Legal Systems Very Different from Ours (David Friedman) / Law and Order / A very interesting project, based on a graduate seminar led by Friedman: an economist, physicist, and anarcho-capitalist, the son of Milton Friedman (... and Rose). The book reviews 13 real legal systems (“Ours” refers to the USA), including Jewish law, Romani law, Amish law, and Pirate law. It’s well-sourced, trustworthy, and written in an informal tone. I find it quite hard to imagine a reader who won’t find it fascinating.

Transformer (Nick Lane) / Pop-Sci / Biochemistry / Super interesting. Basically about the Krebs cycle (and metabolism at large), its relation to the origins of life, cancer, and aging, and its central role in Lane’s “Metabolism first” view. For me, it was somewhat difficult to read since I don’t really like or know chemistry, and the book doesn’t spare details, getting very technical (by my low standards, at least).

Quantum Steampunk (Nicole Yunger Halpern) / Popular Science / The subtitle is “The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow,” and I had high hopes for the book. The topic is extremely interesting (the intersection of quantum information theory and thermodynamics). The tone, however, is annoying, with way too many personal anecdotes and unhelpfully detailed analogies. I accidentally read it simultaneously with “Alice and Bob Meet Banach” (a highly technical text about somewhat overlapping topics), which paradoxically helped me understand the pop-sci book and not the other way around (and that might be the worst thing to say about a popular-science book).

The Story Paradox (Jonathan Gottschall) / Pop-Sci(?) / Literature, Sociology / Impressively bad. Takes a potentially interesting topic - on which the author is an expert - and treats it in the most banal, trivial, and non-insightful way imaginable. Even the unindented associated irony of being a boring book about engaging narratives feels like a cliche.

Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon) / Science Fiction / A classic, published in 1930. The back cover sums it up nicely: “...not so much a novel as a history of the future, written with breathtaking imagination. Over the course of 2 billion years it describes the evolutionary rise and fall of 18 distinct races of men, of which Homo sapiens is the first and most primitive... No other science fiction writer has attempted, let alone achieved, a work on this scale”. Stapledon clearly got many things wrong (though he was also definitely very insightful about things to come, both social and technological). But even mentioning it is to completely miss the point of the book.

Trust (Hernan Diaz) / Fiction / Well written, fun to read. But ultimately not a very good book (and its “twist” is super obvious). Rashomon-like. The first two “novellas” are not-great almost by design, the third is very good, and the fourth is very short - and supposed to be the shocking solution, but at this point it’s obvious what’s coming.

Slow Horses (Nick Herron) / Fiction / Disappointing. I heard good stuff (including in Haayal) and was looking forward to a long sequence of fun books, but I didn’t enjoy it much. The characters were cartoonish, the writing sloppy, and the humor not funny. The world-building was horrible. I didn’t expect hardcore realism (the author clarifies in the preface that he has no personal familiarity with intelligence work), but I did expect some common sense.

Stone’s Fall (Iain Pears) / Historical Fiction / Pears is one of my all-time favourite authors, and while this is not his best work - it’s certainly a good book. A complex historical mystery set in the early 20th century, involving finance and intrigue. Great, but too long, and a bit too “sensational”. Still, Pears’s skill in weaving together multiple timelines and perspectives shines through.

Scale (Greg Egan) / Science Fiction / Excellent, and classic Egan. It starts like a normal detective story about a murder mystery, but instead of on a ship* or a train, it’s set in a world with alternative physics built around a hypothetical standard model with seven generations of leptons- which is developed in great detail and plays a central role in the plot.

Phoresis (Greg Egan) / Science Fiction / 3 novellas / This is going to be a bad review, so just recall that I’m a huge Egan fan and I believe that even at his worst he’s better than 99.99% of sci-fi writers at their best. The first novella (“The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred”) was probably the worst thing I’ve read by Egan - completely unlike him, and basically a space-opera dealing with social issues like a normie, boring sci-fi. The second (“Dispersion”) was much better but still not great, trying too hard at social commentary (though at least there’s some concrete scientific-mathematical aspect in the world-building). The third was also not very interesting, but it’s solid and distinctively weird, so I can’t complain.

* Ok, it's also literally on a ship.