Noel Rappin Writes Here | Blog

June 2026

2026-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

I read nine books this month, and honestly not as many high notes as last month. I think we’ll talk about eight of them.

The Tapestry of Fate — Shannon Chakraborty

StoryGraph Rating: 4.47 (1st of 9)

My Rating: Double (1 of 9)

Book Two of the Amina al-Sirafi Adventures

To start with the positives: this book still has a lot of what made the first book great. Amina is a great character, the use of folklore and myth from the Persian Gulf region is very interesting. Chakraborty does a good job of weaving the mythological magic in with the story and still having the action and motivations be manageable.

This book picks up a little bit after the end of the last book, with Amina getting a new assignment from her new supernatural frenemies. She needs to recover a magical spindle. Easy! Except it’s in the possession of a magical queen on a mysterious island who has the power to rewrite fate and change people into sheep. Less Easy!

Our Heroes set off (after a detour that serves to set up Amina’s daughter as a character), and they are eventually shipwrecked on the mysterious island, Amina is separated from all but one of her crew, and then the plot proper kicks in.

It is certainly a choice to have a book series about a notorious pirate and her crew and then have the bulk of the last two-thirds of the book take place on land, with the captain separated from the crew. And yet it works, mostly. “It’s a little too long” is a very annoying comment about a book or movie because “too long” is usually the symptom and not the cause. In this case, the book does basically the same scene — Amina investigates something mysterious, has health problems, mistrusts her best friend — a few more times than strictly necessary.

The last two words of the book lead us to… well, I have my suspicions, but we’ll see.

Go Gentle — Maria Semple

StoryGraph Rating: 3.62 (8th of 9)

My Rating: Single (7 of 9)

Marketed As:

Well, it’s an Oprah book, so it’s got a quote from Oprah that it is both a “page-turner” and “one wild ride”. So it’s got that going for it.

This book has very strong “Apple TV 8 episode series” energy — it’s kind of a mystery but not really, it’s kind of a romance but not really, it’s breezy and funny, but not a pure joke. In a way I can’t quite define, but feel in my heart, it’s the harmonic mean of Lessons in Chemistry and Margo’s Got Money Problems, both turned into Apple TV shows, even though it’s really not that much like either of them.

Our hero is Adora, she’s made her mark as the author of a popular translation of Stoic Philosophy and she’s got a cushy job as the in-house philosopher for a wealthy NYC family that has their own museum. One day she has a meet-cute with Digby, who has a mysterious job and gives her a mysterious mission. From there she gets caught up in what may be a plot involving guns being smuggled as art, or possibly art being smuggled as guns, or maybe art being smuggled as art.

But it’s not really that much about the plot. Adora has a past, and the book has a lot of questions about whether Stoicism is actually helping her or just helping her avoid her life.

It’s the kind of book where there’s a news item in the first chapter that activists have blown up the Rosetta Stone, and you are, for some time, not quite sure if we are meant to take that as satire, or as a sincere thriller plot beat, or perhaps both. And if you say “that’s not a kind of book”… exactly, the book is weird (complimentary). And its particular genre mix feels more like a TV show than a book, which brings us back to 8-episode Apple TV series.

I pulled this quote from an interview with Semple — “one of my beliefs is that your protagonists can’t have friends.” Because a friend would talk the protagonist out of doing the crazy thing you need to drive the plot. Honestly, I’ve heard worse writing advice.

The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective — Jo Nichols

StoryGraph Rating: 3.84 (3rd of 9)

My Rating: Single (8 of 9)

Marketed As:

“in the vein of The Thursday Murder Club or Only Murders in the Building but with a southern California twist.” That gives you “amateurs bond while solving a murder” and “a murder happens in their place of residence” and “we are in California”. I mean, that’s about it, except this book has non-elderly detectives.

This book very much tries to do what Osman does in Thursday Murder Club, by which I mean a murder mystery with multiple viewpoints from a group of people who become a tighter community through solving the murder. In this case, it’s a group of people who live in the title cottages, a group of small bungalows in Santa Barbara owned by Mrs. B, an elderly eccentric who likes to take in strays.

Anthony, a menacing-looking ex-con, moves in, and shortly thereafter a real estate developer is found murdered in the courtyard. The police put one and one together and arrest Anthony. Mrs. B., insisting on his innocence, marshals the other tenants to prove his innocence, and off we go. (I will note that the blurb tells us that Mrs. B. confesses, which is true, but that’s on like page 200, which I think is well past the event horizon at which you put plot points in marketing blurbs)…

For most of the book my thought was, this does an OK job of doing what Thursday Murder Club does really, really well. It’s a little too insistent on showing us how quirky the characters are, and a little too blatant in showing us how they are fixing each other. But it’s fine, enjoyable, the characters are easy to hang out with.

The ending… Well, look, I’ve seen murder mysteries where the detective effectively does unilateral jury nullification. But, well, in this one…

— MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD REALLY DON’T READ THIS — (actually, wait, I’ve given myself spoiler text as a display option, let’s use that…) It turns out that Mrs. B. is actually guilty of the murder and a second murder is actually done by Anthony, to protect Mrs. B. And the other tenants, who were worried that, Anthony might have violent impulse control problems, upon learning that he actually does have a violent impulse control problem, decide en-masse to frame a tenant’s ex-husband (who admittedly did try to kill that tenant). That does not count two other felony assaults that we overlook because the good guys did it to punish a bad guy. And look, I like Batman as much as anybody, but in the real world, this is genuinely bad, right?

For The Bride — Becca Grischow

StoryGraph Rating: 4.10 (2nd of 9)

My Rating: Single (6 of 9)

Sometimes my rating scale just doesn’t really fit. This is a very enjoyable book, that breaks no new ground, but which has more depth in it than it needs to get by. The official line for double is “would I recommend this to myself if I had a lot less time to read”, and the answer is “probably not, but maybe” That said, I did enjoy it a bunch. (I also think the SG rating here is an exhibit in the “romance fans give higher ratings than mystery fans” theory.)

Our two FMCs are Alice and Renee, Alice is our viewpoint. They are brought together as bridesmaids for a mutual friend, but they loathe each other over past slights. This is enemies to lovers of the flavor “the people they hated are in the past, the new people are much better people”. Alice is trying to put her life back together with relatively new sobriety and quite recent grief over her father’s death.

This has most of what I look for in a romance novel — I believe the characters are good for each other, there’s a background plot that they need to work together one, there are some time honored tropes (Only! One! Bed!), but Alice’s complex grief and attempt to make amends for her real past mistakes gives the book enough of a background that makes it really work.

The Word Is Murder – Anthony Horowitz

StoryGraph Rating: 3.79 (5th of 9)

My Rating: Single (4 of 9)

This one is weird because my “Marketed As” section is about how another book referenced this one — This book was one of the comps in the Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone series. It’s also metafictional, but less satirical. In this case, Horowitz, a UK novelist and TV mystery writer of some renown, finds himself acting as the Watson to a Detective Hawthorne, a former cop turned consultant. Unlike the Ernest Cunningham books by Benjamin Stephenson, Horowitz doesn’t do any goofing off about the rules of mysteries. He does do metafictional goofing on the difference between the story as it happened, and what he does to shape it into a novel, he argues with Hawthorne about it rather a lot.

The setup here is that Hawthorne approaches Horowitz to write a true-crime book following his adventures, baiting him with the details of an unusual murder. Horowitz agrees, for reasons, even though he doesn’t like Hawthorne. From there, we get… well, we get a murder mystery, peppered with some commentary on what makes a mystery story interesting. The mystery is well-done, the commentary is solid, if a little precious at points, and the way that Horowitz is willing to pull this into his actual real life is interesting. (Though, as a mystery, it’s something of an exercise into how red you can make a red herring and still have chasing it feel relevant to the plot.)

The thing about Sherlock Holmes as an archtype is that he’s not actually supposed to be an asshole, he’s just working on a different plane of existence than everybody else. (This is one reason why Elementary is a better take on Holmes than BBC Sherlock, even though there are some individual amazing episodes of Sherlock). Horowitz really leans into it here – Hawthorne goes past just being unusual into actively being unlikable. (Horowitz makes him really homophobic to the point where I thought it was meant to be a bit.) Horowitz doesn’t make himself particularly likable either, which makes for a weird backdrop if both the characters are kind of annoying.

And yet, I checked out book two, in part because I am an easy sell on metafiction, and in part because I’m curious if or how Horowitz modifies the characters over time.

Guilty By Definition – Susie Dent

StoryGraph Rating: 3.82 (4th of 9)

My Rating: Double (2 of 9)

Marketed As:

Well, it has a blurbed quote from The Washington Post that ends “the perfect tonic for any philobiblist’s mubble-fubbles”. Yes those are both words (bibliophile and a state of depression, respectively). They are both defined in the book itself, FWIW. And no, my spellcheck doesn’t recognize either of them.

So, our main characters here are a group of editors at what is Legally Not the Oxford English Dictionary, it’s just a very prestigious dictionary that happens to be at Oxford. One fine day they get a very cryptic letter in the mail signed by “Chorus”, as several of them separately get postcards with ominous Shakespeare quotes and such. It quickly becomes clear that the letters are all to do with the 15-year-old mysterious disappearance of Charlie, the older sister of one of the editors.

Martha, the younger sister, goes to the police, and is encouraged to ask around about Charlie to see if she can learn anything new. And it turns out a lot of people have secrets, some of which relate to the disappearance, some of which don’t. The letters keep coming, though.

Your general enjoyment level here is going to depend on how much you like characters with very large vocabularies and who love language, and on how much you like reading about people solving cryptic crosswords. The general rhythm of the book is, they get a letter, it’s hiding a message, they use that message to talk to somebody to get more information and so on. It also helps if you are up for a lot of descriptions of how Oxford is a special place (this would make a very odd double feature with Babel…)

I’m fine with all that, and I basically enjoyed this one — amateurs solving mysteries with their specific skills seems to be one of my sweet spots. A couple of spoiler-y quibbles with the ending — there’s a point in the middle of the book where it becomes clear what’s actually happening and it becomes clear who had the most at stake in what Charlie was doing before she disappeared. There are some logistics that are surprises, but overall, I feel like if I guess this much of the finale, then the mystery is pretty easy. We do learn who “Chorus” is, which isn’t really played as a mystery to be solved, and the book does explain why that person sent the letters, though not really why the letters needed to be super difficult cryptic crosswords.

Obstetrix — Naomi Kritzer

StoryGraph Rating: 3.77 (6th of 9)

My Rating: Double (3 of 9)

Marketed As:

The blurb starts with “Doctor Liz has just been acquitted for performing the last abortion in North Dakota when she’s kidnapped”, and that’s a weird sentence. First of all, “Doctor Liz”? Second of all, that’s not quite the way the book phrases it. It’s not inconsistent, it’s just kind of oversimplified.

There’s a genre issue here, this is a little bit being marketed as SF because it takes place in the future, but the only actual difference from 2026 reality was a very thin difference in the law, I don’t think there’s any substantive tech difference (maybe a very very slight one), it’s really a “15 minutes in the future” thriller, but in a more minor key.

Our main character, Dr. Liz Gwinn (I have to imagine that it kind of bugs Kritzer that the marketing copy drops her last name), is, as we meet her, still recovering from having been prosecuted for normal medical care that is now illegal in North Dakota. She follows a potential job lead, and for her troubles she is drugged, kidnapped, and taken to what can only be called a cult compound to act as their resident OB/GYN for the many, many pregnant women on site.

The rest of the story is survival in the sense of gathering resources and looking for your chance, survival in the sense of maintaining sanity, and (a little bit) survival in the sense of building community. It’s genuinely disturbing in a “boy I wouldn’t want to be stuck on a cult compound” kind of way. Even though Liz is rarely in direct physical danger, that risk and the attempt to control her actions and thoughts loom over the entire book.

The execution here is very strong, there’s a nice running bit about the stories that Liz uses to ground herself and remember the outside world (and a creepy bit at the end where she realizes that she’s unconsciously changed her vocal register after being at the compound).

It’s not often I think a book should be longer, but this book spends a few pages at the very end explaining what’s been happening while Liz was captive, and I think I would have been happy to have that as an interlude every couple of chapters. I think you could still keep the suspense and the sense of frustration going on the other side as well. (To be clear, I understand why Kritzer chose to keep a tight focus on Liz, I’m just saying this other choice would have also worked.)

Startup Hell – Caitlin Rozakis

StoryGraph Rating: 3.77 (7th of 9)

My Rating: Single (5 of 9)

Marketed As:

Look, here’s the whole text: “A hilarious contemporary fantasy about a junior sales witch stuck in corporate hell, who has to evade devilish pacts and her kickass, world-saving, demon-slaying mum to save a (surprisingly hot) demon, and work out how to hit her quarterly target”. My only quibble here is that she’s not a “sales witch” – the fact that she isn’t a witch is the whole point of her character. The rest is fine, if maybe tonally slightly different from the actual book. It remains weird to me that there is a term “urban fantasy” and yet a book that involves demons that takes place in New York City doesn’t count.

This book went a little harder than I expected. Honestly, I was expecting what you might call the romcom version of a startup job, which is to say, not exactly realistic, just some vibes and some hooks to hang a plot on. (For some reason, I’m thinking of The Hating Game…). Rozakis, per her author note, has 15 years of experience in marketing at startups, and has clearly Seen Some Stuff, which gives the book more of an edge than I thought it’d have. There’s a particular bit about venture capital and vampires, that isn’t maybe a 100% original thought, but it was well-executed, and eventually Morgan’s growing ethical dilemma about working in this particular startup feels very honed from the ethical dilemma of working at a lot of startups.

When Books Could Code 2a: _Extreme Programming Explained_ Explained Extremely

2026-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

We’re back with When Books Could Code, Essay Two, Chapter B, Subsection 3, Paragraph 2, Line 7. I’ll continue the discussion of the first edition of Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Back, published in 2000.

In Part One, we talked up the problem that Beck identified with how software projects run, and in this post, we’ll talk about the set of solutions that he proposes. In the next post or two we’ll talk more about what happened after the book was released and how the second edition updated XP.

The XP Solution

The solution section of the book describes the original twelve practices. To this point in the book, Beck has given XP values, principles, activities, and now practices, and this all feels a bit like epicycles on top of epicycles – one of the apparent goals of the second edition was to clear up the relationship between all these moving parts.

The twelve practices are the signature feature of the first edition of this book. They are meant to be simple, even naïve, when done on their own, but they are more than the sum of their parts because they are “self-reinforcing”. This leads to the main tension of the book, which is between XP as a prescriptive model of twelve things that every team should do, and as a descriptive model of twelve practices that work, but where each team needs to find their own path. Many people took this book to be prescriptive, which Beck says was not his intention. That said, it’s not hard to see how the plain text of the first edition would give you the idea that these twelve things were the One True Way, especially if you wandered into any of the listserv discourse after the book came out.

I think the accurate reading here is that Beck identified a set of practices that he felt were objectively useful, and which he found became even more useful when “extremifying” them, and on top of which were even greater than the sum of their parts when done together. This is, if I may use the adverb, and extremely exciting set of discoveries, and it’s easy to see why Beck was eager to show what his team had accomplished.

I think, though, that Beck was being so careful to make the point that the practices support each other and that doing only one or two of them wouldn’t give you the full value, that he overshot a bit, and the book sometimes sounds like these 12 practices are the Only Way of XP, even if that was never really the intent.

The set of practices is very much colored by the state of software development in the 1990s when the book was written, meaning largely for software that was actually released to users, rather than server-side software that is just deployed. Like a lot of books written in the early 2000s, this book was written in a context that was significantly different the context in which it would later be read.

I would absolutely write an entire series with a separate post on each of the twelve practices because it’s fascinating to me the different trajectories they took. But in lieu of that, here’s a quick tour of the Original Dozen.

Planning Game — I was surprised going back to this one, it was not what I remembered. The planning described here is likely not what you think of when you think of Agile planning, the way planning is discussed in this edition was deprecated almost immediately by the book Planning Extreme Programming, by Beck and Martin Fowler. Most of what you remember about how Agile planning works is from that book, and from the second edition of XP Explained, which picked up on that new vision of planning.

Small Releases — Basically took over the web development part of the world, and now that software is largely distributed online, took over pretty much everything. Even release sizes that would be considered large by today’s standards are still much smaller than what Beck considered small in 2000.

System Metaphor — Even at the time, this was immediately the forgotten practice. The idea — that there is a metaphor used to pull the design together — is a good one, but it’s not necessarily applicable to all systems or possibly it’s hard or possibly it’s not something most engineers care about. In any case, it was rare at the time and it’s rare now.

Simple Design — Defined as a design that uses as few classes, as few methods, and as few actors as possible. This is foundational to moving in small steps – the complexity is only added where needed. I think it’s fair to say that, like a lot of YAGNI-related principles, this one is often honored in the breach. (YAGNI, the acronym for “You Ain’t Going To Need It) is another XP-related term that doesn’t come from this book, it comes from Ron Jeffries’ later book Extreme Programming Installed.)

Testing continually — Beck doesn’t quite stress testing first yet. The chapter on testing starts with “we will write tests before we code, minute by minute”, but the rest of the chapter doesn’t harp on that fact, focusing instead on the tests being isolated and automatic. “You should test things that might break” gets used here. The concept of Red/Green/Refactor comes from Beck’s next book, “Test-Driven Development”. (Martin Fowler’s Refactoring book, also published about the same time, assumes that you are doing testing first). I will note that Beck spends time here defending the idea that programmers will write tests at all, let alone write them first.

What happened to testing as a practice after this is chaotic, but the primary upshot, at least in the Ruby world, was that writing tests did become part of the expectation of production code, but that test-first development turned out to be a much harder sell overall, for reasons that are still a little confusing to me.

Refactoring — Between this book and the Martin Fowler Refactoring book (definitely a future book I want to write about), the XP/Agile folk were successful in promoting the idea that refactoring was a thing that you could do continually in small steps, as opposed to something you would take a six week break to do every couple of years. I think adoption has been imperfect, but the meaning and impact of the term definitely changed.

Pair Programming — Paring was arguably the most radical practice that XP suggested. “It is a subtle skill, one that you can spend the rest of your life getting good at”, Beck writes, and that bit of advice was largely overlooked.

I have a million things to say about pair programming. Here’s three:

As far as I can tell, the number of Ruby/Rails shops that actually pair regularly is now effectively zero. I’ve worked at a lot of places that claimed to pair, and in 25 years, I’ve worked at exactly one place that actually did it regularly.
Pairing is hard, and even while acknowledging that, Beck understates some of what makes it hard, sample quotes include: “What if two people don’t get along? They don’t have to pair” and “What if someone refuses to pair? They can choose to work like the rest of the team, or they can choose to look for work outside the team”. I submit that those are both glib glosses on hard problems.
Pairing was always a hard sell to management, and the logistical problems are real. What if you only have three developers on the team? What if you are in an open space next to teams that need quiet? What if you are all remote? And that’s before you get into any interpersonal or power dynamics. “In my experience,” Beck writes, “pair programming is more productive than dividing the work between two programmers and integrating the results”. That has not been my experience, and I think it’s quite hard to achieve in practice.

Collective Ownership — Not much to say here, I’d say this got mostly adopted in the sense that teams don’t explicitly have individually owned code, but it’s still pretty easy to get code silos on teams that aren’t trying hard to avoid them.

Continuous Integration — Probably the biggest success of the XP practices, most teams in the web world take this even farther and do continuous deployment, and the definition of “continuous” in this book (integrate at the end of each iteration) is far too slow for most modern teams. There’s been a definite tension pulling teams out of Agile/XP style iteration planning because they want to deploy all the time.

40 Hour Week — “The XP rule is simple — you can’t work a second week of overtime”. The goal here is laudable, and I think that directionally many parts of tech got better at this, at least for a while. In the sense that this is a developer practice that developers control, I think that this is still largely aspirational.

On-Site Customer — The idea that a coding team should have continual access to somebody who can make product-level decisions is both obviously beneficial and remains beyond the operational capacity of many projects. The couple of times that I was able to work like this as a consultant were truly great, though.

Coding Standards — This, I think, has gotten pretty strong adoption. In the Ruby world, most teams use some flavor of Rubocop on all code, and nearly every language community that has sprung up in the last 25 years has a built-in or standard default linter or formatter or both.

I’d say the upshot here is that many of the individual practices have been widely adopted. The concept of this group of twelve being adopted as a group and reinforcing each other, that basically didn’t happen.

But see my post on entropy from a few years back for a slightly different look at what happened to the XP practices as a group.

Implementation

Section three of the book is about implementing XP and it starts with great advice:

Pick your worst problem.

Solve it the XP way.

When it’s no longer your worst problem, repeat.

This is great, it’s a little bit in tension with the idea of the twelve self-reinforcing practices, but it’s generally good advice. (I note that retrospectives are not an XP practice in this book, they were added later.)

Beck says:

Solving the most pressing problem also addresses the objection to XP that it is “one size fits all”.

But then later:

Step -1: Rearrange the furniture so you can pair program and the customer can sit with you.

But even later, quoting a book on teaching Skiing:

You will only see 20% of the improvement when you have done 80% of the exercises.

This poses a dilemma. Is XP all or nothing? Do you have to follow these practices to the letter or risk not seeing any improvement? Not at all. You can get significant gains from parts of XP. It’s just that I believe there is much more to be gained when you put all the pieces in place.

What I think is happening here is that Beck legitimately believes that the 12 practices are the natural end state for an XP team, but is offering on-ramps for teams to get up to speed. That said, I think the all-or-nothing question is the most muddled message in a book that is generally quite clear.

There’s a section about “What Makes XP Hard”:

“It’s hard to do simple things”
“It’s hard to admit you don’t know”
“It’s hard to collaborate”
“It’s hard to break down emotional walls. The smooth running of an XP project relies on the smooth expression of emotions.”

So… I mean, this is all directionally true, and it’s even directionally true that this is what made XP hard. But it isn’t exactly unrelated to the early community sense that if you failed at XP it was probably your own fault. (Ultimately, I think the missing word here is “trust”, but that’s another story.)

Then a chapter about when you shouldn’t try XP, which I very much appreciate. “The biggest barrier to the success of an XP project is culture… Any business that runs projects by trying to point the car in the right direction is going to have a rough time with a team that insists on steering”. True, I think, but also understates the extent to which many businesses are going to have people that want to steer. And I think it undersells the benefit of steering at larger scale. Or at least the perceived benefit of steering at large scale.

“Another culture that is not conducive to XP is one in which you are required to put in long hours to prove your commitment to the company.”

“Really smart programmers sometimes have a hard time with XP” (I think this is more accurately expressed as “raging egoists have a hard time with XP”. In my experience really smart programmers who are not raging egoists are fine with XP. Enthusiastic, even.)

“Size clearly matters, you probably couldn’t run an XP project with a hundred programmers. Nor fifty. Nor twenty.” Not that people didn’t try… But then, “the biggest bottleneck in scaling is the single-threaded integration process”, I think that one actually got solved, and the problem with larger teams is simply that it becomes increasingly risky to have large teams that don’t coordinate.

You also shouldn’t use XP:

If you are using a technology with an inherently exponential cost curve. I think in practice this means if you have a lot of hardware customers or something where making a change has some kind of huge direct cost.
In an environment where a long time is needed to get feedback
If you have the wrong physical environment. “If you have programmers on two floors, forget it”. I do wonder the current state of Beck’s thought here as remote teams became more of a thing.

Then What Happened?

This book went out into the world with a bang. Many, many teams wanted to try it, and many struggled. It was clear that the ideas in the book resonated with developers, and the idea of having a process more focused on doing things than planning things was a big draw. I might be overstating it, but there was quickly a sense that the book over-indexed on the specifics of the few teams that were the initial adopters.

There was an XP listserv in the very early 2000s and I’m pretty sure it’s archives have gone into the Vast Beyond (the web archive has a main page, but not the individual messages, as far as I can tell). I would pay genuine money for a chance to read through those archives.

I’m looking at an archived monthly summary list from 2000 with the heading “no excuses programming” and messages from Kent Beck and Dave Thomas, and the specific messages aren’t stored, and to say I’m curious about the content of those messages is a wild understatement.

Anyway, I lurked on that listserv for a while, and I remember it being a lot of “I tried XP and it didn’t work”/”well you must not have been doing it right”, and in retrospect that should have been a stronger signal that it seemed to be at the time.

There were a series of follow-on books within a year or so that explained facets of XP in more detail, responding to feedback, extending and changing some of the practices, like planning, and adding new ideas like retrospectives. As we’ll see, the second edition was very much an attempt to consolidate.

XP was not the only lightweight process being proposed around this time, and in late 2001, seventeen people involved with XP, Scrum and a couple of others got together in a ski lodge and produced the Agile Manifesto, which is an umbrella term for the bits of the various processes that all these people could agree on.

(Parenthetically, somebody should do an oral history of this while enough of the original seventeen are still around to participate.)

From that point “Agile” became a huge buzzword, everybody wanted to be “Agile”, and the definition was fuzzy enough that almost everybody could claim it (boy, do I have a story… next time).

Next time, we’ll talk about how the second edition of XP Explained consolidated all this feedback, and then some thoughts on where XP and Agile went after the book came out.

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.