I read all of Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup on Saturday, it was great. It's the story of Theranos, a tech company that claimed to have created revolutionary blood-testing equipment. The company was valued at close to $10 billion, received hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, had massive partnerships with companies like Walgreens and Safeway, and a board of directors filled with huge names.

Except that it turns out that their technology didn't work, and they had been basically faking or lying their way through everything. It's a fascinating story, with the book written by the investigative journalist who was key in exposing them in the first place.

Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett. Just finished Witches Abroad, another of the Discworld series, and that might be one of my favorite books of all time.

I'm currently starting Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie. Picked it up because I heard good things and looking forward to checking it out!

I'm now reading The Craft of Intelligence by former CIA director Allen Dulles. As Director of Central Intelligence and the CIA therein, he ruled during an era overrun with McCarthyism. He oversaw coup d'états in both Iran and Guatemala, he also oversaw the Bay of Pigs. He was positioned in the CIA in one of the most interesting times of the American Intelligence Community's history. That said, I am a huge privacy advocate. I've decided to read his book in an effort to view the other side, what historical motivations have been for foreign and domestic surveillance in the United States and around the world, and how they relate to the present and the future. I am looking for parallels in motivations, as it seems we don't often learn from history and are doomed to repeat it.

I'm currently getting caught up on Ward. It's an on-going sequel to the somewhat-famous web serial "Worm".

Basically it's a deconstruction of the superhero genre as a whole. Top notch stuff.

Last week, I found a secondhand hardback copy of an old sci-fi book I like, so I'm re-reading Murasaki, a shared-world novel written by a bunch of Nebula-winning authors.

Meanwhile, my current bedtime reading is Between The Strokes Of Night, because someone mentioned Charles Sheffield in a recent thread here, so I decided to revisit this book.

I'm reading a book by an entomologist who creates a taxonomic system to classify those little plastic fish that soy sauce is served in, as if they were actual animals. It's only available in Japanese so It having to read it bit by bit using Google translate.

I'm reading the poems of Konstantinos Kavafis, translated by Aliki Barnstone (Greek -> English).

I became a Stephen King addict in the last year. I picked up The Dead Zone from the library but haven't really had a chance to get into it yet. I also bought From A Buick 8 in a library book sale and I hadn't heard of that one so I'm excited to read it!

I am currently reading Revenant Gun, the third and final book in Yoon Ha Lee's excellent Machineries of Empire series. It's not much of a spoiler to say that Shuos Jedao is back from the dead again, and the internal and external conflicts and power struggles of the hexarchate continue. Like the previous books it's pretty "soft" by sci-fi standards because of the strange, reality altering, effects of calendrics but it's by no means bad for that. Lee's universe is weird but it's consistent. Definitely recommended, start with Ninefox Gambit.

I picked up Dragons of Eden today from a local bookstore. No idea when I'll get to it, perhaps this weekend.

I'm reading Jo Nesbø's books about detective Harry Hole. He's probably best known internationally these days for the disastrous film adaptation of the sixth book in the series, The Snowman. I've so far refrained from seeing the film, but I finished the book last year, and it was great. As was the seventh book (Panserhjerte/The Leopard) that I finished last week. I finished the book while in an airport, waiting for a flight, so I immediately bought and started reading the eight book (Gjenferd/Phantom), and it seems very promising.

My biggest criticism on The Leopard would have to be that it relies too heavily on a sort of deus ex machina, an invented computer system that supposedly gives the user easy access to all sorts of digital traces by exploiting government-mandated back-doors in the hardware and software that forms the Internet. The system featured briefly in some of the earlier books, but takes a more central role in this one. It is however interesting to note that this book was published in 2009, and this computer system is described as somewhat similar to a system later described in documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

I'm reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I love books that explore alien cultures, and this does that with an interesting twist. I'd definitely recommend it.

Reading The Traitor God by Cameron Johnston for a book club meeting tomorrow. It's a super gritty fantasy novel that takes place in an extremely stratified society controlled by a bureaucracy of mages. The main character was involved in the death of a god, but had his memories of the incident locked away and now lives in exile with the understanding that so long as he never returns, his friends will be protected. His friend is brutally murdered, so he returns to the empire to do some murdering of his own.

The book falls into the sub-genre of "grimdark" fantasy, with considerable violence (think GoT) and a good number of morally questionable actions from a hero who's mostly good, but is very much as capable of hate as love. At times I felt the protagonist went a little too iamverybadass, but it's still been a very entertaining read in a pretty fresh fantasy world.

I'm trying to (re)read House of Leaves. I wasn't able to finish it last time, it's a very... difficult book, and I don't even think it's that good, but it's very weird and different, and kind of feels like a challenge to me.

I am currently reading Machine Learning for Developers. My buddy and I are starting work on a Sims clone as a side project. I am also reading a fan made Heroes of Warcraft D&D 5e player's guide.

I've started reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality which has completely hooked me in, even though it's sitting at a whooping 661K words and I've 0 chance of finishing it in a reasonable timeframe.

Just finished The Call of Cthulhu it was pretty good. Quite short but very expressive. Thinking i'll read The Trial by Franz Kafka next.

I just started reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. The introduction is so far great, I can't wait to get into the story.

Shadow's Edge.

I am currently reading the Old Man's War series. It's OK, but really I just needed something to read. I haven't found any sci-fi that has kept me engaged that much since finishing The Nexus trilogy and Neal Stephenson's latest book. My main problem with a lot of sci-fi books is that they are so short, as soon as I get into them they are over. Why can't more authors pump out 1,000 page novels to actually keep me going for a little while :)

I just finished American Gods. It was amazing. I loved every bit of it. Now I'm halfway through Carrie by King

Slowly making my way through The Burning Maze by Rick Riordian. There's so many books I need to read, I really have to buckle down lol.

I'm working through East of Eden and It Can't Happen Here right now.

I'm reading a collection of poetry (from about 1914 till about 1935), as well as one of GK Chesterton's Father Brown books. I'm really enjoying both, Father Brown makes a much more interesting sleuth than Holmes in my opinion.

Mindfulness in Plain English, it's a hands-on book written by a Buddhist chaplain. I have the physical version of the book, but it's free to read on many websites, including this one.

I'm reading So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson, and Unsong by Scott Alexander.

Shamed is very interesting, because it's written in a very soul searching manner, Ronson came up with the idea of the book when he thought the the power of the internet to shame people was some new equalizer that was going to be a great force for good after he used it to get some academics who were using his identity on a twitter-bot to shut it down, so he resolved to get right in the heart of the next major public shaming outrage he found, and things got dark, fast.

Unsong is a web serial alternate history novel where the Apollo 8 mission, rather than passing by the moon, crashed into the great crystal sphere surrounding the earth, allowing God's divine light back into the world, and bringing back angels, demons, and the power of the Kabbalah. It's a web serial, so sometimes the prose is clunky, but it's also hilarious at times, shades of Terry Pratchett. Like when the forces of hell take over Siberia, and march on Moscow, but the Soviets hold the line, prompting president Nixon to form an alliance with the devil to wipe out the soviet menace, thus spawning the idiom that "only Nixon could go to Hell."

(read the last paragraph if you want to have some hope) I just finished reading a few sci-fi, ""easy"" books (i.e. books you can read without thinking too much, while sitting at the beach with a cocktail), so I decided to read something non-fiction, and I've been intrigued by anarchism in general for a bit so I decided to read something with substance on it: "Anarchism: From Theory to Practice" by Daniel Guérin.

It's super interesting so far because he talks about it from a wide perspective, trying to include all the different schools of thought in anarchism (while commenting very early on about how that word is kind of bad because most everyone who hears it thinks Mad Max instead of what most people who advocate for anarchism mean; a lot of it falls under a broad umbrella with quite a few different names). On the other hand (so far at least) he doesn't pick one thought and say "and this is the right one", but puts people in their historic context so that you can better understand why they would have chosen/thought what they did, and instead of vaguely paraphrasing he tries to quote people directly so that he's interpreting their thoughts as little as possible, and letting them talk for themselves instead.

Also, in one of the most recent bits I read from his book he talks about how a few of the people most well known for anarchism went through different phases in their lives wrt their political philosophy. He talks about a few people that started out very anarchist and "mellowed out" or went in a different direction, but also about people who started out somewhere else completely and ended up becoming more anarchist as times go on. And what's neat is that there wasn't judgment. There was just a sense of "sometimes people change in what they believe and that's OK". And I feel like that's something we could use more of? In fact a similar thought-pattern is what keeps me coming back here to ~, the fact that here people seem to be OK with changing their opinions as time goes on.

I'm reading "The Command of the Ocean" by N.A.M. Rodger, which is a high-level historical overview of the Royal Navy from the English Republic to the end of the Napoleonic Wars.