- The Hidden Girl, Ken Liu
- High Output Management, Andy Grove
- Pep’s City, Pol Ballús and Lu Martín
This is for both March and April of 2022, which is somewhat disappointing. For various reasons, I just hit a wall over those two months and didn’t make as much reading progress as I would have liked. I was pretty consistent with my daily read, but usually once I get going I’ll exceed the allotted time by a significant margin. Not so much these past two months.
Here come’s the break …
The stories from the The Hidden Girl are worthy of Ken Liu, but didn’t stick with me as much as some from The Paper Menagerie, but maybe that’s to be expected.
Unlike The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, the selection here is much more guided by my own personal taste, including some of my newest work, a never-before-published novelette, as well as an excerpt from the next Dandelion Dynasty novel.
Thoughts and Prayers (mind the horrific ad tech on the previous link) is the standout for me, in an extremely disturbing and dispiriting way. I also appreciated Ghost Days demonstrating hacker nous with its recursion theme and Lisp bits! Many of the stories had stimulating engagements with posthuman and post climate change life.
Parts of High Output Management are clearly dated and specific to a manufacturing enterprise. There are still quite a few useful nuggets for any manager though.
Pep’s City is a stapled together collection of vignettes less than a coherent book. The authors pulled out a couple of good incisive details that were new to me regarding players like Raheem Sterling, Kevin De Bruyne, and Aymeric Laporte. Heard more voice of the Spanish speaking players which makes sense with Spanish speaking authors.