Inspired by my friend Jen , here is the media I’ve been consuming. I’ve always had a hard time reading books and recently started using Audible to listen to audio books. I had put it off for a long time, figuring that I wouldn’t use it and I would just waste money. Oh boy was I wrong. I burned through tons of books and very much outpaced the one credit a month I got from Audible.

2022

My 2022 reading list started out with lots of self-improvement and quickly devolved into tons of sci fi. I regret nothing =). John Scalzi and Dennis E. Taylor are probably my favorites this year, although Scalzi has way more books than Taylor. I’m hoping another Bobiverse book comes out soon because I was really enjoying it and hope he can keep the momentum going with the next book.

Thinking in Systems

Donella H. Meadows

Fantastic book that changed how I viewed the world and problem solving. All too frequently the way that we try to “fix” a problem is by looking at the result and trying to change that directly. Dr. Meadows explains through the language of Systems Theory (states, flows, loops and feedback) how in order to make a real change we must intervene at the cause of the problem not the outcome.

The perfect example of this is drug addiction. How do we address drugs in America? Make it illegal, war on drugs, JUST SAY NO. Which did exactly all of jack shit. In the words of Bill Hicks :

George Bush says we are losing the War on Drugs.
You know what that implies? There’s a war being fought and people on drugs are winning it!
What does THAT tell you about drugs?
Some smart, creative people on that side. They’re winnin’ a war and they’re fucked up!

The reason that the “War on Drugs” didn’t work is because it was addressing the outcome rather than the cause. Drug abuse is caused by an underlying need that is not being met: untreated trauma, hopelessness, despair. If you don’t address those root causes you’re not going to correct the addiction. Furthermore, by making them illegal and putting the folks using them in jail you’re just inflicting more trauma on already traumatized folks and ensuring that they are more likely to relapse. Beyond that, making them illegal creates artificial scarcity which increases the profitability of selling drugs and ensures that there will always be someone willing to take the risk given the huge reward. But big words and pretending to fight a war are much bolder things that are easy to sell and treating trauma is hard, hard, hard so we pretend that we’re doing something by addressing the outputs of the systems rather than the underlying dynamics and tell ourselves we’re doing good when in actuality we’re just making things worse.

This book is a great introduction to Systems Theory and will definitely change how you look at things, although it might make you a little frustrated and sad at the state of our world when you get done.

Why We’re Polarized

Ezra Klein

This was a fantastic review of how exactly we got to where we are. Klein starts of with going over a review of “what went wrong” in 2016. His argument is surprising to most except most of those who may have been paying very close attention: nothing. Nothing change in 2016 to get Trump elected and in fact the most knowledgeable folk would have told you we’ve been on this trajectory for over 50 years. Kline uses Systems analysis (reading Thinking in Systems right before this was a great move lol) to analyze how the roots of 2016 go back to the Civil Rights Act and basic human nature. Before the Civil Rights Act political affiliation in America was much more like your favorite sports team: you were a Democrat because that’s what your parents were… assuming you put any effort into politics at all. The most conservative Democrats were far to the right of the most liberal Republicans and there really was no concept of either party being “right” or “left”.

However, after the Civil Rights Act the parties sorted into left and right - “liberal” and “conservative”. The way to gain influence quickly turned from compromise (which Kline points out almost always meant the same thing: fucking over black folks) to a self-reinforcing cycle:

• You lean into the “core beliefs” to motivate your base
• Your opponent uses that as a way to motivate their base, pushing them the other way
• Rinse and repeat until you have a country full of folks that are convinced the “other side” is EVIL and wants to destroy America

Overall it’s pretty bleak and there are not a lot of ways out of where we are, but Klein does suggest that Rank Choice Voting can help and it seems like it could.

Still Just a Geek

Wil Wheaton

Wil Wheaton reads his memoir “Just a Geek” and adds hours of annotation and commentary. It’s a beautiful and heart wrenching look at a young man growing up in a world he never really wanted. Wil never backs away from holding himself to account for the shitty sexist jokes he made, often stopping to literally yell at his younger self.

This is one of the most heartbreaking things I listened to over the last year. Some of the subject matter is extraordinarily hard because Wil is talking very openly about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his parents, which would be hard enough to read but listening to the raw emotion as he recounts the physical and emotional abuse of himself and his sister is absolutely heart wrenching.

Listening to Wil’s struggles gave me the courage to seek out a therapist. I highly recommend it, just be aware that it can get extremely heavy at times.

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

Felicia Day

Felicia Day proves that she’s exactly as hilarious and awesome as we already knew she was =). A fantastic memoir of Felicia’s rise from sheltered nerd who gets a math degree just because she can to the awesome person that she is. Not nearly as heavy and introspective as Wil Wheaton’s memoir, but then again I get the impression that Felicia’s parent’s weren’t quite as horrible as Wil’s. The audio book is fantastic because of course Felicia reads it. Highly recommend if you love Felicia Day or just want to read a fun nerdy memoir.

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)

Katie Mack

Katie Mack takes us through how the universe will end - with a bang? with a whimper? WHO KNOWS! But it’s fun to think about if you’re a big ole nerd like me.

Salt Fat Acid Heat

Samin Nosrat

Absolutely game changing book for me. I love to cook, but this book helped elevate my cooking by bringing together ideas that I had never quite put together. Highly recommend if you’re an amateur cook who enjoys cooking but hasn’t had any formal training. Nosrat describes this book as the one she wished he had when she started her journey as a chef, I know I wish she had written it sooner =)

Old Man’s War Series

John Scalzi

I knew Scalzi from Twitter long before I read any of his novels. He seems to be a decent person who loves burritos¹ and he writes some pretty great novels. He’s fairly popular so it seemed like a good place to dive into modern science fiction.

Old Man’s War was John Scalzi’s debut novel and it is fantastic. It is the first in a series of 6 books along with a few short stories². The series is set in the far future where the universe is populated by many different alien species, all vying for the same space and resources. The Earth itself has become something of a backwater, essentially a resource pool for military recruitment since mankind has invented stolen technology that allows them to transfer the consciousness of a human into a younger genetically and technologically enhanced body. The fine people of Earth get to live their lives, then live it again in a brand-new shiny body made just for you. There are only two catches

1. You must join the army (Colonial Defense Force) and
2. Once you join the CDF you can never return to Earth.

The series follows John Perry and his friends. On his 75th birthday John Perry visits his wife’s grave and joins the CDF. We follow his adventures as he parades around the known galaxy meeting strange new aliens and killing them for their resources (as we humans tend to do). Along the way he makes friends and discovers love in a most unexpected place. The storytelling in the series is quite fun, with one whole book (Zoe’s Tale) retelling the previous story (The Last Colony) from the perspective of John’s adopted child. While the writing is great this is definitely a military science fiction series which may or may not be your jam.

Interdependency Trilogy

John Scalzi

Another Scalzi series, this one set in a far future human civilization where interstellar travel is through a hyperspace phenomena known as “The Flow”. The Flow does not follow the standard laws of physics and allows people to travel between stars in months rather than decades. For thousands of years The Flow has remained (relatively) stable but now is beginning to collapse threatening the very basis of The Interdependency, a political system organized around houses that maintain government enforced monopolies and force the powers that be to play nice (to a degree). It’s a fantastic space opera and Scalzi does a phenomenal job of building a history of humans who have long since lost contact with their ancestral home and painting a fantastic picture of humans who, unsurprisingly, no matter how much they already have never seem to have enough.

Three Body Problem Series

Cixin Liu

One of my work friends had recommended The Three-Body Problem to me and it sounded interesting — it starts with the Chinese cultural revolution and goes through the heat death of the universe. You know, usual stuff there. The original is written in Chinese and while I found that the story was great sometimes the prose was a little lacking. I’m not sure if that’s due to the translation, language and cultural differences in writing between English and Chinese, or if the Cixin Liu’s style just isn’t quite what I was used to coming off of reading a lot of Scalzi . The story is fantastic but probably the bleakest thing I’ve ever read. I like my sci fi to be reflective of reality, which is one of the reason I like Scalzi and Taylor, and they always do a good job of making humans and other races be just the right amount of horrible. Liu on the other builds an entire trilogy on the thought “what if aliens are so, so much worse than humans”?

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Philip K. Dick

Global warming has heated the Earth to the point where it is uninhabitable outside during the day, the UN is drafting people to colonize other nearby worlds, but the conditions are so horrific that everyone on them is hooked on a hallucinogenic drug (Can-D) that lets the users share an experience centered around toy layouts (named “Perky Pat”), who unsurprisingly are the manufacturers of Can-D. A new drug (Chew-Z) arrives on the scene which threatens the Can-D market. If you’re familiar with Dick’s other work that should sound just about right. I specifically picked it because I needed a palate cleanser after Three Body Problem and this did not disappoint. It’s weird a hell and I’m here for it.

The Sirens of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut paints a fantastic portrait of a failed invasion of Earth by Martians. As opposed to some of the other books I had read up to this point instead of focusing on how horrible people are (although let’s be honest - Vonnegut doesn’t shy away from that) The Sirens of Titan puts a very fine point on how insignificant we are.

Agent to the Stars

John Scalzi

What if aliens exist but… they are so sufficiently weird that they need some major PR. This quirky one-off book by Scalzi is tons of fun

Bobiverse Series

Dennis E. Taylor

The Bobiverse follows the exploits of Bob, a computer engineer who lives the dream by becoming fantastically wealthy only to die shortly after and awake after his consciousness has been uploaded into a computer which is going to be used to control a von Neumann probe (a self-replicating spacecraft). The series follows Bob as he expands through the universe, saves humanity and a few other species from existential threats, and ponders the meaning of the universe.

Dennis E. Taylor is a computer programmer who found a second career as an author. His books have a great sense of humor and the Bobiverse is packed full of humorous nerdy references, kind of like Ready Player One but somehow for me manages to be more nerdy and less obnoxious at the same time. Perhaps it’s because Bob is a giant nerd, and he knows that he’s a nerd and is unapologetic about it.

So far there are 4 books in the series and I enjoyed them all immensely. I hope that Taylor gets back to writing more soon!

Imperial Radch Trilogy

Ann Leckie

The Radch trilogy is set in a far future where much of humanity has consolidated under the Radchaai. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender and Leckie uses “she” pronouns for pretty much everybody. The Radchaai had succeeded for a very long time under a system of perpetual expansion - new worlds are continuously conquered and half of their populate is harvested to be used as ancillaries - human bodies whos mind has essentially been erased and is now controlled by massive AIs on Radchaai ships. Those ships and ancillaries go on to conquer more worlds over and over again in a cycle of continuous expansion. At its center the Radchaai civilization is controlled by Anaander Mianaai, the Lord of the Radch, who has lived for thousands of years using clones and a technology similar to that used for the ancillaries and has become essentially a living God who rules all of Radchaai space.

The story centers on the last remaining ancillary from a Radch ship Justice of Toren, Breq, who encounters one of her lieutenants from 1,000 years earlier. Breq helps the Lieutenant escape from the planet they are on while she searches for something that will allow her to destroy Anaander Mianaai. Over the course of the three novels Leckie we learn more about Justice of Toren, the history of the Radchaai Empire as well as how the empire operates (yeah this is another “people suck” series lol)

The Murderbot Diaries

Martha Wells

I would have never picked up this series on my own, but my friend Kim highly recommended it and it did not disappoint. Martha Wells does a fantastic job of telling the tale of Murderbot - a rogue Sec (Security) Unit who has hacked his governor module. Sec Units are constructs - cloned humans interfaced with cybernetic augments who are not considered people in the Corporation Rim (THD is set in a futuristic capitalist hellscape where everything is ruled by corporations). Because Sec Units are not considered people and are essentially forced to do dangerous work while frequently being abused by the people they are supposed to be protecting Sec Units frequently have severe mental health problems. The overwhelming portrayal of rogue Sec Units in the media is of them killing everyone. Our protagonist on the other hand uses their broken governor module to watch soap operas. Thousands and thousands of hours of soap operas. Murderbot then uses its security skills to hide the fact that they are downloading thousands of hours of media and generally hit its tracks.

The Murderbot Diaries would be incredibly bleak were it not for how incredibly charming the extremely introverted Murderbot’s personality is. I’ve never related to a cybernetic murder machine quite the way I did with this series. I sincerely hope there are more coming!

Cinder (The Lunar Chronicles)

Marissa Meyer

This one was recommended to me by Ashley . I usually don’t go all in on YA, but I trust Ashley’s opinion and Marissa Meyer delivers. The first book in the Lunar Chronicles it combined a lot of themes in this year’s books: sci fi, robots and magic. Put retelling fairytales and how can you go wrong?

Cinder is a retelling of Cinderella where Cinder is an unwanted cyborg orphan. In the Lunar Chronicles world, which is set in post World War 4, cyborgs are treated as less than human and Cinder’s step mother treats her like a burden, despite the fact that Cinder is the only one supporting the family. Cress’ life is turned upside down one day when Crown Price Kai shows up at her repair booth to have his android repaired. Of course this can’t be a simple “boy meets girl” story because that would be boring, but eventually Cinder does go to the ball after discovering a startling thing about her past and the fact that she may be the key to saving the world. No pressure there.

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