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Book Cover Subtitled, Life is What You Make It, this is a book about making things.  It has many, many other components though.  It is partly a memoir of the author's career.  It is partly a book about management, especially the end of Chapter 4 which covers delegation and the importance of communication.  It is also very instructional, in that it prescriptively lays out a number of best practices for making, along with illustrative stories of why these practices are so important....

Book cover Set before the first prequel movie, this book follows Jedi Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, and his Jedi Apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi, on a diplomatic mission set forth by the Jedi council.  They are sent to a planet, Pijal, that we haven't seen before, which really is a great way to see the author's creativity. We are presented with a wide array of new characters on this new world, like the Jedi Rael Averross, who has been the regent of Pijal for the last 8 years, and the escaped slave Rahara Wick....

Book Cover Every once in a while, I try to get in a review of a classic.  Something that some of my readers are likely to have read themselves.  I do this, mostly, to help readers calibrate my taste...  That is, it seems likely enough that some readers are likely to disagree with everything I like, and might find it compelling to read a book that I really didn't like....

Book cover This short book (novella) is the first in the trilogy.  Binti is the name of the main character.  This book starts on a distant future (unspecified timeline) Earth where humans are now space-faring, and alien races are known. There is a lot to unpack in the world-building and the world is built along with the story.  Each chapter is unusually episodic, in that some small part of the last scene of a previous chapter will be often be repeated at the beginning of the next....