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My Robot Year

2026-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been trying to write a follow up to my last LLM post for nearly a year and all the ideas kind of founder because:

a) I think “oh, good another LLM post, just what the world needs”, and

b) At the speed I’ve been finishing things lately, the whole world will have changed three times by the time I finish this.

Still, it’s now been almost exactly a year since I started using LLMs significantly in how I interact with code and I have some thoughts:

They, like, work?

At RubyConf the other week I described the last six months as “On December 15th, everybody in this room stopped writing code.” It’s an exaggeration, but some point in fall 2025, the LLM models hit a tipping point where the generated code got good enough that it was clearly beneficial for many programmers on many tasks to use an LLM to write code. Note that I didn’t say “the best tool for all programmers on all tasks”.

I don’t, like, like this reality, but that is the reality. The LLMs basically work to write code. There’s all sorts of things they aren’t good at, but writing Ruby to a certain level of complexity, that is within their powers.

The tricky question is whether the models are continuing to get better in practice (I know that the metrics say they are getting better in the abstract). It’s hard to measure the problems you don’t have. I will say that although the models do currently struggle with some specific issues, and certainly never met complexity they didn’t like, they are better than they were last fall. I never have dynamic type errors in Ruby, and though I do sometimes have genuine functionality misses, it’s not that often. The models do seem to be getting better at picking up code style from surrounding code. They are also getting better at adjusting to a style or need if you push back.

I will say the harnesses have been getting better, though admittedly I haven’t done much with looping or multiple agents or that path.

The prototype trap

If you’ve ever been a consultant on a project where the client was not particularly technical, you’ve almost certainly shown a demo and had the client want you to ship it as-is. Because it’s done, right?

And you explain that just because the demo UI is pretty doesn’t mean it’s ready. There’s security, and error handling, and edge cases, and performance, and full functionality and all kinds of things. But it can be hard to convince somebody that when they see a polished UI demo, that it’s just a studio set.

In the world of the robots, the cost of a demo has dropped to basically zero. The cost of the other parts of the process – review, performance, security audit, compliance, weird edge cases – they’ve all dropped too , but they haven’t dropped nearly as much. Meaning that the relative cost of a demo to real code is way, way lower than it was.

Presumably, this is leading to increased pressure to ship demos. I see this even in my own work, just dealing with myself. I spend a bunch of time getting the requirements right and doing design, then the code happens in what seems like a blink, and then I have the relatively slow work of validating it, and managing the code logistics, and suddenly that all seems like it takes forever. It’s a genuinely weird and not all that great cognitive phenomenon pushing toward not reviewing the code because that slows things down.

Complexity

Two essays that I wrote about five years ago are interesting right now:

In 20 years, I looked at my first 20 years of professional projects and concluded:

Software tools like Rails resulted about an order of magnitude improvement on delivery speed for web projects over that time
That increase had partially been obscured by a corresponding increase in the minimum level of complexity needed to be a viable web app
Over the same time, hardware had gotten faster by something like two orders of magnitude-ish
That extra hardware speed had, from a developer’s perspective, been spent on making development more available to more people

In The Road To Legacy, I wrote:

Code complexity increases exponentially with the number of internal dependencies in the code
One thing that creates internal dependencies is developers not knowing the full context of a problem when the code is written
Because the increase is exponential, you often don’t see the problem coming until it’s unavoidable

Put them both together and add robots…

LLMs represent a huge increase in our ability to create and comprehend code, possibly even an increase that scales at hardware speeds. That increase may or may not translate to organizational productivity. But we actually do have options about what we do with that increase. Do we put it into pure speed, do we put it into safer tooling, do we put it into ease of use?

LLMs, almost definitionally, are coding without full context in such a way that creates internal dependencies, and I would expect that without significant human input, they will do so in such a way that increases code complexity super-linearly.

Which suggests one of three potential outcomes:

LLMs can keep up — the LLM ability to handle context increases exponentially faster than code complexity, forever. This, to me, seems unlikely.
We figure out how to get LLMs to write code that does not increase in complexity exponentially. I mean, we haven’t so far, but you never know…
After a brief period of productivity, code winds up back in a state where the totality is too complex to be managed at once, only now the code is two orders of magnitude more complicated.

I mean, I know where I’d bet…

We legitimately don’t know the side effects of letting these tools write code on lots of large codebases for more than a year.

I have my guesses, but I’ve been wrong enough in the last few months to be cautious. I do think that a lot of the ideas that keep cost of change low for human coders (especially encapsulation and DRY) are also going to prove to be useful for LLMs, because the constraints are still the constraints, but honestly, who knows?

Quality, ownership, fun, craftsmanship

After a few months of insisting that I wasn’t going to use LLMs on my personal projects, I gave in and built a couple of prototype level tools for my own use, the most interesting of which is basically a re-skin of Major League Baseball’s daily scoreboard.

Unlike my work projects, I largely haven’t done code review on them (code review is pretty token-intensive…). I’m in kind of a weird place with them. I’m glad they exist – I use the scoreboard basically daily. But I’m not sure I feel like I built them, and I can’t decide if that’s a minor quirk along the lines of “I’ll never use a telephone answering machine” or an existential career crisis. Or both.

In an unrelated story, about six months ago, in response to something or other, I said that I felt more identity threat from LLMs as a technical writer than as a software engineer, because on some level engineering still happens, whereas long-form technical writing seems like it’s being completely subsumed. I think that’s broadly still true, but…

Sometimes, at work or on side projects, using the LLMs does feel like creative work on my part being instantiated by a tool that does the boring part. Sometimes it feels like I’ve sorcerer’s apprenticed a bunch of brooms with buckets. Sometimes it feels like I’m just along for the ride. I can’t yet predict what actions are going to trigger what reactions. It does feel a little bit like when I was a manager briefly and had less contact with the ins and outs of code. And, of course, I stopped being a manager…

Conway’s Law + Robots?

What are the Conway’s Law implications of having a team that is using LLMs for code? Conway’s Law suggests that the structure of a codebase mimics the structure of the organization that produces it, or put another way, if the structure of your codebase does not mimic the structure of the organization, that’s going to lead to problems.

My first reaction was “no effect”, but I’ve definitely had issues trying to “pair program” with an LLM, to the point where it is sometimes easier to have the LLM write a chunk of code for me to review rather than have me edit it directly and have the LLM’s model of the code be out of date. That’s very much the kind of friction that leads to Conway’s Law problems.

One thing that seems true is that most organizations are not prepared for having 10x the code velocity running through their processes. My analogy here – if you ran 10x the water pressure through your plumbing, you would quickly find where the weak joins and leaks are. If you had a small communication problem, congratulations, you now have a big communication problem. A small bottleneck is now – presto chango – a big bottleneck.

A lot of people are coming to the conclusion that LLM use suggests smaller, more focused teams. Which makes a certain amount of sense, if you bound a team by their purview, LLM use at least in theory gives a smaller team the ability to have more purview.

The flip side, of course, is that more teams means more communication paths, and, in general more communication, and the communication is generally the part that is not going at LLM speed. So hopefully those teams have pretty well encapsulated code blocks, because everything is going to get more complicated.

My recommendation here, to the extent that I have one, is basic agile methodology – find your biggest problem, make a directional adjustment until it’s no longer your biggest problem, repeat. Retrospectives and reflections on what’s actually working seem like a good idea. We’re still in early enough days that experimentation still seems like a good idea, but doing so with some idea of what you are trying to do and some way of determining if you’ve done it or not.

Anyway, that’s where I am. 15 months ago I wrote “I don’t yet miss LLM chat when I don’t have it”, and I think the difference is now, I do. And I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

May 2026

2026-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

This was a big month with all kinds of book releases that I had been waiting a long time for. StoryGraph ratings are as of June 7, I think. I read eight books, and I think we’re going to talk about seven of them.

A Case of Life and Limb — Sally Smith

StoryGraph Rating: 4.19 (6th of 8)

My Rating: Double (6th of 8)

The sequel to A Case of Mice and Murder which I read last month. I like these books a lot. 6th out of 8 this month is nothing to sneeze at.

I really like the main character. Despite being very uncomfortable in social situations, he’s determined not to make others feel uncomfortable. He’s curious, while he can be judgmental, he’s able to take inspiration and learn from those around him. In this case, he’s unwilling to make snap judgments about a 19-year-old actress, and is able to see that she’s smart and brave. He’s a delight.

It’s also a rock-solid mystery story, and a more-than-decent legal drama in the background. Can’t wait for the next book here. This would be a solid BBC series, honestly…

Platform Decay — Martha Wells

StoryGraph Rating: 4.33 (2nd of 8)

My Rating: Triple (2nd of 8)

This is the first Murderbot book since the TV show, (now, the Nebula Award winning TV show) so a couple of notes on that.

The blurb for this book says “This may well call for… eye contact!”, which is definitely a post-TV thing, because “eye contact” is a bit in the show and not so much in the books. Not even in this book.
The TV show’s art direction is impeccable, the cast is really great. The decision to actually show Sanctuary Moon worked extremely well. I think they did generally a solid job turning a 150 page novella into 10 30-minute TV episodes. The show’s tone is a little bit broader and more silly than the book, which I think is partly to give the Preservation Humans a little more personality and also because a lot of what the book tells us about them would be hard to get across quickly visually. Like, “space hippies” isn’t exactly what they are, but it’s 300% easier to get across visually than what they actually are.
Wells seems to think of the show as a very well done AU of the book, and that works for me.

Anyway, this book. It’s billed as “Murderbot has to babysit on a rescue mission”, which is not untrue, just a little overblown. This is about a rescue mission, and when I say that, I mean page one of the book has Murderbot starting infiltration and the last page is Murderbot leaving. There’s no ramp up or down, it’s the no fluff just stuff structure. It’s amazing that Wells can keep that pace up for 250 page (there is a brief flashback to explain the setup). There’s just not really any babysitting.

Murderbot has a new mental health mode, which means it does periodic emotional check-ins, which are pretty funny. But beyond that, it’s Murderbot, getting better at being Murderbot in the world.

I genuinely appreciate Wells’ commitment to not doing fan service in these books. Which is to say, with a fan base that would have been happy to have 250 pages of Murderbot and ART/Peri bantering, or a nice heart-to-heart between Mensah and Murderbot, or even learning more about the crew of Perihelion, we get none of that. It’s all rescue. The entire Preservation/Peri human cast of people we’ve seen before has, I think, exactly one word of dialogue in the book.

It says something about Wells’ skill here that, through Murderbot’s narration, we get the impression of all those other characters and the understanding of how those relationships have changed. The one word of dialog is perfect, as is Murderbot’s description of it. I won’t spoil it for you.

Consistently, through Wells’s career, all books, what she’s great at is creating these enormous, weird, interesting environments with big set pieces, action or otherwise within them. The torus station here is one, the Raksura books have tons of them, the Witch King series has a few, you get the point, she’s amazing at that part.

The Last Contract of Isako — Fonda Lee

StoryGraph Rating: 4.20 (4th of 8)

My Rating: Double (4th of 8)

Marketed As:

“The Last Contract of Isako is epic science fiction like only Fonda Lee can write it”, or, in other words “For fans of Fonda Lee… here’s a book by Fonda Lee.”

Definitely what I needed right now was a book where a 50-something main character is dealing with relations with a new adult child while also dealing with aging in a world where when people are laid off, they are expected to walk out into the wilderness of an alien planet and just die. Real escapist literature, there.

This is a kind of SF that will likely prompt people to say “they don’t write ‘em like that anymore”. it’s not a space opera at all, it’s a look at a kind of dystopian society, but with a real attempt to get us to understand their morality, even if (I suspect) we are not expected to agree. I guess it’s not crazy dissimilar to These Burning Stars.

We’re 500 years into human habitation on a barren, inhospitable world. 25 years in, communications from Earth cut off in what is known as The Great Silence. The planet is basically a company town, the terraforming corporation is the government, and there are no public goods or public government as such.

The title Isako is our viewpoint character, she’s an atier (that’s “a-tier”, took me a minute…), a combination of business advisor and bodyguard, and when we meet her, she’s laying people off. Why, you might ask if you did not read the first paragraph of this note, would you need a highly trained martial artist to do layoffs? Well, because, this is a company town and when you are laid off, you are expected to “resign”, which is to say, walk out of the airlock and into the inhospitable planet, where your life expectancy is measured in seconds. Some people don’t take that very well. Also, this will hit differently if you work at a place that recently did some kind of layoff event.

Isako’s client as we open the book is a Director on the losing side of a corporate war, after his “resignation”, she comes to be hired by the winning side to dig up dirt on yet a third Director, who has extreme pro-terraforming views. (The political split here is between people who want to put 100% into terraforming and people who want to try to figure out what happened to Earth). She quickly learns that the third Director’s atier is missing, and then we get into a nice mix of noir, cyberpunk, samurai, and SF as Isako unravels the mystery.

I rated this a double, it was looking for triple, but I thought the ending didn’t quite work? I don’t completely feel I understand the actions of all the players. (I will note that despite the relatively high SG rating, I did see some reviews that thought it was disappointing, which I guess if you expected Jade City, it’s not that.)

Big Fan – Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski

StoryGraph Rating: 4.35 (1st of 8)

My Rating: Triple (1st of 8)

Probably fair to say up-front that I’m a big fan of both Posnanski and Schur, separately as maybe the best short-form sportswriter going and maybe the best comedy show-runner going, and together as hosts of a truly pointless sports podcast. This book is nominally about what it’s like to be a fan across mostly but not exclusively sports, but it’s also a chance for Joe & Mike to attend cool events, and make the other person attend an event they might hate.

I was a little worried about this only because I’ve been hearing them talk about this for months and months, and I was afraid it’d feel like I read it already. But honestly, they did a great job of hold back most of the cool stuff.

We’ve got largely unconnected essays ranging from Joe writing about a visually impaired NASCAR fan, to a collection of literally millions of baseball cards, to a Buffalo Wild Wings in Dallas on day one of the NFL season. They each let their daughters write a chapter on being a Taylor Swift fan. Good Place writer Megan Amram writes about NYT crosswords.

The book is joyful and sincere and occasionally a little heartbreaking, just like being a fan.

All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan

StoryGraph Rating: 4.22 (3rd of 8)

My Rating: Triple (3rd of 8)

So, it’s a little glib to say that this is the book that I wanted Long Live Evil to be, but that LLE was only about 90% that book. It’s worth unpacking why.

Quick blurb — our heroine is a 20-year-old woman named Rachel, who when we meet her, is dying of cancer. She is invited to step into her favorite fantasy series, where she is embodied as a minor villain, and she decides to lean into it. But she makes some very poor decisions…

Last time, I wrote this:

Three quibbles: 1) it takes a while for all the ducks to line up and for the book to get going, 2) Brennan fiddles with the heroine’s specific knowledge of the underlying books in a way that is a little contrived, 3) the book doesn’t end on a cliffhanger exactly, but it does end on a major revelation.

To quickly mention 2 — I still think it’s convenient that Rae somehow is missing a major fact about a major character (that character’s original name), but looking back, there are multiple clues in book one that she is acting on incorrect information.

1 and 3 are related, this series has an odd structure for a trilogy. Your classic trilogy has book one end on a moment of local triumph with the larger battle still to come. Book two expands the world, describes the larger conflict, and often ends on a cliffhanger or a moment of despair. Book three resolves everything.

There’s never really a moment of local triumph for Rae, most of book one is about getting to the big reveal at the end, which means it is actually laying down a lot of exposition. With that all done, book two is free to be somewhat wilder. This book is funnier, sharper, and more chaotic than the first one.

By the end of the book we have a SPOILER number of people from our world running around trying to fix the story, and all of them make a total hash of it. It’s rare to see a book where the side we are nominally rooting for makes so very many bad decisions, and even rarer to for that book to have those decisions mostly make sense and not make the reader irritated.

There’s a lot going on, we have to track not only the actual story, but multiple iterations of the story that existed before Rae jumps in. And our knowledge of that previous history makes some of the beats of this story hit harder. It’s a very hard tone to pull off, given the amount of potential exposition, and yet it all mostly works.

There’s also a lot the book says about relationships with favorite characters, especially favorite evil characters, and what those kinds of stories are for, and what it’d be like to meet your villainous hero.

There’s a reveal in this book I did not see coming, and another one I should have seen coming, and if you thought the last one ended on a cliffhanger…

Kill Your Darlings has a title but not a date.

Cinder House — Freya Marske

StoryGraph Rating: 4.04 (8th of 8)

My Rating: Double (7th of 8)

2026 Hugo Award nominee for best novella.

This is a Fairy Tale Retelling, ™ and patent pending. You may have guessed which one from the title.

The catch here is that Ella dies on basically page one, and becomes a ghost bound to the house her stepmother and stepsisters now own. The wicked steps soon learn they can command Ella to do any sort of house tidying, and they can compel her to do pretty much anything else once they learn that any damage to the house causes Ella pain.

There is, of course, a prince. He is charming, or at least charmed, such that anybody who watches him dance falls in love with him instantly. There is a festival, and midnight, and magic shoes.

I liked this — at it’s worst, it feels a little by the numbers, but at its best, it does a nice job of making the sympathetic characters sympathetic and making the familiar story beats feel motivated. (I also thought the magic was nicely done).

Radiant Star — Ann Leckie

StoryGraph Rating: 4.20 (5th of 8)

My Rating: Double (5th of 8)

First sentence:

“In the city of Ooioiaa, there are of course several different consororities, but when one says “the Consorority” one means the Consorority of the Translocation” — it’s the “of course” that gets me here. If you showed me this sentence blind, only telling me it was published in 2026, I feel quite confident I would have guessed the author was Ann Leckie in fewer than three guesses.

We are, as mentioned, in Ooioiaa, the only city on the planet of Aaa. This book is part of Leckie’s Radch series, with the events of other books kind of hinted at in the background. But our focus here is on Ooioiaa (I really feel for the audiobook narrator…), recently conquered by the Radchaai, and where there is a huge religious focus on the Temporal Location of the Radiant Star and the various sects, saints, and savants thereof.

I have to admit, I make fun of marketing blurbs here, but this one is honestly stellar, it succinctly describes the actual plot of what is kind of a sprawling book and doesn’t pretend the book is something it’s not.

What the blurb doesn’t tell us is how completely weird this book is, as, I supposed, evidenced by the first sentence. This is SF in the Jack Vance mode, presenting a culture whose motivations seem utterly bizarre to us, but from a narrative voice that takes that culture for granted. The narrator is pretty voicey and clearly expects the reader to have in-universe knowledge of at least some of the religious doctrines in play. Leckie wisely does not really explain why the Radiant Star is a point of worship, it’s enough that we accept that it is. (Leckie also said on social media that the narrator’s identity isn’t meant to be a puzzle to figure out, also the correct decision.)

What the book is actually about is a little hard to describe? You ever see the demonstration of a chain reaction involving mousetraps and ping-pong balls? This book spends the first 200 pages or so setting up mousetraps — we have some sectarian conflict over the temple, there’s conflict over a rich person attempting to purchase sainthood, there’s a colonization conflict with the Radchaai overlords, there’s the Radch civil war happening deep in the background, and a couple more besides. And then the ping-pong ball drops, and there’s glorious chaos for about 75 pages, and then there’s an ending.

At its best (that chaotic 75 pages) the book is amazing, I did come to actually care about the stakes, which are mostly the management of this temple. (There are some stakes about whether the whole planet will fail, but it seemed pretty clear that part would resolve itself). The stakes are so small — like the book is not exactly cozy (it only scores about a 3 on my patented cozy metric), but it’s also not epic, exactly. The ending, I thought, was a little anticlimactic, but that’s kind of a minor point against the fabulous buildup.

April 2026

2026-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

I read nine books in April and we’re going to talk about all of them. Warning: wild swings in tone ahead, as we go from some fairly light books to at least one very, very dark book.

The Librarians — Sherry Thomas

StoryGraph Rating: 3.51 (9th of 9)

My Rating: Single (8th of 9)

This was the book that got me interested in comparing StoryGraph ratings to my own, because it looked like the gap between my Single (which I enter as 4.25) was so different than the StoryGraph rating, but it turned out that the rankings were nearly identical (in part because this was a pretty good month for books).

Still, that’s a low SG score for a book I basically liked. Usually, when there’s a gap like this it means one of the following:

The book is weird in a “not for everybody” way, but it clicked with me (like Remember You Will Die)
The book has a clear flaw that I’m overlooking because I liked the rest of it so much.
It does seem like mysteries have tougher scoring or are more divisive, though I can’t quite prove that.
The book “escaped containment” and has been exposed to people not part of its natural audience (an award nominee, for example). Conversely, it’s a later book in a series, the haters have left and only the fans remain.
There’s a huge disconnect between the marketing and the actual book and people came to it with incorrect expectations.

This book is a mystery, but also last one — it’s marketed as a thriller — the US cover is wildly misleading, though the actual blurb is better. And it’s not really that. There is a murder, and there is a mystery. But if you are looking for the normal rhythm of “I, the detective, am going to uncover puzzle piece after puzzle piece to solve this conundrum”, this isn’t it.

This is much closer to a workplace drama or found-family story. Our main characters all work together in a suburban Austin library. All four of them are hiding something in a mostly benign way, but the deaths of two people who attend a game night at the library disrupt their lives. They do wind up solving the mystery but the book is more concerned with how they all learn to live with their past mistakes and trust each other. (Thursday Murder Club is not a terrible comp, but this book is not as funny.)

I had some technical problems with it – the book goes back and forth in the timeline to keep the reader in suspense and it’s a little annoying, and I’m still not sure I completely understand what actually happened with the McGuffin. But I did like the characters and went into “book, don’t you dare harm one hair on this amazing person’s fictional head” mode, so it was successful in that way.

How To Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay — Jenny Lawson

StoryGraph Rating: 4.26 (3rd of 9)

My Rating: Single (5th of 9)

I’m not sure how much I have to say about this one. Jenny Lawson, known online as The Bloggess, has written a few memoirs about dealing with her particular set of mental health issues. This is more of a self-help book, in that it’s a list of small things you can do to improve your day, your work, your outlook, what have you.

It’s fun, I suspect it’ll be genuinely helpful, and her voice remains inimitable.

The Ending Writes Itself — Evelyn Clarke

StoryGraph Rating: 3.67 (8th of 9)

My Rating: Single (9th of 9)

Marketed As:

The blurb includes stuff like this:

“it will remind you, in the best way, of Agatha Christie” — Stephen King

Now, I am but a simple reader and no Stephen King, but I tend to read “it will remind you of Agatha Christie” as “fair play mystery”, which this is decidedly not. I suppose that’s not the authors’ fault.

The setup here is that six different mid-list writers are called to the remote island castle of famed mystery writer Arthur Fletch. When they arrive, they discover that Fletch is dead, with one last chapter of his last book unfinished, and the six of them are in a contest to finish the chapter with a million dollars and another million dollar advance on a book deal to the winner.

Remote island, mystery writer, motive all over, this is very tropey. And I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that the writers start dying. However, and this is more of a spoiler, it’s more of a thriller/horror than a mystery — nobody solves anything, we just figure it out when there are two people left standing and one of them is trying to kill the other one.

What it is more than anything is a chance for Clarke (pen name for authors V. E. Schwab and Cat Clarke) to satirize the publishing industry. All the characters have been chewed up by publishing in one way or another, and none of them come off particularly well. (There’s a bit about how YA loves a young author, which is particularly biting given that Schwab sold her first novel before graduating from college).

I’m not quite sure what to make of this at the end of the day. As a thriller, it’s a little oddly structured. (At least two of the characters relive childhood trauma, but it feels coincidental?) As a satire, it’s obviously knowing but a little mean to the writers, in a way that feels strange coming from authors that escaped mid-list. It’s clever, though.

Red City — Marie Liu

StoryGraph Rating: 4.16 (4th of 9)

My Rating: Double (4th of 9)

Marketed As:

“The Godfather meets The Magicians…Perfect for fans of V.E. Schwab” (speaking of V.E. Schwab…).

“Godfather meets the Magicians” isn’t bad actually, “The Magicians” is maybe a little on the nose, but it’s accurate. I’m not completely sure why V. E. Schwab is catching strays here, my best guess it that it’s a signifier for “here’s a popular author who writes books that feel a little like YA novels, but with sex”?

The real missing comp here is Jade City, and not because the names are similar, but because that’s the “Organized Crime, but with Magic” series of the last decade. Hold that thought…

And Another Thing Or Two

There’s a thing in SF/Fantasy where sometimes it’s easier to describe and have the reader accept a big change than to accept a small change.

If you wanted a world where left-handedness was, like, half the people instead of 10% or whatever it actually is, you’d struggle to explain it because it’s not weird to the characters and it’s unlikely to come up organically. Whereas, for a fantasy magic system, you often can just have the character explain whatever physics-bending they are doing and nobody blinks.

In an unrelated story, in this book, Los Angeles is “Angel City”, New York is “Gotham”, and London is “Londinium”.

Next… I think this might be a Gail Simone observation, but I could be wrong. In the DC comics universe, many mythological figures canonically actually exist, including, say, the Greek gods, and the Fae. As fun as this is to play around with, a side effect is that a number of ideas and stories that in our world are the product of human imagination, in the DC universe are not, because the supernatural beings actually exist.

In an unrelated story, in this book, Zeus was an alchemist. Shakespeare, as well. Basically any person from the past famous for exceptional deeds was an alchemist.

Oh, Yeah, There’s a Book

I should talk about the actual book. Our main characters are Sam and Ari. They meet as somewhat isolated children, forming a friendship where they somehow become very emotionally reliant on each other despite never learning basic facts about each other’s lives. In the fullness of time, they are each secretly inducted into rival crime/alchemy syndicates, each trying to control “sand”, an alchemical drug that makes people into more perfect versions of themselves.

There’s honestly a lot to unpack here. Alchemists are given work names that are passed from generation to generation — he’s Shakespeare, she’s Mozart (but not that Mozart). And to oversimplify a bit, eventually they are both asked to kill each other at about the same time they each realize the other is an alchemist and that they are both the hotshot young talents of their respective teams. But are they still attracted to each other?

Tale as old as time and all that, and I suppose all the above sounds a bit harsh. I really did like it — the magic system is cool and the magic battles are notably well written, interesting, and actually followable. There’s a lot that works on a scene-by-scene basis. I have some quibbles about the plot structure as a whole (a couple of actions at the end are maybe not motivated, the ending is maybe less climactic than advertised).

I will note that for a universe that is basically our universe with renamed cities and a magic drug that makes people super-smart and charismatic, there doesn’t seem to be that much different about the society? On like page 382 a character idly muses about all the great advances that sand has wrought and how it has been transformative. I would have liked to have seen more of that.

Sequel, April 2027…

A Case of Mice and Murder — Sally Smith

StoryGraph Rating: 3.96 (6th of 9)

My Rating: Triple (3rd of 9)

Not everybody can re-invent a genre, somebody has to be there to just work in the genre.

1901 London. Our detective is one Gabriel Ward, a barrister (or solicitor, I can never tell the two apart. He’s one or the other and probably would be mortally insulted if I gave him the wrong title). He’s brilliant, and I think we can safely say neuro-atypical coded, and very content to live a life of routine inside a genuinely real UK institution where all the lawyers live (the Inner Temple). And then one day the Lord Chief Justice of England shows up on his office doorstep, quite dead and also quite barefoot.

That’s the murder part. The mice part is to do with Ward’s current case, a tricky copyright dispute over a children’s book called Millie The Temple Church Mouse.

Anyway, this is a straight-up mystery novel, something of a change of pace after reading a bunch of meta-mysteries, thrillers, and whatnot.

It’s a quite well-structured one. Ward is well-suited to be a reluctant detective — he’s preternaturally well-read, and has a lawyer’s eye for piecing together a system. He’s also been sort of shut out of the world, and the case re-convinces him that he can be a part of it. You could imagine that being handled quite badly, but here it works, and is quite sweet in spots. Sticks the landing quite nicely.

I liked this one a lot. I often struggle with historical mysteries, but this one is really good.

The Midnight Show — Lee Kelly

StoryGraph Rating: 4.14 (5th of 9)

My Rating: Triple (2nd of 9)

Marketed As:

Interestingly, it’s not marketed in relation to other books at all, even though the Taylor Jenkins Reid fan in your life will probably love it.

Note one: It’s interesting how framing a book as a series of interview transcripts gives you a certain license to do particular kinds of foreshadowing. Like the kind of thing where the narrator drops hints about the future and it’s often insufferable in a regular book works quite well here in a fake-interview structure because both the interviewer and interviewee can quite naturally share context that the reader lacks.

Note two: It’s always interesting to me in a historical story that intersects with known reality where the authors choose to use real people and where they choose to use fictional famous people. In this particular book, it’d also be interesting to list which real people clearly either don’t exist or didn’t have careers in this book. Or which real people have clear fictional analogues. (Harrison Ford exists in this world, the entire original SNL class doesn’t, Lorne Michaels has a clear analogue).

Note three: It’s sort of an unexamined trope of mystery stories (which this is, kind of), that characters can just flat-out lie or omit things to the detective like sociopaths even if they aren’t actually sociopaths.

This book is about Lillian Martin, who is Legally Not Gilda Radner from The Midnight Show, which is Legally Not Saturday Night Live. In this universe, TMS premieres in 1980 and is the fresh new comedic voice of a generation. (Which is why I say SNL presumably didn’t exist.) Martin goes missing, presumed dead, after a Valentine’s Day show in 1983.

Forty years later, a noisy reporter starts asking questions — most of this book is interview transcripts from her notes.

So, without doing spoilers, I think the book does a great job on character work, often juxtaposing two different characters’ opposing views of the same event. I think it does a decent job of managing expectations. Again, without spoilers, there’s a thing you clearly think is a possible solution to the mystery that the book explicitly shuts down early on. There’s a very cool character reveal late in the book that is the kind of thing that you can only pull off in the faux-interview structure. It’ll be a killer moment in the inevitable six-episode streaming adaptation.

Again, trying to avoid spoilers, the book spends a lot of the back half presenting two different and mutually exclusive interpretations of what Lillian and the people around her did leading up to her disappearance. I think that becomes untenable as one side becomes clearly delusional, and that happens maybe about 15 pages earlier than you’d want it to happen.

But overall, very charismatic book, a lot of fun, satisfying ending.

Apple: The First 50 Years — David Pogue

StoryGraph Rating: 4.48 (2nd of 9)

My Rating: Single (7th of 9)

This is one of those books that I kind of wonder who the actual audience is, which is I suppose a weird thing to say about a book I paid genuine money for. But, as long-time Apple person, I’m not sure I learned a lot, and at the same time, I think it’s not quite pitched for the causal non-Apple fan in your life. That said, this is the biggest StoryGraph - my ranking gap of the month, so it clearly found an audience.

Apple, of course, has one of the weirdest stories in the history of American business. Honestly I think Pogue is at his best when writing about the period after Jobs left and before he came back — the early part is very well covered territory, and the later part, I guess also is in a different way. (I’m biased here because my 1995 internship was right at the end of that Jobs-less period.)

What I think Pogue does nicely in covering the middle part is make it clear just how dire Apple’s situation was while also giving the people involved their due for their actions that helped set up what Jobs was able to do when he got back. In this telling, Apple was chaotic and teetering on the brink basically from about 1982 when Apple 2 sales started slowing down until really, the launch of the iPod in 2001. Jobs leaving is just a comma in that chaos, not the dividing line.

The iPod is when Apple finally figured out an answer to the question of “can we find a way to get a mass audience to pay a premium for a well-designed product”. (The iMac was just a low-end computer — it sold enough to keep the company going, but didn’t change the trajectory of the company)

After Jobs dies, the book becomes sort of a dull listing of each new product and how it came about, and I’m not sure that, say Apple Fitness deserves it’s page and a half, and I use Apple Fitness every day.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country — Molly Crabapple

StoryGraph Rating: 4.58 (1st of 9)

My Rating: Triple (1st of 9)

Boy did this one bring up a lot of feelings. Very clearly the best book I read this month. Strong contender for book of the year, it’d be the first non-fiction book I ever felt that way about. It’s astonishing. Not an easy read at all, though.

This is the story of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party/organization that existed throughout Eastern Europe from the late 1890s until Ashkenazi Jewish culture was obliterated. This is my culture. I don’t know a lot of family lore, but I’m pretty sure I have a relative in my great-grandparents’ generation who came here directly fleeing a military draft.

This is not a happy story of a scrappy organization that overcomes obstacles to eventually achieve a victory. Or a moral victory. This is the story of a group of organizers, both idealistic and practical, who were systematically destroyed. Who were eventually slaughtered by their enemies from the right, but also by their enemies from the left, and also from other Jewish factions, all enabled by the general indifference of the world at large. Critically, the story of the Bund is not just the story of progrom and holocaust, but also of community and solidarity. Of course, the story of Jews in Eastern Europe in this time is necessarily violent. Violence is a background note of the entire history.

It’s a measure of something that I keep trying to calibrate that last paragraph to make it less angry even though my anger is justified and even though you should see what I cut from that paragraph.

Anyway, the important through line of this book is the tracing of a conception of a Jewish place in the world that does not involve a Jewish state – here where we live is our country. From the beginning the Bund and the Zionists were at odds. The Bund basically saw the early Zionists as reactionary and delusional, not to mention feeling that the Zionist project reinforced the idea that Jews were not a part of Europe. The people who would become the first government of Israel do not come off well in this book at all.

Nobody’s Baby — Olivia Waite

StoryGraph Rating: 3.94 (7th of 9)

My Rating: Single (6th of 9)

Marketed As:

Perfectly cute cozy SF mystery — it’s blurbed as “Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple”, which credit where credit is due, that’s pretty spot on.

We’re on a generational ship, though in a slight twist, nobody really dies because their memories get stored and uploaded into new bodies. It’s got pleasant small town vibes, this is not a ship harboring a deep dark secret. Which is why when a baby pops up, it’s a mystery. It’s cute, there’s not enough cosy SF in the world.

When Books Could Code 2a: Extreme Programming Part 1 (of many)

2026-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

On this episode of “When Books Could Code”, we’re talking about the book that probably had the largest single impact effect on my career, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck, published in October 1999. I read it in… probably March, 2000. There was a second edition in 2005, we’ll cover that in a later post.

This version of the post that you are reading is about my fifth pass at getting this one out. My draft got up to 7000 words, so we are splitting it into parts. In this part, we’re going to talk about the book itself and the problem that it is trying to solve.

Just to put this out here — Kent Beck is the only person that I didn’t have on the Tech Done Right podcast because I was too big a fan. There’s a non-zero chance that Beck will read this, and that’s mildly terrifying. Kent, if that’s you — hi! Whatever I say here, this book changed my life, I genuinely believe in what it tries to do and I likely would have burned out on programming without your book.

A Story

Let me try and describe my head space when I first read this book, I think my reaction will make more sense.

It’s the year 2000. I was about a year into my first job out of grad school as the only professional software developer at a very small web consultancy. They had been a documentary film company that had wandered into creating web sites at exactly the time when there was a huge wave of money pouring into the web, and they hired me because they thought my graduate degree meant I knew something about software. I knew it didn’t but I didn’t tell them that.

In early 2000 we started a new project for a major Fortune 500 company, the first time that several of their subsidiaries would collaborate on a common website. We had a tight 90 day deadline. Not because they needed it in 90 days, but because — and I swear this is true — they wanted to prove to themselves that they could move at “web speed”.

I won’t go into all the ins and outs except to say that nobody on our side had ever worked on a project in need of this much project management (least of all me). It featured me snapping at a client that “they weren’t going to be the one up at midnight” as a response to some request or other. (The owner of my company had me apologize). It featured our CEO tearing up the entire UI five days before the project was due, not because the client was complaining, but because he just didn’t care for it. He also loved nothing more than having us make live changes to the staging site on conference calls with the client. (The staging server lived under my desk.) Don’t even get me started on the chain-smoking Oracle contractor we hired…

It was a long 90 days, made even worse by the fact that we never seemed to know what we were doing. I was frustrated because I was never able to leverage the few things I did actually know about software in a way that made the project easier.

In the background, I was starting to hear tell about something called “extreme programming.” It was the greatest innovation in programming since the invention of the zero, or possibly an excuse for cowboy coders to run amok. I was intrigued. (I already knew who Kent Beck was from Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns and also was aware of his JUnit writing and also that he was part of the original C2 wiki crew.)

Anyway, after a few all-hands-on-deck long weeks, we did ship the project on time. Only for the client to a) get mad it wasn’t available instantly because they didn’t understand how DNS propagation worked, and b) just sit on it for weeks, because they didn’t need it for anything immediate, they were just trying to prove they could move fast.

Right after that project, I read XP Explained. I was, you might say, primed for it. We had something like a retrospective on the project, where I insisted that we not treat it as a success just because we shipped. I read excerpts from this book, which prompted some teasing from the boss because of course I would bring a book report to a project meeting. (I have been me for a very long time.) Turned out we didn’t really have the capacity at that place to do anything like XP, and I wound up spending the next several years searching for a place that did. And also trying to make the places I worked into places that could work like this, to mixed success.

The Book

In partial rebuke to some stuff that I wrote last time, the forward for this book comes from the Gang of Four’s own Erich Gamma. Gamma’s forward ends with this:

[Beck’s] views and approaches always challenge the way I approach software development. There is no doubt that XP challenged some traditional big M approaches; this book will let you decide whether you want to embrace XP or not.

I think the “M” in “big M” is meant to be “methodology”, but I invite you to spend a few seconds thinking about funnier things it could be. “Meatloaf”, “Mustache”, and “Midichlorian” are three that come to mind for me.

Call me sensitive… but that’s not exactly a full-throated endorsement, is it? It reads one notch short of “in conclusion, XP is a land of contrasts.”

Beck’s actual introduction in the Preface is much better, and does a fantastic job of contextualizing the entire book.

XP is a lightweight methodology for small-to-medium sized teams developing software in the face of vague or rapidly changing requirements. This book is intended to help you decide if XP is for you.

Simple. Clear. Defines a boundary. It’s worth noting after decades of comments over whether Agile is for large teams that the specific initial claim here is that XP is not for large teams.

We then get a very clear statement of a core principle:

XP takes commonsense principles and practices to extreme levels.

If code reviews are good, we’ll review code all the time

If testing is good, we’ll test all the time

And so on…

This is to my mind, one of the two core elements of XP. It’s not about the specific practices, as such. It’s about the idea that if there is something in your process that is beneficial but you only do it occasionally, try doing it continuously and in smaller slices. It will likely work better. That, and continual improvement (which is not quite described in this version of the book), are the most important ideas I took from XP.

Beck argues that the specific practices in the book are great because they are based on things that are generally useful for most teams, so the book is a guidebook on how to make them extreme, and therefore better. There’s a little bit of tension here — the book wants to claim that the original 12 practices work best as a group because they are self-reinforcing, but also that teams should find their own practices and it isn’t a one size fits all. Resolving this tension is a big part of the book’s second edition.

XP, Beck says, makes two sets of promises. To programmers, “they will be able to work on things that really matter, every day.” To managers, “they will get the most possible value out of every programming week.”

The Problem

The first part of the book is about the problem that Beck is trying to solve.

Beck uses this section to frame software development. “The basic problem of software development is risk”. XP “addresses risk at all levels of the development process. XP is also very productive, produces high-quality software, and is a lot of fun to execute.” This is interesting to me because in my head, I’ve always remembered this book as identifying the cost of change as the basic problem. Risk and cost of change are similar, but not quite the same…

A very common “fact” bandied around about this time was the that a majority of software projects fail. It was never quite clear to me where that fact came from or even if it was true. I don’t feel like I hear about this stat much these days, which is partially because it was always a little bit bogus, and partially because web development enabled a large section of the software industry to re-define “success”. But the idea that most projects fail, I think, is a big part of the background against which this book was written.

There’s a short chapter about the economics of software development, which, interestingly, marks “interest rates” as one of the key factors in the business of software — spending later and earning sooner is good because you spend less interest on loans and more interest on income. This idea drives some of what Beck later writes about prioritization. Notably, this book was written before the zero interest rate economy of the post 2008 world, which changed the math quite a bit.

The goals of XP in this context are:

To take smaller steps in order to minimize downside risk by increasing the chance you will catch a problem earlier.
To ship working software sooner so that you can start earning or saving money.
To plan for continual change and reduce the cost of later change, rather than building an immutable design up-front.

Chapter 5 is where we get to cost of change, “One of the universal assumptions of software engineering is that the cost of changing a program rises exponentially over time.” I’ll note that in the book Leprechauns of Software Engineering, Laurent Bossavit argues that this was never actually true. Or at least that it depends on what you mean by “over time”. Anyway, Beck lays out the case here that XP will keep the cost of change steady over time “this is the technical promise of XP”, Beck says, and now it’s clearer to me why I remember that being the main argument.

After that we get the somewhat famous driving analogy, where XP is compared to a driver who is always prepared to make small adjustments rather than letting the car drift for blocks at a time.

We also get the first look at the four values: communication, simplicity, feedback, and courage, which will eventually kind of morph into the Agile Manifesto.

And another core principle of XP:

It is betting that it is better to do a simple thing today and pay a little more tomorrow to change it if it needs it, than to do a more complicated thing today that may never be used anyway.

I’ll note that a) I still very much believe that is true and b) there’s kind of an excluded middle there.

We also have five basic principles: rapid feedback, assume simplicity, incremental change, embracing change, quality work. And four activities — coding, testing, listening, and designing. “Feedback” here refers mostly to “how fast can we tell if what we did worked” and not “I’d like a socially approved way to say uncharitable things about my co-workers”.

What’s New

While I think the solutions proposed by XP got most of the attention, Beck’s framing of the problem in software development was also novel and the framing is what makes his solutions seem feasible.

There was a lot of momentum in the 90s over the idea that you could solve all software’s problems with better requirements and design up front. You can see part of that movement in Design Patterns, and also looking at anything written about UML at that time, plus it was the message of a lot of the 90s hype about objects.

This book was written against the backdrop of two ideas that were in very common currency:

A lot of software projects fail, and the new design ideas weren’t necessarily helping that.
The cost of change feels like it goes up, and whether that’s because of the phase of the software or just because the software keeps getting more complex is maybe not relevant.

And if those are the background facts you are assuming, then the idea of “well, what if we didn’t do X” is worth entertaining. So, if we don’t do Big Design, what can we do to lower risk? Well, we can test. Okay, but what do we do to lower the cost of testing? Well, we write the tests first. Okay but what do we do to keep that from getting out of control? Okay we pair program…

And so on, that’s where XP comes from. Next time, we’ll talk about the proposed solutions, or at least the first wave of proposed solutions.

The Triumphant Return of a Thing Nobody Will Care About

2026-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

In 2002, legendary baseball sabermetrician Bill James released Win Shares, his mega-calculation of how to create a single baseball stat that combines everything a player can do to create value.

It was not a complete success. The baseball stat that is used these days for combining everything is called WAR, which stands for “Wins over Replacement”. Both stats attempt to summarize a player’s entire contribution into a single number. Both are effectively impossible for a normal person to calculate. But they come from different assumptions and measure things differently. It’s maybe easy to see why James’ version didn’t take off — it’s a little weird in how it works, and James never had the time or energy to convert people to it.

In the early 2000s, I spent a bunch of time writing a program that calculated Win Shares from the existing data sources, since nobody was doing it reliably. Those sources mostly don’t exist these days, so I have now rescued the code, re-implementing it as a Rails app with an HTML generated front-end, and pointing it at today’s available MLB data. I then took the liberty of updating the method a bit. Which is dangerous, but I think my steps are modest.

Since I’m basically writer’s blocked writing about coding itself, I’m going to unstick myself by writing about this little side project for a bit.

I don’t want to get into a huge discussion about Win Shares vs. WAR — okay, to be fair, I’d love to do that, but it’s somewhat digressive from the main point and I’m not really qualified, so let’s start with what a Win Share is.

A Win Share is… a one third of a win. Each team gets exactly three win shares for every game they have won in a season. These Win Shares are allocated precisely across the players on the team. For example, as I write this, the Cubs are 45-38, which means they have exactly 135 win shares as a team. The Win Shares method allocates those 135 shares among the Cub players. The number of Win Shares given to each player reflects the value that player has delivered. And the total number of Win Shares for all Cub players equals 135. As I write this Pete Crow-Armstrong has been allocated 19 of those Win Shares, leading the team. A typical MVP-candidate season is 30 Win Shares or so.

Also, in the Win Share system as written, players get integer numbers of Win Shares. So, PCA has 19 Win Shares and not 18.9

You likely have questions:

Wait, what?
That works? It sounds bizarre?
Why three?

To answer the last question first, it’s three because that’s what James perceives as the reasonable precision of the system. At that level, he’s reasonably confident that a difference of one win share is meaningful. (In a 2023 article, James talks about mistakes he made in the system, and refuses to declare the three-share thing a mistake, even as he acknowledges that a more decimal based formula might have been more approachable.

The integer rounding has a related, James argues that a tenth of a win share is so far within the potential error of the system that it’s not worth arguing about, and he didn’t want people to ascribe meaning to a tenth of a Win Share.

Fair enough, but I do think it’s objectively funny to write a system so complex that it takes 40 pages to explain, that gets deep into the minutiae of things like sacrifice bunts allowed and how many left-handed batters the team has faced above average and then have the last step be “round to the nearest integer”. (The 2023 article lists “complexity” as one of the mistakes).

To answer the first two questions: yeah, it does work.

The way to think about the whole system is as an accounting system. The Cubs have 45 wins, that’s the value of their season to date. The system then asks: Which players responsible for those wins? And for how many of them? The system is a careful attempt to allocate responsibility for the team’s success across the players.

The next question you might have is whether it’s better to be a player on a good team because a good team has more Win Shares to allocate. The answer is no, because a good team also has more players who have delivered value — that’s why it’s a good team. Turns out there’s a more or less predictable relationship between the performance of the players and the performance of the team, so it doesn’t usually matter how good the team is overall.

That said, the system strictly adheres to the idea that all values must add up to the team total. If you’ve seen any in advanced sports statistics at all, you know that there’s always some variation between the team total and individual totals. For example, a baseball team’s wins and losses are easily predictable from their runs scored and runs allowed, but no team will exactly match that prediction. What causes that gap is something of an open question, it could be better clutch performance, it could be that the team has been unusually good at winning close games, it could be luck.

In James’ view, that gap consists of some kind of skill or value that the system is not measuring. (In the 2023 article, he calls this a mistake, but it’s clear that he thinks the underlying logic is strong, but that it could have been expressed differently.)

The gap between stats and wins is assigned to players. So, if a team has won 90 games, but their raw stat performance suggests they should have only won 86 games, that extra 5% gap is assigned to every player, on the theory that there’s 5% of value unaccounted for, and something must have caused it.

How do you calculate Win Shares?

The system starts by splitting responsibility for wins at a team level among batting, pitching, and fielding. Then the wins in each of those buckets are allocated them to individual players. Basically, the more runs you score the more value goes to your offense and fewer runs you allow the more value goes to defense. Defensive shares are split between pitching and fielding, so things like lots of strikeouts means more value for pitching, while more double plays means more value for fielding.

The batting and pitching shares are then apportioned to players based on their stats — the system calls these “claim points”, and then the win shares are allocated to players proportionally to their claim points. For batters James uses his Runs Created formula (more or less). Pitchers are more complicated but most of their claim points are based on runs allowed per inning.

The thing is, this structure — starting from the team total and trying to split things up — does a very good job of allocating value. Since you are kind of bounded by the team total, almost any reasonable measure of individual worth that’s even vaguely proportional gets you pretty decent results. James actually presents a one-page version of the formula that is within 2 Win Shares of the 40 page version for like 90% of players. Which, again, is kind of funny.

The fielding stats are both where I think the real breakthrough of the system was in 2002, and also where 85% of the complexity is. To really oversimplify, James:

Realized that good teams and bad teams alike both have three defensive outs an inning and 27 defensive outs a game.
As a result the team fielding stats of good teams and bad teams will look superficially similar, causing a huge amount of distortion in individual fielding stats.
But we do have a good idea of whether a team is generally good at defense, because a team that is good at defense will give up fewer runs based on the amount of balls the pitchers let be put in play.
We can assume that the results at a team level are a result of the abilities of the players individually. So a team of overall good defensive performance should have, on balance, good defensive players.

So the complexity in James system is trying to tease out how much credit each individual position gets at a team level, and then splitting the credit for that position among the people who played it. Credit by position at a team level is generally whether the players at that position, as a group, have made more plays than league average. Credit by player is basically proportional to how many plays each player has made.

Again, the idea of starting with team performance and trying to account for it does a decent job of isolating players that are providing defensive value.

So What Did I Do?

Win Shares are a very convoluted system that pulls in a ton of stats and ends in a very satisfying single number for each player, and the system was described in the book excruciating detail.

Naturally I wanted to build it.

One thing about revisiting this code is that there is just way more data available now than there was in 2002. I’m not smarter than Bill James, but there are a couple of cases where he is clearly and explicitly trying to estimate a piece of data that we can now just access directly.

1B Putouts

James’ formula for first basemen does some contortions to estimate the number of unassisted putouts made by first basement. We now have that information directly, so I used the direct count.

Similarly, James has a complex formula to estimate the number of plays where a first basement makes an assist via a throw, but that number is now counted directly, so I used the direct count.

Outfield Splits

In 2002, outfield fielding wasn’t as readily available split by position. But I do now have that information, and so I treat fielding by each outfield position separately rather than treating all outfield as one bucket. (This information may have existed in 2002, so this may have been a deliberate choice by James, but I’m not 100% sure).

Relief Pitchers

This is kind of a big change, but I think it’s directionally correct. James wants to give extra credit to relievers who pitch in important situations. What he does is calculate “Save Equivalent Innings”, where a relief pitcher is given credit for “bonus” innings pitched based on his saves and holds, and is credited with extra runs saved based on those bonus innings.

But that’s, at best, a very approximate measure of who is pitching in really important situations, and is somewhat less appropriate now than it was in 2002 based on changes in how pitchers are used. The data now available has an actual measure of the average importance of the situations that a reliever comes into a game, so I’m now using that number to calculate bonus innings. If a reliever comes into a game in unusually important situations, the reliever gets bonus innings.

Game Shares

This is the place where I walked out the farthest on my own.

James’ original work calculates Win Shares but not Loss Shares. He says in the book that Loss Shares are complicated and he didn’t want to wait another two years to publish, but he doesn’t really elaborate. He does describe this as the biggest flaw in the system.

I think there are at least two complications:

Any reasonable structure is either going to conclude that the very best players have negative loss shares or is going to have to very much contort itself to avoid that.
It seems to be pretty easy to do this in such a way that players are penalized for playing harder defensive positions, which leads to bad results.

Also, it’s not clear what a “Loss Share” is. It seemed to me that it was much easier to try to calculate opportunities — call them “Game Shares” — allocate the Game Shares to individual players and then assume Loss Shares are (Game Shares - Win Shares).

So, here’s what I did. There’s a bunch of super-fiddly small choices here, and I’m not very confident in them, but the final numbers seem decent. Still tweaking.

Each team gets three game shares for each game played: Effectively, this means that each team also gets three loss shares for each loss.

Split among groups: I use the inverse of the split for win shares, based on the default, which is 52% for defense, if the team has 55% win shares for defense, then they have 49% loss shares for pitching. We handle the pitching -> fielding split similarly. I don’t split fielding into positions on the grounds that a) it’d be a huge pain and b) doing so is exactly how I learned that you can penalize players at high skill positions.

Each bucket is split among players: I tried to make this pretty simple, mostly based on time played with a sight penalty for poor performance.

A batter earns a claim share by making an out
A pitcher earns a share by pitching a third of an inning. Plus a share for a fielding error, plus some shares for poor performance, essentially if you give up runs more than 150% of the league average.
a fielder earns a share by being in the field a third of an inning, plus a share for a fielding error. (DH’s earn shares as though they were fielders).

This does mean that the best players have negative losses, especially the best pitchers, but I’m fine with that, the numbers seem, to me, to be reasonable.

I did compare my results to WAR and by and large there are three systemic differences:

Win Shares gives credit for performance as a batter with runners in scoring position, WAR doesn’t.
My defensive opportunities create a small penalty for players at low-skill positions (or DH), because all players accrue opportunity at the same rate, but a Shortstop can accumulate more wins that, say, a First Baseman. WAR’s penalties for this are apparently harsher because I seem to be rating DH and 1B players a little higher.
Win Shares are clearly less generous to the best starting pitchers.

It seems to me that the last two are calibration issues that I might be able to fix, though it’s not 100% clear to me that Win Shares is wrong here.

Future Frontiers

There are a couple of other things that are now counted that James estimated, probably the biggest one is opportunities for outfielders to throw out runners and how often runners advance on an outfielders arm. We also now count stolen base attempts at second and third separately, that could make a very minor difference in the catcher ratings.

Okay, but what are the numbers?

As I write this, at the end of June, the Win Shares MLB all-star team looks like this — we’re rating players based on Win Shares above Replacement, where Replacement is considered to be a .300 win percentage, so it’s Win Shares - (Game Shares x 0.3).

Catcher:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
William Contreras	MIL	16	0	11.2
Shea Langeliers	ATH	13	4	7.9
Liam Hicks	MIA	12	2	7.8
Dillon Dingler	DET	12	5	6.9
Ryan Jeffers	MIN	8	-2	6.2

I think Contreras has the highest defensive Win Share total of anybody.

First Base:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
Nick Kurtz	ATH	18	-2	13.2
Jonathan Aranda	TBR	14	2	9.2
Bryce Harper	PHI	14	3	8.9
Michael Busch	CHC	14	4	8.6
Alec Burleson	STL	13	4	7.9

White Sox rookie sensation would be on this list except for injury.

Second Base:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
JJ Wetherholt	STL	17	-1	12.2
Brice Turang	MIL	15	2	9.9
Luis Arraez	SFG	13	4	7.9
Ketel Marte	ARI	12	5	6.9
Ozzie Albies	ATL	12	5	6.9

I’m not actually tracking it, but I think Wetherholt is the top rookie in the ratings so far.

Third Base:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
Miguel Vargas	CHW	17	0	11.9
Junior Caminero	TBR	15	2	9.9
Isaac Paredes	HOU	12	4	7.2
José Ramírez (10-day IL)#	CLE	12	4	7.2
Matt Chapman	SFG	12	5	6.9

Shortstop:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
CJ Abrams	WSN	17	0	11.9
Bobby Witt Jr.	KCR	15	2	9.9
Otto Lopez	MIA	13	4	7.9
Brayan Rocchio	CLE	12	4	7.2
Kevin McGonigle	DET	12	5	6.9

Elly De La Cruz was in the mix before his injury.

Left Field:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
Bryan Reynolds	PIT	15	1	10.2
Brandon Marsh	PHI	13	2	8.5
Sam Antonacci	CHW	12	0	8.4
Mauricio Dubón	ATL	13	3	8.2
Randy Arozarena	SEA	13	3	8.2

Center Field:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
Pete Crow-Armstrong	CHC	19	-2	13.9
Andy Pages	LAD	15	4	9.3
Mike Trout	LAA	13	2	8.5
Michael Harris II	ATL	12	2	7.8
Byron Buxton	MIN	12	4	7.2

Quite a comeback here for PCA, who had a very rough start to the year.

Right Field:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
James Wood	WSN	17	1	11.6
Corbin Carroll	ARI	16	1	10.9
Jordan Walker	STL	15	2	9.9
Aaron Judge	NYY	11	2	7.1
Ronald Acuña Jr.	ATL	9	2	5.7

If I remember correctly, Judge was leading at the time of his injury.

Designated Hitter:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
Yordan Alvarez	HOU	23	-7	18.2
Shohei Ohtani	LAD	22	0	15.4
Yandy Díaz	TBR	19	-4	14.5
Kyle Schwarber	PHI	17	-1	12.2
Iván Herrera	STL	12	5	6.9

Alvarez has the best total in the league by a bit. Diaz is third, so this is where I think I might not be penalizing DH’s enough.

Ohtani is 13 - (-1) as a hitter, 10 - (-2) as a pitcher, and is credited as 0-4 as a DH, he rounds to 22-0 instead of 23-1.

Starting Pitcher:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
Cristopher Sánchez	PHI	13	-3	10.0
Chase Burns	CIN	12	-3	9.3
Jacob Misiorowski	MIL	12	-3	9.3
Eduardo Rodríguez	ARI	11	-3	8.6
Cam Schlittler	NYY	11	-1	8.0

Ohtani just misses this list a pitcher, largely because he has fewer innings than the other top players.

Relief Pitcher:

Player Name	Team	WS	LS	WSAR
Mason Miller	SDP	10	-7	9.1
Jhoan Duran	PHI	9	-6	8.1
Louis Varland	TOR	9	-4	7.5
Cade Smith	CLE	8	-4	6.8
Antonio Senzatela	COL	8	-4	6.8

A weird quirk of the system is that relief pitchers are the most likely to have negative losses.

Total

Put it all together and here is your top 10:

Rank	Player Name	Team	Position	WS	LS	WSAR
1	Yordan Alvarez*	HOU	DH	23	-7	18.2
2	Shohei Ohtani*	LAD	DH	22	0	15.4
3	Yandy Díaz	TBR	DH	19	-4	14.5
4	Pete Crow-Armstrong*	CHC	CF	19	-2	13.9
5	Nick Kurtz*	ATH	1B	18	-2	13.2
6	JJ Wetherholt*	STL	2B	17	-1	12.2
7	Kyle Schwarber*	PHI	DH	17	-1	12.2
8	Miguel Vargas	CHW	3B	17	0	11.9
9	CJ Abrams*	WSN	SS	17	0	11.9
10	James Wood*	WSN	RF	17	1	11.6

That feels defensible…

March 2026

2026-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Yep, we’re doing this again. I read 11 books in March and we might talk about all of them here, depending on how low in my own ratings I’m willing to go… StoryGraph scores are as of June 7, which should give you a sense of how averse I am to actually finishing anything I start these days.

Eye of the Bedlam Bride — Matt Dinniman

StoryGraph Rating: 4.53 (1st of 11)

My Rating: Double (3rd of 11)

Dungeon Crawler Carl, book six.

Look, I just need to admit it. I’m in on this, I’m along for the ride. I have no idea how Dinniman lands the plane, but I’m not sure how much it will bother me if he doesn’t.

I’m fascinated by books or movies that absolutely should not work but somehow do. This book, for example. The premise is notoriously hard to describe in a compelling way. The satire is broad and often a little crude, especially early. The series is set up so that each book has the same fundamental plot (solve the puzzle, beat the level). The first book is likely objectively the weakest of the bunch, and if it’s not the second book is.

And yet… It’s still really compelling, even as Dinniman writes 700 page books, and even as I genuinely wonder how this ends well.

And Now, Back to You — BK Borison

StoryGraph Rating: 4.15 (6th of 11)

My Rating: Single (7th of 11)

Marketed As:

“Two competing meteorologists are forced to find common ground in this opposites attract, When Harry Met Sally inspired romance, from #1 New York Times bestselling author B.K. Borison.” The When Harry Met Sally reference here, presumably is code for “one of them is really uptight and the other one is not” because otherwise the two works have basically nothing in common. Like, I think the defining features of WHMS are that they are opposites and that they have a long time relationship and try to be friends. This book… is not that.

What it is, is a sequel to Borison’s First Time Caller, it was set up quite explicitly in that book. Our radio station’s very organized meteorologist is sent off to work with the bubbly, klutzy meteorologist of the neighboring TV station.

This book is as tropey as you can get, as our two leads are shipped off to the wilds of western Maryland to cover a huge snowstorm. Do they get snowed in? Is there a mix-up that leads them to have to share a room? A room where there is Only One Bed? Does he learn the value of spontaneity while she learns the value of structure? Do they have an embarrassing incident that is accidentally broadcast live?

To quote John Rodgers, “You say trope, I say well-honed narrative tool”. Overall, the book reads great while it’s going, I had a fun time. The characters have some more depth beyond their tropes, and they are actually trying to accomplish something together outside the romance plot.

There isn’t a third-act breakup, which is nice, but both main characters have an antagonist, and they are both cartoonishly awful, and we never really get any motivation from either of them, and we also don’t really get a satisfying defeat of either of them, which does make an otherwise kind of nice ending feel like it falls a little short.

Everyone on this Train Is A Suspect — Benjamin Stephenson

StoryGraph Rating: 3.93 (7th of 11)

My Rating: Double (4th of 11)

Everyone this Christmas Has a Secret — Benjamin Stephenson

StoryGraph Rating: 3.77 (11th of 11)

My Rating: Single (6th of 11)

Everyone in this Bank is a Thief — Benjamin Stephenson

StoryGraph Rating: 3.93 (8th of 11)

My Rating: Double (5th of 11)

Marketed As

Train: “fiendishly fun locked room (train) murder mystery in the spirit of Murder on the Orient Express.”
Christmas: “If Knives Out and The Thursday Murder Club kissed under the mistletoe.”
Bank: “perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Anthony Horowitz.”

Osman is the writer of Thursday Murder Club and Horowitz is the writer of a mystery series where he inserts himself as the Watson figure, which honestly I just checked it out of the library on that description, so I think the bank quote wins as the most accurate descriptor. Murder on the Orient Express just means “this takes place on a train”, Knives Out means “funny and a lot of people liked it and we hope that rubs off”. (Really, so does Thursday Murder Club).

The Books:

Here’s the thing about murder mysteries. For a genre that is nominally so grounded in reality, the simple fact is that the very idea of a fanciful crime being solved by an amateur is outlandishly fictional. It has, as far as I can tell, never actually happened. (Even fanciful crimes with clues being solved by professionals seems quite rare in reality.) I first came to terms with this reading Scott Westerfeld’s So Yesterday, where a character goes to the police specifically because she knows that amateurs never solve crimes on their own…

Anyway, these are the sequels to Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, and it’s fair to say that since I read three of these in a month that I’m in on this series. I actually liked all three of these a little better than the original. What they lose in some of the bits about mystery rules applying they gain in the fact that Ernest has now in-universe published Everyone in My Family and everybody in the books knows that Ernest is trying to apply mystery rules and the books have a lot of fun with that. They are also all a little less tonally all over the place, they are not as dark as the deaths in the first book.

In the train book, Ern has been invited on a train that is hosting a mystery fan convention, and eventually one of the guests of honor dies. Many mystery tropes are deployed. (I personally like the bit where Ern says that the rule is that the killer needs to be mentioned by name and asserts that the killer’s name appears 106 times in the book. He periodically posts updates of name counts…).

Book three applies the meta-detective schtick to a “holiday special”, a novella in which the detective learns the true meaning of Christmas, in a bit that I thought was quite clever.

Book 4 is a bank heist. Or rather, multiple overlapping bank heists. It is still clever while also being different from the other books. There’s at least one thing that happens where the author’s note insists that it could theoretically happen and then admits that “theoretically” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, so, fair, warning, I guess.

Testimony of Mute Things — Lois McMaster Bujold

StoryGraph Rating: 4.18 (5th of 11)

My Rating: Single (7th of 11)

Book, like, 15 in the Penric and Des series. They are all good, if all a little slight. This one is out of chronological order, much earlier in the timeline, for some reason.

These Burning Stars — Bethany Jacobs

StoryGraph Rating: 4.23 (4th of 11) ‘

This is a book where the StoryGraph rating was part of what pushed me to actually read it…

My Rating: Double (2nd of 11)

Science Fiction! On Spaceships! This is part heist/con story, and part revenge drama, and part watching high-functioning sociopaths at work. Guess which part I liked best.

We have a government controlling a small handful of star systems linked by jump gates. Our main characters are Esek, nominally a cleric but also one of the sociopaths; Chono, who is less nominally a cleric and less of a sociopath; Jin, a hacker/grifter; and Six, the other sociopath. For reasons, one of the first thing that happens in the book is that Esek, for no particular reason, humiliates Six when they meet — Six is a student, Esek is a cleric looking for talented novices. Most of the rest of the book is basically Six’s revenge in one form or another.

The world-building here is genuinely interesting, there’s a persecuted minority group that is involved in the manufacture of the fuel for the jump gates, they were nearly obliterated seventy-five years prior, and this resonates through the entire story. (Their name – “Jevani” – seems like a near-portmanteu in ways I’m not completely comfortable with…)

This is also A Book With A Twist. It’s a pretty good one, and Jacobs hides the card there skillfully enough that I had to go back in the book and check that she had, in fact, hidden the card. The thing I can say is that the ending of the book suggests a much different plot structure needed in the second book.

Destiny of the Republic — Candice Millard

StoryGraph Rating: 4.38 (3rd of 11)

My Rating: Triple (1st of 11)

This is a pretty great narrative non-fiction. Short and focused, and by being focused avoids a lot of the pacing issues that can happen in narrative non-fiction. Not a biography of James Garfield, it’s the story of his shooting and the subsequent medical malpractice leading to his death.

Some quick notes:

The assassin, Charles Guiteau, was familiar to me from the “Assassins” soundtrack, where he is somewhat sane-washed. His type of delusional narcissism feels sadly really familiar — these days they probably would have made him Ambassador to France
If for nothing else, it’s worth reading for the portrayal of Garfield as a genuinely admirable person who came from the most abject poverty imaginable to the Presidency, and who seems to have been much less of a competitive jerk than many others who have held that office.
Also Chester Arthur, who as Vice President was a national joke but who seems to have somehow risen to the occasion and into the office.
I haven’t seen the Netflix show yet, but it’s very much on my radar..

There’s not much of an alternate history hook here, though I suspect that a healthy Garfield would have won re-election, in reality Arthur did not get (or fight for, really) the nomination (he had health issues), and the Republican candidate, James Blaine, lost to Grover Cleveland. It’s not hard to think that Garfield could have won that election had he lived, but also it’s not clear to me what the downstream consequences would have been.

Wearing the Lion — John Wiswell

StoryGraph Rating: 3.86 (9th of 11)

My Rating: Walk (9th of 11)

2026 Nebula Award Nominee

This is, and this is going to sound judgy in a way I don’t mean, the American Sitcom version of Greek Myth. There are hi-jinx and shenanigans.

I have about 4000 things to say about this book, which I don’t think I loved, but I can at least say was interesting. This is a retelling of the story of Heracles, it’s almost worth thinking of it as a secondary world fantasy that has a lot in common with Greek myth.

The book splits viewpoints between Hera and Heracles, with the catch being that Hera hates Heracles from the jump because he is the product of one of Zeus’ adventures. Heracles, unaware, prays to Hera and just assumes her favor, no matter what she tries to do to him. Eventually, she goes too far, and the rest of the book is about recovering from that mistake. (Well, it’s about Hera hiding the mistake from Heracles, and then recovering from it.)

This is a book about grief, and anger, and not being defined by your worst day. Like Wiswell’s last book, it’s also about who gets described as a monster. It’s also about found family, in this telling, rather than slaying all the mystical beasts in his labors, Heracles befriends them and they share adventures together, so we wind up with Heracles, the Hydra, the Boar, the Hind, and so on traveling the world together. It’s honestly bananas.

February 2026 Books of the Month

2026-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Continuing the month-by-month catchup that I started in January, here are February’s books. I read 8 and I think we’re going to talk about seven of them.

As one of those random things, the StoryGraph scores for this month as a whole were lower than January, even though my scores still remain pretty high. Something is up with my own scoring, because my average score is up significantly from last year, which means I’m doing some kind of weird grade inflation.

The Regicide Report — Charles Stross

StoryGraph Rating: 4.11 (2 of 8)

Rating: Single (6 of 8)

This is book umpteen gazillion in the Laundry Files, and the last in the line that follows the actual Laundry and Bob Howard and his ilk.

I always struggle with how to talk about umpteenth books in series. In this case, ever since the beginning of the series, we’ve known about Case Nightmare Green, the inevitable magical singularity that will doom humanity. Most recently, the Laundry have made a deal with an evil from beyond time to make that evil PM of Great Britain, because the alternative was somehow worse.

We also know, because this book is actually now a flashback as the series has continued forward in time, that the Laundry loses and the evil from beyond time continues to run the UK.

Which makes bringing Bob’s story to a satisfying conclusion somewhat challenging, since we know he loses. Stross, who is nothing if not committed to working out the logic of his worlds to their inevitable conclusion and beyond gives it the old university try here.

In book time, it’s 2014. The setup here is that Her Majesty, by virtue of her public position, is a huge storehouse of magical energy and some party or another is maybe trying to kill her to access that energy. Bob and his wife Mo, who by now are quite powerful magic entities in their own right, are tasked with security and keeping things from going totally non-linear.

Bob and Mo are still fun to spend time with, the series is getting a bit lore-heavy by this point, but I’ll forgive that in farewell book. Stross takes the 2014 setting to throw a few strays at British politicians who would become infamous in our timeline. The end is a little hampered by it’s just really hard to describe a battle between two multi-dimensional powerful beings and, again, a truly satisfying win has already been taken off the table. Still, I really this series and the way it parodied first spy tropes and then urban fantasy tropes and I’ll miss it.

Football — Chuck Klosterman

StoryGraph Rating 3.93 (3 of 8)

My Rating: Single (7 of 8)

Marketed as:

The marketing blurb for this book is lacking in hinges. Paragraph one: “A hilarious but nonetheless groundbreaking contribution to the argument about which force shapes American life the most. For two kinds of readers—those who know it’s football and those who are about to find out.” A lot to unpack there, not least of which is the idea that there’s some sort of ongoing argument to which the answer is “football”.

Later: “If Žižek liked the SEC more than he liked cinema, if Stephen Jay Gould cared about linebackers more than he cared about dinosaurs, if Steve Martin played quarterback instead of the banjo . . . it would still be nothing like this.” It’s like I always say, for your football book to succeed, you need to bring in the philosophy and paleontology fans.

I’ll be honest, I have no idea what’s happening here beyond some copywriter saying “I don’t know what to do with it either.”

Oh yeah, the book…

Long time pop culture essayist Klosterman with a series of essays on (American) football, a subject that he’s clearly obsessed with and also clearly wishes he was less obsessed with, which makes for an unusual tone for sure.

Like about everything I’ve ever read from Klosterman, it’s about 33% brilliant, 33% banal, and 33% unhinged (it’s not out of the question that Klosterman wrote the marketing blurb. I mean, he probably didn’t but it wouldn’t shock me).

Among the essays here:

There’s a discussion of why football is a good TV sport despite it’s obvious limitations. This happens to be a topic I think about frequently (generally, what makes a good TV sport) and his analysis here makes tremendous sense to me.
Later he spends pages explaining why he’s not weird for thinking Jim Thorpe is the greatest football player of all time, a position that, while I think many people would disagree with, is not some kind of unheard of claim, and is clearly kind of pedestrian given how Klosterman defines “greatest”.
There’s a discussion of violence in football that turns into — reasonably — a discussion of whether it’s moral to let people do dangerous things if they are popular. Fair enough, but Klosterman starts his argument with “first, we have to assume God doesn’t exist”, which is a big swing.

Homemaker – Ruthie Knox & Annie Mare

StoryGraph Rating: 3.73 (6 of 8)

My Rating: Double (5 of 8)

Marketed As:

I’m deeply shocked that this book doesn’t have a comparison in its blurb.

The Book:

Turns out I’m clearly replacing romance books with cozy mysteries.

We’ve got Prairie Nightingale, a single mom in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She’s about five years post divorce, and her divorce settlement allowed her to set up a trust fund to basically let her run her house like a small business, she’s hired a chef and a personal assistant and so on. About that time, she also outed a local doctor as a huge abuser and got him sent to jail. As a result, she’s somewhat on the outs with the local mom group, for reasons that frankly don’t reflect well on the local mom group.

Anyway, it’s a few years later and a local mom has gone missing and Prairie decides she’s uniquely suited to finding out what happened.

This book wears its heart on its sleeve — it’s full of women who are involved with men who abuse or diminish them in some way. It’s pretty upfront about what it’s trying to do and overall I found it worked. (The fact that the FBI agent on the case takes her seriously and is not another awful person goes a long way toward helping the vibes). Book one in a series, and I’m probably in.

The Strength of the Few — James Islington

StoryGraph: 4.28 (1 of 8)

Me: Double (2 of 8)

Book two of what the blurb calls “The Hierarchy quartet”, so I guess it’s a four book series? I can’t find another source for that, but let’s assume the publisher’s marketing is authoritative. (I was honestly hoping for a duology.)

This had been staring at me from the top of my Kindle TBR collection for about two months, and it was finally time.

One of my long-standing storytelling theories is “don’t split up the team”. Say you are telling a story about a team of five, and they split up. Now you are telling five stories, and each story gets 1/5th the time. It’s hard to do well.

In an unrelated story (but spoilery for The Will of the Many), or hero Vis is now split into three different people on three different worlds and turns out we go back and forth between the three viewpoints. It’s a 700 page book, so nothing is rushed, exactly. But it, for me, diffuses the tension somewhat.

There are three things that are broadly true here:

The book is kind of slow going for a while, there’s a lot of pieces to move around the board, in fact there are three unconnected boards, so three separate versions of Vis learning what’s happening, it all takes a lot of space.
This is the middle book of a series and it basically ends on three separate act breaks, one in each world. Not cliffhangers, exactly, and mostly the story beats for the book are resolved. Ish. But in a way that leads to more questions.
Once the track is all placed and the train starts moving, it starts moving. The first book of this series never lacked for bonkers ideas and neither does this one.

The next book should be a doozy.

Out of the Loop — Katie Siegel

StoryGraph: 3.61 (8 of 8)

Me: Double (3 of 8)

Marketed as:

The marketing blurb for this is “The Seven Year Slip meets Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers in this wholly original time loop mystery.” I’m assuming that the line being drawn here is that they don’t want readers to think the book actually takes place in the time loop, which is why I guess we don’t have “Groundhog’s Day meets Knives Out” or something like that (okay, one of the quoted blurbs is “Like Groundhog Day meets Memento” — it’s also got a quote from Mary Robinette Kowal, which is cool). I would love to have been in the meeting where they decided the cozy mystery comp to this book about a 28 year old woman would be a book about a 68 year old woman, but this is apparently why they don’t hire me to write book blurbs.

Anyway, Amie has a problem which is that she’s looped September 17th over 700 times. And when September 18th finally comes, she learns that her upstairs neighbor has been murdered. Amie decides to try and solve the crime, in part because she feels guilty for not stopping it any of the 700 times it happened.

Sometimes, I think a book has been crafted to specifically delight me. I could see this being too SF-weird for a mystery reader, and not SF enough for an SF reader (which I suspect explains the StoryGraph score). We never find out how or why the time loop happens, which is clearly the correct choice for this book. There’s also a romance plot with Amie’s ex-girlfriend Ziya.

And as a person who loves SF/mystery mashups, I really did eat this one up. The narrative voice is quirky: “A bent spatula sat between the two police officers, one of whom looked like he’d recently discovered that he’d been sitting on a spatula,” the character banter works, and the mystery is suitably cozy.

Amie’s time-loop experience does figure in the book, but not exactly in the way you’d expect. For one thing, coming back to the normal world after two years living the same day over and over is really, really weird, a part that Siegel explores nicely. You’d think that Amie is able to take her microscopic knowledge of all comings and goings on the day of the murder to figure out what happens, and that’s sort of true, but in an interesting way that is a more about how Amie’s own decisions affect other people than about her knowledge of the day. And I thought that was more satisfying. The mystery, romance, and character arcs all work together in this book nicely.

Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot — Alexis Hall

StoryGraph: 3.91 (4 of 8)

Me: Double (4 of 8)

This is the third book in Hall’s series about a UK baking show that is Legally Distinct from Bake-Off, with a host who is Legally Not Sue Perkins (though, to my ear, Hall does a heck of a job replicating her voice).

Our first main character here is the titular Audrey Lane, a small-town journalist who applied to the show on a lark. The other main character is Jennifer Hallet, the abrasive foul-mouthed show producer (as seen in the previous books). And you might think that there’s a bit of a grumpy/sunshine thing going on, but Audrey has a bit of a mouth on her too. There’s also a 92-year-old contestant who has a secret past.

This is fun, a little less fluffy than you think it’s going to be, and Hall does a nice job with the banter, it’s hard to do “insults that sound like flirting” but I think it really works here.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone — Benjamin Stephenson

StoryGraph: 3.84 (5 of 8)

Me: Triple (1 of 8)

So, I’ve been pushing into mysteries more this year, and there’s probably a larger note about them as I learn what I do and don’t like.

Unsurprisingly if you’ve met me, witty meta-narratives generally work. I think I tried this one a couple of years ago and bounced off it for reasons I don’t remember. Anyway, after seeing a lot of recommendations, I tried it again, and I really liked it. (I genuinely don’t get the StoryGraph score here, this is a pretty acclaimed series as far as I can tell… And no, I really don’t want to read the actual reviews.)

Our viewpoint character, Ern Cunningham, writes guides about how to write mysteries, so he’s very versed in the rules of a fair play mystery. The book starts with them, and he references them continually. And, in fact, everyone in his family has killed someone. The odds are pretty good that Stephenson has a notebook somewhere with a list of all the ways you could kill someone and not have it technically be murder.

Anyway, this is in part an exercise how a narrator who continually insists on his own reliability can, in fact, be unreliable, but still fair. It’s a solid mystery on its own. Also, despite the meta hi-jinx, this book is pretty dark — the murder weapon is very creepy, some of the back story is rough. At a couple of points that tone mismatch between the back story and the lightness of the “it’s all a story” meta-shenanigans threatens to go off the rails, but I think it holds up at the end.

January 2026 Books of the Month

2026-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been doing book review posts here for a pretty long time, and I love doing them, but they are somewhat time intensive. I finally remembered the XP approach to work intensive practices, which is to do the job more frequently, in smaller bursts. I’ve been doing that – I’ve been writing reviews of books as I go, but editing my initial rambling into this rambling is what takes most of the time.

So we’re going to try posting month-by-month. We’ll start catching up with January 2026. (Secretly, I’m hoping this will get me to write more in general, don’t tell anybody.)

Ground rules:

I’m not writing about everything I read. I’m not interested in writing publicly about books I didn’t like, and sometimes I just don’t have anything to say, even about books I like.
That said, this should end up with me writing about more books overall.
There will still be a year-end post, but it’ll likely be shorter. But who knows.
Books are listed in the order I read them, because that’s the order my drafts are in.
I’m giving my score, using the baseball system from The 2025 Book Post, and the StoryGraph score as of May 31, 2026. And I force ranked mine, to match the StoryGraph scores.

I read 11 books in January, and I’m writing about 8 of them. Here goes..

The Butcher’s Masquerade – Matt Dinniman

Book 5 of Dungeon Crawler Carl

StoryGraph Score 4.58 (1st of 11 this month)

My score: Double (3rd of 11 this month)

I put this in the 2025 recap, but it only took 5 books for me to realize that DCC has roughly the same energy as Battlefield Earth:

Earth has been conquered by much more powerful aliens
Some random dude decides to destroy them starting from nothing with just pluck, luck, and leverage.

Anyway, book 5. I appreciate that Dinniman is to some extent taking the consequences of this premise seriously, mostly just how messed up the galaxy needs to be for the dungeon crawl to even exist. The books are getting somewhat lore-heavy, there are a few times here where there’s a callback to an earlier book that isn’t fully explained, I expect that eventually I’ll need to read this with a fan wiki at hand or something.

The book is still pretty tense, for as long as it is, Dinneman does a good job of keeping the stakes clear, he is starting to go the “here’s the plan, fade to black” a little much especially for a series in first-person narration. Still, though, you can see Dinniman get better and better as the series moves on.

The Keeper of Magical Things — Julie Leong

StoryGraph: 4.24 (3rd of 11)

Me: Double: (1st of 11)

First line:

Certainty Bulrush was in the midst of arguing with a particularly intractable quilt.

Our POV character, Certainty, is a Novice Mage with the ability to talk to objects. Well, I guess anybody can talk to objects. But they talk back to Certainty. Her other magical skills are somewhat lacking, so she is stuck with no clear path to becoming a full Mage. Through one thing and another, she finds herself assigned to the least magical town in the realm helping to create a storehouse of magical junk that the Mages need to store someplace safe. She’s accompanied by Aurelia, a Mage with a reputation as an ice queen who has some secrets of her own.

You mostly know where this book is going, though the journey is fun. Will they find the perfect artifacts to wake up the sleepy and depressing little town? Will they fall for each other? No spoilers wink. But it’s all really charming, the interactions with the objects are well-done, it’s got a certain kind of “let’s put on a show”-adjacent energy, and I liked the ending lots.

That’s two really solid books for Leong, who is good candidate for my informal “authors whose next decade of books is exciting” list.

This book made me want to talk about genre, though admittedly almost every book makes me want to talk about genre. Wait, I have a section header…

Marketed As:

The marketing blurb for this book calls it a “charming novel” and does not use the words “romance” or “fantasy” or “cozy”. Granted that it does say that there’s magic, so “fantasy” is probably implied. What is it, though?

Romance has an actual official definition, at least according to the Romance Writers of America, who I guess would know: “Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.”

Whether this book is a romance by that definition depends on how you define “central” — the romance plot and the plot-plot are very close to 50/50 in this book. Normally I’d look to which plot drives the ending that the writer wants you to see as the true victory, but actually both plots resolve at the same time with the same action (which is nicely done, honestly).

It is obviously a fantasy — we’ve got magic and everything. I guess technically you could call it a romantasy, but if you are looking for deeply angsty enemy to lover action, this is not the droid you are looking for, so to speak. And it’s interesting that the publisher is not marketing it as romantasy.

It does score a 7 or 8 on the cozy scale, so I guess what this really is is cozy fantasy.

This has grown on me over time, and I think it’s clearly my favorite book of January. A lot of is fun, it’s maybe a hair two long in act 3. Honestly, I think I would have liked the romance plot to be a little more centered. Aurelia’s necklace is an interesting character/plot bit in a “fantasy lets you make a metaphor concrete” kind of way.

1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin

StoryGraph: 3.95 (7th of 11)

Me: Single (7th of 11)

Marketed As:

I wish non-fiction books had marketing blurbs that said things like “for fans of House of Morgan and the Money Stuff newsletter.

A couple of semi-random notes about a book that I did learn a lot from…

Pacing narrative non-fiction is hard. This book has two problems. The first, which is kind of endemic to the genre is a problem with interrupting the flow. The narrative will have a line like “With steely resolve, John Doe walked into the room.”, followed by “Born in 1880, Doe came from a long line of…” And then we get two pages of John Doe backstory that brings the narrative to a screeching halt. But the alternative is not giving the reader the full weight of what it means that John Doe walked into the room, it’s a hard problem.
The second is more specific to this book. It’s very vignette based, and at the end of the day, I feel like I kind of missed a sense of the overall sweep of what happened while we got kind of caught up in the tangles of a handful of bankers. It starts way early, though, which does put the October 1929 crash in context really well.
Seriously, though how do you do this book, title the chapters by date and not have a chapter titled October 29, 1929.
It is neat, though, that a lot of the people involved are legendary names that are still companies to this day. Merrill, Lynch, Morgan, Fox. Even David Sarnoff pops in.
“Gambling on stocks had replaced drinking as a legal intoxicant”
Maybe the wildest thing I learned in this book. Public issue poling wasn’t really a thing in 1932. But to the extent that it was, Hoover lost to FDR, not over the economy — voters largely saw a kind-of recovery in 1932, and may have been skeptical of FDR’s plans — but over prohibition, which Hoover supported and FDR vowed to end. Wild.

There is no Antimemetics Division by qntm

StoryGraph: 4.06 (6th of 11)

Me: Single (5th of 11) (but it was a close call, almost a double. I might change my mind.)

Do the Math:

(The Rook + The Laundry Files) / 2 with the darkness turned up some

Marketed as:

“a whip-smart tale of science-fiction horror”, which isn’t bad, the blurb ends with “Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.”, which is frankly, outstanding.

The setup here is that we are following the Unknowables Organization, and specifically the Antimemetics division. An anti-meme is an idea that steals memories. Of course, one problem with a division studying anti-memes is that everybody tends to forget what they are working on.

The first like 60% of this book is a mix of vignettes and reports about various anti-memetic objects, with clearly some story going on in the background. At about the 60% mark, everything blows up, and we spend the rest of the book resolving the plot. (Worth noting that this all started on the SCP Foundation website, which is collaborative fiction about… well, any description I give will be inadequate.)

The first half of the book is more successful, it’s weird but manageable and the memory games are comprehensible — it’s a lot like a darker version of The Rook series. I like the format switches.

The second part… well, I think there’s a point at which when you state that you are describing ideas beyond human conception, it’s pretty hard to describe them in such a way that is within human conception, so there’s a lot here that you kind of have to take on faith. (To some extent this is true of a lot of SF/F, but there’s a point beyond which it’s hard to sustain. The thing about Case Nightmare Green in the Laundry series is that Stross is pretty careful to make his eldritch nightmares have to fit in a human brain – he’s also pretty clear that Case Nightmare Green is unavoidable and undefeatable).

On the whole, I did like this, but I’m not sure it’s for everybody. The people who it is for, though, are going to love it.

The Treasure Hunters Club — Tom Ryan

StoryGraph: 3.68 (11th of 11)

Me: Double (4th of 11)

Marketed As:

Per the blurb: “Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone meets The Goonies”. That’s fair. I take this to mean “somewhat low stakes mystery with twists and something like a treasure plot”. It’s got a little bit of Westing Game DNA too.

So this is a weird one because it got a lot of good reviews and it was an Edgar award nominee… But it’s StoryGraph score is lower than you’d expect given that. This is the biggest gap between SG rank and my rank this month. My guess is two things: 1) as an award nominee, the book was read by people outside it’s natural audience, and 2) I think twist-based mysteries are inherently divisive.

Wait, rabbit hole. It was nominated for the “Lillian Jackson Braun Memorial award” which is given to a “contemporary cozy mystery”, which you know I couldn’t help trying to figure out. The website lists 10 criteria. The main points are:

contemporary
amateur detective with no training
emphasis on being part of a community
sex and violence are off page
it’s “light in tone, often humorous”

Sounds like my thing, actually, so I’ll be looking out for more of those.

Anyway, the main characters here are three people who wind up in a small coastal town in Nova Scotia for different reasons. A fifteen-year old girl who grew up there, a struggling author who is house-sitting, and the long-lost grandson of the richest family in town. They all get caught up in a local mystery — buried pirate treasure, never found. And then there are a few mysterious deaths, and well… we’ve got a novel.

I mostly liked this, the vibes are good and it carries itself through what might otherwise be a kind of a slow burn setup pretty well.

There’s a big, big twist at about the 75% mark. It’s maybe right on the edge of fair play, and I suspect it turned off a lot of people.
Amazon reviews call it “choppy”, which might be code for “the three stories don’t intertwine the way we want.” But the pacing of the end is genuinely weird — it’s tense for about 5 seconds and then it’s over.
There’s also a trope at the very very end that I genuinely dislike, but it’d be a spoiler to say that [REDACTED] does something unilateral with [REDACTED], that is the kind of thing that only happens in books.

Inside Threat — K. B. Spangler

StoryGraph 4.32 (2nd of 11)

Me: Single (6th of 11)

Book six in the Rachel Peng series, which is itself a small part of the extended story called A Girl and Her Fed. The Peng books are relatively straightforward SF action thrillers about a group of augmented humans who form a law-enforcement agency called OACET, the larger A Girl and Her Fed story is very weird and harder to classify. Anyway, in this one, while still brooding over the end of the previous book, Rachel is sent to New Orleans to help a former agent who has left OACET, secretly. Things spiral rapidly out of control and eventually we have mercenary companies, kidnappings, and rocket launchers. I like this series and this author quite a bit.

Of Monsters and Mainframes – Barbara Truelove

Truelove is a nominee for the Astounding award for Best New Author

StoryGraph: 4.20 (4th of 11)

Me: Double (2nd of 11)

Marketed As:

The official blurb describes it as “The queer love child of pulp horror and classic sci-fi”, which is unusually accurate for a blurb like this. To restore my faith in bad comparisons, USA Today is quoted with “Fans of Murderbot will love this quirky sci-fi romp.” I mean, I am a fan of Murderbot, and I basically liked this, and I guess they both have unreliable machine narrators, and there is no doubt that it’s quirky. But “sci-fi romp”? Really? Also, this book is way, way goofier (complimentary) than Murderbot. In some ways, a good comp is Light From Uncommon Stars, another book that is perfectly happy to have fantasy and SF tropes bounce off each other.

This book is genuinely unhinged (complimentary). Our viewpoint character is a space ship. Specifically, Demeter, a shuttle between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Also, as we start the book, then entire ship’s passenger list is being killed by Dracula. Yes, that Dracula. And that’s not the only classic movie monster that makes an appearance.

This book is very aware that we’re just here for the ride, so when other monsters show up, and the plot gets increasingly ridiculous, it all sort of works?

I suspect your milage here is going to vary based on how much you are willing to put up with Demeter’s myopic AI viewpoint. I admit I’m not normally a fan — I spend enough time interacting with myopic AIs, but for some reason, the sheer weirdness of a ship with the whole panoply of MGM horror monsters mostly charmed me.

When Books Could Code #1: Design Patterns

2026-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

What is this?

I’ve spent my whole career fascinated by writing about programming. How do programmers explain what we are doing to each other? How have books written about programming changed the way we work and think? So now I’m writing about programming books.

If you think this is somewhat elegiac for the Era of the Programming Book, as the co-author of a 700 page programming book in an era where there will be roughly zero new 700 page programming books, yeah, kinda.

So this series, “When Books Could Code” (alluding, obviously, to the “If Books Could Kill” podcast, making my title the faint echo of somebody else’s joke, which somehow seems appropriate).

In the same way as the Ruby neighbor posts did, I’m going to try to give a sense of what the book felt like when it came out, how the book fits in to the world, what it changed and also what parts of it hold up or don’t hold up.

The Book

All the authors are listed on the back cover as “Dr.”, which is a bit of a key to what this book actually is. Per the book itself, it started as part of Erich Gamma’s Ph.D. thesis.

The thesis was apparently about “ET++”, which was an OO framework for building desktop apps written in C++. As part of the thesis, Gamma apparently created a catalogue of useful “patterns” in the creation of the framework. The catalog spun off as its own thing. The other three authors came into contact with the catalog, probably through the OOPSLA academic conferences, and they moved it into its own work and eventually to a book.

It is arguably the most influential programming book that isn’t about a specific language. (Other possibilities: XP Explained, Mythical Man-Month, Clean Code — I’ve actually never read two of those…)

It is impossible to overstate how ubiquitous this book was. I very much remember working at Motorola, circa 2005 — ten years after the book came out — and every cubicle had a copy. It’s certainly one of the few programming books to have spawned a backlash that was nearly as influential as the book itself.

To my genuine surprise, they don’t seem to have ever done a second edition. There are a bunch of offshoots, though, both official and unofficial. (Including Design Patterns in Ruby from Russ Olsen, also the author of Eloquent Ruby.)

It’s worth noting the timing here, since the book came out in 1994:

This book predates Java, the code examples are in C++ and, much more rarely, Smalltalk. The book was a huge influence on Java, both the language and the standard library. (That’s one reason I’m surprised they never did a second edition with the code samples in Java.)
As a result, it also pre-dates most of the 90s hype about object-oriented programming, though, the book was a contributing factor in that hype.
But this does mean the book was written in a context that was much different than the context when most of its readers encountered it. You might argue that the book was trying to solve a problem that was largely solved by the time many of its readers got to it.

My physical copy, from 2000, is the 20th(!) printing. Wikipedia says it sold more than 500,000 copies. To provide context, that is well over an order of magnitude more than I have sold. Total. All titles.

I’m not sure when I first encountered it… actually I can check. Please hold while I dig around in dusty basement bookshelves…

My grad school work in 1997 and 1998 was using modeling software to teach Object-Oriented design, and I did, in fact, cite this book in the dissertation, so I clearly read it in 1996 or 1997.

This is 1998-me, writing about why I did not choose to include support for patterns in my modeling software. In addition to some logistical issues (the student programs were generally too simple to support patterns, I ended with this.

My experience in attempting to teach design patterns when I taught [the OO class] was that they were not particularly helpful — the students had not had any experience encountering the kinds of problems that patterns are aimed at solving, so they did not see the need for them.

It’s also possible that, as a very novice teacher, I was not doing a good job explaining things. (Somewhere in my basement I think I still have the final exam from that class, I should pull that out someday).

What’s The Big Idea?

Like a lot of these programming books, the authors lay out their thesis in an introduction that doesn’t get read by a lot of people.

We quickly get this quote:

Experienced object-oriented designers will tell you that a reusable and flexible design is difficult if not impossible to get ‘right’ the first time.

What’s striking about this sentence from a 2026 perspective is that depending on your definition of “experienced”, the number of “experienced” OO designers in the entire world when this book was being written was… pretty small. OO was still a fringe case. C++ was released in 1985, but did not have a lot of users. Smalltalk went public outside Xerox in 1981 but it wasn’t really public until 1983, and was always kind of niche. It was entirely possible to be a professional programmer in 1994 and not touch object-oriented anything.

Anyway, you were saying, Gang of Four…

One thing expert designers know not to do is solve every problem from first principles. Rather, they reuse solutions that have worked for them in the past… Consequently, you’ll find recurring patterns of classes and communication objects in many object-oriented systems. These patterns solve specific design problems and make object-oriented designs more flexible, elegant, and ultimately reusable.

There’s that “pattern” word.

I’ve threatened a few times to write about the OO hype of the 90s, and the word “reuse” was a big part of that hype cycle. 90s OO was all about chasing reuse, in the sense that business logic objects created for one program at your organization could be re-used as-is in other programs. This never really paid off in the way that it was expected to.

Off the top of my head, I think that the problem was that the 90s OO designers were thinking the wrong level. By the 2000s, Open Source was vast enough that we had extremely substantial and influential reuse, but not of individual business logic classes as much as we got it of entire foundation libraries (like, say, Rails). So, I didn’t share my User class from program to program, but I did share the underlying HTTP layer logic.

Sorry, I interrupted you again, Gang of Four, go on…

An analogy will help illustrate the point. Novelists and playwrights rarely design their plots from scratch. Instead, they follow patterns like “Tragically Flawed Hero” (MacBeth, Hamlet, etc.) or “The Romantic Novel” (countless romance novels). In the same way, object-oriented designers follow patterns like “represent states with objects” and “decorate objects so you can easily add/remove features.” Once you know the pattern, a lot of design decisions follow automatically.

I don’t necessarily thing it’s a good idea to pick on people who are likely smarter than me, and have certainly been way more influential than I have, but the idea that the only examples of novels and plays they have are Shakespeare or “countless romance novels” is just incredibly funny. I’m flip-flopping a bit on how I feel about “novelists and playwrights rarely design their plots from scratch”. I guess it’s true, or at least, truthy — what is Save The Cat if not a pattern language for screenplays? That said, I don’t think that design decisions in creative work “follow automatically”. Though I guess I don’t really think they do in OO design either.

There’s something about this analogy that feels like a category error — “The Romance Novel” does not feel, to me, like it’s at the same level as “represent states with objects”. One feels like an entire work and one feels like a trope.

Anyway, before I run away on a Romance Novel theory of OO Design, the thesis of the actual book:

Seemingly disparate programs will have common patterns of logic or interaction.
By identifying these patterns, and applying tried-and-true solutions to them, you end up with — well, I’ll quote them — “design patterns help a designer get a design ‘right’ faster”.

The innovation here is the idea that a “pattern” is a useful unit of design, both for the actual design and for reusing solutions in multiple problems. They don’t really define what makes a design “right” in any rigorous way, but they suggest that patterns make a design quicker to establish, easier to reuse, and more consistent. I think the implication is that by using existing solutions, bugs will also be less frequent.

I should note that the book is pretty explicit that this is just a sampling of the most commonly used patterns and that readers are encouraged to identify, name, and define common patterns in their own domain. I note that because it’s a point that frequently got lost when people started to apply the book.

Okay, but what’s a “pattern”?

All of this is based on the writings of Christopher Alexander. Alexander was an architect, and the co-author of A Pattern Langauge (1977), which is where the term “pattern language” comes from.

A “pattern language” isn’t a language in the computer sense, but a common set of patterns that all share the same structure and interact with each other. The patterns become the way you discuss the design space, so they do kind of become a language for talking about design.

A pattern typically has a name, a problem that it is trying to solve, a description of a successful solution, and a cross-reference to related patterns. Per wikipedia, Alexander’s architecture patterns include things like “a place to wait” with the problem being “people need a place to exist while they wait for a thing to happen”, and solution pieces presumably including “seating”, and “a television turned to the most annoying news station available”. I’m assuming.

What I’m quite not sure about is when the ideas about useful and reusable structures in architecture started to cross-pollinate with software. But the early software pattern writers were pretty explicit that they were trying to adapt Alexander’s work.

Book Structure

There’s a foreword by Grady Booch that is four paragraphs long and might, might, have taken upwards of an hour to write.

The book starts with the introduction containing the above quotes, some logistics, and then a bunch of sections on how patterns work and some general OO design stuff like inheritance versus composition. Then there’s a case study building a WYSIWYG editor called Lexi and showing how patterns work to help design an editor like this.

Looking at it, in some ways the case study a clearer statement of the author’s priorities than the introduction is. The chapter is 44 pages long, has something like 20 different object diagrams or interface listings, some pseudo-code, and basically zero lines of actual code logic. (That’s maybe unfair, there are code samples, but they are like if statements leading to constructors for classes not shown or straight up comments, basically all the code is showing structural logic not business logic.) This is not a book for people interested in implementation details, it’s about strategy, not tactics.

That’s fine, the book can be about structural logic, but using it does lead to a technical form of OO (see here), where the classes tend to be defined by their role in the pattern rather than their role in the domain.

Each pattern gets a consistent format with as many as 13 subsections ranging from name to sample code to known uses. We start with “Abstract Factory” also known as “Kit”, (as in “UserKit”) a term which did not make it out of the 90s but which is actually a lot easier to type than “Abstract Factory”, and good on me for writing a joke that forced me to type “Abstract Factory” again. And again.

To give a sense of the timeline here, the motivation for AbstractFactory starts with “Consider a user interface toolkit that supports multiple look-and-feel standards, such as Motif and Presentation Manager”. I’ve used AbstractFactory a lot, and I’m pretty sure that’s no longer the main use case.

I could cherry-pick stuff that didn’t age well all day. Like this consequence of AbstractFactory — “Extending abstract factories to produce new kinds of Products isn’t easy. That’s because the AbstractFactory class fixes the set of products that can be created”. True in C++, but not true in Ruby and not even true in Smalltalk in 1994. (You are all narrowly escaping a 20 part series where I dissect each of the patterns one by one. Very narrowly.)

The fact is, though, that the discussions of the individual patterns are pretty thorough. There are implementation examples, pros and cons, uses in the wild, relations to other patterns. These discussions really do make you feel like you could start applying these patterns to your code immediately. Which is both the impact and the backlash.

Because people did start applying these patterns to their code immediately whether the code warranted it or not.

Impact

To start with the concrete impact, several of the patterns were explicitly incorporated into Java, either the language or the standard library, often using the same names. (Smalltalk already had a lot of the patterns in its library, the book in some sense is a guide for how to do fun Smalltalk stuff in C++.) I’m not 100% sure what the vector was to Java, though. (None of the four actually worked on Java itself, as far as I can tell, but Erich Gamma was one of the co-creators of the JUnit test framework and also worked on Eclipse, which was one of the earliest Java IDEs.

I think there was less impact on Python and Ruby, in part because those were further along when the book came out. Both Python and Ruby have a lot of the patterns built in to their language or standard library.

Where the book was immediately successful was in changing the way people talked about their code. The naming of the patterns caught on and people very much started to explicitly look for ways to incorporate the patterns into their code.

Reaction

Let me tell a little story.

In 2000, I started a new job. The company did back end email server software. The first thing my new team wanted me to do was review the current state of a new project. A team of five had worked on it for six months. I cannot for the life of me remember what the project was.

I do remember what they asked me to review.

The deliverable was a binder. Five people, six months, and they had produced a design. And that’s it. The design was a bunch of UML diagrams, and I’m sure it included a lot of design patterns.

I don’t remember what I said publicly but I do remember what I thought privately, which is “wouldn’t the project be in better shape if people had already started coding something”.

Anyway, you can probably guess how this went, basically as soon as they started actual development they realized that one of their requirement assumptions was wrong and most of the design was not usable.

So… in my head we have a classic thesis / reaction:

Thesis: Using UML diagrams and doing a lot of design up front will improve program reuse.

Reaction: Big Design Up Front is often a waste of time, you are better off using that time to build code that is amenable to change. This technique became known as Agile, more or less.

The line between the two groups isn’t that clear-cut — Erich Gamma did work with Kent Beck on the early JUnit releases. (But none of the Gang of Four were in the original Agile Manifesto group.)

Of course, by now the two have coalesced and we have the synthesis: whatever the heck teams do now that they kind of call agile-ish and which waves in the direction of design patterns now and then.

The other kind of backlash was a more on the execution side. Based pretty much solely on my own experience, this book tended to be interpreted in two incorrect ways:

These 20 patterns were the only patterns that existed.
A design could be evaluated solely on how many patterns it used.

You see where this is going, or perhaps you are old enough to have been a professional in the 2000s and you lived it. Patterns everywhere! And I’m sure I indulged that myself.

The designs just got too complicated. Especially once it collided with “everything must also be an interface” design in Java. Eventually you would have an explosion of classes that often existed either to just check a box for inclusion in a pattern, or to just shuffle data around without any actual use. Since the people misinterpreting Design Patterns tended to see this complexity as a positive, it was nigh-impossible to debate them out of the patterns.

Current Status

Well, I don’t see the book around as much anymore. Quite a high percentage of the actual patterns (like “iterator” or even “abstract factory”) just became part of the way we talk about software. A few (“chain of responsibility”, “Memento”) kind of faded. But looking at the list of patterns, I’d say I’ve used or discussed about half of them in, say, the past year. That’s not a bad contribution all by itself.

What does seem to have faded is the idea that patterns will save us (or even that OO Design will save us). As for the Agile reaction, we’ll get to that…

The 2025 Book Post

2026-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

One exciting thing about this year’s book wrap up, at least to me, is that I wrote mini-reviews all year, so these reviews should have a stronger tendency to sound like I actually read the book. And also this will come out in March and not, like, May.

Another exciting thing, again, for me, is that I think I finally cracked my personal dilemma about How To Rate Books.

So, this is like the nerdiest thing ever, but basically I’ve never quite known what to do with 5 star or 1-10 ratings for books.

I have a pretty good system for finding books I will like, and I do, in fact, like about 90% or so of the books I read at least a little. So on a 5 star scale, basically everything is a 4. Storysite gets around this by allowing you to have quarter-point gradients, but it’s not clear to me that the difference between giving a book 4.25 and 4.5 stars carries any meaning. And expanding the scale so that most of the books that I like are 1-2 on the scale breaks with the understanding of what a “one-star” book is.

Now, here’s where some of you are going to roll your eyes. Because a baseball analogy dawned on me. The scale is:

Out: I regretted reading this
Walk: I was neutral about this book
Single: On the whole I was glad to have read this
Double: I liked it and would recommend it easily
Triple: I will enthusiastically tell you about this book whether you like it or not
Home Run: This book became my personality for a while
Grand Slam: This book became my personality for a long time

I like this. It successfully gives the message that most of the things I finish have at least some value to me, while also making clear the distinction between a home run and a double. (I do seem to read a lot of doubles). It also extends nicely on both ends (strikeout, double play, three-run homer, grand slam), and lends itself nicely to descriptions like “double stretched to a triple” or “could have been a double, but the batter held at first” which to seem, at least to my weird brain, to be metaphorically useful. And which, you’ll be glad to know, I have generally restrained from in this post.

And, best of all, I pretty quickly got to a place where I’d finish a book and my gut would say “single”.

And so, off we go, this is every 2025 book that was a “double” or higher, plus a small smattering of books I rated “single” that I thought were worth talking about.

Within each group, books are sorted by when I read them, which is not helpful to anybody except that any little references that I built up all year while writing mini reviews should still work.

In some cases, where I thought it was fun, I threw in the first line of the book. I also think I got every case where the marketing blurb for the book referenced it as a combination of two other books, and we’re going to mock those for a while.

Onward:

Single +

A Passion for Passion by Alice Fraser

Elevator Pitch: Do you like satiric fake romance novels?

Why Did I Read This: Fraser is one of my favorite funny people going right now.

Alice Fraser is an Australian comedian and writer, probably best known in the US for being one of the regulars on The Bugle podcast, but she’s also hosted a series of her own podcasts. Her podcast “The Last Post”, was a daily dispatch from an alternate reality that got stranger and stranger over time, and one of the features of that reality was romance author D’Ancey LaGuarde, whose regular book releases would be reported on the podcast.

Fraser has an amazing ability to toss off extremely plausible and somewhat satiric novel synopses (her current podcast Realms Unknown starts each episode with a fake description of an SF/F story in the genre being highlighted in that episode and I swear that a good 75% of them sound like they’d be outstanding). This book is a collection of descriptions of LaGuarde’s novels, and a sort of retrospective of her faux career and a few other romance related satires.

The jokes here are both broad and specific, the kind of satire that comes from really knowing and loving a thing. And if they get a little repetitive they are still pretty good jokes.

Back After This by Linda Holmes

Elevator Pitch: A woman goes on a bunch of dates for a podcast. Solid pitch, could easily have sold in the room.

Linda Holmes had the possible misfortune to release her “woman goes on a bunch of dates for a podcast” novel, at roughly the same time as a separate “woman goes on a bunch of dates for a call-in radio show” novel was released (First Time Caller).

Anyway, as a very, very long time Linda Holmes fan, I liked this one better.

Our main character is a podcast producer – Holmes’ background as a podcaster for more than a decade makes this feel lived in. She’s talked into going on a series of dates for a new show while getting advice from an influencer, but at the same time she has a series of meet-cutes with different people, possibly accidentally including her actual true love.

It’s a solid book, I liked that Holmes made the influencer character complex, the job dynamics seem real, and the relationship is charming.

Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

Elevator Pitch: Financial shenanigans in the tech world of the early 80s.

Why Did I Read This: I need to come up with a better joke here than “because it’s Cory Doctorow”.

I admit I don’t quite get what Doctorow is trying to do here. Which is not unusual for me, with respect to his fiction career. (I should say, I have tremendous respect for his fiction career.)

This is the third book about Marty Hench, forensic accountant to the tech world, each book taking place earlier in the timeline, so this one is basically Marty’s origin story against the backdrop of the computer industry of the late 70s and early 80s, which I’ll admit at least some nostalgia for.

(There’s actually way less connection between the three books than you’d think.. I mean, I have a notoriously bad memory for characters, but I did search the other books, and I don’t think there’s much overlap of the supporting characters). I’m not completely sure why we’re telling the story backwards, but I am also not Cory Doctorow.

Anyway, Hench gets hired by a company that markets really bad computers to religious organizations, taking advantage of the religious community. Turns out the bad guys are being undercut by ex-employees who are reverse-engineering their stuff to remove lock-in.

Hench realizes almost immediately who the bad guys are and switches sides. Things escalate. There is accounting and violence.

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis

Elevator Pitch: Magic School. But Magic Elementary School. And your POV is the parent. The official blurb is “Big Little Lies goes to magic school”. While I could imagine that describing a book, it decidedly doesn’t describe this book…

Do The Math: Scholomance, but adorable?

Do we have a consensus definition of “cozy” in “cozy fantasy”?

Of course we don’t. It’s hard to do without being circular on the definition of cozy, but here goes.

If something is billed as “cozy”, I expect it to cover most of these points:

Low stakes
Relative lack of on-screen violence or gore. (Some would add on-screen sex)
Leans into a “cute” or “adorable” aesthetic
A sense of a community or found family, or of a character or characters finding their place in the world
A lack of cynicism, earnest sincerity tends to carry the day

I’ve seen a definition that also suggests that a cozy fantasy can’t have a romance, but I think that’s too restrictive, there’s all kinds of cozy romances.

Does that track? Score each of those on a 0,1,2 scale, add them up, and you get a 10 point scale.

Legends and Lattes scores about a nine, I think. Can’t Spell Treason without Tea scores about seven? Goblin Emperor scores… I make it six (it has higher stakes than the others). Galaxy and The Ground Within scores about an 8.

Which brings us to GGSPTA, which I score as about an 7-8. But it also has a character who is deeply anxious about her child and whose marriage is really not doing well. Large chunks of this book did not make me think “cozy fireside read”, even though parts of it did, and parts of it are genuinely funny.

Our main character, Vivian, had her life turned upside down when her kindergarten-aged daughter was bitten by a werewolf. She is directed to the title academy as a place where her child can get the attention she needs, but that also makes her an outsider among the somewhat insular parent body and there are so many things about the magic world that Vivian doesn’t know. Including a prophesy that seems to be targeting her daughter. This is sort of satire and sort of not, Vivian gets to a very dark place mid-book before eventually recovering herself. I’m not normally a fan of “we weren’t really in danger” as a plot resolution, but on reflection I think that the choice of actual plot mechanic is funny enough to overcome my reluctance.

I liked it, maybe not as much as I hoped to, but I still liked it.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman

The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman

Elevator Pitch: As noted online multiple times, this series is deeply resistant to elevator pitches

Why Did I Read This: It sounded ridiculous to me but a lot of people I trust recommended it including Alice Fraser, so there you go

Recommended If You Like: cats; absurd satire; deeply weird politics

So, I think the first thing to say about this is that I read five books in this series this year (well, the last one actually bled over New Year’s) and my overall reaction is to say in my best Benoit Blanc Voice, “It makes no damn sense. Compels me, though”.

In the first few pages, Earth is destroyed by unimaginably powerful aliens, who turn the entire planet into a video game, which is also streamed across the entire galaxy. Carl, our hero, has survived through sheer luck, and with the help of his cat Donut, who quickly becomes sentient, (don’t complain, the cat’s the best part…) now has to survive the game.

He’s got stats, there are weapons and power-ups, and healing potions and NPCs and the whole slightly bonkers aesthetic of a video game crossed with the even-more bonkers aesthetic of reality TV.

This book, as far as I can tell, does for LitRPG what Legends and Lattes did for cozy fantasy, becoming a point of entry for a sub-genre that people didn’t even know they wanted.

Is it good? That’s maybe the wrong question. It’s a lot of fun. Carl’s fine – he’s your basic SF hero who is extremely good at avoiding functional fixedness, but Donut is the real star.

One thing that helps is that over the course of the books, Dinneman widens the story. It’s probably a bit much to say he is querying the premise, but he does take seriously the idea that a galactic society that puts together this kind of entertainment regularly is deeply messed up.

Oh – and once I thoght of this this, I couldn’t unsee it. This book totally is the modern Battlefield Earth – a nobody from Earth takes on a galactic power that has conquered Earth using nothing but his guile and wits. Dinneman is more tongue in cheek than Hubbard, but there’s a lot in common.

Tea You at the Altar by Rebecca Thorne

Alchemy and a Cup of Tea by Rebecca Thorne

These are book three and four of a series, you probably want to start at the beginning.

“Will they or won’t they” is not the only romantic trope – “they already do and they are great together” is also a lot of fun. The Thin Man is a beloved classic for a reason.

I’ll note that this series, which I would consider cozy or cozy-ish, does have pretty high stakes.

It does have a tight community focus, but only because people come from around the world to the location. There’s a relative lot of violence and tension. Whether it’s cute or not is an open call.

Anyway, I like this series a bunch, I think the characters are fun (there aren’t many books that have a character willing to go with puns the way Keyanthe does…), and I love banter from characters who are already together.

I don’t know this really as cozy as, say Spellshop, but I do think it’s a lot of fun.

The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison

I mean, I guess you have to admire Addison’s ability to continue to write stories in the Goblin Emperor world and only give us small glimpses of the actual Goblin Emperor (Maia does make a minor appearance here, which was welcome).

Instead, we continue to follow Celehar, a perfectly good character who has perfectly good adventures – he bargains with a ghost dragon.

(I’m mostly kidding here, I don’t like bugging authors for the books they don’t write, but Maia is one of my five favorite characters of the last decade or so, and I kind of would love to know what’s happening with him.)

This is one of those books that doesn’t quite go where you think it’s going to go – the ghost dragon moves things along quite a bit. I liked it, and I curious what Addison will do now that this series also seems closed.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Elevator Pitch: The moon turns to cheese. It’s funny til it’s not.

Recommended If You Like: cheese-based humor; weird apocalypses

This one shouldn’t work at all. But actually it’s pretty gouda. That’ll brie the last cheese pun.

The premise is that suddenly the moon turns to cheese. Not a metaphor. Actual cheese. Not just the actual moon, but all moon rocks on earth also change.

You would think this is the setup for a ridiculous comedy, and it starts that way. Each chapter of the book is a different vignette, more or less one a day. They do intertwine, but basically they are all kind of standalone.

Then it gets a little more bigger in scope as people grapple with what it means to have moon suddenly change into cheese. The book is careful to point out that just because people don’t know how the change happened yet, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rational explanation for it somewhere.

Eventually the smart people realize that the cheese moon is unstable, suddenly getting a lot less ridiculous and turning the book into the most delicious disaster novel ever.

This book succeeds at what it’s trying to do to kind of an astonishing degree – make you take seriously a genuinely goofy premise. I liked this more than Scalz’s more serious novel this year.

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst

Elevator Pitch: The coziest fantasy that has ever been cozied. The blurb says “Like a Hallmark rom-com full of mythical creatures and fueled by cinnamon rolls and magic” – seems about right.

“Cozy” is an inherently vague word, but if it doesn’t apply to this book, I’m not sure what it would possibly apply to. On the cozy scale I listed above, this scores like an 11 out of 10. It’s so cozy, that for the rest of the year, I assumed that I had written the cozy definition seen above for this book and was surprised when I went back and saw that I had written it for a different book.

Our heroine is a librarian at one of those great fantasy libraries of magic but we don’t learn much about it because it’s sacked by rebels on page 2, and she escapes with her life, a boatful of books and her friend, who is a sentient spider plant. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that a sarcastic sentient spider plant is very much “cute aesthetic”

With no other options, she returns to the outlying isle of her birth, which has mer-horses, adorable bakeries, and a deep problem with the lack of magic help coming from the main empire.

Can she find allies, friends, and more than friends, while solving the problem and thwarting those who would do harm? This is the kind of book where the nominally dark and forbidding forest actually turns out to be populated by adorable animal-shaped sprites. Where the various characters have skin in all shades (our main character is blue – to be clear, I thought this part was awesome).

I’m not immune to the charms of a sentient spider plant, and I had a good time with this one, but it’s kind of thin. But adorable. Probably this year’s winner of the “light but cute but light but cute” award.

As for the sequel, if you read The Spellshop and think “good book, but not enough talking plants”, then boy howdy is this sequel for you.

Our sequel concerns the woman who created the sentient spider plant. In The Spellshop we learn her punishment was being turned into a statue. In this book, she gets better and finds herself on an island with a bunch of magical greenhouses stocked with sentient plants and one grumpy gardener.

If you look at my Cozy criteria, the sequel scores about a 14 out of 10:

Low stakes – for most of the book there are only two human characters, the stakes couldn’t possibly be lower. Huge, epic revolution is far, far in the background.
Low violence – yeah, no violence
Cute aesthetic – the book has a sassy talking rose plant, so I’m going to go with “check”
Found family / Community – check and check, literally in this case in that the male lead basically finds his family
Lack of cynicism — yep, that too.

It’s also a prototypical grumpy/sunshine romance.

And for all that, the book basically works. (There’s a little too much fretting about whether she’s going to get in trouble for breaking the laws about magic that we, the reader, know are already dead letters). But I actually like the magic system in these books, there are a lot of descriptions of plants, and it’s got small dragons. It’s fine, it’s all fine.

One Death at a Time by Abbi Waxman

Do The Math: Hacks + Erin Brockovich + Knives Out

I think so much about books that are surprises or disappointments, that it’s nice to sometimes find a book that is exactly what I think it will be.

Waxman, who has written a lot of romance or romance-adjacent books, takes a swing at a murder mystery. Our amateur detectives are… well, quite a pair. The famous one is an actress in her sixties, once a huge star, then wrongfully imprisoned for killing her husband.

On her release, she’s become a lawyer, specializing in advocating for the wrongly accused. The other one is her AA sponsor, who becomes her personal assistant.

The characters are great and feel unique, Waxman has always been good at narration. I’m not 100% sure I completely understood the through line of the plot, but this is a setup for a series if I’ve ever seen one, and I hope it gets there.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Recommended If You Like: Taylor Jenkins Reid fans should feel at home, a lot of people noted the similarity to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

Award For: Goodreads Reader Favorite for Romance

This is Emily Henry’s sixth adult romance novel. Five have won Goodreads awards for best romance (all but the first, so five in a row). I’d say she’s established herself as the most popular romance author in the country right now. And there’s a reason for it – she’s really good.

One thing that happened to me this year is that I got just a bit burned out on romance books, but I stuck with a few authors that I really like, and Henry is one.

Our main character here, Alice, is a journalist. She’s obsessed with Margaret Ives, a midcentury celebrity, a notorious heiress who burned bright, burned bridges, and has been out of the public eye for decades. Alice has tracked her down and is trying to secure the rights to write a biography. Hayden, an award winning biographer, has also been invited, and our heiress declares that she will spend one month working with both of them before announcing which one she trusts with her story.

As somebody online pointed out, a strict NDA is one way to keep your romance characters from fully communicating…

The book bounces back and forth from Alice’s perspective to Margaret’s story, ostensibly from the eventual biography. Alice and Hayden fall for each other because of course they do. Henry does a very good job of creating a plausible and interesting backstory for Margaret (also, the description of Hayden’s previous award winning book seems quite plausible in a way that is hard to do).

Your enjoyment here is going to depend somewhat on your patience for sorting out the details of Margaret’s story, there’s a lot of backstory and a complex family tree. Alice and Hayden have a good story but Margaret is a good third of the book and if you aren’t into that part, it’s going to feel slow. I liked it, so I liked it.

Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood

As I said, I did kind of burn out on romance novels this year, no particular reason, it happens sometimes. Ali Hazelwood was another one I kept up with and she had four books come out this year, of which this was probably my favorite. (Deep End was also good).

One of the reasons I started reading romance novels was to try to understand how they work – what does an author do to make a story compelling against a backdrop of a lot of expected plot beats. I’ve never felt that it’s a problem for a story to have expected plot beats, but it does place the burden on the author to make me care what happens anyway.

This book is a follow-up to Not In Love, our viewpoint character is Maya, she’s the 24 year old much younger sister of the previous book’s main character. She’s had a probably-requited crush on Conor, her brother’s 38 year old best friend, for about four years. The age gap is the “problematic” in the title. We have a lot of Hazelwood tropes here – Maya is in STEM, though she’s bolder and less quirky than some other Hazelwood characters. The MMC is emotionally unavailable in part because he’s covering for how much he’s crushing on the FMC.

In most of the other Hazelwood books, though, the characters start as rivals, and in this case they are already close friends. Maya’s viewpoint voice is strong and funny and determined to break down Conor’s resistance. Hazelwood sets this in Sicily, a part of the world she clearly loves, there’s enough background wedding drama to keep things moving. Overall, I very much enjoyed this. This book has a fantastic cover.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Why Did I Read This: I’ve liked Reid in the past, and the subject matter is definitely up my alley

Do The Math: Apollo 13 + 12 years + romantic subplot

Award For: Goodreads Reader Favorite for Historical Fiction

I have two quibbles right off the bat:

The book centers around a fictional space shuttle accident in December 1984. While of course you can write about any historical fiction thing you want, as somebody who pretty clearly remembers Challenger, which happened in January 1985, this felt a little weird.
I can’t remember the other one. It’ll come to me. Wait, I’ve got it. We get the viewpoint of two astronauts who actually go into space and the both separately come to the conclusion that, all things considered, they’d rather be on the ground. That’s certainly a choice.

I can’t speak to the technical accuracy. Reid says flat-out at the end that she took significant artistic license. My guess is the facts of the accident are broadly plausible for “melodrama” levels of plausible and that she played pretty fast and loose with the NASA staffing rules to have an astronaut in space for one mission and then as the main Mission Control contact on the next mission six weeks later. (They did used to run missions that close together, though). That’s just a guess, though.

Anyway… Our main character is Joan, and we meet her in 1979 as an astronaut trainee and in 1984 at Mission Control during the aforementioned accident.

On board the shuttle is another astronaut named Vanessa, and as we move in the older timeline, we see Joan and Vanessa fall in love, which at that time meant absolute secrecy. So we go back and forth between the accident in 1984, and the 1979-1984 timeline gradually revealing the relationship between the two.

There’s nothing exactly surprising that happens, though I have to admit that it somewhat harrowingly depicts what a same-sex romance against the background of the early 80s needed to look like. It wasn’t that long ago, I was alive, if not adult.

Nothing surprising, but it’s all quite well done, it’s easy to root for the characters (though there are a couple of bits with side characters that don’t really go anywhere) and when it comes time for the big speech, the big speech delivers. Honestly, what more can you ask for?

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older

Why Did I Read This: See previous raves in previous years…

Opening Lines: “A storm was writhing over Valdegeld, its tendrils churning Giant’s ever-present fog and pressing sleet and freezing rain through the atmoshield and onto the august buildings of Valdegeld University and auxiliaries, including my—less august, but evocative and comfortable—lodgings.”

Last year for book two of this series, I talked about how beautiful the writing in this series is.

This year, I want to talk about how beautiful the world building is.

The mystery is great, I was originally somewhat skeptical of Older spending so much time with Mossa and Pleity separated, but in the end I think it was mostly worth it to get to see Pleity investigate on her own.

So, separate from that I want to talk about the world building here, because I think Older does something subtle and heartbreaking here. We have this Jovian community that is in many ways lovely – not tremendously prosperous, perhaps, but growing and stable. Pleity is a scholar. She’s a Classical scholar, which means she studies old Earth. We are given to believe that Classical scholars are much more respected than Modern scholars, who study Jupiter and also do stuff like, you know, science.

Pleity’s research is part of the ongoing Classical project to re-introduce life back to earth. Specifically, Pleity is attempting to research things like the normal proportions of different animals in a forest from textual analysis of novels. I think that we, the readers, are supposed to believe this is a doomed pursuit, but in-universe, Pleity is a highly respected scholar. When she meets a Modern anthropologist of Jupiter, she’s confused – why would anybody want to study the people of Jupiter?

Older does a thing, where a character says that something was a “deeply human” thing to do, but they don’t mean it the way you or I might say it, they mean it to mean “carelessly destructive”. And eventually I realize it – this culture is deeply traumatized and suffering from collective survivors’ guilt. And it’s a background note, but it’s such a thoughtfully played background note. This series is beautiful.

The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso

The Last Soul Among Wolves by Melissa Caruso

Why Did I Read This: Another recommendation from Alice Fraser

Opening Lines: “It’s easy to fall into the wrong world”

The “If I had a nickel meme” but for books where Raven is a symbol for learning. To quote the dragon in Raven Scholar, “there are other birds”.

This book features a thing you don’t see all that often in fantasy worlds – the main character has a two-month-old, and she’s on her first night away, so when the book starts, she’s already tired, happy to be out, feeling guilty, and also has no idea how to talk to people anymore. (It’s some slightly modern diction for a more Victorian-era setting, but I mean, that’s, like, every fantasy book.)

She’s at what you can think of as a New Year’s Eve party when things get weird. And by weird, nearly the entire party dies of poisoning, then the clock strikes the hour and they are get better, but the entire party has shifted to another level of reality. Which is, apparently a thing that can happen in this world, which has multiple layers of reality stacked on top of each other.

We then get a kind of a mash up of a time-loop, a game of Traitor (since somebody in the party is triggering the changes), and some weird magic things. Also there’s a romance, which is not the main point, but which worked. (I’m usually all in on “they met as kids but as adults they don’t recognize each other” as a trope.)

Caruso does a good job of making each loop distinct, which is good, because there are like 11 of them, and the magic system is unique and mostly interesting (there are times where it feels contrived, and times where it seems less weird than maybe it presents itself to be).

Still, the mystery was good, the ending was satisfying.

As for book two, this is going to sound like a dig, but I mean it as a compliment – Caruso does a fantastic job here coming up with a premise that is both obviously related to the first book in the series, but which is its own thing with it’s own plot arcs and story beats.

This time round, Kem is called upon by an old friend to help with what turns out to by your run-of-the-mill “all your friends got inscribed in a cursed magic book, and now all the people in the book are going to die except one, who gets to own the magic book”. That old thing.

This builds on the events of the first book, it feels more like it’s setting up a long ongoing series than a trilogy, but I don’t really know what Caruso is planning. I’m in, though, this series is good.

Wait, sometimes this information is, you know, available. From the author’s website: “The current plan is for three books! It’s the sort of series I could expand indefinitely if the opportunity arose, though.”

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Elevator Pitch: Robots open a noodle restaurant in future San Francisco

Recommended If You Like: Noodles, of course, but also robots

So, given the cozy scale referenced above, this scores an 8 or a 9. You don’t see cozy SF as often as you see cozy fantasy, that’s for sure.

It’s about a group of robots that decide to start a noodle restaurant in a future San Francisco still recovering from California’s war of independence.

The robots are “human-equivalent” intelligence, and are thus nominally free under California law, but can’t own property, and are subject to discrimination, like, if somebody thinks your noodle restaurant is run by robots, you might get review-bombed. This is a novella, and there’s not a lot of plot, it’s mostly vibes, it’s a found family story where the family is robots. Good vibes, it’s a very sweet story.

One of my new fascinations is the difference between fictional AI and real world AI. Newitz is obviously sympathetic to the robots here and their desire to just run a restaurant and feed people and eventually create a community space. Newitz is also very much against the use of LLMs in creative fields at the moment. I’m not saying the positions are opposed, you can articulate why the two things are different and should be treated differently. But I still think it’s interesting that the idea of an artificial sentient is still so compelling, even with our artificial non-sentient LLMs. I also think it’s interesting how little the science fiction conception of AI has in common with AI as we are all currently living it.

Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read

Elevator Pitch: Hate Muti-Level Marketing? You don’t know the half of it.

Well executed history of Multi-Level Marketing in the USA from its emergence out of the world of direct door-to-door sales to its current status as evil behemoth with too much political clout. The author is pretty clear that there is no actual distance between legal MLMs and illegal pyramid schemes and the only reason the MLM’s have managed to stay legal is through a combination of obfuscation and buying influence. Kind of a grim story, actually.

Royal Gambit by Daniel O’Malley

Elevator Pitch: The Rook is back!

For the second time in a row, I only found out about a new Daniel O’Malley book after the fact, which was weird.

Anyway, this is book four and I guess it’s a universe now, with four stories that largely don’t share protagonists. For the record, this book is more of a sequel to book 2 with its Grafters and its royal family ending, so book 3 is more of a side quest.

Our viewpoint character is Alix. Like most children in this world who exhibit supernatural abilities in the UK, she’s taken by the Checquy as a small child. Unlike most, because she is of a noble family, the Checquy finds it useful to sort of embed her as a playmate of the princess, which has basically earned Alix the enmity of all sides – her Checquy peers distrust her because she had extra privileges as a child, and her parents are intent on mining her for all the power they can extract from the Checquy, and the princess is a little skeptical of her because she is obviously keeping a secret.

As we start, the actual Prince of Wales is supernaturally murdered, and Alix is both investigating the crime and protecting her friend the princess. This is more of a thriller/police novel than the other Rook books, and it’s a pretty good one. A nice side effect of O’Malley’s somewhat, um, exuberant descriptions of the supernatural in these books, is that the range of possibilities for what this killer is capable of is nigh-infinite and the investigators seem truly terrified. I also think the killer’s motivations were both surprising and interesting. It did have a little less of the joyful weird descriptions of past Rook books, and I did miss that, but overall, fun.

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher

Elevator Pitch: Kingfisher takes on Snow White. Kinda.

This based on Snow White in that it has a character named Snow, a magic system involving mirrors, and something like a poisoned apple.

Everything else is different, which is something of a Kingfisher hallmark these days.

Look, I enjoyed this book, the characters are charming, the magic is creepy and unique, there’s a couple of real nightmare images. Does it have a lot of micro tropes that are, like, common to Kingfisher’s books? Yes. Did I mind? No.

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

Elevator Pitch: Hallett takes on the high-stakes, hard-driving world of English pub quizzes.

Recommended If You Like: I feel these books are choose your own adventure adjacent in I way I can’t quite articulate

This is another of Hallett’s murder mysteries through found texts, in this case a wannabe documentarian is sending information to a Netflix producer to convince Netflix to fund his documentary about a mysterious death at a pub in rural England.

As is the case with other of Hallett’s novels, we have a combination of text threads, emails, recorded text and other records, and as with her other books, information is very much withheld from you to make the plot points pop. This book is really upfront about that – we get an email from the documentarian from time to time telling about the amazing upcoming twist.

As a result, this one is less of a fair play mystery than other Hallett books.

Anyway, I basically liked it – your milage may vary on the big twist and the general structure, but it’s fun and twisty, and as a little bonus it ends up being surprisingly gentle to a character that you think is being made fun of most of the book.

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman

The first thing I want to say about this book is that what Osman is doing here is really hard.

It’s a mystery novel where at least a dozen characters are, at least briefly, viewpoint characters. The main characters are incredibly charming and the characterization is very precise. You know which characters are good at things that others are bad at, and it never seems to be for plot contrivance.

He makes it look easy, but if it were that easy, I’d read 50 books a year that do it instead of, like three.

Anyway, the character stuff here continues to be good and genuinely touching – especially in this case the focus on one of the mother-daughter relationship. My main quibble here is the plot itself, it’s got a dash of “the stakes were never really as high as everybody thought”.

There’s two stories that you think are going to intertwine, but they don’t really, and Osman at the end gives a little “you thought the flashy story was the real story, but actually it was this other thing”. He almost pulls it off, but not quite.

Don’t get me started about the Netflix movie…

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

Elevator Pitch: What if Miles Vorkosigan, but gothic horror

Book three in the Sworn Soldier series. This time, our hero Alex is in West Virginia investigating a very creepy mine that turns out to be somewhat Lovecraftian.

Not a lot really to say about this, except to marvel that the same person can put out “Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking”, “Swordheart”, and this.

We Had A Hunch by Tom Ryan

Why Did I Read This: There are a few sentences that pretty much guarantee I’ll consider your book and one of them is “Former teen detective grows up”.

Do The Math: The official marketing says “Nancy Drew meets Yellowjackets”, and I guess Yellowjackets is a stand in here for “adult characters dealing with weird teenage trauma”?

In this case, we’ve got three teen detectives, the Van Dyne twins, your classic “children of the police chief” teen detectives and teen hacker and reluctant detective Joey O’Day.

25 years ago they got in way, way over their head and as a result, the twins’ father and one of their boyfriends were killed.

Now, 25 years later, they’ve gone their mostly separate ways. But a copycat is back in their small town….

Strong premise. If you think it would be a great setup for, say, an eight episode Netflix series, good news, it’s already been optioned. I tore through this one pretty quickly, and I think it’s triple-level for about the first 80%. Eventually we reveal both the original killer and the new killer, and I think one of them was well-planted, and one of them is maybe a little more dubious. (Both of them depend on the characters being sociopaths and able to lie convincingly for a long time, which, fair enough I guess).

Still the end didn’t quite hold together for me, I think it drops to a double. It caused me to go back and read Tom Ryan’s previous adult mystery.

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree

Opening Lines: “Fuck,” cried Fern, ducking back inside the carriage a whisker before a clawed and scaled hand sailed past.

Recommended If You Like: Talking cutlery, emotionally unavailable heroes, basically if you like the T. Kingfisher White Rat books

Just so we’ve all got this straight, Baldree released Legends & Lattes in 2022, and basically kick-started a new subgenere of low-stakes fantasy stories.

By his own admission, he tore up his first try at a sequel and eventually wrote Bookshops & Bonedust, which is a prequel. (Not that you asked, but all three books style themselves with the ampersand in the title).

This book takes place after Legends & Lattes and features Fern, introduced as a bookseller that Viv befriends in Boookshps & Bonedust. Fern is moving to open a shop next to Viv, which starts to look like Legends & Lattes, but when that all goes very smoothly you start to expect that something else is going on.

Fern is dissatisfied as a bookseller, and literally stumbles into an adventure through the expedient of drunkenly falling asleep in a wagon belonging to Astryx, a famous hero and bounty hunter.

Let’s go to the scoreboard:

Disaffected middle-age heroine
Emotionally unavailable hero
Forced on a common quest
Cutlery with a human soul that talks
Cute-coded non-human chaotic creature

Oh – I thought, Baldree has written a T. Kingfisher novel. It’s not quite as good as, say, the Paladin books, but it’s in the ballpark. It’s more violent than the previous two in this series, I should warn.

I was in on the emotional conclusion, so I guess that’s good.

Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd

Elevator Pitch: Can you have cozy dark academia? The official blurb says “cozy dark academia novel for fans of Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series and R.F. Kuang’s Babel”… which, thank you, you have suggested a cozy novel and a dark novel, both of which take place in the past… which this book does not. So, shrug?

Why Did I Read This: Author Max Gladstone recommended it highly

Opening Lines: “The classroom door shimmered, and I scowled at it”

This book, and I say this with love, is subtle as a brick.

Our main character is Dorothe Bartleby and she’s a grad student in Magic. As we meet her, she’s flunked her first oral qualifying exam and has one more chance to pass or get kicked out.

Magic, in this book, can only be done by people born on a new moon, which is a clever way to limit magic usage without making it feeling like a chosen one or eugenics element.

Anyway, Dorothe is trying to prove that early novels were literally magic, and along the way she inadvertently creates a magical skull that narrates her life whether she wants it to or not. In the background – and this should be a spoiler but it’s on the dust jacket – students who ask for disability accommodations are vanishing. So, subtle like brick, but also fun?

It’s trying to be both cozy and dark academia, a mix that doesn’t always work (the cozy part depends on us not fully internalizing that dozens of students have been magically kidnapped). The skull bit works better than you’d expect (or than I expected), and I was on board at the end (though I think the end doesn’t quite hold on its own logic).

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher

Why Did I Read This: Kingfisher is mostly an insta-buy

Opening Lines: “Selena picked her new home for no better reason than the dog laid down on the porch.”

I read a lot of Kingfisher, but they are all so good…

This is Kingfisher in horror mode. Our heroine is Selena, she’s fled to the desert to escape a bad partner and visit her aunt, only to learn that her aunt has passed on. She moves into her aunt’s house and eventually discovers that the roadrunner god is real, had an interesting relationship with her aunt, and would like to continue the deal.

Two quick notes:

For a novel that is nominally horror, this scores really high on the Cozy Scale, like 7 or 8, might even be higher than Brigands & Breadknives.

For no obvious reason, this book takes place at least 30 years in the future, there’s a reference to a moon colony, and the desert area is a “historical zone”, which is never fully explained. I’m great with this – I actually love it when authors do subtle SF/Fantasy stuff in the background, but I wonder if it confused anybody.

Triple

The Will of the Many by James Islington

Elevator Pitch: A Roman Empire coded magic school

Why Did I Read This: Big fave on BookTok

Opening Lines: “I am dangling, and it is only my fathers blood-slicked grip around my wrist that stops me from falling”

Do The Math: Beru Cormorant + Name of the Wind x Roman Empire + a bunch of other magic school stories

I was extremely into this for about the first two-thirds.

The magic system is very cool, and works as metaphor while also being interesting as not-metaphor. The main character is also interesting, and I think the book does kind of an interesting thing with the Chosen One trope, in that he’s basically explicitly set up to look like a Chosen One. There are some cool set pieces, characters that are meant to be smart are actually smart, but not infallible. It’s got a lot going on.

The last quarter or so of the book is basically a boss battle. It’s the Final Task of the school year, and it’s probably overly complicated, in that the book goes into a lot of strategy mishigas that is ultimately totally irrelevant. Then our main character gets a glimpse into what the real stakes are, and the literal last five pages make the book much weirder without explanation. So, at the end of the day, there’s a lot that isn’t really resolved (apparently this is a trilogy, but my guess based on where this one ended was duology….wait, again, this information is look up able, and trilogy it is) and while the scope of the series seems epic, that’s not a totally satisfying experience on its own.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

This is El-Mohtar’s first solo novella, she is one half of the duo responsible for This is How You Lose The Time War,. This book is fantasy, and fairy fantasy at that, about two sisters one of whom falls in love with one of the fae, and one of whom doesn’t. This is the kind of fantasy story that feels like folklore, is designed to feel like folklore, plus some flat-out gorgeous writing.

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal

Why Did I Read This: I love this series basically beyond rational thought

When I say that this is objectively the weakest book in the series, it’s still going to be one of my top five or so books of the year, because, as I said, I love this series beyond rational thought.

Unlike the previous three books, this one is less plot and a bit more vibes-based – all three previous books had very strong goals, this one is more of a mystery and character book. It’s great – Kowal really makes the possibility of the best minds in all the world working together look very enticing. But it’s also a little less focused, and we’re starting to get to the point where the plot is constrained by the fact that they are all prequels to the original Lady Astronaut of Mars short story (which I wonder if that makes parts of the plot feel weird given that a lot of the novel readers probably haven’t seen that story).

All that said, after a book in this series that ended with Elma saying the Jewish Mourner’s Kaddish, this one ends with her saying Shehechianu, the Jewish prayer of thanks, said in response to happy days. And, well Elma is pretty high on my list of fictional Jewish characters who seem to relate to Judaism the way that I do. It hit.

I should note there’s a thing here… Kowal admitted online using an early version of LLM (from, like 2022) to help convert real news articles to the fake news articles and to help narrow down the questions she was asking experts. This was before LLMs really became a flashpoint, and it was plausible to just putter around. Anyway, Kowal says there are maybe like 50 words in the book that come from an LLM. I don’t really care, personally, but it does seem like this will knock the book out of Nebula consideration.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

I read this back to back with The Spellshop and that’s quite a contrast…

Book two in what is, I guess, the “Ana and Din Mysteries” series. If anything, it might be a touch better than book one.

Fantasy series, an empire beset by magical titans, whose blood transforms the land. The empire has industrialized and weaponized the titan blood to create all manner of things, including, for example, Din, a person with perfect recall.

In this book, we’ve moved to the city that is the main refinery for titan blood, which is located an a great geographic location and a tricky political one, in that it is technically not in the empire, but in a neighboring kingdom. There’s a murder. Locked room. And a conspiracy. And eventually a story about what it means to have power, what it means to have responsibility, and what it means to be part of an empire that is so clearly made for a single purpose.

I’m not quite sure how Bennett does it, but the atmosphere of the book is practically tangible, you can touch it and smell it and practically hear the ground squish when the characters walk in the mud and wow I love this series.

When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory

Elevator Pitch: What if we were living in a simulation. I mean, what if we all, 100% knew for sure we were in a simulation?

Why Did I Read This: Gregory is the author of the amazing Spoonbenders.

Opening Lines: “…and there’s the tour bus now, green and bulbous, with long black mirrors drooping in front of its face like caterpillar antennae. It’s climbing out of the underworks of Manhattan, onto the upper level of the George Washington Bridge. CANTERBURY TRAILS is written across its side in white script.”

Do The Math: Canterbury Tales + The Good Place

I feel like this one didn’t get enough attention.

Everybody lives in a simulation. How do they know that? Well, starting seven years ago, once a week everybody in the world wakes up to see the words “you are living in a simulation” floating in front of them. Also, there are dozens and dozens of weird anomalies in the world, places where the laws of physics don’t apply. So people are pretty much convinced.

This book is unhinged in the best way.

Our main characters are a group of people who have gathered for a bus tour of several of the anomalies in the USA. (The bus company is Canterbury Trails, in case you had any confusion about what was happening…) Part of the fun of the book is how weird and inventive the anomalies are, and I won’t spoil it.

Part of the depth of the book is the range of reactions to things like what does morality mean if we are in a simulation? Do you believe in god or do you pray to the simulators? When did the simulation start? Are all the people in the simulation sentient?

There are also characters. A comic book writer and his terminally ill friend. A nun, with a Rabbi. A 17 year old influencer. A skeptic. The character arcs are interesting, especially the range of how they engage with the simulation.

This is a classic SF metaphor but not a metaphor book, and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Elevator Pitch: I just knew this one would have a real humdinger of a marketing pitch, and lo: “A Deadly Education meets Plain Bad Heroines”. So, I guess I’ll take fictional boarding schools and death for $200, Ken.

What it really is, is magic school from the point of view of the administrators.

Why Did I Read This: Very strong prepublication buzz, and I loved Tesh’s last book.

Opening Lines: “Doctor Walden looked glumly at the form she had to fill in. At the top it said RISK ASSESSMENT.”

Our lead character is one of the most powerful wizards in the world, who also is the head teacher at one of the most prestigious magical boarding schools in the world. Magic is not a secret in this world, but it’s dangerous and not very powerful, so even a prestigious magical boarding school is always looking at the bottom line.

Turns out that a boarding school with hundreds of young magicians attracts powerful demons (I guess that’s the Deadly Education hook), and right at the beginning of the book a very powerful demon that has been harassing the school for years is killed by our main character.

Wouldn’t that normally be the end of a book? You’d think, but in this case, the real danger is what happens next. There’s a student death from the past that lingers in the history of the school, which I guess is the Plain Bad Heroines hook. Then, well, then other things happen.

I loved this book, it’s unabashedly a love note to teachers, while being very skeptical of academia. The plot structure is a little weird (also true of Tesh’s last novel), but ultimately works. It’s very creepy when it needs to be, there’s a cute love story there, but ultimately it’s about what a teacher would try to protect, and also about continuing to live after making terrible mistakes.

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Elevator Pitch: The official marketing comps are “Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi”, which I admit does paint a picture. I guess if you squint Piranesi is dark academia? Otherwise not really sure what it’s doing in the mix, the books aren’t tonally similar at all.

Why Did I Read This: Boy this got some weird online discourse….

First off, per an interview, Kuang pronounces it “kuh TAB uh sis”, and not “CAT a basis” but also said she doesn’t really care how you pronounce it.

Alice Law literally Goes To Hell after her advisor dies in a freak lab accident that she feels responsible for. She’s accompanied by her frenemy Peter, in a world where Magic is real and where Dante and the others are non-fiction.

This is one of those buzzy internet books that I feel like I’ve been hearing takes on for months. I don’t really want to get into all the takes, but I do want to say a few things.

The magic, environment, and character arcs are all thematically resonant with each other in a way that is really rare in magical fantasy. The magic explicitly relies on delusion, Alice is a character defined largely by her self-delusions, and her trip into Hell takes her to characters basically trapped by their self delusions. When they all align, the book is very satisfying.
I’d like to introduce a trope named “Lipstick Incident”. A Lipstick Incident is something that happened in the past that caused two people to become estranged, and which is referred to repeatedly before actually being explained. Katabasis is a little bit of a fake out here – Alice refers repeatedly to something that caused her and Peter to no longer be close, but the eventual reveal, while bad, is kind of dwarfed by two other reveals that we don’t see coming because Kuang has been kind of distracting us with the Lipstick Incident. (Fine, I’m grabbing the term from the brief period where Mark Waid got to redo all of Archie comics, look it up, he really had a good thing going there until Riverdale came out and swamped him.)
I’d like to introduce a trope “obvious misunderstanding” – this one you can probably guess. Alice has an obvious misunderstanding with Peter about his notebook, this is, to me, one of the book’s most unforced errors. (The other, I think, is that the villains are underdeveloped) I do like that Kuang takes a big swing at about the two-thirds mark. And that we don’t learn Alice’s real motivation for a long time.
There was some online griping about the amount of sources that Kuang uses in the book, that it felt like a textbook or something. Worked for me, but it is a book that puts the “academia” in “dark academia”.
Triple. Wasn’t sure it would be. Is.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

Elevator Pitch: Oh, this got a fun one: “In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders’s own All the Birds in the Sky” – you don’t often see an author comped to herself. Alice Hoffman here is presumably the Practical Magic books? To me the comp here is Jo Walton’s Among Others, which had a similar magic system.

Opening Lines: “Jamie has never known what to say to her mother. And now—when it matters most of all, when she’s on a rescue mission—she knows even less.”

This was a roller coaster, at least for me.

I had been putting it off on fear that it would be too heavy. And not too heavy, but pretty heavy, for reasons I don’t need to get into.

We’ve got three stories here:

The main story, featuring Jamie, trying to get her mom back in the world after six years of mourning for her mom’s wife. Jamie can do magic, and tries to teach her mom.
A background thread featuring the entire history of Jamie’s parents’ relationship
A background thread involving the 18th Century woman authors that Jamie is researching for her dissertation – Anders clearly loves the research she’s done for this part, and it’s hard to blame her

Anyway, there’s a lot here to like. I’m fond of a magic system where you aren’t quite sure if magic is real. For a system without explicit rules, Anders does a great job making clear what happens at the end, and why. Like Katabasis, a very good case of the magic system reinforcing the themes of the book.

So, I was into this at the end, parts of which are lovely.

My main complaints:

At the end, the characters are really didactic in explaining the point of the story
I found it hard to read in long chunks, especially in the middle, in part because it’s so raw, so this isn’t really a complaint.

I guess I was sure this was a single for a while, but when I finished it, my brain said “triple”. But I’m still thinking about it – I’m guessing this is going to be a book where I remember the best parts and not the flaws.

The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud

Elevator Pitch: It’s the middle grade Understanding Comics

Why Did I Read This: Did you see where I said it’s the middle-grade Understanding Comics?

My love for the work of Scott McCloud goes back a long way, before Understanding Comics. I deeply wish that the Zot! omnibus books would get a digital release. That’s neither here nor there, I suppose. This is explicitly an attempt to do a narrative middle-grade gloss on Understanding Comics, a few kids get together in a cartoonist club, and a friendly librarian teaches them some of the lessons of Understanding Comics in a kid-friendly way. Sounds potentially dull, but these are two genuine masters here, so it’s actually quite charming and fun.

Dead Hand Rule by Max Gladstone

Why Did I Read This: Craft Wars!

Book Nine of Ten for the Craft Sequence, this was supposed to the ending book, but Gladstone wound up splitting it.

I do not recommend you start with this one. The Craft Sequence takes place in a fantasy world where magic is essentially based on law and finance. Except for the gods. And the monsters, I guess. There’s a lot, and it’s fun to see a fantasy world with basically modern tech and wild baroque imagination.

At the end of book 8, we had a situation where there is an overwhelming external force poised to destroy the world, and also an internal force that is, at the very least, determined to knock down any power that could stop the outsiders.

What do the existing powers do? They call a conclave. All the powerful people and nations mentioned or alluded to in the past books all come to the metaphorical table in our main city of Alt Coulomb to decide how to work together to defeat the foes. But who isn’t at the table? And who isn’t really interested in working together?

The first, like, two thirds of this book are really fun. It’s a bunch of big personalities having big debates against high stakes, with the occasional assassination attempt to liven things up. It’s maybe the loosest Gladwell’s writing has ever been – parts of it are the most Pratchetty this series have ever been, just with more evil squid overlords.

Then things start happening, which is also fun, but starts to run up against the limits of how to make the magic in these books comprehensible to the readers. Still, great book. Ends on a cliff.

The Essential Peanuts by Mark Evanier

This one is pretty straightforward, a history of Peanuts through 75 “essential” strips, each one augmented with a selection of strips on the same theme, and a bunch of short essays covering the history of the strip from Schulz’ childhood until his death and the continued life of the characters. Picks its spot, does the thing quite well, gets off the stage.

Slayers of Old by Jim C. Hines

Elevator Pitch: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Golden Girls” – maybe the easiest one of these on the board. That’s pretty much exactly it.

Opening Lines: “Forty years ago, I began keeping a list of annoyances that came with being a Hunter of Artemis. I’d gotten up to two hundred and four.”

Our heroes are, not to put a point on it, old. Jenny is a former Hunter of Artemis, which is Legally Distinct from being a Vampire Slayer. She’s Buffy, age 55, if Buffy had rage quit at age 20 and told the Watchers to pound sand. Annette is a little older, she’s a half-succubus former supernatural PI. Temple is near 100, he’s a magical protector, think Dr. Strange at age 100. Together they run a bookshop in Salem MA, and do not fight crime.

Until… Look, you think this book is going to be light and filled with jokes like staking a vampire with a cane while saying get off my lawn (my joke, not Hines’), and there’s some of that. Hines does a particularly good job with Jenny’s back story, it really feels like there’s a seven-season TV show back there.

But Hines is not afraid for the book to get a little dark. Jenny is dealing with real trauma from her time as a hero, Annette genuinely regrets some life choices. Temple is really aging and can’t do all the things he once could.

The eventual Big Bad is tied to one of those things, and I’m dying to describe it here because the Buffy fans will eat it up but it’s spoilers.

So the book is fun, deeper than you’d expect, nails the ending – I was reluctant to score it a triple because it’s kind of light, but really, what’s a triple if not those things.

Trope note, this book does the thing where there are short interstitial bits between chapters that are uncredited, but we become aware they are the Big Bad POV. I like this structure, I’m not sure how many other SF/F books I’ve seen it in (Ali Hazelwood uses it in a couple of her romance books.)

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

One of the problems with, like, the StoryGraph tracking and stuff is that it subtly pushes me away from long books.

And, so, I embarked upon Ron Chernow’s 1100 page biography of Mark Twain, which became my personality for a couple weeks in December 2025.

It’s hard to really review a biography, here are some thoughts. (I will note that the professional reviews of this book are pretty mixed)

The sheer breadth of Twain’s life is astonishing. He was wildly famous in his time, and almost absurdly well-traveled, and as a result, has some connection with nearly every person you can think of who was prominent in the US or Europe between 1870 and 1910. At least six US Presidents pop in. At one point, we go back to back between Helen Keller (Twain was the first to call Anne Sullivan a “miracle worker”) and Nikolai Tesla.
What people struggle with in this book is the length – the body of the book is 1050 pages. And the proportions. Huck Finn is published on page 340. The last 15 years of Twain’s life are fully half the book. At times, it reads like a biography of his daughters.
I can’t speak to what this book brings to the table in terms of new scholarship. There are critiques that it doesn’t really get Twain’s irreverence. I kind of see that? But also I kind of don’t.
It’s fun to think about what Twain would be in today’s media environment – he was made for the blog/newsletter/posting world. But he’d also either be a victim of wellness grifters or an actual wellness grifter…
As I’ve said before, when I really lock in to a book, I often want to read it aloud. Well, not Chernow’s book, but Twain. Specifically “The War Prayer”, a short-story/essay published after Twain died of which I was unaware and which could have been written yesterday.

Home Run

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Elevator Pitch: Just… trust me and read it? (Interestingly, it has a very prominent blurb from Alex E. Harrow, see next book)

Why Did I Read This: A lot of positive buzz online

Opening Lines: “Once they made sacrifices here, to appease the Eight. This was many thousands of years ago, but the rock remembers.”

Recommended If You Like: Non-hereditary empires, genuinely funny gods, tangled plots, ravens, weapons-grade doorstoppers

I saw a review of this that was basically “this is a book that, while you are reading it, you think ‘this is a good book’”.

That sounds vague, I guess, but I completely get it.

This is a good book.

It’s a 650 page book that doesn’t feel long.

It’s a novel full of twists that all feel earned, I was genuinely shocked by a twist I didn’t at all see coming, which is rare.

It’s a book that keeps changing what’s going on – it’s a mystery, no it’s a trial, no it’s survival.

It’s a book with smart characters who are actually smart and plans that are actually well planned.

Also it’s funny and has a very unique narrative voice.

My only quibble is that it briefly threatens to get out of the author’s control in the last, say, 20% and that also a lot of the end of the book is setting people in place for book two, which kind of muffles the book from having a satisfying end on its own.

But, all that said, this is a very good book and if you at all like 650 page fantasy novels, you will probably like this.

Grand Slam

The Everlasting by Alex E. Harrow

Elevator Pitch: What if Replay was about Red Sonja?

Why Did I Read This: Harrow is a little hit or miss for me, but this book had outstanding buzz.

Opening Lines: “Several years after the war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.”

So about five pages into this book, I thought, this book is a triple or a home run depending on if it sticks the landing. Five pages!

Oh, it stuck the landing.

Our lead is Owen, he’s a scholar in a secondary world, modern age, studying Una Everlasting, a legendary hero. As the book starts, he receives a miracle in the mail. The miracle is a book, The Death of Una Everlasting, believed to be a myth. He sets about to translate it, and through some machinations, he meets with the ambitious Minister of War, and through other machinations, is sent back in time where he meets Una Everlasting herself.

That sounds contrived, you think. Buddy, you don’t know the half of it.

You think you know what will happen next. And kind of you do, but then at a critical moment, when Owen says he’ll never forget Una, his antagonist says, “you always do”.

Oh, you think, this isn’t a time travel story, it’s a time loop story.

And you think you know what will happen next. And kind of you do.

And mostly you don’t.

This book is so good on so many levels, I want to start with, the writing is, sentence by sentence, gorgeous. So many beautiful turns of phrase, and smart observations.

The plot is complex but comes together like the tumblers of a safe falling into place. You don’t think it’s going to be the kind of book where everything falls in line, but it is.

What Harrow does essentially in the background while we’re paying attention to Owen and Una is astonishing. What she does after she pulls the curtain aside is amazing, and what happens after that is heartbreaking.

It’s a romance, sure, but it’s also about stories, and what we fight for, what we fight for as people and what we fight for as countries and what makes a story something people will fight for. It’s an angry book, in places, it’s a deeply romantic book in places, it’s even funny here and there.

There’s so much craft here, in the service of so much to say. I think it pipped Raven Scholar for the win here at the very end of the year.

Noel Rappin Writes Here | Blog

My Robot Year

They, like, work?

The prototype trap

Complexity

Quality, ownership, fun, craftsmanship

Conway’s Law + Robots?

May 2026

A Case of Life and Limb — Sally Smith

StoryGraph Rating: 4.19 (6th of 8)

My Rating: Double (6th of 8)

Platform Decay — Martha Wells

StoryGraph Rating: 4.33 (2nd of 8)

My Rating: Triple (2nd of 8)

The Last Contract of Isako — Fonda Lee

StoryGraph Rating: 4.20 (4th of 8)

My Rating: Double (4th of 8)

Marketed As:

Big Fan – Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski

StoryGraph Rating: 4.35 (1st of 8)

My Rating: Triple (1st of 8)

All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan

StoryGraph Rating: 4.22 (3rd of 8)

My Rating: Triple (3rd of 8)

Cinder House — Freya Marske

StoryGraph Rating: 4.04 (8th of 8)

My Rating: Double (7th of 8)

2026 Hugo Award nominee for best novella.

Radiant Star — Ann Leckie

StoryGraph Rating: 4.20 (5th of 8)

My Rating: Double (5th of 8)

First sentence:

April 2026

The Librarians — Sherry Thomas

StoryGraph Rating: 3.51 (9th of 9)

My Rating: Single (8th of 9)

How To Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay — Jenny Lawson

StoryGraph Rating: 4.26 (3rd of 9)

My Rating: Single (5th of 9)

The Ending Writes Itself — Evelyn Clarke

StoryGraph Rating: 3.67 (8th of 9)

My Rating: Single (9th of 9)

Marketed As:

Red City — Marie Liu

StoryGraph Rating: 4.16 (4th of 9)

My Rating: Double (4th of 9)

Marketed As:

And Another Thing Or Two

Oh, Yeah, There’s a Book

A Case of Mice and Murder — Sally Smith

StoryGraph Rating: 3.96 (6th of 9)

My Rating: Triple (3rd of 9)

The Midnight Show — Lee Kelly

StoryGraph Rating: 4.14 (5th of 9)

My Rating: Triple (2nd of 9)

Marketed As:

Apple: The First 50 Years — David Pogue

StoryGraph Rating: 4.48 (2nd of 9)

My Rating: Single (7th of 9)

Here Where We Live Is Our Country — Molly Crabapple

StoryGraph Rating: 4.58 (1st of 9)

My Rating: Triple (1st of 9)

Nobody’s Baby — Olivia Waite

StoryGraph Rating: 3.94 (7th of 9)

My Rating: Single (6th of 9)

Marketed As:

When Books Could Code 2a: Extreme Programming Part 1 (of many)

A Story

The Book

The Problem

What’s New

The Triumphant Return of a Thing Nobody Will Care About

What’s a Win Share?

How do you calculate Win Shares?

So What Did I Do?

1B Putouts

Outfield Splits

Relief Pitchers

Game Shares

Future Frontiers