Bene Geserit prophecy, and the prescient knowledge conferred by the spice makes the outcome seem entirely expected. There’s no real surprises for anyone involved. As an exercise in worldbuilding, Dune is amazing and definitely on par with other renowned fictional worlds. But if you focus on the main story, it feels like it’s just going through the motions.

After reading “Three Body Problem” last year, I started thinking back on my lectures in my first year of college. Our physics lectures were extraordinarily boring and mostly comprised a lecturer who solved problem sets in front us in an illegible scrawl on a projected screen. However, the early chemistry lectures were great and some of the best lectures I think I had in my 6ish years of university. The lecturer, Professor Paul Brint, who would often diverge into lengthy chemistry-related anecdotes, recommended a book called “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” which has now been on my to read list for about 15 years. I decided to finally pick up a copy and go through it. I wasn’t disappointed.

Like Professor Brint, Richard Feynman was a master storyteller. The book is a collection of his stories, written in a quirky and energetic writing style, that describe his academic career, his work on the Manhattan Project, his dabbles in different disciplines, and his many esoteric hobbies. At the heart of each story is his childlike curiosity, his amazing problem solving ability, and his mischievous sense of humor. More than a few of his quips had me laughing out loud. His compulsive need to question order and rules lead to many tussles with bureaucracy during his career including several attempts to circumvent secrecy measures in place during his time on the Manhattan project.

Although most of the book is funny, there is a real humanity to it as well. In each instance, these human moments are succinctly captured in a short few sentences. The death of his first wife from tuberculosis and his method of coping by submerging himself into his work is described in a few sentences. The aftermath of working on the atomic bomb clearly left an imprint on him for the rest of his life and his thoughts on the matter are summarized quite concisely. He doesn’t delve into these subjects but he does tie them off in a hopeful tone. Feynman kept going after his wife died and the world kept going after the bomb.

Feynman’s grit saw him learn the bongos in Brazil, launch a side gig as an artist, and travel to many different countries. I especially enjoyed reading about how he visited Japan and his attempts to engage with the culture. It reminded me a lot of my own experiences when i first arrived in Tokyo. There are things I never thought I could ever eat before coming here such as fish. Like myself, Feynman went through a culinary catharsis. His enthusiasm for Japan led to him attempting to learn the language with this particular endeavor ending with frustration with the different levels of politeness and deciding that it wasn’t the language for him.

To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have selected physics after first year in college regardless of whether I had read Feynman’s book or not. However, I did and do find it captivating to be able to see physics from the perspective of someone passionate about finding practical solutions to everyday problems. Feynman’s physics seems very different from physics as we learned it in college. Rote learning of formulas, boring problem sets solved in front of us by someone else without interaction, and computerized formulaic experiments with subsequent report write ups seem antithetical to the physics of Feynman. Schools that trained students to pass exams rather than imbue students with any practical knowledge and books designed to be sold rather than cover any meaningful problems are vehemently opposed by Feynman in a number of his anecdotes.

I try to read at least one autobiography every year – in 2020, Phil Knight’s Shoedog book about the founding of Nike proved to be so good that it was awarded a permanent place on my minimalist Tokyo apartment bookshelf. As I think it will also prove reread-able, Feynman’s book has earned a place alongside it. Somewhat unexpectedly, Feynman’s patchwork of memoirs, equal parts intriguing and amusing, is the best book I read in 2021.

I read the first book in the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski last year after watching the show on Netflix. Although the fantasy based show had a lot of terrific action scenes as well as an interesting premise, it did seem a little incoherent overall. It felt as though it had been pulled directly from a comic panel by panel leaving the story structure a little jumbled. To try and put the pieces together, I decided last year to read The Last Wish which, not only fixed a lot of the issues I found with the show, but also provided me with a great read overall. It was so good that I had to pick up the second book in the series.

Until relatively recently, I would have said that Sword of Destiny was the best book that I had read this year. Just like the preceding book in the series, the book starts quickly and maintains at a rapid pace until the very end. Unlike other fantasy books, there’s no dawdling in Lothlórien or any meandering Bran chapters. In the Witcher series, the important things happen while we’re reading the book and everything else is either just left out or told in tidbits through character interactions.

There aren’t many differences between this book and the previous entry. However, I will say that I preferred this book just because of how it explores Geralt’s character. As a mutant designed solely to kill dangerous beasts, he does not experience emotions and as a supernaturally powered warrior who can quickly dispatch any assailants, most people are naturally wary of him. It creates an interesting dynamic between himself and his companions particularly in this book. His relationship with Yennefer causes him something of an existential crisis as he wonders how he can love someone when he, by nature, isn’t capable or having any feelings at all. Or is he? His companion Dandellion (Jaskier in the show) shows us many of his positive attributes and would appear to be a mutual friendship. Geralt’s a cynic, he’s sarcastic, and he’s very very dry – maybe based on his own experiences – but it seems that he’s still open to believing that there’s something more to his life and his destiny. I’m very sympathetic to this line of thinking – exploring the human parts of someone who is only part human makes for a very interesting character analysis.

You can see why it might be difficult to adapt this to television as there isn’t really room to fill in the gaps as Geralt moves from one place to the next. There’s no intermission scenes between chapters where characters can just launch into some expositionary dialogue in the book so the TV show writers have a choice between inventing these scenes or just going with the flow from the books. I think the choices they made are overall good but it does make it a little difficult to understand what’s happening in the show. It also looks like the show will be omitting one of the best chapters in this book, the titular “Sword of Destiny” where Geralt has some interesting dialogue with some dryads as well as a key character in the series. It’s a shame but it will be interesting to see their own changes to the story.

I haven’t read a series of books in a long time (The last series probably being Sherlock Holmes during college) but I imagine I will be reading every book in the Witcher series. After this book, the format changes from the fast paced short story structure to a more overarching linear narrative. Even so, I will be picking up the next book in the series as there’s a lot to like about these characters and this story. I can’t wait to dive into the next book in the series.

I first heard about Yeonmi Park on Joe Rogan’s podcast. She’s a North Korean defector who has been making a number of media appearances over the past few years. I haven’t followed much of Joe Rogan’s podcasts since he moved to Spotify (Youtube is just easier to use on fly). I thought this was good though – so good that I picked up her book. As one of Japan’s nearest neighbours, North Korea frequently comes up in the news here mostly due its bellicose behaviour. Even in Ireland it is a topic of some fascination. I thought “In Order to Live” might provide some insights into this mysterious country.

Yeonmi’s account starts with her upbringing in North Korea. She describes her simple but austere childhood, her school life, the joy of hidden contraband, and how she was constantly hungry. Day to day life in North Korea does not come across as a living hell because the population seem inoculated against their own lack of control and feudal living standards. The government propaganda machine influences everything from their house decor to the language they speak. Yet Yeonmi’s father with his underground operation selling metals around the country shows that there is a certain tolerance for small scale corruption and bending the rules. The circumstances which lead to her escape heavily involve her father’s operation and the North Korean caste system whereby one family member’s transgressions against the state can doom the family name and their ability to earn a living for generations.

I have a South Korean friend here in Tokyo who I have asked about his neighbours to the north. From him, I found out that most escapees from the north will actually travel along a dangerous northern route through China rather than attempt to traverse the southern border where there’s a good chance they could be shot on sight. Yeonmi herself made the journey through China where escapees are often trafficked into the sex trade and then through the Gobi desert to Mongolia before finally reaching South Korea. In South Korea they face the difficult challenge of integrating.

I think what did strike me about Yeonmi, apart from surviving a horrendous series of experiences, was how she was able to learn so much in such a short time. In China, Yeonmi became proficient enough in Chinese to talk to her captors and translate for other escapees. In South Korea she had to catch up with the local education system which is renowned as one of the most strenuous in the world (Famously the police are brought out onto the streets to help students taking their college entry exams get to the test stations on time). And then for extra credit, she learned English as well and now she’s a bestselling author. It is a story about how she survived and then worked really hard and went on to be a success.

Yeonmi’s account as well as accounts of other North Korean defectors are often disputed. And Yeonmi herself also courts controversy with her comments likening the American university system to her home country’s form of government. A lot of the attacks on her credibility do seem politically motivated when I read them. However, I do think there’s a lot that can be taken from this book. My own image of North Korea prior to reading this book was mostly based on the James Bond film “Die Another Day” so in my head the country looked like a bleak minefield more so than a place where real people lived. It is an interesting account of how regular North Koreans live.

I snapped up Neuromancer by William Gibson off Amazon at the same time I bought the game Cyberpunk 2077 (a game which drew a lot inspiration from the book). The recommendation came from YouTube video game reviewer, Tim Rogers. Neuromancer has been cited as the quintessential work of the cyberpunk genre. As I had a lot of hopes for it, and it was time to switch to fiction after reading about FDR, I bumped it to the front of my reading queue.

Neuromancer’s first chapter “Chiba City Blues” starts off with the line “The sky above the port was the colour of television , tuned to a dead channel.” From here, the rest of the book sort of flickers through the life of former hacker Henry Doresett Case as he goes from being a down and out drug addict to professional mercenary lured back into his profession for one last score.

On the surface, this story sounds intriguing, if not a little hackneyed. The futuristic setting as imagined from a 1980s perspective also sounded like a few other books and movies that I really enjoy. In fact, there’s a lot in this book that seems to have inspired or have coincidental similarities to some of my favorite movies such as Escape from New York and the Matrix.

Reading the book, however, was an unpleasant experience. The opening setting in Chiba sort of hinted at this but I was okay with this. The book threw in some Japanese words which I didn’t have trouble with. At one point, the author randomly inserted the word “Sanpaku”; a word that I learned only last year meaning an eye with white space between the iris and lower eyelid – literally three white spaces surrounding an eye. No doubt the author felt as smug using this word as I felt when I understood it. After Chiba City Blues however, the plot takes us to Turkey and then elsewhere and probably some other places too.

As the plot became increasingly difficult to follow, the strange unexplained niche words became the least of my problems. New characters would suddenly show up without any introduction and old characters would suddenly change motivations or just do things for no reason with no explanation. At one point X tries to kill Y but it’s okay because Y killed X 5 minutes ago. Also the gang are in Turkey or the matrix or somewhere else. What are they even doing? About two thirds of the way in, I ended up feeling annoyed with the book – so much so that I started complaining about it to my friends or anyone who would listen. How is this book so critically acclaimed when it’s so incomprehensible. This feeling was accompanied by a more self conscious feeling of embarrassment. “Maybe it’s me. The book is brilliant and I’m just not getting it”. Or maybe I was reading it the wrong way? Apparently, I’d once tried to read Ulysses the wrong way before so that was also possible.

I started reading reviews for the book online on Amazon and Goodreads – not something I usually do when reading a book – because I had to know if other people had the same problems. The most insightful reviews were from people who acknowledge the odd structure and pacing of Neuromancer while also expressing it as a reason that they like the book. “It’s supposed to be disorienting”. So I plodded on and finished the book with this in mind. After reading the book I looked up the summary on wikipedia and confirmed that i hadn’t actually missed anything – I knew what was going on but it felt as if it was all going completely over my head.

Reading Neuromancer certainly was a different kind of reading experience. I felt that I might have liked the book if it wasn’t so scattered. The AI itself is interesting (and coherent) in every single appearance and whenever it speaks is when the book makes the most sense. Maybe this was intentional? At one point the main character tells the AI that *he* can’t understand anything the AI is talking about. I felt like asking Case to shut up because I hadn’t understood a thing he had been doing since he left Chiba. The character Armitage as a mysterious contractor with an even more mysterious benefactor was also someone who I was easily able to follow as his background gets explored as the story progresses.

I did think about this book for a while after finishing it. That’s usually a good sign but in this case I’ll make an exception. Once I knew that I was supposed to get a headache from reading Neuromancer I felt a bit better but I simply don’t like feeling disoriented or getting headaches when reading a book. And I am absolutely not going to be reading any more books in this series.

After reading “Hall of Mirrors” earlier this year, I wanted to follow up on some of the main characters. FDR played a pivotal role in restoring the economy of US after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. He is also renowned and revered for establishing America’s social security system and is often held in high regard as one the USA’s best presidents. As I wanted to learn more, I chose Jonathan Alter’s “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope” as I thought focusing on the early part of his presidency would be a good compliment to what I’d previously covered.

I’ve let this book percolate for more than a while after reading it. It wasn’t a bad book by any means but the amount of accolades it received left me hoping that it would be more than what it was.

As an introduction to FDR for someone like me, the book is quite an easy read. The chapters are quite short – most about 3 or 4 pages – and cover the essential components of FDR’s life. His childhood, illness, and attempted assassination are described in concise chapters and his political allies such as Elenor Roosevelt and Louis Howe each have chapters that focus on what they brought to the table. In that regard, it’s quite accessible and it probably works well as a reference book.

Alter deals with FDR’s ascent to the presidency, dust-ups with Al Smith and President Hoover, and the titular Defining Moment which was his famous inaugural address. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself”. However, the book’s greatest strength is that it does a good job of pinpointing what sets him apart from other presidents. “Hall of Mirrors” seemed to boost the idea that FDR was exactly what the American public needed in that he was not Hoover and was not beholden to Hoover’s policies. Although, Alter also leans on the idea that the USA needed a president with a fresh start, he also posits that FDR was the right personality at the right time – a charismatic individual who singlehandedly uplifted the spirit of the nation. A careful media manipulator, FDR also had unprecedented access to every American’s living rooms as radio became widespread. He was perhaps the first showman president.

As the focus on the book is the early days, we don’t get much insight into WWII or the court packing scheme. However, I was happy that the book leaned into the more anecdotal reports of what FDR was like behind his media apparatus. These sorts of reports might not get traction in other books but they do end up being a part of Roosevelt’s own mythology.

My main problem with the book was mainly that its title “FDR’s Hundred Days” doesn’t faithfully represent its contents in that the Hundred Days aren’t addressed until the final section of the book. Rather than an analysis of his first 100 days we get an overview of his early presidency. A more faithful, though more clichéd title, would have been “FDR: Becoming President”. As the chapters are also quite short, there isn’t a lot of analysis in general which I would have preferred. My own favorite chapter in the whole book, “The Chief Croupier” was also the longest and it thoroughly delved into FDR’s character.

One thing new I came away with after reading this book was that FDR not only saved the US economy, but also saved its democratic system. Although unthinkable in the present day, many US citizens would have happily elected a dictator to save them from financial destruction. FDR refused to be their dictator and became instead the only four-term US president.

I will read more about FDR as I do have three more terms to cover and there are a couple of books I’ve seen that look like they provide a good in depth analysis of his presidency. For now though, I’m happy that I have a smattering of knowledge regarding the cast and characters involved in the Roosevelt administration.

I’ve been looking for a great science fiction book for some time now. The last really great science fiction book I read was Christopher Priest’s Inverted World more than a few years back. Since then I’ve read some good science fiction books here and there but nothing that left a long lasting impression. The Three-Body Problem came up in a few recommended lists (including the Hugo Awards which is how I select most science fiction reading) so I decided to give it a try.

The book deals with first contact with an alien species and the effect that this has on Earth society. I’ve read this kind of story before but an interesting difference here is that the story takes place in China. So we get some interesting cultural perspectives and glimpses into Chinese history (often explained in footnotes), and some different political positioning. Highlighting superpower rivalry in one humorous moment, Red Coast Base’s initial first contact message is edited from a “Our enemies no doubt told you lies about us” to a more sagacious “We try our best to be friends with all other nations”.

Something I did think was interesting about the style of the book was that we’re largely left to interpret the characters’ motivations by ourselves. There are no long, ponderous thought bubbles. Rather, we see what the characters are experiencing and are then left to think about their motivations by ourselves. The villain of the story experienced the bloodiness of the Cultural Revolution in the opening chapter and it no doubt left its scars on her and leads to her ruinous decision at the book’s halfway point.

The book does contain many interesting ideas that are explored through a creative narrative. Philosophical discussions, environmentalism, and particle physics are all discussed and form part of the story. The titular three-body problem is explained through a simulation of a three star system where unpredictable gravity patterns devastate the local inhabitants. The problem itself reminded me of conversations my friends had at school about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the “God Doesn’t Play Dice” counterargument. (Up until now, I haven’t really thought about physics since first year of college).

The Three-Body Problem was a thought-provoking book and it poses a lot of interesting discussions. It did take me a while to remember the Chinese names – 7 years in Japan and I’m still not great with Japanese names so I hope they’ll forgive me that one! – but otherwise a great read. I look forward to reading the sequel at some point in the future.

I read books by US presidents (at least the last two) so I was going to get to the new guy eventually. My expectations were not terribly high for this book but I was surprised at how much I liked it compared to other political biographies.

With that said, I found the first part of the book documenting Biden’s early days pretty corny. More than a few times, when reading about how Young Joe confronted the poolyard gangster after work or when he went home after meeting his future wife for the first time and told his family he’d met the woman he’d marry, I found myself rolling my eyes and putting the book down. “Really, Joe? You did that? Wow…”. We get this image of a small town Scranton boy with big dreams and it just screams “I am running for political office”.

The book does get a lot better when Biden is elected to the senate though and I feel the subjects he deals with are much better framed. We do get a sense of the changing times with older segregationist voices still present in the Senate and how Senators of the time managed to interact with each other civilly while still pushing forward their individual manifestos. Biden is clearly focused on foreign affairs from his early career and his personal interactions with Marshall Tito and Slobodan Milosevic offer an interesting perspective of the US intervention in the Bosnian War.

My favorite part of reading US presidential biographies are when they give appraisals of other presidents. I doubt they give completely honest opinions (especially seeing as this book was written just before Biden’s 2008 campaign) but the insights are interesting nonetheless. As Biden had met face to face with 5 presidents at that point, he does have some amusing anecdotes. His first conversations with George W. Bush are especially entertaining.

Overall, you get a sense that Biden’s been around for a long time. I do think it was a good book and worthy of a read if you’re interested in the types of people who manage the world.