The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham

Fascinating look at the rise and fall of the Dixie Mafia with thrilling legal drama and great storytelling. 5/5 Stars.

Power, Faith, & Fantasy, America in the Middle East 1776 - 2011 by Michael Oren

"I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one."  --Jimmy Carter to Yasir Arafat, July, 2000.

This well-researched and insightful history book fills in some important gaps that other historical fiction and history books I have read on this topic leave out. The book is long but still manages to omit an enormous amount of context and concurrent events to those described.  I wish professor Oren had added more references and made the book longer (it is very long, but still fantastic).  The main theme of misset expectations, culture clash, and lack of empathy among the leaders is well-presented.  If you are at all interested in America in the Middle East, I highly recommend the book, 5/5 Stars.

Armageddon by Craig Alanson

This chapter in the never-ending story is better than some of the others, and continues to develop all the characters.  It drops direct hints of a bigger, awe-and-wonder, galactic-scale mystery and kills off some of the characters who were with the reader for 8 books.  The creative, bizarre, desperate schemes always eventually work out in the end, so this cliff hanger "formula" is getting tiresome.  I am hoping we can get more and better political stories among the space aliens.  4/5 Stars.

Detecting Deception

In Malcolm Gladwell's Talking to Strangers, Gladwell has some fun anecdotes explaining how experts and trained professionals were deceived by liars.  Gladwell champions some relatively weak theories explaining how and why we are so terrible at detecting deception.  Recently, researchers at (you can't make this up!) the "Lie Lab" have published a fantastic comic, a youtube video, and research paper explaining that going deep into details is the most reliable method of probing for deception.

Comics are underrated as the most approachable and effective communications medium.

Meetings according to devth

My buddy (who unwisely works in fintech) posted this twitter thread about meetings that I have enhanced and summarized.

All two of you who follow my blog likely have wisdom, links, and strong opinions about tech business meetings so I welcome your comments in my G-Doc here: 

https://is.gd/devth_mtgs

Proposed Meeting Hygiene Workflow

Quotas

• max 10 hours per week for individual contributors (ICs), 

• 20 hours per week for managers. 

New meetings that exceed this quota forces an existing meeting to be deleted before a new meeting can be accepted.

Automated meeting follow-up workflow

• All participants anonymously rate how effective the meeting was [1-5] for their individual purpose.

• All participants answer "This could have been a Slack thread." [Y/N].

Automated Meeting Scheduler workflow

• Includes a mandatory checkbox: "we tried to resolve this issue on Slack" before booking.

• Forbids creating a meeting without an agenda and associated Notes doc.

• Verifies that the meeting notes include at least one task is created

• Warns if number of tasks and assignees is disproportional to number of participants

• Forbids creating a meeting with more than X participants; requires manager approval

• Calculates and displays meeting cost in the description and notes doc

• Requires mandatory inclusion for the reason each participant is invited

• Adds meetings coach approver or manager approval to restrict meeting creation for organizers who score low on meeting effectiveness.

A Zoom meeting will always be much less effective and much less enjoyable than meeting in real life. Let's stop pretending otherwise.

Babel by R. F. Kuang

The Nebula Award nominees for 2022 were recently announced; Babel  looked intriguing; my ranking algorithm pushed it high up on my queue.  The magic system is interesting, but the system is arbitrary and clashes too much with physics so I would categorize the book as fantasy, not sci-fi. The linguistic roots & translation subtleties are fun but also clash with linguistic research (Adger, Chomsky, Pinker), so they were also disappointing.  However the story and characters are fun and the writing is immersive. So I did enjoy the book. 4/5 Stars.

What makes you feel bad must be eradicated

Someone pointed me at this fascinating Boston Globe opinion piece that is worth sharing.  It has some interesting insights but is an inadequate summary of the 25-year study on which the author's concepts are based. The Atlantic article she cites is another great companion piece.  As the author says, "Living in a society means encountering people who test us, or annoy us, or infuriate us—or to whom we ourselves are tiresome, annoying, and infuriating."  Trying to remove all friction is fruitless and counter-productive.

Quantum Earth, Book 2: Earthside by Denis E. Taylor

The story continues.  Still fun. 4/5 Stars.

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

It's been a (long) while since Gladwell's David and Goliath (2013).  I do not read Gladwell's New Yorker column or listen to his podcast, so I have not kept up with his ideas and opinions.  I stumbled across this 2019 book in my library and was happy to read it on Libby.  As usual, the book is very entertaining; readers love it and critics dislike it. The logic and science are relatively weak but the rhetorical methods and story-telling are fantastic.  As always, I enjoyed the stories. 4/5 Stars.

Ceephay Queen by Joel Shepherd

I love the Spiral Wars series by Shepherd.  The two year gap between Qalea Drop and Ceephay Queen was difficult to endure but enhanced the pleasure of diving back into the Spiral Wars universe with my beloved characters.  I intentionally read this book slowly and even recorded some aphorisms:

One worries less about turbulence when one is a pilot. There is a metaphor in there somewhere.

You start to use it, thinking it is a saddle but it ends up being a leash.

A person meets her destiny on the road she takes to avoid it.

Nothing is more dangerous than an officer with a good idea.

The photon hits the electron; the wave hits the shore; we are all just pawns in some larger game; the magic of sentience lies in the attempt to make the process slightly less random.

Why make a small threat when you can make a bigger one?

The day humanity accepts that "dangerous" automatically means "bad" is the day we start to go extinct.

You may not be interested in violence but violence is always interested in you.

I was disappointed in Styx's new character arc and her dialogue; I don't particularly like most of the new characters.  The new species, Rhee incompetence, and lazy writing about the politics are also a little disappointing. The book is still fantastic and I can't wait for the next installment. 5/5 Stars.

Utopia by Lincoln Child

I picked this up at the library the last time I was there.  The book is a little dated; the similarities to Disney are blindingly obvious.  The characters are poorly developed.  The story line is fun, though. 3/5 Stars.