January reads

Starry Messenger by Neil deGrasse Tyson

The book has some interesting ideas and concepts. The book describes Tyson's thoughts on current themes and events. For example, a part of the book talked about the many times he was excluded from jury selection due to his evidence-based views and knowledge of how eyewitness testimony is mostly unreliable.

This book meandered quite a bit in the beginning. Although, I might have felt that way because I've consumed a lot of Tyson's content in the past. It's a short read if you're interested in Tyson's work.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I'd never read this book before and knew little about it. This book left me kinda shook. I don't know if the protagonist went crazy or if all the events in the book truly happened (aliens and time travel). I want to say this was the first book I read based during WWII that didn't portray the protagonist as some hero going around winning battles all day. It also introduced me to the Firebombing of Dresden. I may have missed those lessons back in high school, but learning about them made me feel quite horrified.

Five Decembers by James Kestrel

I kept going with the WWII theme. The book centers around a detective in Hawaii who is assigned a double homicide a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. His investigation leads him to a mysterious person who runs off to China. The detective goes after him, and then December 7th happens, and he finds himself captured and taken to Japan! Yikes! Despite the book's provocative cover, the story was well told and left me wanting more. Highly recommend this one.

Genome Odyssey by Euan Angus Ashley

Read this one for our company's book club! It was a great read too. However, reading the book made me feel frustrated with the fact that so many software engineers in the industry are working on what I would describe as frivolous ventures whose sole purpose is to rob everyone of their attention in order to make more ad revenue (hoity-toity I know). We have software engineers literally writing code that literally sequences the genome, and yet how many of us pursue those jobs? How many of us would instead go for a company like google or twitter? Barf.

Golden Son by Pierce Brown

The second book in the Red Rising trilogy is fantastic! I enjoyed the first book, but the second turns it to eleven and does not let up. It was an excellent read and had one of the craziest cliffhanger endings I've ever experienced. I instantly started reading the third book in the trilogy and am loving it so far.