Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review:  We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinkster

In We Are Satellites, the sole science fictional element is a device called a Pilot, which has a blue glowing light and is implanted in a person’s head to supposedly optimize their awareness and productivity. The story is told in … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Libraries have been some of my favorite places on Earth ever since I was a child. When our family lived on lower Capital Hill in Seattle, my mother would drive me and my siblings to the Henry Branch Library on … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Best American Short Stories 2021 Edited by Jesmyn Ward and Heidi Pitlor

This collection is comprised of what is considered by the two editors to be the best “literary” short stories of the year, as opposed to the best genre short stories, which appear in different collections. As usual, though, two of … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton

This book is relatively new, having been published in 2021. It was recommended to me by one of my sons; soon afterwards I found out that another of my sons was also reading it. In short, it is a superb … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Fated Sky is a sequel to The Calculating Stars, and they are both part of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series. The Calculating Stars is a superb novel; it blew me away when I read it a year and … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I saw this book on the library shelves for several weeks before I decided to give it a read. That’s because I was so disappointed by Weir’s second novel, Artemis. Weir’s first novel, the one that catapulted him to international … Continue reading

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Book Review:  One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon by Charles Fishman

I picked up this recently-published book thinking it was an updated history of the Apollo program but as I began to read I soon realized that it is not really that at all. Instead, it is a look behind the … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 Edited by John Joseph Adams and Veronica Roth

This collection has a different tone than the other best of the year collection I recently read and reviewed, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Volume 2 edited by Jonathan Straham, and it’s not just that it includes fantasy. The selection … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum

This book is a heavy read; that applies to the physical weight of the book as well as the subject matter. It deals with the attempts of the Soviet Union to bring Eastern Europe into subjugation after World War II. … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Volume 2 Edited by Jonathan Straham

This is the second year of Strahan’s new best of the year science fiction anthology series, one that he has deliberately modeled after the late Gardner Dozois’s classic decades-long series. (Strahan acknowledges Dozois in the introduction.) With all respect to … Continue reading

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