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Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Readable, cutesy scifi. Weir writes with the same constipated wittiness of John Scalzi, which unfortunately makes the book nowhere near as good as it sounds. 

All the characters are basically the same character, they all speak the same way, and "wow," "noted," "it's a thing!" and "or something" are standard dialog items. This author can tell a competent story but he can't (yet) produce interesting characters.

A reader looking for a significant recent sci-fi work (like Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem) would be deeply disappointed with this novel.

There is one interesting MacGuffin-type device in this book worth mentioning: by giving his main character amnesia, the author has the magical ability to endow him with any technical skill or technical knowledge he needs: just narrate (or have the main character himself "realize") that he already knew it before. For example, if the main character needs to do a spacewalk, make him already highly trained at it, and then have the amnesiac character say to himself "I must have practiced this a lot." It's an interesting device that gives the author much more flexibility to deal with plotting problems, but it flattens the main character into a type of a Mary Sue (or "Competent Man") with superpowers.

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The Dhandho Investor by Mohnish Pabrai

Worth reading, and rereading, and re-rereading. An elegant book that teaches fundamental principles of value investing, and much more. The Dhandho Investor  also has the highly unusual quality of being useful at a wide range of reader sophistication levels: you can gain tremendously from this book as a beginner or as a deeply experienced investor. I'll single out Chapters 5 and 6 for particular mention: Chapter 5 describes author Mohnish Pabrai's investing framework, with nine interlocking and synchronistic rules. Chapter 6 describes in very simple language all of the gigantic structural advantages of investing in the stock market, as it offers low frictional costs, a tremendous selection of possible businesses, and, most importantly, periodic incredible opportunities. These two chapters explain why you will take a pass on almost all investments--but then, once in a while, make large bets on specific situations that meet your requirements. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon ...
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Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all  "riddled" with errors  and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead  Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction  by J. Allan Hobson  for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as  Restful Sleep  by Deepak Chopra  for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences  on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...
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By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy by Michael G. Vickers

The least deceptive way to read this endless, muddled and minutia-laden memoir would be to view it as a very long piece of propaganda: a type of limited hangout of all of the covert (and overt) things the United States does globally in its attempts to project power. It can also be read as an attempt at an extended--and I mean extended --defense of the CIA and all of its meddlings all over the world. This is if you actually read the book. Don't. Piled up with words but saying little of substance, this is the most obfuscatory memoir I've ever read. The author's voice fundamentally irritates: he has a compulsive need to share staggering amounts of unnecessary detail, he comes across as a relentless credit hog, and he repeatedly attempts to place himself right in the middle of the action--even when it's clear he wasn't. Perhaps least ethical of all, he has a habit of framing his actions and decisions so they appear more correct and predictive in retrospect than they ac...
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