Q3 2021 Roundup

With the fall equinox, summer is now over.

This blog has passed 2800 daily posts in a row, though reported hits are way down from last year.  Posts will continue until readership improves.  : – )

This summer saw many posts on favorite topics, including dinosaurs, robots, solar energy, and cryptocurrencies.  And robot helicopters on Mars.   And the melting cryosphere.

If we hear about a solar powered robot dinosaur that eats cryptocurrency you know it will appear in this blog!  Especially if it emerges from a melting icecap and goes to Mars to transform into a helicopter.

Book Reviews

As always, weekly reviews of 14 fiction and 6 non fiction books.

Notable book:  The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor

Fiction

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
The World Gives Way by Marissa Levien
The Very Nice Box by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Captain Moxley and the Embers of Empire by Dan Hanks
The Paris Labyrinth by Gilles Legardinier
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Questland by Carrie Vaughn
The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Elysium Fire by Alistair Reynolds
The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Non-fiction

The Amazons by Adrienne Mayor
Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen
Venus and Aphrodite by Bettany Hughes
Forget the Alamo by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford
We Had A Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff
Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko

Great Names For a Band

Terms found in real technical papers, not made up at all.

“Spin Orbit Torques”
“Cadmium Telluride”

Book Review: “The Very Nice Box” by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman

The Very Nice Box by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman

Yet another “revenge of the English majors”!  I really liked this first novel, a collaboration, no less. 

Blacked and Gleichman have a lot of fun with company life.  The satire is broad and merciless. I’ll just say that the head of the HR department has the job title “Chief People Officer”, and leave the rest for you to discover. 

Protagonist Ava works at a home furnishings company, where she designs boxes.  After a tragic auto accident, she has been deep in despair.  Her work is her life.  Not that she isn’t very, very good at designing boxes, including her current “Passion Project”, sold as “The Very Nice Box”.

Ava’s settled life is shaken by the arrival of a new manager, rapidly falling in love with same, and a serious of increasingly peculiar events.  We can’t help but root for Ava and her friends, even as we cringe at questionable decision after questionable decision.  Not that we are sure what the right decisions should be most of the time.

Eventually, things seem to come out OK, despite everything.  I think.  There are some loose ends I kind of worried about (like, what happened to Mat?).

I have to say that most of the men come off terribly in this story.   But then many of the women, companies, computers, etc., don’t look very nice either.  But not everyone or everything is as bad or good as they first appear. 

I think the main lesson is the importance of real friendship and love. 

I look forward to more from these two.

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1. Laura Blackett and Eve Gleichman, The Very Nice Box, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2021.

Sunday Book Reviews