March 2025

 Hi friends,

March brought several adjustments to our family. I went back to work, and Dan took his parental leave. I have conflicting feelings about going back to work, but it’s gotta be done, so we continue. We enjoyed spring break at home. Dan took the girls to do lots of fun things around town, and my mom came out to visit for a few days. 

I did find some time for some good reads this month as well. I’ve noticed that most nonfiction books that come out these days are between 200-250 pages, and for someone that regularly reads 700-1,000 page fantasy/ scifi behemoths, these seem to fly by, and I enjoyed several this month. Maybe fantasy fans are just built different. Let me know what you think of these books and if you have suggestions for further reading. 

Best,

Tonya 

The Mission by David W. Brown

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recommendation: maybe

Review: I’ve reviewed NASA’s Europa Clipper project for several years for work, and I was immensely relieved and impressed when it launched last October after a real nail-biter of an integration and test period. It was a massive win for NASA and for the Jet Propulsion Lab, who led development of the project and desperately needed a win after several set backs on other recent projects. This book tells the story of how the Europa Clipper project finally came to be. It was released in 2020, which was obviously years before the project actually launched, so it doesn’t explain some of the more recent developments on the project including the change of launch vehicle from NASA’s massively expensive Space Launch System (which goes for around $2 billion a launch) to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy (which I believe Clipper got for about $250 million). There was another book’s worth of drama in that story and then in the horrible realization about a year before launch that all of the thousands of transistors used in the spacecraft electronics were unlikely to withstand the harsh radiation environment around Europa. Surprise! Anyway, this book does cover all of the drama leading up to NASA’s selection and includes accounts from the principal agents in the project including the project scientist and several of the project managers. If you thought that managing major government acquisition projects sounded low drama and boring, think again! I didn’t really care for Brown’s sensational writing style, but he did a good job of covering all the details of the many studies and fits and starts that Clipper went through before it finally started its journey to Europa. I would recommend only for those really interested in NASA acquisition or the mission itself. 

Kingdoms of Death (Sun Eater #4) by Christopher Ruochhio

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I have conflicting feelings about this book. It was extremely well written and executed. The character development was phenomenal, and I can’t think of many other characters that I’ve read that I now feel I know as intimately as I know Hadrian Marlowe. But --- and it’s a rather large one this time --- this book is really hard to read. A good portion of the book is consumed with a captivity and torture plotline, which is hands down my least favorite plotline to read. I had a few moments when I considered not finishing it because the things that Hadrian goes through are so awful, and I didn’t want it affecting my mood in real life. That being said, I’m glad I did push through. Ruocchio doesn’t flinch from portraying the horrible things that happen to Hadrian, but since the story is written from Hadrian’s point of view hundreds of years in the future, we know from the get go that he survives and escapes somehow, so that at least gave me some hope that things would be OK. If I had complained before about the villainous Cielcin aliens not getting enough page time, that criticism is now revoked. We spent the majority of the book enmeshed in Cielcin society, and I didn’t care for it one bit. The ending and not-so-great escape attempt don’t fix any of the trauma Hadrian experienced, but it does allow him a chance to rest and recuperate. I’m going to continue reading the series because after four books I feel very committed, and now I’m feeling really motivated to see Hadrian tear down all the Cielicin, something that he says he’s done since page one. Ruocchio is truly setting the bar for modern day sci-fi epics. You can see echoes of Dune and Star Wars in the story, but it’s really its own thing now, and one of the most immersive worlds I’ve read in a long time. 

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amada Ripley

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: As some of you might guess, now is a rough time to be a federal employee. While my legislative branch agency is thankfully exempt from most of the changes that are being forced upon the executive agencies, my coworkers and colleagues from those agencies are deeply impacted, and so far, none of it has been for the better. That being said, it felt like a good time to read a book about how to handle conflict. One of the main takeaways I had from this book was how to recognize high conflict in my own life. Do you ever find yourself playing out conversations in your head with people you disagree with, during which you deliver that zinger of a point that you can never think up in the actual moment and that end with your conversational opponent admitting their mistaken and thanking you for showing them the error of their ways in all your brilliance? If so, you’re probably involved in high conflict. The conflicts we see in our national dialogue seem to be getting even higher. Ripley explains that a two-party us vs. them system will almost always lead to high conflict. Ripley provides powerful real-life stories of former gang members, environmental extremists, and a mediation expert who gets caught up in vicious small town politics. She uses these stories as case studies to demonstrate how people can actually get out of high conflict. That doesn’t mean that we run from conflict, or cave to the demands of those around us constantly. It does mean that we develop pathways for people to find alternatives and create spaces where people can come together and see that the “them” they’ve been villainizing are people too. I could get up on a soap box and preach all day about the problems with our political system, but I would rather recommend that you read this book. Then we can have what will doubtlessly be a much better conversation. 

The Light Fantastic (Discworld #2) by Terry Pratchett

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: Reading Discworld feels like coming home from a long, stressful day, and curling up on the couch under a big fleece throw with a steaming mug of a hot beverage and relaxing into a day off. Pratchett’s ability to satirize common fantasy tropes is not only hilarious but also helps shift my view of how I read other stories and what I take away from them. In this installment, our favorite reluctant hero, the largely incompetent wizard Rincewind, and his tourist friend Twoflower hesitantly embark on another adventure full of scheming wizards, bloodthirsty druids, Cohen the barbarian, and everyone’s favorite sentient trunk. I can’t say any more than that I loved it, and I can’t wait to read more in Discworld. 

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (Dungeon Crawler Carl #3) by Matt Dinniman

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: This was my least favorite Dungeon Crawler book so far. I didn’t like all the train business. Dinniman even puts a note at the front of the book saying that you don’t need to worry about all the trains and figuring them out. He says that it’ll all be explained at the end of the book with a map. Maybe this is one of those things that gamers really like, but I just thought it was confusing and didn’t put in the mental effort to figure out the puzzle. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had? I did like pretty much every other aspect of this book, especially the characters. Donut, Carl, and their new teammate Karina are so much fun to follow. I also really liked how they had to work with other crawlers to figure out the puzzle that was level 4 of the dungeon. We got much less Mordecai in this book than the previous one, and I figured that was because he was making things too easy for our heroes. I’m hoping that we get more of him in future books. I’m mostly enjoying seeing the dungeon unfold book by book, but I really want more of the larger universe. We get little snippets of the politics and economics of the universe throughout the book, but it’s not a focus yet. I just want to see Carl, Donut and party tear down this awful system. I think that later books will expand into this plotline more. Right now we’re still layering on reason after reason to hate the dungeon and the system that created it and uses peoples' lives for entertainment and profit. 

Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde #3) by Heather Fawcett

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review:  This is the third and last (I think) installment in the cozy fantasy story of Emily Wilde and her fairy paramour Wendell. In this volume, we spend most of the book in the fairy realm, and get to see how far Emily will go to save her beloved Wendell and his fairy kingdom. I love that Emily doesn’t have any special magical powers beyond her extensive knowledge of all things fairy and her courage to do what needs to be done. She’s always the least magically powerful character on the page, but she uses her knowledge as its own secret power to out-maneuver all of the immensely powerful magical beings she finds herself living among. I love it. She saves Wendell so many times throughout this book. It’s easy to understand why he’s so besotted with her. The book starts off kind of slow, and we get to spend a good amount of time just hanging out with Wendell and Emily. I love seeing these two together so much that I can’t really complain that this was a pacing issue, and I’m sure that fans of the first two books will appreciate seeing them together more in this book. There is one moment that truly took me, and Emily, by complete surprise. The resolution felt a little too easy maybe? I don’t know if that’s fair to say to Emily who went through quite a lot of trouble to set things right. Maybe it’s better to say that I never doubted that Emily would solve the problem. That does take away some of the suspense, but you don’t read a book like this because it’s a thriller. You read it because it’s cozy and clever, and you love seeing Emily and Wendell together. From that point of view, this book is a complete success!

The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review:  I realized a while ago that my attention is extremely valuable, and that where I direct it reveals what my values and priorities are. Hayes explains how social media and smartphones have commoditized our attention. He contends that this changes what it means to be human. The largest most profitable corporations in the world are all competing for the finite resource of human attention, and they have teams of brilliant people whose entire job is to keep our eyeballs on the screen scrolling for as long as possible. Bearing this in mind, I feel a small sense of accomplishment every time I turn away from a social media feed. Hah! I beat them. As a cable news host, Hayes is a perfect person to explain attention capitalism. He makes several good points throughout the book, “A public sphere wholly dominated by commercial platforms seeking to maximize the aggregate amount of attention they draw in order to monetize that attention will produce a public that has a difficult time sustaining focus.” And, “If attention is the substance of life, then the question of what we pay attention to is the question of what our lives will be.” Hayes also explains how getting attention for the sole sake of attention is now the goal for many public figures. Previously, public figures would try to get your attention to focus on their chosen issues and policies, but realizing that the final goal is to simply have attention does a great deal to explain the behaviors of people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I always enjoy a book that helps me to understand the crazy world we live in better, and this one definitely succeeded in that. It almost feels like now I’m seeing behind the curtain every time I recognize the urge to pick up my phone when I’m bored, or when I see click bait, or an attention grabbing headline, or hear about the latest exploit of some public figure. 

How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food by Vaclav Smil

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

Recommendation: yes

Review: I love reading Smil’s books. He is the opposite of the sensational, click bait driven attention capitalism media that we’re exposed to nearly every waking second. You wouldn’t think that it would be interesting or relaxing to read about how many gallons of water are needed to produce one pound of beef or how diets change with greater affluence, but it really is. Smil starts the book by telling the reader that there will be a lot of numbers in this book, and he’s not exaggerating. I can’t really imagine Smil ever exaggerating to be honest. This book takes you through the numbers of how much energy, land, and water are required to create the food we eat. I don’t really remember any specific numbers to be honest, but I remember the big takeaways: beef is by far the most energy intensive animal protein there is, and chicken is the least. Smil rejects many popular theories of environmentalism including that a vegan diet is appropriate for the entire population. He concludes that, “No unprecedented gains and no untried radical solutions are required to provide the next generation with adequate food supply: we just need to keep on improving production efficiencies, reducing waste, adjusting diets, and promoting measures that reduce food’s overall environmental impact.” And, “it is rational to argue that, barring mass-scale conflicts and unprecedented social breakdown, the world will be able to feed its growing population beyond the middle of the 21st century, when the combination of new demographic realities and new scientific advances may present us with entirely new options.” That may not be very headline grabbing, but it is supported by data, and I appreciate that.