puf.io

Florecita Panaderia on 23rd and Bartlett

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I first encountered Florecita Panaderia, in its original location in a Bryant street alley. I’d been walking through the Inner Mission, wanted a pastry, but didn’t feel like Tartine (whose large Manufactory is around the corner). Florecita’s pan dulce was quite good, but somehow I only went there a few times.

Since September 2026 Florecita Panaderia has relocated to the corner of 23rd street and Bartlett street, in the location that used to host Shuggies (and Velvet Cantina before that). Florecita Bakery is attracting a lot of people to their new location; and for a good reason, as their made-from-scratch pan dulce are delicious!

The site consists of two spaces, connected by a passage. You typically enter from the corner into the space where the concha’s are sold and made.

The dough is portioned on-site, and then baked into perfectly sized concha’s right where you can see them. And smell them… oh my gosh, can you smell them!

After you get your concha(s), head to the second space to wait for your coffee and/or to relax and eat your pastry.

If the inside seating is all taken up (some folks were working on laptops on my last visit), there is also seating outside in the parklet.

Do you have any favorite coffee or pastry spot in the Mission or elsewhere in the city? Let me know through the links at the top of the page.

Parable of the Talents - Octavia E. Butler (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Parable of the Talents started showing up in my book recommendations and top X lists regularly in the past year and a half. The book was first published in 1998, and its recent resurgence likely has to do with its narrative: a social and economic collapse of the United States, and the rise of a Christian fundamentalist, authoritarian president under the slogan Make America Great Again.

The book follows protagonist Lauren Olamina as she builds a peaceful community in northern California based on her newly founded Earthseed faith. This faith was mostly developed in the predecessor book Parable of the Sower (which I didn’t read) around the central tenet that ‘God is change’. The community gets raided by followers of the president, who kill a number of the Earthseed community (including Olamina’s husband), and send the children (including Olamina’s daughter) to Christian American homes, out of reach from their parents. After being enslaved for 17 months, they’re finally able to free themselves. Olamina sets out to find her daughter and other lost Earthseed children, and in the end builds Earthseed into a nationwide and even international network of communities.

Even when it was published, Parable of the Talents was set in a near-future post-apocalyptic world, but its story now begins just a few years into the future. I found the Earthseed philosophy interesting, as it’s the second novel I read recently that takes a nontheist view of religion¹. That and its parallels with the current religious and political climate in the US made Parable of the Talents a hard book to read, for all the right reasons.

Footnotes

See my review of Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass from the His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman’s view on religion in those books is quite different from Butler’s Earthseed, though. ↩

Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lords and Ladies is the fourth Discworld novel centered on the Lancre witches, and picks right up after Witches Abroad. In this book, young witch Magrat is preparing to marry King Verence, but Lancre is invaded by elves (the titular lords and ladies). It all reeks of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but with everything twisted 180° around in a way that only Pratchett can.

The elves in Discworld seem beautiful (due to magical glamour), but are inherently cruel and dangerous. They are pretty much the perfect opposite of Granny Weatherwax, who epitomizes being kind-but-not-nice. Combine that clash with Magrat growing from a “wet hen” (Granny’s words) into a confident warrior queen, and it has all the ingredients for a classic Pratchett story.

I loved this book, as it combines hilarious comedy bits (Magrat in her armor, the men of Lancre doing a play) with deep philosophical ideas (being beautiful is not the same as being good, being respected is not the same as being worthy, etc.) through interesting characters. By now I’ve really gotten used to Indira Varma’s narration, and especially enjoy the way she voices the three witches.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I first heard of Slaughterhouse-Five back in my teens, when it was on the allowed-reading list for English classes in my Dutch high school. It took me four decades, but I finally got to it. 😅

Based on Vonnegut’s experience as a POW during the bombing of Dresden in WWII, it tells the story of Billy Pilgrim. The book tells of Billy’s war experience, but also of his experience with alien abduction and with time travel to different phases of his own life. Moving non-linearly through Billy’s life, the book mixes war memoir, science fiction, and dark comedy.

As explained in the introduction, Vonnegut struggled for a long time to write Slaughterhouse-Five. I found it an interesting read, and the absurd mixture of styles made it easier to deal with his lived experience and the absurdities of war.

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years - John Scalzi (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Science fiction short stories are one of my favorite “genres”, especially when they explore an alternative reality where only one or a few aspects of our current reality are changed, such as in this short story by John Scalzi.

The premise is that people can travel back in time, but they can only return to their original time after 3 days, 9 months, or 27 years - and they’ll return only a few seconds after they left. The second interesting rule here is that any change they make in the past will spawn a new timeline, and they will always travel back to their original, unmodified timeline.

Most of the story executes this premise well, and the writing works for me. It’s written from the perspective of a time travel machine operator, who describes the customer trips he facilitates over the course of a day. The travelers we encounter all have different goals, allowing the book to explore various scenarios. I found the ending less satisfying than I’d hoped for, though, which is why it gets only 3 stars from me.

The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials #3) - Philip Pullman (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Amber Spyglass is the last book in Pullman’s oft-praised His Dark Materials trilogy, and seems to be the most divisive of them. The first book, The Golden Compass, introduced the initial world and its “magic” system, while the second book, The Subtle Knife, expanded into a multiverse and explored responsibility and sacrifice.

In The Amber Spyglass, Lyra and Will journey to and through the world of the dead, join a rebellion against the Authority, and discover the significance of Dust and how to preserve it for the future of conscious beings.

This third book is much more philosophical than the previous two, and explores concepts like free will, divine authority, and how love can take many different forms. I found some of the characters and their choices a bit too obvious and over-the-top (like Mrs. Coulter), and others are a bit too subtle and drawn out (like Balthamos and Baruch), but overall enjoyed the story. Given how explicitly it deals with religion and ends with the idea that life is finite and it is up to us to build a better world, I get how that may make the book hard to stomach for certain folks. For me, though, it was a fascinating exploration of these ideas, and it felt like a good ending to an interesting trilogy.

Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity - Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, Mikey Dickerson (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Crisis engineering is the practice of navigating high-stakes crises, understanding why complex systems fail, restoring shared clarity, and using disruption as an opportunity for lasting improvement. The book is written by a former government CTO and two former Google SREs¹, who are now partners at a company that specializes in crisis engineering.

The book first covers two well-known crises in detail: the partial nuclear meltdown in Three Mile Island, and the problems launching HealthCare.gov (whose rescue Mikey led). It then explains the crisis-engineering toolkit, which centers on sensemaking: getting everyone to see the same picture of what’s happening, so that they can start addressing problems together. It then ends with a practical example where they used the crisis-engineering toolkit: helping fix California’s unemployment-benefits system during early COVID.

I found the book a relatively easy read, especially given its potentially complex subject matter. The authors did a great job bookending with some big examples, and sprinkling the more-theoretical middle part with shorter examples too. I still found the middle part the driest, probably because I haven’t been dealing with any such crisis recently. It was also fun to recognize many of the practices from working with SREs and on difficult projects during my time at Google.

Footnotes

Site Reliability Engineers are the folks who ensure that Google’s services stay running. Since these are highly complex systems, many of the techniques they use in crisis engineering were developed or refined in that role. ↩

The Moustache - Emmanuel Carrère (Rating: ★★☆☆☆)

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Moustache is a story about a man who shaves his moustache on a whim one morning, only to have his wife, colleagues and friends insist that he’s never had a moustache. What begins as a small joke ends up with the man spiraling out of control. Remembered trips that apparently never happened, friends that apparently never existed, etc.

The book explores how having one’s own memories denied by others may affect a person’s sanity. In itself this is an interesting concept, and in places the story is a real page-turner. But in other places I found the writing boring and repetitive, like the protagonist repeatedly obsessing over how others might be plotting against him. This could still have been a 3-star read for me, except for the last two pages, where the book suddenly takes a turn that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In my continuing quest to read Pratchett’s Discworld books, starting from the highest rated subseries and working backwards, I am now going through the Witches works and just finished Witches Abroad. There is no Stephen Briggs narration of this one, so I listened to Indira Varma’s audiobook narration.

In Witches Abroad, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick travel to a distant kingdom where a fairy godmother is forcing people’s lives into fairytale stories. The witches confront those stories, the idea of destiny, and the ideal of happily ever after.

All of it is told in a way that only Terry Pratchett can, with constant winks to the danger of good intentions and forcing people into expected roles¹, and the importance of free will and self-restraint. While his treatment of deep moral issues is still a bit more obvious and less nuanced than in many of the later Discworld books I’ve read, it’s already a long way from the earliest works in the series. Pratchett wrote 41 Discworld novels in 32 years, and I find it fascinating (but not always satisfying) to read his evolving style and craftsmanship.

Footnotes

The fairytale damsel-in-distress is named Emberella, which gave me a good chuckle. ↩

The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials #2) - Philip Pullman (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The His Dark Materials trilogy often ranks as one of the greatest young adult and fantasy book series ever written. It’s a coming-of-age story set in a series of parallel universes. The first book (The Golden Compass) follows 12-year-old Lyra in her steampunk-like world where scientific inquiry is heavily controlled, and where people have external animal dæmons. At the end of the book, Lyra crosses a bridge into another universe.

The Subtle Knife starts with Will, who is the same age as Lyra and lives in our world in the late 90s (when the books were written). Early on, Will discovers a way to travel to the same world Lyra went to, and they fairly quickly meet and become a team. Many characters from the first book show up again, and through a series of adventures and fights, Will ends up in control of the titular knife.

While I enjoyed the first book in the series, it didn’t fully live up to my expectations, and sadly, the second book continues that trend. Where The Golden Compass leaned heavily into world-building for Lyra’s alternate universe, Will’s world is what we know and the third parallel universe is just not as interesting, so there’s less world to build. The plot moves along nicely though, and through some unexpected (R. R. Martin-esque) twists it all ends on as big a cliffhanger as the first book, but a darker one. I look forward to reading how the story wraps up in The Amber Spyglass.

Mother Dearest - Clare Bird (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Thanks to NetGalley and Minotaur Books, who provided an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.

After The Correspondent, this is the second epistolary novel I’ve read this year. Is there a 2026 trend that I don’t know about? 🤔 Mother Dearest is told primarily through letters from Imogene, in her mid-20s, to her controlling mother whose home she just left after an argument.

Imogene moves in with her aunt and starts building her own life, based on the deeply warped rules and expectations she’s learned from her mother. She finds the “perfect man”, cozies up to him, removes his wife and daughter from the equation, and recounts it all in detail in frequent letters to her mother.

It’s interesting to read Imogene’s explanations of her behavior and choices and her surprise at ordinary life outside the overbearing home she grew up in. The prose is easy to read and the epistolary format works well here. The plot is a bit too predictable for my taste, but it rolls along nicely. The final letter, from Imogene’s long-lost brother to their long-gone father, was a nice touch to wrap the story up.

Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling - Bret Hart (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bret Hart was an active pro-wrestler from 1978 until his retirement in 2000. He first became famous in WWF (now WWE) as The Hitman, one half of The Hart Foundation, together with Jim The Anvil Neidhart, before becoming one of the promotion’s biggest singles stars.

In this autobiography from 2007 Hart covers his life as the eighth of 12 children. His father ran the Stampede Wrestling promotion in Calgary and trained wrestlers in the ‘Dungeon’ in his home basement. Based largely on the audio diary Hart kept during his wrestling career, he retells family and wrestling events through personal observations and anecdotes all the way through his 2006 WWE Hall of Fame induction.

I’ve been a fan of pro-wrestling since my early teens, and discovered Hart through The Hart Foundation’s feuds with The British Bulldogs. Hart has always been an exceptional wrestler, and just in case you didn’t know that, he’ll remind you of it every few pages. And it’s not just him saying it (😉); everyone who ever told him so seems to be quoted in this dense memoir.

I found the first third of the book, covering his youth and early wrestling career, hard to read, as the paragraphs lacked almost any storytelling. It often read like a bullet-point summary of events, rather than a personal memoir. Luckily, that changed in the rest of the book. Maybe Hart’s personal audio diary became more detailed as his career progressed. 🤔 Hundreds of wrestling personalities make an appearance, as Hart interacted with so many of them throughout his long and storied career.

Hart comes across as very self-centered and bitter, always judging other people’s actions while justifying his own. For example, he justifies his incessant cheating while on the road by saying that he just couldn’t stand to be alone, but then blames his wife for being nasty to him when he was not traveling. 🤷 All in all, the book does not paint Hart as a very likable person, which is an interesting choice in an autobiography. Luckily, the author doesn’t have to be likable for this to be a fascinating, personal view of a long, eventful period of pro-wrestling history.

Babel - R.F. Kuang (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After Yellowface and The Poppy War Trilogy, Babel is the third book by R.F. Kuang that I’ve read. In Babel, a Chinese orphan is brought to 19th-century Oxford to study translation and magical silver-working. As he uncovers the university’s role in British imperialism, he must choose where his loyalties lie.

Like The Poppy War Trilogy, this book puts a fantastic spin on a real period of history. But while the former focused on a military conflict inspired by 1930s and 1940s China, Babel explores 1830s academia, linguistics and colonialism. The Babel story mostly plays out in Oxford, with a few excursions into China. It starts as a pretty small story, but expands drastically in scope before settling into an explosive finale.

Like The Poppy War Trilogy, this book showcases Kuang’s talent for building wonderful alternate worlds and histories. The magic system in Babel (based on semantic gaps in translated word pairings) is truly fascinating, and opens up lots of possibilities. And the almost-but-not-quite-real Oxford is well done. The story Kuang sets in this world is also not bad, just somewhat predictable, which is again similar to how I felt about The Poppy War Trilogy. All of this would have easily made this a four-star story.

What keeps it from reaching four stars is the same problem that I have with all of Kuang’s writing: her characters are incredibly one-dimensional and her writing often strikes me as very pedantic. The protagonist in this story, for example, mostly comes across as a weak-willed boy who wants to please people, but then suddenly in the final chapters he becomes overly strong-willed. This could show character development, of course, but the switch is sudden and seems more driven by the needs of the plot rather than by a developing character. The antagonists show even less development, though, and it repeatedly feels like I’m being “yelled” at about colonialism and capitalism. Despite wholeheartedly agreeing with those sentiments, the tone is just off-putting.

Given that I’ve repeatedly noticed this in Kuang’s work, it’s fair to ask why I picked up this book. And I might say that it happened to be on sale (which indeed it was), but truth be told, the worlds Kuang creates are truly fascinating to me, I just regularly wish somebody else would write the stories in her worlds.

Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force #1) - Craig Alanson (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Expeditionary Force is by now a 19-book series that follows a US soldier (Joe Bishop) when Earth gets pulled into an interstellar conflict. Joe discovers an ancient AI of mysterious origin (which he names Skippy), who is as sarcastic as he is brilliant.

In this first book in the series, Joe and his band of space pirates first fight the hamsters alongside the lizards, then switch sides and help the hamsters fight the lizards, before finally freeing Earth from its occupiers and Joe setting off into space to help Skippy find the other ancient AIs.

Columbus Day mixes space opera pulp of the purest kind with splashes of Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque absurdism, and that’s not a bad thing. The story is very readable, the plot moves fast, and the interaction between the characters is funny and functional. I enjoyed this book for what it is, but wonder how its lightweight nature and (so far) lack of character development hold up across the series.

Book covers as a source of happiness

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of my life I’ve been a reader. As a child, I would go to the library at least once a week, often twice, and each time I would go home with the maximum number of books I was allowed to check out.

It all started with physical books of course, of the dead tree type, but that changed when we moved continents. We couldn’t reasonably bring all the books we owned with us, so we had to get rid of many hundreds of them. This was before Little Libraries were a thing, and I hated having to get rid of so many of the beloved books.

Discovering e-readers

For a few years I read (many fewer) books electronically on cramped, small LCD devices. Luckily, I then discovered e-ink - a passive, low-power display technology, perfect for electronic books. I got my first e-reader in 2009: a Sony Reader PRS-505.

When I switched to using a Kindle in 2011, you had two options for what the device would display when not in use: you could get your Kindle with a discount and it’d show ads, or pay more and it’d show a random stock illustration.

👆 This is an example of an ad I saw, I didn’t actually buy this specific book. 😅
👇 A stock illustration from someone else’s Kindle, as I never paid for the ad free version at that time.

I never really minded the ads. Though many of them were for romance novels, I also got some interesting reads from them. But then in 2021 Amazon updated the Kindle firmware to allow the non-ad versions to show the cover of the book that you’re reading. It was my favorite tech thing of that entire year!

It turns out seeing the book cover, on my nightstand or elsewhere, was a small happy moment for me; one that I’d missed since switching to Kindle e-readers.

Tracking my reading

I am still an avid reader. In recent years I read on average just over one book per week. And while I very much enjoy the reading experience, I have a lousy memory. Most of the time I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the three most recent books I finished, even when I likely very much enjoyed them.

This is one of the reasons I track my reading meticulously on Goodreads and on https://puf.io/books. One thing I love on Goodreads is seeing a tableau of books I recently read.

👆 The covers of the 20 most recent books I finished before publishing this post

Being a reader of e-books, this is the closest I will ever get to having a shelf of books that I have read. Seeing it makes me happy.

E-ink devices

Over the years, I’ve also become lightly obsessed with e-ink screens. I order more devices with e-ink screens than I actually need, and then end up trying to find a use for them.

I have multiple of most of these and e-recycled many more

Recently I got some Picpak devices, which are cute, small, color e-ink devices. The screens can show only black, white, red and yellow. So while they are promoting them to show photos, you’ll see that the photo selection on their boxes is… optimized for the display: none of these pictures show blue or green.

That makes sense, and I even got some pretty good photos on it myself. But it takes more effort than I’d like: selecting photos with necessary color palette (so without much blue/green), cropping them to fit the 4x3 aspect ratio of the devices, uploading them through the (finicky) Picpak app. It all works and the result is great, but I wasn’t sure how often I’d be doing this.

Then somebody posted what they had done with their Picpak devices to r/eink and I immediately knew that I wanted that too:

Look at the vibrant, solid yellow and red on these screens.

I set up one of my Picpaks to display today’s weather, through the Tesserae companion server for driving e-ink screens.

Then I started playing with what else Tesserae could do, and had it send one of my favorite recent book covers to another Picpak.

The gorgeous book cover for The Martian Chronicles on a monitor and an e-ink device

And suddenly I knew what I wanted: to have a Picpak show the cover of a book I am currently reading or have recently read, and then show different ones during the day.

Automatically showing a recent book cover

So I built, or rather I had Claude Code build, a solution that updates my red Picpak at fixed times to show a book cover. Claude wakes up at those times, determines what book cover to show from my Goodreads RSS feeds, resizes the image, and pushes it to Tesserae to show on the Picpak. The Picpak device wakes up once an hour and grabs the current cover image from Tesserae.

As you might expect from something vibe coded like this, it’s overly complicated, even after three iterations of telling it what to fix and clean up. But… it works.

I now see a different cover image at various times of the day, which automatically updates with my Goodreads status.

As you can see above, the images aren’t always great, and the Picpak screens are rather dark and muted. But even then, every time I glance at this little screen, I am reminded of a current or recent book, and that brings a smile to my face.

For those who are really curious, e-ink screens are notoriously slow to update and color e-ink screens are by far the worst of that. There is lots of room for improvement and recently there have been some promising breakthroughs, but… here’s the update cycle for my Picpak.

![](https://i.imgur.com/omsrKQ3.gif)

That’s 20+ seconds for one full refresh. 🤯

Luckily, normally this just happens automatically once per hour, and I’m not waiting for it. It’s just a happy moment when my eye glances by the little screen and I see yet another book I recently read.

The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life - Ian Bogost (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I first discovered Ian Bogost through his writing about games, shortly after he became “internet famous” for creating Cow Clicker, a satirical Facebook game about… clicking cows. He now writes for The Atlantic and has just published the book The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.

The book is about finding joyful moments in everyday life, mostly by reconnecting with the physical world. It starts with recognizable examples, like tracing the edges of a sofa cushion with your index finger, feeling the diagonal ridges on modern paper coffee cups, or shifting gears in a manual-transmission car. The second part of the book focuses on how we lost so many of these moments through digitization, automation, and what Bogost calls dematerialization. The final part shows examples of how to reclaim that sensory life.

The Small Stuff is a relatively thin book, but as I often find with books built around a single central idea, the entire idea could have fit in a single essay or a series of blog posts. In fact, Bogost is currently exploring many of the same ideas in an eight-week newsletter series for The Atlantic. But finding joy in everyday experiences is something dear to me, so I enjoyed reading the book despite that.

The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials #1) - Philip Pullman (Rating: ★★★☆☆)

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Golden Compass has been showing up in my (automated) recommendations for a long time, so I decided to finally read it. It’s the first book of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy, published between 1995 and 2000.

The book follows 11-year-old Lyra, who is being raised by scholars in an Oxford college. In Lyra’s world, every human has a dæmon - an animal-shaped manifestation of their soul that is always with them. This bond between human and dæmon is key to the book’s central conflict. When Lyra and her dæmon Pan uncover an abduction conspiracy and learn the unsettling truth about her parents, they join up with Lyra’s gyptian friends and travel into the Arctic to rescue her friend Roger and other abducted children. Later, Lyra unintentionally provides the means to open a bridge to another world, and the book ends with Lyra and Pan crossing into the other world.

From start to finish, this book is a real page-turner. The story progresses at a rapid pace, and there are twists and turns every few chapters. That makes it a very easy read, but at times I found the story lacked depth. The witches, the aeronaut, and the college staff all seem fascinating, but we learn relatively little about them. And though we discover more about the background and motivations of some of the main characters, they mostly remain the same throughout the book. With more character development and a stronger sense of the larger story, this would have rated higher. It’s a fun, fast-paced story, though, so I am eager to see what the second book, The Subtle Knife, brings.

The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Martian Chronicles is a collection of standalone stories about humans colonizing Mars. The stories form a loosely connected multi-year chronicle tracing the arrival of the first expeditions through the eventual abandonment of most human settlements. While the book is classified as science fiction, Bradbury shows little interest in scientific explanation or plausibility - and Mars functions more as an imaginative backdrop for his stories.

Some of the stories are pretty poetic, others are humorous, and some explore human connection. One of the first stories, “The Earth Men”, describes the second expedition to Mars and how their experience is assumed to be a hallucination by the Martians, who proceed to explain away whatever evidence the crew provides to the contrary. Another standout to me was “The Long Years”, about a man who creates android replicas of his deceased wife and three children. These androids are not the sci-fi type, but to me felt more like golems built by a man to recapture what he lost.

Although some elements (like the romanticized treatment of the native Martians and racial and gender stereotypes) have aged poorly, the stories overall held up well for me. It’s light on the sci-fi aspects, but it offers - as one would expect from Bradbury - emotionally charged, atmospheric storytelling in an imaginative setting.

The Land and Its People: Essays - David Sedaris (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I mostly know David Sedaris from the fact that he once wrote about the Dutch Sinterklaas phenomenon in Six to Eight Black Men, and we have that book in a cabinet, but The Land and Its People is the first book of his I’ve read. As is typical of Sedaris, it’s a collection of his essays ranging in length from 5 minute narrations to almost half an hour.

The essays are anecdotal accounts of David’s experiences at home (in New York nowadays), and during his travels around the world. They’re all told with his characteristic wit and snark, and often center on his family and friends and his experiences with Duolingo (🦉). While Sedaris’s writing is easy to absorb, many of the stories are about affection, grief, mortality, and the difficulty of being a decent partner, sibling, or friend.

I listened to the audiobook of The Land and Its People, assembled from live recordings of Sedaris performing the essays at different live appearances. Sedaris’s narration made them even easier to consume. Nothing earth-shattering, but quite entertaining.

Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive 5) - Brandon Sanderson (Rating: ★★★★☆)

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Although I discovered Brandon Sanderson’s writing relatively late and still have plenty of his prolific output to explore, I try to limit myself to one of his books per year. That’s because the books in The Stormlight Archive series are all very, very long and tend to disrupt my reading schedule. Wind and Truth clocks in at 1,330 pages, the longest in the series so far - and it marks the end of the first half of what’s meant to be a 10-book series. 🤯

The Stormlight Archive series is set on storm-ravaged Roshar, where warriors, scholars, rulers, and magical Radiants try to unite humanity while confronting ancient enemies, political backstabbing, and personal trauma. Wind and Truth covers a span of 10 days during which Dalinar, leader of the human coalition, prepares for a decisive contest with the god Odium, while all of his allies wage battles of their own in different places and planes.

The build-up to the final confrontations is, long but very eventful, which feels like a recurring issue throughout this series. The writing is good and engaging; there’s just so much of it! This could easily have been two decent-sized books, which feels like a common theme for the series too. I regularly wished that Sanderson had taken a similar approach to Awaken Online, with a main story arc and then side-quest books that further explore specific characters and their adventures.

Wind and Truth is a solid entry in the series and a good capstone to the first main story arc, but I am also somewhat glad to be done with it. I might at some point explore some of Sanderson’s other writing in the same Cosmere universe.