Honestly, it's hard for me to evaluate this book since I am neither a designer nor a person with disabilities. What I can say is that it presents a fresh, punky attitude towards disabilities and assistive technologies, arguing that anything used by person more or less constantly (hearing aid, wheelchair, artificial limb...) must be not just effective in a medical/engineering sense, but also pleasurable and expressive. The book is glossy, a little unbalanced, a manifesto rather than a plan, but it's provocative and very fun.

This is a book that needs no introduction. The Hobbit is the progenitor of pretty much all modern fantasy, even more than the Lord of the Rings it is the prototypical adventure tale. Middle Earth is both epic and intimate. The sentences sparkle and shine like elven jewels, the whole of the book intricately constructed like a coat of dwarven mail.

If you don't love the hobbit, you're no friend of mine.

The question of "what did Heinlein really think?" is open to debate. Is he a free love hippie, a la Stranger in a Strange Land? The ur-fascist militarist of Starship Troopers? The staunch survivalist of Time Enough for Love? The creepy racist and incest fan of books which shall not be mentioned?

I think that the 'real Heinlein' is on display here, in Space Cadet. Sure, it's one of his juveniles, but it deal with big issues, like what kind of people and institutions can be trusted to police a solar system and control forces which could wipe out all of humanity. The main characters are appealingly competent, well-meaning problem-solvers who through ingenuity, endurance, and diplomacy overcome the hazards of Space Patrol training, the asteroid belt, and the swamps of Venus. The book is solidly hard sci-fi, some hand-waving aside (waste products from nuclear rockets, the short range of radios, swamps on Venus), both in technology and sociology.

Now, the only open question I have is, is this a better book than Have Spacesuit, Will Travel?

One sentence review: cost-benefit analysis should be used for everything.
Second sentence review: because it means you can avoid real policy analysis by reducing everything to money at the highest levels and telling somebody else to do the important work.
Third sentence review: if every economics department in the country were to catch on fire, would anybody care?

The last book in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, a return to form for Douglas Adams, and all told, my favorite volume in the series. Perfect blend of humor, pathos, philosophy, and finishes with a bang.

Microscope describes itself as "a fractal role-playing game of epic histories." This is a big claim, perhaps insanely ambitious, but Microscope might just be able to pull it off. I haven't had a chance to play Microscope, so this based just on reading the text, but that said:

I've theorized roleplaying games as about Structured Negotiation. In that regard, Microscope gives you a very powerful and elegant way to narratively generate histories. The nested structure of Period-Event-Scene intuitively let players control the scale of the game. Scenes, the core roleplaying bits, are cleverly framed by use of a Question which must be decided. The rules themselves give a lot of power to each player in turn, demanding contributions from everybody in the hotseat, and discouraging collaboration and play by consensus. Your epic history is supposed to be a spiky mess.

Where I am less sure about Microscope is it's ability to resolve impasses, when players disagree or have no good idea. The game is a little shaky on how long (in real time) everything is supposed to take. Like most story games, tMicroscope needs a high trust, imaginative groups.

Regardless, I'm very excited to get a chance to play Microscope and see how it works.

This might be the best of the Blue Ant trilogy; a densely woven and deeply paranoiac take on the early 21st century, again centered around the enigmatic Hubertus Bigend and the krewe of misfits he collects around himself, in furtherance of incredibly abstruse ends.

What separates this one from the others is that Gibson finally takes the trilogy full gonzo. The previous two books I read and thought something like "That's it? I see weirder stuff in my inbox before breakfast." I refuse to spoil Zero History, but finally the objects of desire are worthy of Gibson's innate weirdness.

As always, the language is a masterpiece of materiality, the perfect post-industrial rendering of designs and artefacts. The characters, are, well, Gibson characters, but then you read these books for the sentences, and the sparks of strangeness that seem to be ripped from the headlines.

This is the complete history of the Red Eagles, a squadron of American pilots that flew MiGs to train other pilots how to fight the Russians and their clients. Davies apparently interviewed almost everyone associated with the Red Eagles, and left no stone unturned. On the downside, this means lots of boring details about changes in command. But buried in the mass of the book are real nuggets of military history gold: black bureaucracy, fighter pilot hijinks, the difficulties of maintaining Russian aircraft without the benefit of spares or manuals, and of course, the stone-cold badassery of the pilots who went up in these airplanes day after day, and mostly brought them back home through the worst conditions. I won't spoil the good bits in this review, but the MiG-23 is just not a good airplane, and it is amazing that it only killed one American.

What to say about this book? Nothing good, definitely. It starts with a fairly serious if whimsical question, "What is it like to be a thing?" (shades of Thomas Nagel), but loses itself in a cavalcade of irrelevant philosophical flatulence.

As an STS scholar, I take the equivalence of human beings and things seriously. Bruno Latour's Parliament of Things actually sounds like an interesting idea. But even if we erase the divide between human and non-human, there still seem to be some bifurcations in the world: things and signs, atoms and bits, entities with intentional stances and those capable solely of reaction. A philosopher should examine these common-sensical distinctions, and the ways in which they are wrong. A true unitary theory would be a wonder. That is not in this book.

I'd hoped to see an approach by which we might approach the existence and quality of things: objects, technologies, artifacts, and so-called nature. Instead, Bogost throws out a few sparkling bon-mots in a sea of disconnected anecdotes and generally sloppy thinking. A subject that should be approached with immense care is treated with disrespect.

The only reason I finished this book was to honestly describe how bad it was.