Some Short Book Reviews

I'm trying to up my reading game, spending more time reading (which includes having the book read to me by Google Play or the Kinde app), and less time listening to podcasts or doom scrolling. This was also motivated by the need to read a few of the nominees for the Hugo Awards, since I bought a supporting membership to get the voters' packet.

So here are some short reviews of some of the books I've read in the last few months.

• Children of Time/Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky: I've been meaning to read something by Adrian Tchaikovsky for quite a while after recommendations by friends and family members, and I'm glad I did. Both Children of Time and Children of Ruin were highly readable SF with interesting and believable aliens, solid world building, and well-developed characters. I found the plot of Children of Ruin a bit hard to follow in places, but other than that I thoroughly enjoyed both books. 

 

• The Regicide Report by Charles Stross: With The Regicide Report, Charles Stross finally completes the main story arc of his long-running Laundry Files series. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't read at least some of the other books in the series. Given that the events in the book take place before the sequel New Management trilogy, it felt a bit redundant. 

• Death of the Author by Ndedi Okefor: This is a Hugo nominee and I might not have read it otherwise. In the near future, a university teacher of creative writing gets fired after criticizing a student and decides to write a science fiction novel. The book becomes a huge success, completely altering the author's life. In alternating sections, Okefor includes parts of the author's novel, gradually integrating the two stories. It's well done and very readable, if a bit heavy on family drama. 

• The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow: I am not a big fan of fantasy novels, but decided to read this based on some glowing reviews and its Hugo nomination. It's a riff on the Arthurian legend, with a time travel loop thrown in. I found it quite compelling; the setting, pacing, and characterization are first rate and Harrow is a top flight prose stylist. It may win the Hugo award this year and it would be well deserved. 

• Ancestral Night/Machine by Elizabeth Bear. I have read and enjoyed several shorter stories by Elizabeth Bear but have not read any of her novels until now. These are space operas with a large cast of aliens and a diverse human culture spreading through the galaxy. I liked the setting and stories but there was too much character introspection for my taste, and I found myself skimming a lot. I will read the third book in the series, Folded Sky, soon.. 

 

Coming soon, a review of Biological War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen.

Photo of the Week - August 23, 3026

Today's photo is of marigolds that we planted along the side of our garden to attract pollinators. We've planted them before, but this year they really took off. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Marigolds

Saturday Sounds - The Tragically Hip - Live July 22 - August 20, 2016

Today's musical treat is something very special, especially if you are Canadian. Live July 22 - August 20, 2016 is a live album culled from the last concert tour of Canada's most beloved band, The Tragically Hip. 

That isn't hyperbole, by the way. Their last concert was broadcast live over the CBC and watched by an estimated 11, 700, 000 people, about one third of all Canadians. (The CBC will be rebroadcasting it tonight at 7:00 p.m. eastern, on TV and radio, CBC GEM on the web, Sirius XM and YouTube. I will be watching, with beer and Kleenex in hand).

As for the album, I think it will eventually become known as one of rock's greatest live albums. The band, and especially lead singer and lyricist Gord Downie, who was dying of brain cancer during the tourn, gave it their all. It's far more than a greatest hits album; the hits are there, but so are a large number of deep tracks from their catalog, all brilliantly played. If you are new to The Hip, check out "Nautical Disaster", "50 Mission Cap", "New Orleans Is Sinking", or "Bobcaygeon", to name a few of their most popular songs..

Play it often and play it loud.

 

Getting a Better List of Styles in Word

Styles are one of Microsoft Word's better features but Microsoft has never made them particularly easy to use and especially never easy to manage. In my last job, I eventually created a small set of templates with a common set of style names but with differing formats. Some documents could have more than thirty styles. Tracking changes to the styles across differnt documents was painful. 

Office Watch points outs that you can use AI tools like Copilot or Gemini to help you analyse and manage your styles. 

Copilot or any AI (Claude, ChatGPT etc.) can read a Word styles document and reorganize the contents into something more useful, such as:

• Hierarchy table
• Grouped Styles
• Style Guide
• Design System Diagram
• Visual Table
• Style Compliance Table

The article includes a sample prompt and some examples of reports and diagrams that you can create. 

As I recall, Adobe FrameMaker doesn't have many features for reporting on style properties, but there are third-party tools that you could probably use in conjunction with AI tools to create similar reports.

How Journalists Are Using AI

The Nieman Journalism Lab has published an article showing how several Pulitizer Prize-winning journalists used AI tools in their work. 

 A translation of a mass shooter’s cryptic journal in the days after an attack. A public records review that revealed failures to install flood warning systems in Central Texas. An exposé of American technology companies’ complicity in building the Chinese surveillance state. An audit of the SEC’s crypto lawsuits that showed weakening enforcement under the second Trump administration.

On May 4, the Pulitzer Prizes recognized these stories among the winners and finalists across 15 journalism categories. The reporters behind each of these stories also disclosed using AI to the judging committee. Ultimately, five award winners and three finalists this year disclosed AI adoption in their submissions — the most since the disclosure requirement was added in 2024.

The journalists use of AI fell into several key categories:

• Searching for information in a large number of public records
• Translating under deadline pressure
• Making a trove of documents searchable
• Checking other writers' work

Looking at the details of how these tools were used really makes me wish I had had them available when I was working as a technical writer at the TSX. Just the ability to search through the job control system or QA test databases would have been very useful. 

Photo of the Week - August 16, 2026

This week's photo is of our garlic harvest for the year. It wasn't our best; we got 30 heads out of about 36 planted, and they were mostly on the small side. Still, it's not a lot of work and they taste better than most of the supermarket garlic. 

Our garlic harvest for 2026

Saturday Sounds - Girma Woldemichael - Nafqóté

This week's musical treat is from Girma Woldemichael, an Ethiopian-Canadian saxophonist living in Toronto. I was completely unfamiliar with him or his music until hearing an interview with him on CBC radio. His music synthesizes African elements with jazz, and funk and I quite like it. Nafqóté is his most recent album. You can find several more on YouTube Music. 

It's Called a Polycrisis and We're In One

Recently, I read an article by Charlie Angus:  What Keeps Me Up at Night. 

In it he says: 

We are like the three little pigs hanging out in a straw house.

The war in Iran, climate fires across North America and Europe, the political chaos of Trump — would be a serious test of global resilience at the best of times. But now these issues are beginning to lay across each other like terrible ley lines.

So let me lay out four areas where global leaders have left us dangerously vulnerable.

He goes on to discuss four areas of vulnerability in more detail.

• The Strait of Hormuz and the Fertilizer Crisis
• A Planet on Fire
• Regulatory Suicide
• The Marine Super Spreader Event

For more on the El Nino event that Charlie Angus discusses in his article, see this: Okay, These El Niño Forecasts Are Getting Ridiculous.

An analysis published Wednesday by the United Nations’ World Food Programme shows that the strengthening El Niño is on track to significantly worsen food insecurity in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries. The record-strong El Niño that occurred between 2015 and 2016 impacted the food security of 60 million to 100 million people, and WFP’s preliminary analysis shows that the 2026-2027 El Niño could push at least 49 million more people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027.

“El Niño is a massive threat to the food security of millions who are already vulnerable,” Carl Skau, WFP’s acting executive director, said in a statement. “The sooner we help families to prepare for these climate shocks, the greater our ability to save lives and protect livelihoods.”

All these events (and more) are part of a larger event: a polycrisis. 

Per Wikipedia:

A polycrisis is a situation where many different and separate crises happen at the same time. These problems mix and make each other worse. The total damage is much bigger than just adding the problems together.

Key Features of a Polycrisis

• Simultaneous timing: Multiple major shocks happen right next to each other or overlap. 

• Interconnection: Systems like the economy, the environment, and politics link together. A failure in one area feeds into another. 

• Amplification: Fixing one problem can accidentally make another problem worse. 

• Overwhelm: Governments and leaders struggle to handle everything at once

Things were bad enough before the current and burgeoning El Nino and the multiple economic and political crises caused by Trump's abysmally stupid attack on Iran. 

But now? There's another term for the situation we find ourselves now, coined by writer William Gibson in his wonderful novel, The Peripheral. The Jackpot. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I am very afraid that I'm not.  

2026 Aurora Award Winners

 The winners of the 2026 Aurora Awards for the best Canadian science fiction and fantasy were announced last weekend. 

These are the fiction winners.

• Novel: The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, Robert J. Sawyer
• YA Novel:  Breath of the Dragon, Fonda Lee & Shannon Lee
• Novelette/Novella:  The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar 
• Short Story: “The Stone Played at Tengen”, R.H. Wesley
• Graphic Novel/Comic: Shark Girl, Kate Beaton

A Brief Trip on Toronto's Eglinton LRT

Last week, I had to be up in North Toronto so I took a ride on the new Eglinton LRT. I got off the bus on the southeast corner of  Avenue Road and Eglinton but had to cross to the northwest corner  to get to the LRT station. 

I was surprised at how deep it is, nine flights of stairs or five escalators to the platform level. The train cars are more like streetcars than subway cars. I didn't think the layout and seating made good use of the space and the doors are very narrow. The cars are also noise in the tunnel than the subway.  It was half full at around 2:00 p.m. which is a good sign.

I got off at Eglinton and took the elevator up to the subway level. If you do that, make sure you go two stops up to the upper concourse. (I mistakenly got off first on the lower concourse.) I don't know why there is a lower concourse as it doesn't seem to go anywhere. 

It's unfortunate that Metrolinx didn't run the line the extra mile to Eglinton GO station instead of ending it at Kennedy. That would have made an easy connection for anyone coming in from the east and wanting to take the LRT to midtown. As it is, I probably won't be using the line much. 

First and second sets of nine escalators

The platform at Avenue Road station

Photo of the Week - August 9, 2026

This week's photo is of the marina at the foot of Liverpool Road. I should have taken a picture of the excellent ice cream cone I had just before taking this picture. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and unedited.

The marina at sunset.

Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass

I recently broke down and subscribed to YouTube Premium because the ads were getting too annoying. A subscription to YouTube Music Premium was also included, and I've been browsing through the music library. So today,  here are three recent albums of Philip Glass's music and one special treat. (YouTube Music doesn't allow embeds so I'm just providing links to the albums). 

• Einstein on the Beach: Ictus, Suzanne Vega, Collegium Vocale Gent, and Tom De Cock. Einstein on the Beach is perhaps Glass's best known work but its a monumental piece and rarely performed in its entirely. I was fortunate to see it in Toronto in 2014, and it was one of the musical highlights of my life. This recording is a new arrangement for performance as a concert and is somewhat shorter than the original opera. It's been performed in Europe since 2018.

• Knee Plays from Einstein on the Beach: Arranged by Vox Sarenrae. The Knee Plays are my favourite pieces of music from the opera so I'm glad to see them excerpted in an album. The orchestration makes me think of what Einstein on the Beach would sound like if it had been performed by Emerson Lake and Palmer. 

• The Tao of Glass: Philip Glass and Phelim McDermott. This EP has five of the pieces of music featured in the theatrical production currently playing in London. You can buy the EP on Bandcamp. 

• And finally, we have this: Philip Glass: Etudes Polka by Joseph. C. Krause. It's short, which is probably a good thing. 

Movie and TV Reviews - July 2026

Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in July. 

Movies

• Remarkably Bright Creatures: A quirky romantic drama featuring Sally Field and octopuses. We liked it a lot. (Netflix)
• Enola Holmes (1 - 3): A wildly implausible but entertaining series of movies featuring a teenage sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Light but well made. (Netflix)
• Afterburn: Half the Earth gets hit by a super solar flare and the bad guys take control. B+ for the production values; B- for everything else. (Amazon Prime)

TV Shows

• Beyond Paradise (season 4): The Death in Paradise spinoff continues. Light but likeable. I like it that not all the plots involve murders. (BritBox)
• Criminal Record (season 2): A gritty British Police procedural. More intense than the first season but not quite as good, though Peter Capaldi is great, as usual. (Apple TV)
• One Piece (seasons 1 & 2): A live action remake of a long-running anime series. Not very deep but fun to watch. (Netflix)
• Widow's Bay: This series starts out as a comedy following the mayor of a small town in Maine trying to get more tourist visits and shifts into a horror mode. I thought the comedy element was more successful.  (Apple TV)
• Blue Lights (season 3): A police procedural set in Belfast. Gripping and intense. One of the best examples of the genre. (BritBox)
• Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed: A comedic drama featuring the wonderful Tatiana Maslany (star of Orphan Black) "as a divorced fact checker who falls into a web of murder, blackmail, and youth soccer." Fast moving, funny, and worth watching just for Maslany's performance. (Apple TV)