Read Books

This is a Great Courses video series on crafting sentences. It walks its audience through different sentence types and goes into the rhythm of a sentence, discussing the value of longer and shorter sentences and why. There are a lot of examples, it wanders into ideas from antiquity and touches on the bad ideas and why they are bad.

Overall, it provides a wealth of information and will enhance the audience appreciation of a well-written sentence.

This is a light-weight book on particle physics with no math, touching on elements of quantum chromodynamics. It starts with basics of quantum mechanics and a basic introduction to Feynman diagrams. It discusses basic mechanics of the standard model, why it needs extensions and how we can get there. Dr. Kane goes into the capabilities of different colliders and their different technologies, then dives into supersymmetry particles, the search for the Higgs particle and string theory.

In spite of the topic, it is a fairly easy read, written well and is interesting, written at a good level for anyone interested in the material but not extremely versed in the science itself.

Dr. Kane is a professor at the U. of Michigan, director emeritus at the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics and is a leader in string theory.

I’ve always liked Claudia Nice’s books, her art is good, her instructions clear and to the point. This book’s focus is on trees, tackling many different types of trees in different seasons. She uses step-by-step examples to walk the reader through the painting process showing the palette and easy-to-follow steps with examples at each stage of the painting. There are examples in a variety of media, including pen and ink, pastel, oil, acrylic and watercolor.

This book is billed as a sequel to American Gods but bears little resemblance to the former other than the theme that gods walk on Earth among men.

This is the story of Charlie Nancy, Fat Charlie, who dislikes his father whom he regards as extravagant and irresponsible. Nancy is getting married, his fiancé wants him to invite his father to the wedding. This precipitates a road of discovery into his own past and his family, including an unknown brother.

Charlie’s and his brother have an unusual relationship, uncomfortable, maybe untrusting, but grows as they are thrust together.

Charlie is a rather weak character, both literary and his personal character. Not particularly likable, but his growth through the book changes him greatly.

The writing is above average and is engaging. And the book is funny. There are only a few primary characters, interesting and mysterious, and Charlie meets a number of peculiar characters in his journey.

The book discusses the French culture by providing a brief introduction to numerous topics and then supporting anecdotes. The topics are grouped by chapter discussing subject including love, fashion and art, cusine, wine, nationalism, sports and international relationships among others.

It starts with a series of weakly-related anecdotes that left me dry, suspecting the book wasn’t going to deliver much of value. But after getting into the book, the character seemed to change and became much more interesting.

It could have used some editing, most of it was pretty good but there were a few typos-into-other-words that tend to get missed by spellcheckers and perhaps less aware editors. For instance, on page 20 the text indicates that Jaques-Yves Cousteau redacted a treaty for protecting Antarctica, if so, he should be ashamed! The problems are few and sometimes amusing.

The book is informative and amusing, a fun and fairly quick read.

This is the seventh book in The Expanse series, it takes place thirty years after the events in Babylon’s Ashes. Earth and Mars are part of a coalition and the Belt has come into its own power governing trade through the gate.

The Roci is sent on an incidental mission to Freehold, where Holden renegotiates the Transport Union’s demands on Freehold, who would have died from those demands. Holden brings back Houston, their leader as prisoner. On returning, Holden and Noami decide to retire leaving the Roci to Bobbie as captain.

The main plot revolves around Laconia, who has been experimenting with the protomolecule and developing new technologies. The Laconians invade with one ship, quickly taking over the Medina station, leaving Santiago Singh as governor, then heading for the inner planets, with another ship on-way to the gate. The Roci crew don’t have access to their ship and join Saba in the underground. Jim Holden is ultimately taken prisoner and transported to Laconia. The first Laconian ship was defeated in a costly series of battles, but not destroyed. The book closes with Holden arriving on Laconia as prisoner and the Laconians still a looming thread with their second ship near to arriving.

Another twist is that when the Laconians use their protomolecule-based technologies, an odd black sphere appears on their primary ship and moves completely with the ship. Holden identified it as belonging to the people who destroyed the civilization that made the protomolecule.

One problem is that after 30 years from the last book, the characters have aged, but there doesn’t seem to be any character growth in that time. It’s still the same characters, the book could have taken a month and it would be the same, the time frame only seems to provide an opportunity for the Laconian technology development.

Aside from that, this is one of the better books in a while. It is a lot of action with some weird technologies thrown in.

Set at a Lunar colony in the near future, this is the story of Jasmine Bashara (Jazz), a smuggler fighting for a small life in the colony, who is drawn into a grand plot to control its resources.

The strengths of the book are in the action and most of the science. The book is a page-turner that will keep the reader guessing as to what’s coming.

The writing is simple, grammatically correct but uninspired. The characters are somewhat flat, there is no real character growth in the book.

Jazz is a young girl, very intelligent but uninspired. I found her unlikable, she is untrusting and doesn’t make good decisions. Her skill sets, though they are explained in the story, seem a very odd assortment and somewhat contrived.

The science is mostly good, the reader can learn a lot from the book in this regard. But he misses the science in a few points, these oversights bothered me in the ending, although they wouldn’t affect the ending. The book includes an analysis of space travel costs. In this instance he goes into a good in-depth analysis of fuel costs comparing it to air travel then extrapolating to space travel. However, when he talks about the cost of descending to the Moon’s surface from Lunar orbit, he accounts for the difference in air resistance and gravity, but forgets to account for the cost of moving the fuel from Earth to Lunar orbit.

Overall, I did find the book enjoyable, mostly because of its pacing and I enjoyed picking up the science of a lunar habitation through the reading.