Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

I am not sure when, but I read or heard Ryan Holiday refer to this book as short and important. So on my travels to referee soccer, I listened to this one at the end of March. The audiobook is narrated by the author.

It starts by Green telling of his visit to a tuberculosis (TB) hospital in Africa where he met a boy named Henry, a name the African shared with the author’s son. He then goes on to use Henry’s experience to explore the history of TB. That history is both surprising and horrifying. But the book is not all gloom and doom. The author illustrates some ways we can address this deadly but treatable disease.

The author’s voice is soothing and easy to listen to. This helps a lot with such a hard topic. In the end I found the book extremely well written and even a little uplifting.

My rating: 4/5

Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever by Joseph Cox

I listen to podcast called Darknet Diaries. As it describes itself, “True stories from the dark side of the Internet. This is a podcast about hackers, breaches, shadow government activity, hacktivism, cybercrime, and all the things that dwell on the hidden parts of the network. This is Darknet Diaries.” Episode 146 is the story of a secure phone system that was taken over by the FBI and used as an undercover sting operation to catch criminals around the world. It was based on this book. After listening to that episode, I added the book to my TBR (to be read) pile. As I started to do more soccer tournaments in March, I grabbed the audiobook to listen to while traveling.

The subject matter of this book is both fascinating and disturbing. It shows how widespread use of secure mobile phones is and, as a result ,how difficult for authorities to discover what its criminal users are doing. The book opens with the arrest of the head of one of these secure mobile phone networks. He is held in a Las Vegas hotel room as they try to convince him to turn over control of it to the FBI in exchange for a lighter sentence. He manages to escape to Canada where he is a citizen and the plan collapses. In the aftermath of this, the owner of the ANOM secure phone system contacts the FBI and offers them control of his network if they grant him some immunity. An agreement is made, and the sting begins.

The really disturbing part of this for me is the idea of law enforcement doing this at all. I am not sure if it crosses a line. I understand the desire to get the bad guys, but at what cost? This feels like fraud at best and entrapment at worst. There is no question that it saved lives, so it definitely did some good. I really appreciate that the book covers this dilemma and doesn’t provide any easy answers. After reading this book, I am still ambivalent about what happened. The book is a fascinating look into the dark side of secure mobile phones on both side of the legal/illegal divide.

My rating: 4/5

Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space-Time Continuum by Michael J. Fox

I came across this book in my local library’s weekly newsletter back in November. I loved this movie as a teenager (and still do!), so I was excited to read about its making as told by its star. I  finally borrowed it and read it back in March. Yeah, I’m a little behind in posting my book reviews.

Fox tells the story of how he came to be cast and his experience on the set of Back to the Future. He was who the producers wanted for the role of Marty McFly, but he was under contract for the TV show Family Ties and wasn’t available. Another actor was cast and shooting started. It did not go well. The producers again approached their counterparts as Family Ties. An agreement was made that Fox could do both if he did them at the same time. So for about a month, Fox burned the candle at both ends filming a weekly TV sitcom and a blockbuster movie. Crazy!

Fox also tells about some of the other details of his time on the set, how he got there, and how it affected his life. He is his kind to all he talks about it in the book. It is a quick and easy read. In fact this is my only complaint about the book. It was over too soon. I wish he told us more.

My rating: 4/5

Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books by Hwang Bo-Reum, Translated by Shanna Tan

I came across this book in a newsletter that my library sends out each Saturday morning. It outlines the latest books in all formats available there. This one interested me largely due to its subtitle. Books about books and reader really appeal to me.

This one is a series of essays originally written in Korean. They are fairly short and cover a variety of topics from Read on a Train to Use a Timer to Visiting the Library. I found some of the translation choices clunky. A few of these may be because the book is in British English.

Overall, I appreciated what the author is doing here. And it is wonderful to see the reading life from the context of another culture. However, I found the translation a little off putting. It was good enough, but I would love to see a native English speaker write a similar book.

My rating: 3/5

Short Fiction Read, March 14 – April 4

I have been reading so much short fiction and been so busy with officiating in soccer tournaments that I am going to try something a little different for these updates. It takes quite a bit of time to roll up these summaries each week or so. But it doesn’t take quite so much time to enter what I have read into my table over at my short fiction page.

Going forward, I will use posts like this to announce an update to that page and list below my favorites over that time period. This is the first in this experiment.

Title Author Summary My Notes
The Devourers of War; or, An Excerpt from the Cookbook of the Gods Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe A god who sowed the seed of the destruction of all the other gods must find and destroy their opposites that he also created. An almost perfect mythic fantasy. Well told by a trickster god.
Terms of Enlightenment Patrick Hurley A delinquent criminal is sentenced to a virtual reality monastery. Very satisfying. Explores reality and what motivates us.
Espie Droger Dreams of War Matthew Kressel A logistics officer in the past who is responsible for millions of deaths in his future is visited by a major from that future to punish him. Wow! What a story! Reads like an episode of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. An exploration of indirect culpability.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

My partner is a member of a book club that rotates who hosts the meeting and chooses the book. When they meet at my house, I am welcome to participate. Their last meeting was here, and this is the book my partner chose.

It is historical fiction that takes place in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State at a summer camp run by an elite wealthy family. As the story opens in August of 1975, the daughter of this family who is attending the camp goes missing. More that a decade before this, her brother had gone missing in the same woods and had never been found. The novel explores both the search for the missing girl and what happened when the boy went missing so long ago.

The family is not very likable. The men are grasping. The mother of both missing children is weak and used by the family in a way that is both sad and maddening. There is a female detective that is my hero. She is the only woman on the force and is the one who quietly leads the investigation where it needs to go.

This is mostly a character study of a wide range of people. The author does an amazing job of keeping everything clear even as she jumps from character to character and goes back and forth through the timeline. That said, this book was only okay for me. I suspect that is because so many of the people in it are sad or unlikable. I am okay with that when the exploration of these feelings or flaws goes deeper than it does here. The author tried to write a banger mystery with deep character examination. While she didn’t fail, the result is not as good as if she had simply focused on one or the other.

My rating: 3/5

Short Fiction Hightlights, February 28 – March 13

Of the sixteen stories I read in the last two weeks, only one stood out as five stars for me. That story was “Data Echoes Overlapping” by Megan Chee in the February 2026 issue of Lightspeed. It opens by telling of a long dead galactic civilization and goes on to describe how, millennia later, three more civilizations find their end. Each of these is completely different in how life manifests. The end of the story connects all these peoples in an absolutely brilliant story that explores what it means to be alive and contemplate existence and death. This is the type of exploration of being that I read speculative fiction for.

One other story of note that I read was from the Blood in the Machine blog. “Warning Signs” by Emily J. Smith takes a dark page out the movie Her. The story is about a young employee at a company that makes Alexa-type devices. He uses his to pick up women. He doesn’t treat these women or his home AI device particularly well. And the ending of the story is a very satisfying comeuppance for him.

Be sure to check out my short fiction page for summaries and ratings for all the short fiction I read.

Favorite Short Fiction, February 14-27

I was away at a soccer tournament last weekend so this review of my favorite short fiction includes two weeks of reading. And of the twenty-one stories that I read, six stood out to me as five-star reads.

From Asimov’s first issue of the year, “Stay” by William Preston is a bittersweet tale of a nerdy brother dying of cancer who decides to create an android replica of himself to keep his dog company after the cancer has killed him. He has a somewhat estranged sister who doesn’t like dogs and doesn’t quite get it. If you have a heart and/or love dogs, this one may make you cry. But don’t worry, the dog doesn’t die.

Also from Asimov’s first issue of the year is Will Ludwigsen’s brilliant “The Imaginative Youngster’s Handbook to UFOs”. It is written in the second person directly to the youngster who has pulled it off the shelf in the library. It has the feel of something written in the 1950s to help a misfit youth feel like they are part of something. It is both funny and endearing.

I listen to the podcast Writing Excuses. In the February 7 episode, they do a deep dive on the story “With Her Serpent Locks“ by Mary Robinette Kowal originally published in Uncanny magazine. Be sure to read it before you listen to the podcast episode as it has spoilers. It is the story of a woman whose troublesome cousin invites himself for a visit. The identity of the characters is slowly revealed as the story unfolds to a satisfying conclusion.

Octavia E. Butler explores self-control and responsibility her tale “The Evening and the Morning and the Night“ from the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. The main character is a woman with a genetic disease that without treatment will eventually cause her to destroy herself physically. With her boyfriend, she visits a clinic with a unique approach to treatment. An astounding story of nature, nurture, and choice.

The final story in Butler’s Bloodchild and Other Stories is “The Book of Martha“. In it Martha is tasked by God to make humanity better. She is given all the powers of God, and she can ask him any question. She is deeply uncomfortable with this task, but what she decides to do is stunning.

I have finally gotten around to starting the January issue of Clarkesworld magazine, and it starts out with a banger. “Remember Me in the Meat“ by Sarah Pauling takes place in a world where memories have largely been offloaded to data banks in the cloud. When a climate activist group tasks an assassin to kill a dangerous billionaire, the leader of the cult unleashes a virus that makes everyone forget the assassin. But things don’t go as expected when she finally arrives to execute her target.

I hope you enjoy these stories. Remember, you can always keep up with what I am reading on my short fiction page.

Favorite Short Fiction of the Week

I was a bit busier this week than last and only managed to read five stories, all of them from the first of issue of the year of either Analog or Asimov’s.

My favorite story was a five-star read from Analog entitled “And She is Content” by Frank Ward. It tells of a sentient AI that manages a space ark delivering colonists to their new home on a new planet. Every one hundred years, she wakes up the crew in order to exercise them before putting them back into hibernation. But as she wakes them up this time, she notices something very different. This is a touching story of caretaking and relationships.

And for the first time this year, I didn’t finish a story I started. This one was also from Analog: “Iron Star Swing” by Kate Orman. It seemed to be trying to do something clever about what happens near the event horizon of a black hole. It definitely didn’t work for me. I never really could understand what was happening and tapped out just passed 12% in the story.

Favorite Short Fiction of the Week

I read a lot of good short fiction this week. Of the seventeen stories I read, almost half (eight) were four or five star reads for me. The two five star stories are the first two stories in the latest issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

“Sin Eater” by Mark W. Tiedemann takes place in a near future after first contact has taken place. While these aliens have adapted to our human ways, they still stand apart. The story follows a lone detective who is still grieving for his dead wife as he investigates the kidnapping of two alien children. After their recovery in the opening, the rest of the story explores the attempt to get the aliens to press charges against the kidnapper. It is fascinating exploration of punishment and forgiveness, especially in the context of grief.

“The Origami Man” by Doug Franklin opens with a fisherman off the coast of Alaska finding what appears to be a dead body in the water. But then it seems to come back to life. I don’t want to give away too much of this story but for me it has all that I look for in speculative short fiction—great writing and realistic characters exploring multiple aspects of what it means to be human.

An honorable mention must also go to Octavia E. Butler’s Hugo award winning “Bloodchild”, a disturbing tale of humans at the mercy of aliens in her tale exploring male pregnancy. While an excellent story, this was only a four out of five stars for me due to its disturbing nature.