In the last Physics Blogging Round-Up post I did here, I commented that it may have looked like I was turning into a book review blogger. Then I didn’t post anything for about six months…

I’ve recently dusted off the Forbes blog for a couple more book reviews:

— The Light Ages by Seb Falk: A book about medieval science, and if that sounds like an oxymoron to you you really ought to read the book.

— Hawking Hawking by Charles Seife: An unauthorized bio of Stephen Hawking that didn’t quite work for me.

The long silence is work-related: I was team-teaching a new course on quantum computing, which involved a whole lot of work to stay just ahead of the students, I had to do edits on A Brief History of Timekeeping, and I had a ton of administrative work to do in my Director position, made worse by, you know, the global pandemic. It’s been an interesting year, in the apocryphal-Chinese-curse sense.

The reason I’m doing book reviews specifically is maybe-interesting, though; enough for a light blog post, anyway. In part, it’s the fault of politics: the election of 2020 was so stressful that on the night the returns started coming in, I turned off my phone, grabbed the non-connected iPod and our copy of A Night in the Lonesome October and read a paper book completely offline. Which was maybe the smartest thing I did the whole election season– I was sooooo much less freaked out in the coming weeks of counting than I would’ve been had I watched returns come in live on election night.

This made me realize that reading paper books was a good anti-doomscrolling tactic, and so I’ve intermittently been doing that at bedtime rather than reading stuff on my phone. I don’t always have the mental energy for it, but when I do it’s a whole lot better.

I’ve mostly been reading pop-science books during this phase because I’ve had a horrible case of “reader’s block” at the same time: I keep looking at the ebooks we have and going “ugh, I don’t want to read any of this…” That predates the pandemic to some degree, but has been exacerbated by it because bookstores were either closed or felt unsafe. I used to discover a lot of stuff by just going to the local big-box store and looking through the SF section shelves to see what new hardcovers were out, then order the ebooks of any that seemed good.

Without that browsing, I don’t really have a great way to discover new stuff that’s interesting to me. The kind of thing that’s generating most of the buzz these days doesn’t appeal to me, and for some reason all the recommendation algorithms on bookseller apps suck now. I’ve gotten and liked a few things in the “latest book by known author” vein, but outside of that, it’s been kind of bleak.

Pop-science, on the other hand, remains pretty good for discoverability. In part because I’m known as an author and a blogger who does occasional reviews, so publishers send me press releases, and offer me free review copies of things. And, you know, I can then write reviews that serve as blog content. So it’s been a good stretch for non-fiction reading– I’ve got another half-dozen recent reads in the queue to write about .

Now that Kate and I are both vaccinated, and things are opening up a bit more, I can probably start going to bookstores again, so might work in some more fiction. Which still leaves the problem of the buzzy stuff not being to my tastes, and the stuff I like not being talked about, but that’s for another day…