King Rat

I got a lot read in April!

The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro

A bookstop biography that won the Pulitzer Prize, it traces the life of Robert Moses from budding reformer to ruthless corrupt power broker and back down the ladder to out-of-favor retiree. Read because Robert Moses did more to set the U.S. up for car dependency and where we are in the global climate crisis than possibly any other single person in history. Highly recommended.

City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

One of Le Guin’s earlier works. I hate to write it because it’s Le Guin, but the premise is pretty uninteresting: what if the aliens who conquered Earth lied about everything. Maybe they don’t have unlimited power. Maybe they’re playing you when you visit their capital.

Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

I am not the audience for this jargon filled work that is mostly theory, with a bit of history. The subtitle is a bit misleading too. Táíwò’s idea is that elite capture is inherent in most systems.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The beginning of this was a little weird: two light-skinned Black twins in a town of light-skinned Black people that venerates being light-skinned run away to New Orleans. Once there, one marries a dark-skinned Black man, but eventually leaves him and returns home with their child. The other learns she can pass as white, disappears and is not heard from for decades. Although the story starts with them, it doesn’t pick up steam until it delves into the lives of the twins’ children who have a chance encounter in Los Angeles. From then on out, this blew me away. No pat answers in the book.

The Woman in the Strongbox by Maureen O’Hagan

A Kindle Single freebie, and I got what I paid for. It reads as true crime, but there’s no real crime. Just a woman who changed her name to get away from her family of birth and never told her husband what her actual history was. Then they filed for divorce and she died by suicide, leaving people wondering who she was. But there’s nothing interesting about the story of an unhappy and unbalanced woman.

Countdown City by Ben H. Winters

Second in a series after The Last Policeman. Ex-officer Henry Palace is hired to find the husband of a woman who once was his babysitter. The gimmick is that an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth and there’s about 77 days left. There’s not a lot of reasons to do any job, and lots of things are already going to pieces. Not as interesting as the first book, but enjoyable because I think the book gets a lot right about how people would behave. The disappearance itself is pretty meh.

The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey

The second book in Corey’s The Captive’s War series find a group of humans from Ajiin held captive on the Carryx homeworld, overseen by other violent Carryx client species, and directed to scientific pursuits. There’s a lot of samey-sameness to the ensembles characters, and you’ll get a long way into the book before there’s any real interaction between any female characters. It’s a decent space opera plot though.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

I finished Quinn’s The Rose Code last year. The Alice Network has a similar structure: alternating narratives from different times featuring women in wartime (or shortly afterward). This took me a couple of months to finish even though it’s really good. Part of the story is about Eve Gardner in 1947, who we know has smashed hands and was a spy during World War One. The other timeline in the story is Eve as a spy in 1915. I knew that it would eventually get to the smashing of hands and I dreaded that so much, so I would put this down for days at a time, and switched to The Faith of Beasts when it was published. It’s a great story, but too intense for me to listen to the audiobook through too quickly.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Our protagonist, Newland Archer wants to break free of Guilded Age New York society conventions. They all seem to worry a lot about what other people think, whether the subject is divorce or wearing new fashions too soon. Newland traps himself in an engagement with May Welland to keep himself from running away with May’s cousin, the separated-but-not-divorced Ellen Olenski. This was sooooo slow, and neither Newland, May, nor Ellen has all that much personality. I also struggled with the fact that the conventions that Wharton is poking a stick at would 99.9% warrant not even a shrug these days. Some of them are so esoteric I couldn’t understand what the issue even was.

Eve of Sin City by S.J. Day

A short story in Sylvia Day’s Marked universe. Half the book is explaining the highly-modified Christian lore that turns Cain & Abel into immortal demon vanquishers. In between explaining the lore and fighting demons, the bad boys and girls long to be railed by each other. What if “The Mark of Cain” meant you were a demon hunter instead of whatever religious idea you had? That’s the sort of thing that underlies this universe. What if Cain was a modern day playboy bad boy? I didn’t care.

I didn’t finish as many books this March. Because I’m ahead of pace on my goal of reading 30 books in 2026, so I started Robert A. Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. That’s a behemoth which the publisher counts at 1344 pages long. It’ll be here in April.

Hellacious California! by Gary Noy

There were some stories of chicanery and debauchery, but not nearly as many as I was hoping for. This was an academic book on categories of “vice” dressed up with some stories.

A Stroke of Dumb Luck by Shiloh Walker

This was a teaser short story for the author’s paranormal Colbana Files series (published under the J.C. Daniels pseudonym) that appeared on Tor.com with a free ebook download back in the day. It wasn’t interesting. A … well, I already forgot whatever paranormal ability the protagonist has … goes into a lair of … vampires maybe? I forgot this too … to rescue a missing girl, gets into more trouble than they bargained for, and is rescued by a powerful but suspicious paranormal baddie.

The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni

I’ve read a fair number of business management books. This might be the best one overall that I’ve read. i have only a few quibbles on finer points. I particularly like that the process is very actionable and has clear directions, artifacts and milestones. Obviously the real test though is “does this work?” I’ll find out, as the reason I read the book is my new employer claims to be framing its workings on this book. My previous place of employment could have been one of the many bad examples from the book with expected results. However, that doesn’t mean that the guidance itself works.

Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson

I really enjoyed the first book of the series (The Space Between Worlds) that I immediate put the next book on hold. And this started off even better! Set a number of years after the first book, the inhabitants of a parallel universe have figured out how to travel to the prime universe, and are attempting to kill primes so they can transit over… for what purpose I never really understood. But it was a great, complicated story about Emperor Nik Nik’s runner Mr. Scales dealing with all the ramifications of the incursion. There’s all the themes of the first book, plus added commentary on the haves, have nots, and the police. It’s a great book, but the plot elements get a little too complicated and twisty toward the end. Worth reading but a bit of a down from the first book, which you really should read before this one. I suppose it’s possible to read this without first reading The Space Between Worlds, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

The Courtship of the Queen by Bruce McAllister

The final completed read of the month before I started The Power Broker. The Courtship of the Queen was another short story posted to Tor.com with a free download. A boy grows up playing with sea shells that he imagines are armies of an underwater monarch. I did not understand whether this was meant to be just his imagination or instead that he’d tapped into some hidden realm. Not my thing.

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And that’s it. I plugged away at The Power Broker every day for the last two weeks of March but just couldn’t read fast enough.

I read 10 books and audiobooks last month. Here’s the list:

Bunny by Mona Awad

I can see why people like this book, because what a trip it is. Ultimately, this is not really my kind of thing though, so I won’t be picking up the sequel.

The Underbelly by Gary Phillips

The character (a homeless man trying to find the perpetrator of a crime) and the setting (the homelessness nonprofit complex and the streets of Los Angeles) hooked me, even though the mystery was pretty blah. I put several of Phillips’ books on my list at the library.

How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ

Important work which I mostly can follow, but there are parts that I just do not understand about old works of literature because I haven’t read them and I don’t understand the literary criticism about them. I.e., I’ve never read Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and I certainly don’t know which poets she took inspiration from, nor which poets’ work is influenced by hers. So when Russ writes about Dickinson’s work being isolated (“She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly”), I am not nodding along with thoughts of “this fits”. I read this so I can have a bit of an inkling about what to look for.

White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman

A long polemic about how rural White America has been stoked by reactionary groups and politicians to hate most progress and how that endangers a pluralistic United States.  Filled with fact after fact that meticulously illustrates and connects all the threads.  Very well written, and well organized, but the broad parameters of the phenomenon are well-known.  Also, this is not a solutions polemic; the part on how to solve this (rural self-organizing) is but a percentage point or two of the whole audiobook’s length.

A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps by Jeremy Black

I am a map geek and I love railroads. A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps was both super cool but also frustrating. The cool part is 100 maps of railroad routes from all over the world and throughout history. The frustrating part is that I want to see the detail, and this books takes large maps and makes them fit on pages smaller than 11 inches by 9 inches.

Wool by Hugh Howey

I almost put this down early in the story, because the beginning is grim AF.  I was afraid this would turn out to be grimdark in SF. Stuff like The Walking Dead gets to me for all the hopelessness. And the purpose seems clearly to make the reader feel as hopeless as possible.  After that, the story finally gets into a more plot-driven story where the good folks are fighting against a shadowy cabal running things.  The setting could be a generation ship or a Republic fighting against an Imperial government, but in this case it’s a giant underground silo containing what’s left of humanity built to withstand the apocalypse that occurred on Earth’s surface.

In the Moon’s House by Mary Robinette Kowal

The four main books in the Lady Astronaut series are my favorite of any series in a long time. Just amazing stories. This is a nice little short story morsel about backup astronauts set in the same universe.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

In a post-apocalypse world of sheltered haves in a city and have-nots kept excluded in a wasteland outside the city’s walls, a woman works for a foundation that has discovered a way to travel to other timelines in the multiverse. Because people can’t travel to another timeline while the parallel version of themselves still live, traversers are mainly people from poor backgrounds who are thus likely to have died there.

The setup is ripe for both excellent plotting and incisive social commentary. The title itself could refer both to worlds across the multiverse and to the worlds of the city and the desiccated country outside. In one world, Cara escapes from the clutches of Nik Nik that Road Warrior-esque ruler beyond the city. In another, Nik Nik is the nicer younger brother of the ruler, and she can maybe experience a little of what might have been.

So far, the favorite book I’ve read in 2026.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Another book that I can see why people like it so much, but which wasn’t for me. Sunny is introduced to a world of Leopard people and juju by kids she meets at her new school, discovering that she has a latent talent for it. Thereafter follows her juju school adventures with her newfound friends. But there’s something about the plot that didn’t click with me, though I struggle to put my finger on exactly why.

Socialism . . . Seriously by Danny Katch

A few years ago Haymarket Books offered a bundle of their ebooks as a freebie. As a liberal/progressive who flirts with socialism, I am on the lookout for stuff that can help me be comfortable with socialism because damn but I love their ideals. This turned out to be another book I almost gave up on this month, but ultimately liked.

What I didn’t like: Katch has an early chapter that is a day in the life of what he terms as a bad day in a socialist utopia. The idea being that even bad days pretty good compared to now so why not take a gander at everything that follows in this book. Except that day in the life is unappealing AF. He also has a few chapters taking down the system of capitalism taking potshots at a whole lot of associated stuff. And I find that sort of thing tiresome.

But it’s markedly better when he gets into the things he has on his socialist agenda. Unions. Returning land to indigenous peoples. Revolution, not reform. He also acknowledges and doesn’t simply hand-wave away some criticisms of socialism. Am I convinced? No. But he makes a good case.

Summary from StoryGraph

I read 8 books & audiobooks last month. Here’s the list:

Beautiful Children by Charles Bock

I had the book sitting in Calibre for 15+ years. I am making an attempt to read some of the stuff that’s been sitting there for a while.

Nominally, Beautiful Children is about the disappearance of Newell Ewing, what led up to it and the effects afterward on his family. Unfortunately, I found that I could not understand the connection between all the characters and scenes. Who is this person? What is their connection to the story? Each scene was fine, but I couldn’t make sense of the whole.

I Know What You Need by Tyler Jones

A free ebook single from Subterranean Press.

You know how everything would be different if small things were changed? If the bad guy hadn’t slipped on a banana peel that was fortuitously in the wrong place at the right time? What if someone knew about all those things and had to get those things where they needed to be? I Know What You Need tells a story of that someone.

West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman

IIRC, West Heart Kill was featured on a newspaper’s book section, so I added the audiobook (narrated by Robert Petkoff) to my Libby wish list several years ago.

A locked room mystery with an unreliable narrator who may or may not be a detective visiting an exclusive hunting club in upstate New York. The author plays with the point of view, switching narrators, including making a stand-in for the reader be the narrator at times, and breaks the 4th wall a lot. I thought this was fun, playful and interesting. Once. I don’t think I want to read another book that does this, or at least I don’t think I want to experience this frequently.

The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti

Why am I reading a book that is 16 or 17 years old? The Purity Myth is another ebook that has been sitting in Calibre for almost a decade. Jessica Valenti’s polemic has a well-argued point that America’s virgin/whore complex hurts women. I don’t think that’s changed since the book was written, but a lot of the examples and references feel out-of-date now.

An Unbreakable World by Ren Hutchings

An Unbreakable World is space opera set in the same universe as Hutchings’ Under Fortunate Stars, so I expected a lot of the same. Some solid characters. A fun plot. A focus on telling a story. There’s a bit of a romance happening; enough to make a relationship interesting. The bad guy is a bit of a mustache-twirler. He only makes 4 or 5 appearances though.

Cobalt Red by Siddarth Kara

Cobalt Red is Siddarth Kara traveling eastern areas of Democratic Republic of Congo investigating the conditions of “artisanal mining”. These are small operations employing locals to dig mines, break apart ore, wash ore, and all other activities, manually, in risky conditions, and for piece rates that are neither enough to lift people out of poverty nor anywhere near a significant portion of the value that cobalt brings to technology companies. Laws and conventions are supposed to keep artisanally mined cobalt out of the supply stream for tech devices. Kara’s interviews make clear two really important points: the conditions are abysmal, and the cobalt ore is clearly being merged into the supplies used by ore refineries.

Squirrel Pie by Deborah Brannigan

Squirrel Pie is a memoir by the mother of a friend of mine, so maybe take my thoughts with a grain of salt. I would also not normally read a self-published book but Tara promised it included how she was abducted as a child and her father was the subject of an interstate manhunt. A second word of warning though, the book is full of abuse: child abuse, rape, beatings, animal cruelty, and state indifference to name some of it. Brannigan dropped out of school and became the child girlfriend of Charles “Mac” McCall, who was over a decade her senior. When she finally has enough and returns to her parents’ home, McCall begins a campaign of threatening behavior and ultimately absconds with their child. The writing is well above average for a self-published book.

The Fortune Seller by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

By the time I figured out where The Fortune Seller audiobook (excellently narrated by Stephanie Cannon) was going and that I did not like it, I was so far in that I was on a hate-listen.

The marketing copy on Macmillan’s web site says:

Yellowjackets meets The Cloisters in this beguiling coming-of-age story about class, reinvention, and destiny, set against the backdrop of two mysterious deaths.

The book has little to say about reinvention or destiny, other than the point-of-view character Rosie Macalister is fed up with rich people at the end and character-who-is-not-who-she-says-she-is Annelise Tattinger is a tarot reader. Every damn character is annoying. Most characters actions are convoluted and obtuse. The bad guy is a mustache-twirler. The “thriller” part of the story doesn’t even start until 70% of the way through the book, and it’s not even thrilling. Wikipedia has the following to say about thrillers:

Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. […] A thriller generally keeps its audience on the “edge of their seats” as the plot builds towards a climax.

There’s no feeling of suspense between the good guy and the bad guy here. There’s no cat-and-mouse action. Simply put, Rosie works for an asshole rich guy and the only action that takes places is that she quits and stomps out of the workplace somewhere after 90% of the way through.

Summary from StoryGraph