Tag: books

The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick

A slowly-unfolding mystery of an international coverup about the Moon in the context of the Apollo missions.

A more gripping read than I think it had a right to be given its pace, but I think the drip of new information that drives the story along must have been about perfectly timed to keep me going.

The Old Willis Place by Mary Downing Hahn

The past two years or so each October I'd read aloud to the family A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. It's a Halloween story told one day at a time throughout October.

This year the girls wanted something fresh and I found this billed for the right age range. It seems to have been a hit.

An abandoned manor house with a tragic history and the kids at the center of it all.

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

This had been on my "to read" list for a while, but then Mike mentioned it in the presentation he gave to the Lab back in July so I pushed it forward to read sooner rather than later.

It recounts a team of 15 Smokejumpers (elite fire-fighters that parachute to a fire to get it under control quickly--a big deal during the era that forest-fire management practice was to put them out as quickly as possible) who jumped on the Mann Gulch Fire in 1949. Within 2 hours 10 were dead and 2 fatally burned.

It tries to answer the question, "What happened?"

Interesting read. A little bit of an odd style. Maclean kind of tells the story at least 3 times with slightly different bents and I think his writing is easiest follow if you read it in the voice of a guy telling a tale in order to get the right cadence.

Humankind by Rutger Bregman

Bregman looks critically at human history and the current best data across sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc. to argue the position that people are generally good.

People have done horrible things--of course, without question--but those are aberrations from the norm.

I thought it was a fair interpretation of the available data and any time Bregman introduced a counterpoint to the narrative of everyone-is-terrible he would straightforwardly acknowledge the flaws in his examples.

Easy read and a nice reprieve from the apocalypse stories.

The Peace War by Vernor Vinge

After the heavy non-fiction of A Man on the Moon and Truth, Lies, and O-rings I opted for some lighter fare.

I've read this before. I find it particularly amusing because the antagonists of the story is the Livermore Energy Lab (a.k.a. LLNL). They've imposed a tyrannical peace on the world by sealing away the implements of war.

However, the protagonists disagree on these being a preferable world to live in.

Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge

Although I had read The Peace War previously, I was not aware there was a sequel until I stumbled on it looking for new reading ideas.

So I grabbed this to read. It certainly takes place in the same fundamental universe, but it's a completely different kind of story.

While The Peace War is mainly an action/adventure story this is a murder mystery: The death of a woman from natural causes tens of thousands of years ago. How is that murder and why would anyone even care? Guess you'll have to read it to find out.

A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin

This is a focused chronicle of the Apollo program and the astronauts that flew during it.

Still quite incredible that such feats were accomplished in the mid-twentieth century with such rudimentary technologies--almost through sheer will of the thousands and thousands of people that made it happen.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Stephenson is known for his fairly-hard sci-fi. He does a great job of including solid math and physics and then going beyond in a fun way. His work is definitely more challenging to read than much other sci-fi stuff, but that often is because of the richness of his worlds and the accuracy of the science.

I had little information about Anathem before diving in, which I think made it more enjoyable. It's 1000+ pages though, and without the reputation of the author behind it I may have given up after the first couple hundred pages. For a novice author it could easily have been an rambling mess with no coherent story thread, but for Stephenson it tells an interesting story--he just takes his time doing so. He could easily have published it as a trilogy instead but I think that may have made the story inflection points feel more arbitrary.

Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot and it didn't feel like I was slogging through 1000+ pages, it felt like I was walking the path of the story and enjoying the journey.