My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big City Backyard into a Farm by Manny Howard
4/5
Alternatively funny and painful. Manny Howard is clearly not cut out to be a farmer but he battles through problems that seem to be mostly of his creation and manages to feed himself briefly from his back garden. Given he's doing this with a largish plot of land and an expense account it's a warning to anyone with urban agriculture ambitions. The death toll on the farm is pretty extreme - not the necessary slaughter of chickens for food but the number of avoidable accidents that border on abuse. Am now even more inspired to leave farming to the professionals...
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris
4/5
Wind in the Willows Gone Wild.
It's nothing like his normal experience-mining, but hilarious none the less. Dark, grotesque fairy tails mixing the worst of animal and human behavior together.
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
5/5
After the mediocre FBI books this is a breath of fresh air. A man wakes up on a mysterious ship, supposedly on a slower than light mission to colonize a far off planet. But something has gone horribly wrong. Bear is channeling J.G. Ballard here, Hull Zero Three is mysterious and surreal and eventually haunting. It's hard SciFi with just enough horror (reminiscent of Pandorum and Moon, but much richer than either film). I think it's probably the best novel he's written, and I nearly missed it after assuming he'd gone soft with Quantico.
When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie #3) by Kate Atkinson
4/5
Bit of a rhetorical question in the title, good news is pretty thin on the ground in this brooding third outing for Jackson Brodie. Very good, but need something light now...
Worth Dying For (Jack Reacher Series #15) by Lee Child
3/5
The biggest hobo is back, and faced with by far the nastiest baddies in the series so far. It's the typical small town with a dark shadow setup and you know there's only one man for the job. Reacher has it a bit too easy in this installment. Child sets up some fearsome opponents but then knocks them down almost as an afterthought. While billed as a sequel to 61 Hours (also published in 2010) Worth Dying For stands alone with only a small nod to the bind Reacher found himself in at the end of the last book.
Zero History (Bigend, #3) by William Gibson
5/5
Excellent.
Links
(Related: The Harvard Business Review Fallacy; I Love Email; The Secret Diary of a Xamarin Android Developer, Aged 48 1/3)
(You might also like: Drone School; Catfood Earth; Limantour Spit)
(All Book Reviews)
