Recent Books -- Motherless Brooklyn, A Deadly Education Trilogy, Left Behind, The Next Conversation, This is How You Lose the Time War, I See You've Called In Dead, LeMay, Age of Revolutions, Excession
12 February 2026
- Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. A noirish mystery with a unique protagonist who has Tourette’s syndrome. Great character, great setting.
- A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik. I like Novik’s writing and this trilogy has some good stuff, but I just don’t think yet another angsty teenage magical academy series is what the world needs.
- Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places by Paul Collier. I was excited about this book,and there are many excellent examples and ideas, but midway he gets caught up in philosophizing that just derails the book. Worth reading for the examples and case studies, but don’t read the whole thing.
- The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More by Jefferson Fisher. Great book about how to listen and have better conversations.
- This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Highly rated but didn’t work for me.
- I See You’ve Called In Dead by John Kenney. Another highly rated book that didn’t work for me. I just didn’t care enought about the character to make it through the setup.
- LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay by Warren Kozak. A detailed biography of LeMay – his amazing contributions and his flaws. I knew a little bit about WWII contributions and SAC, but didn’t know about RAND and didn’t remember the Wallace campaign. Makes our leaders of today seem even more feckless.
- Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria. Excellent history of liberalism, revolutions, and the modern world.
- Excession by Iain M. Banks. I hadn’t read a Culture novel in a while, and this one stands up well. Interesting to observe the interaction of the AIs and humans and think about the emerging “AI” in our society.
