Recent Books

To the list

This is a list of books I’ve read since March 1st, 2025.

• Midnight Black (Gray Man, #14) by Mark Greaney
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
• Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5) by Martha Wells
• Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4) by Martha Wells
• Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3) by Martha Wells
• The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes
• Glory Be (Glory Broussard Mystery, #1), Edgar AwardWinner, 2024 by Danielle Arceneaux
• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
• Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill
• Dead in the Frame: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery by Stephen Spotswood
• The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
• Prussian Blue (Bernie Gunther, #12) by Philip Kerr
• Beekeeping for Dummies by Howland Blackiston
• The Postman by David Brin
• A Quiet Flame (Bernie Gunther, #5) by Philip Kerr
• The Variable Man by Philip K Dick
• Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey
• The Forgotten Room (Jeremy Logan, #4) by Lincoln Child
• The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker
• Terminal Freeze (Jeremy Logan #2) by Lincoln Child
• Will the Circle be Unbroken: Country Music in America by Paul Kingsbury and Alanna Nash
• I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin
• Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right: A King Oliver Novel by Walter Mosley
• Swag by Elmore Leonard
• The Third Gate (Jeremy Logan, #3) by Lincoln Child
• Observer by Robert Lanza, Nancy Kress
• Chrysalis (Jeremy Logan, #6)by Lincoln Child
• The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
• The Dogs of Riga (Kurt Wallander, #2) by Henning Mankell
• Six Days of the Condor by James Grady
• Sentinel (Armored, #2) by Mark Greaney

Currently Reading

• The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
• The Case of the Missing Maid by Rob Osler
• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
• Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie

the Wallander novels

I like all the Wallander novels. They were written by Swedish novelist Henning Mankell. The books were turned into a British television series broadcast from 2008 to 2016. The series follows the general outline of the novels. Kenneth Branagh played Inspector Kurt Wallender. The series is also excellent. In addition, there is a “Young Wallender” series on Netflix. There are two seasons of that series which is not a prequel. Rather, they placed the character into modern times. Some fans of the original novels objected to this.

Best Books This Year

“I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom” is the best fiction that I’ve read this year, followed by “Greenteeth”. “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” is the best non-fiction I’ve read this year.

PBS and Grantchester

We donated to PBS. If you donate $60+ you get PBS Passport. This gives you access to quite a bit of previously aired PBS content. We’ve been watching the “Grantchester” series and I decided to read the first novel for the series.

I caught a few older “Austin City Limits” too.

Murderbot

The Murderbot novels are great fun. It’s humorous sci-fi. The stories are written by American author Martha Wells. She’s the winner of four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards.

In the series a security robot (secbot) is the narrator. Secbots are owned by some mega-corporation. They provide security for space explorations but also spy on the explorers for the mega-corporation. A secbot has a “governor unit” that can punish the secbot if they do not obey a human’s order (“punish” can be total destruction in some cases). The narrating secbot manages to hack it’s governor unit which allows it to escape it’s protection enslavement. The secbot renames itself murderbot, although this is a private name that it rarely shares with others. Murderbot enjoys downloading and enjoying interplanetary soap operas. As it spends more time with a series of caring entities (both humans and artificial intelligences), it develops genuine friendships and emotional connections, which it finds inconvenient.

There is a quite good Apple+ series based on the first novel available to stream. It premiered on May 16, 2025.

Lessons in Chemistry

This is another book that has an Apple+ series. The core of the story from the novel is there but they took the story in some different directions. Both the novel and the series are good.

Six Days of the Condor

This is what the movie “Three Days of the Condor” was based on. Its a first novel that was way more successful than the author could have imagined. The directory Sydney Pollack tightened up the story to condense events into three days because he thought that would work better for the movie. The movie is available in various places including the Internet Archive.

The plot (of the movie and book) is that there is a small organization in the CIA that reads books looking for plots and counterplots. All this information is fed into a computer and used to analyze against actual CIA discovered events. The main character, Ronald Malcolm, stumbles upon a plot involving a secret organization within the CIA. As it turns out, this is an actual organization. When his report is sent “up the chain” the plotters send hit men to eliminate the entire reading group (it’s a small group). Ronald Malcolm escapes the assassination while everyone else in the office is murdered. He stumbles through various attempts on his life, uncovers the secret CIA sub group and ultimately publicly reveals their existence.

The name “Condor” is Ronald Malcolm’s codename.

One of the interesting things about this is that high ranking members of the government in the Soviet Union watched the movie. They thought it was describing a real CIA book reading group so they formed their own (much larger) group to do the tasks described in the movie.

In the movie Ronald Malcolm is renamed to Joe Turner.