Rest of the Robots - Isaac Asimov

A collection of Asimov stories with narrator previews is why I picked up this book. Asimov hand picks a very wide variety of stories from different publications to put together in this book.



The short stories in this book are all quick reads and related to the iRobot series of novels. The only common thread is that they all involve the US Robotics organization and enforce the 3 laws of robotics but the commonality stops there. The stories are fun quick reads and delve into a subjects such as interplanetary exploration, human psyche vs robot psyche and even robotics Law.

This a fun quick read with several short stories that don't fail to deliver a different perspective on the Dystopian future presented by Asimov.

The Forgotten Man - Amity Shales

The Great depression. Always been an interesting subject and the title of this book was very appealing to me. The whole idea of connecting Wall Street to Main Street and clearing the blurred lines between Macro and Micro is why I picked up this book as a read.


This book delivers what it says but not unfortunately not what I thought it would. This isn't a rosy narrative or a thorny narrative or any narrative at all. There's a basic outline that chronological but the characters are factual and the timeline stringent. I found it very hard to keep up with the story as the characters don't connect and the author drops of historical characters every other paragraph and just expects you to know who the person was in the 1920s.

There is an attempt to try and make this a simpler read but I warn anyone against the giant attention span and time to read this. You would need to be able to keep a notepad aside and spend large chunks of time trying to get through this and undoubtedly come out an expert on the other side but you'll be doin a lot of the analysis yourself, similar to reading a History book.

Churchill's ministry of ungentlemanly warfare - Giles Milton

The title of this book and the synopsis caught my eye and it doesn't disappoint. Based on the WW2 era this book dives into the background and execution of the idea that England's weakness in time's of war is that they engaged in 'Gentlemanly' warfare and never hit 'below the belt'.




Winston Churchill is not the center of this book but he certainly an important peripheral character that is the shadow enforcer for the entire premise of this book. That if England has any chance against nazi Germany, they would have to resort to ungentlemanly tactics. The answer was a scrappy team of mathematicians, engineers and scientists who changed the direction of the war. After the initial setup the book dives deeply into a few sabotage missions that this team performed which proved to be a real thorn in Hitlers side.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about the underdog, world war 2 or Churchill. This book is written with several comedic undertones with all the true to life characters and many times makes you feel like you were there. 

The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu

This is the second book in the trilogy of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem and a must read if you've read the first one and really pointless to pick up if you haven't.



This book picks up where the first one leaves off with a certain overlap in characters but that's not the anchor for the story. Whereas the first story just touches on the topic, this book has a much larger focus on the existential crisis of humans where we there's a inevitable and looming threat to our existence. There's a lot of great scientific breakthroughs and evolutionary concepts that this book gets into that is very different and fun to get into but then the book also touches on some very dark subjects that do get very disturbing.

I recommend this book to anybody who decides to get into the trilogy as this book is a great 2nd part and even though it starts off slowly it gets into some very interesting mix of futuristic action scenes and disturbing evolution of humanity in a crowded universe.

Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu

A Hugo award winner and a great sciences fiction book by a Chinese author. Enough of a tagline to pick up this book and then i saw this book recommended by Barack  Obama so I picked it up for a good read and very glad I did. Its very hard to describe what this book is about but I'll try anyway.


This was a very refreshing type of science fiction novel that deals with a not-so-distant future where we may make some scientific breakthroughs that may lead to first contact. I was sure that's what this book may be about but it very quickly evolves into a very realistic human element of how we would adopt ourselves to react to such a breakthrough. This also involves technological leaps that we make as a race with a new form of space race while still being, well Human.

Another different perspective was that it was written with the assumption that China is one of the leading superpowers and doesn't put USA in the middle of the story. I would highly recommend this book for sciences fiction fans and even to some who aren't since it deals with the existentialist crisis and a lot of philosophical questions that we may need to deal with as a race.

Armada - Ernest Cline

Written by the same author as 'Ready Player One' this seemed like a very interesting story. Even though the initial reviews were mediocre, I still decided to give it a chance.




Once the plot and main characters have been established you start to see a some similarities in the writing style between this book and 'Ready Player one', but this book does not compare. It's like a high-school dramedy that is extremely predictable and instead of interesting plot twists, the story only gets worse. The characters in the book also get progressively cheeky and the dialogue worse.

I believe the mediocre reviews for this one, and I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone really. One might say its a good read if you want to just pass the time but I wouldn't even say that.