Books I've read. March '26
Another batch of book reviews - 14 books this time, the longest list yet!
The list is longer than usual this time - partly because I got carried away with a few authors, and partly because it has been a rather eventful year.
Previous posts in this series:
And this time I will talk about the following books:
- “The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone” by Olivia Laing
- “Kremulator” by Sasha Filipenko
- “A Hat Full of Sky” by Terry Pratchett
- “Going Postal” by Terry Pratchett
- “The Quantum Thief” by Hannu Rajaniemi
- “The Fractal Prince” by Hannu Rajaniemi
- “The Causal Angel” by Hannu Rajaniemi
- “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages” by Bruce Tate
- “Thud!” by Terry Pratchett
- “I hate apple trees” by Chylik
- “Wintersmith” by Terry Pratchett
- “The Futurological Congress” by Stanisław Lem
- “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life” by Marshall Rosenberg
- “Making Money” by Terry Pratchett
“The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone” by Olivia Laing
I was recovering from a difficult divorce when I read this book. I am also an immigrant living far from my home country, so loneliness is something I know quite well. Because of all that, the topic of this book felt very personal to me.
Olivia Laing moved to New York for a relationship that then fell apart, and she ended up completely alone in a huge foreign city. Instead of writing a self-help book about it, she started exploring loneliness through art and the lives of artists - Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz. Hopper’s paintings of isolated figures in lit rooms, Warhol’s compulsive collecting as a substitute for closeness - she reads all of it as different ways of coping with the same feelings. Each of them dealt with isolation in their own way, and Laing tries to understand how that shaped their work.
What I liked most is that she doesn’t treat loneliness as a personal failure or something to overcome. It is just a part of being human, and sometimes - it is shaped by circumstances way beyond your control. That way of looking at loneliness resonated with me at the time.
“Kremulator” by Sasha Filipenko
This book is based on real archival materials about Pyotr Nesterenko - a former White Army officer who became an NKVD agent in Paris and eventually the first director of the Moscow crematorium, built in 1927.
During the years of Stalin’s mass repressions, Nesterenko worked double shifts - cremating ordinary citizens by day, and the victims of the “black vans” by night. And in 1941, the van came for him too.
It is a very dark and heavy book. Filipenko does not try to make the story comfortable or to explain away what happened - he just shows it, and that makes it hit harder. If you are interested in Soviet history and its darker chapters, this book is worth reading.
“A Hat Full of Sky” by Terry Pratchett
In my previous post I wrote about “The Wee Free Men” and said I couldn’t wait to continue the Tiffany Aching sub-series. So here we are.
This is the second book about Tiffany. She is now eleven and leaves home to apprentice under a proper witch named Miss Level. But soon she gets possessed by a hiver - an ancient creature that has no consciousness of its own and just takes over the minds of others. The Nac Mac Feegle, as always, are around to cause chaos and help.
The book is a bit darker than the first one. Tiffany has to face something she cannot fight with her hands or her cleverness, which forces her to grow in a different way. There is also more of Granny Weatherwax here, which is always a good thing. I enjoyed it a lot!
“Going Postal” by Terry Pratchett
This is the first book in the Moist von Lipwig sub-series. Moist is a con artist who gets caught and is about to be executed, but Lord Vetinari fakes his death and offers him a choice - run the city’s long-dead post office, or disappear forever. And Moist takes the post office.
What follows is a story about a charming, creative liar who has to figure out how to actually build something instead of just scamming people. The book is also a sharp satire on corporate greed - the main villain is essentially a corrupt tech monopolist running the city’s telegraph network. It feels surprisingly relevant. I really liked this book. Moist is one of Pratchett’s best characters, and the whole book is full of great ideas and humor.
GNU John Dearheart. GNU Terry Pratchett.
“The Quantum Thief” by Hannu Rajaniemi
Hannu Rajaniemi is a Finnish author, so this is probably the first book by a Finnish writer I have read if we don’t count Kalevala and the Moomin books I read as a kid. This is sci-fi set in a far-future solar system. The main character is Jean le Flambeur, a legendary thief who is broken out of a simulated prison and taken to a city on Mars to pull off a heist. The world is dense with ideas - post-human civilizations, uploaded minds, programmable privacy, cities that move across the Martian surface. Technically it is sci-fi, but the technologies described feel more like magic than science - nobody explains how any of it works, it just does.
There are also many references to Finnish mythology, culture, and language throughout the book. Quite a few names are literally Finnish words, which makes the setting feel even stranger if you happen to recognize them.
The book is quite difficult to read. Rajaniemi gives you almost no explanations and just throws you into the world. For the first third of the book I was often confused about what exactly was happening. But it does eventually click, and the payoff is worth the effort. The world he built is genuinely impressive and unlike most things I have read before.
“The Fractal Prince” by Hannu Rajaniemi
The second book in the trilogy about Jean le Flambeur. Jean and Mieli travel to Earth, which is now a post-apocalyptic desert world where people live in city-states and share stories as a kind of currency and survival tool. The book is structured like One Thousand and One Nights - stories within stories within stories - which fits both the setting and Rajaniemi’s style well.
It is less disorienting than the first book, partly because you are already used to how he writes. There is more action, the plot moves faster, and the last part of the book brings a lot of things together in a satisfying way. I enjoyed it more than the first one, actually.
“The Causal Angel” by Hannu Rajaniemi
The third and final book in the trilogy. Jean and Mieli are separated after the events of the previous book, and the story this time focuses more on Mieli than on Jean - her past, her motivations, and how her fate ties into everything. The whole conflict between the different post-human factions finally comes to a head.
It is a satisfying conclusion. Not everything is explained neatly, which is very much in the spirit of the whole trilogy. After three books you stop expecting clarity and just go with it. Overall I am glad I read the whole series - it is one of the most imaginative and original things I have read in a long time, even if it demands a lot of patience during the reading.
“Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages” by Bruce Tate
The book takes seven programming languages - Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell - and gives you a quick but meaningful introduction to each one in about a week of study. The idea is not to make you proficient in all of them, but to expose you to different paradigms and ways of thinking about programming.
I was already familiar with most of the languages in the book - Ruby, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell to varying degrees. So for me the most interesting parts were the chapters on Io and Prolog, which I had never worked with before. Io is a tiny prototype-based language where everything is an object and you just send messages around - very minimalist and quite elegant in a strange way. Prolog was even more mind-bending - it is so different from everything else that it forces you to think about problems in a completely different way.
If you are a developer who mostly works in one or two languages, this book is worth reading just to broaden your perspective a bit.
“Thud!” by Terry Pratchett
Another City Watch book. The anniversary of the ancient Battle of Koom Valley is coming up - a legendary battle between dwarfs and trolls that both sides claim the other started. Tensions between the two races are boiling over in Ankh-Morpork, and then a dwarf gets murdered. Vimes has to investigate while trying to stop the city from tearing itself apart.
The book is essentially about how ancient ethnic hatred is kept alive by those who benefit from it, and how history gets twisted to serve those purposes. Pratchett handles it with his usual humor but also with real weight. One of the better City Watch book.
“I hate apple trees” by Chylik
It is a collection of short surreal comic stories built around absurd humor and unexpected ideas. The comic does not follow a single storyline. Instead, each episode presents a strange or ironic situation that often ends with a subtle observation about everyday life.
The drawings are intentionally simple (like all the works of this author), which fits well with the minimalistic and slightly bizarre storytelling style. Rather than focusing on visuals or action, the comic relies on atmosphere, irony, and unusual concepts, making it a small but memorable piece of Belarusian internet creativity.
“Wintersmith” by Terry Pratchett
The third Tiffany Aching book. Tiffany accidentally steps into an ancient ritual dance between the Wintersmith - the spirit of winter - and the Summer Lady. The Wintersmith becomes obsessed with her, starts making it snow roses and snowflakes shaped like her face, and generally causes a lot of problems. Tiffany has to find a way to fix what she broke while also figuring out what it means to actually be a witch.
It is a warmer and funnier book than the previous one, despite being literally about winter. The Nac Mac Feegle appear again, which is always fun.
“The Futurological Congress” by Stanisław Lem
Ijon Tichy, Lem’s recurring protagonist, travels to a futurological congress in Costa Rica. A revolution breaks out, everyone gets exposed to psychedelic drugs in the water supply, and Tichy wakes up in a future where the entire population is kept in a permanently drugged state - living in a comfortable hallucination while reality underneath is bleak and falling apart. The book peels back layer after layer of false reality, which gets disorienting in a very deliberate way.
It is a sharp satire on consumerism, pharmaceuticals, and the idea that people would rather be happy and deceived than unhappy and free. Written in 1971, it feels very relevant today. Short book, easy to read in one sitting, and worth it.
“Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life” by Marshall Rosenberg
The book describes a communication framework built around four steps: observing a situation without judgment, identifying feelings, identifying the underlying needs, and making a concrete request. It sounds simple, but in practice most of us skip all of that and go straight to blame or criticism.
I found it useful. Probably worth reading if you have ever felt that conversations with people tend to go wrong in the same way every time.
“Making Money” by Terry Pratchett
The second book about Moist von Lipwig. Vetinari decides that the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork needs fixing and that Moist is the right person for the job. The bank is controlled by a corrupt old family and, technically, by a small dog who inherited the majority share. Moist knows nothing about banking, but as with the post office, that turns out to be more of an advantage than a problem.
If you liked “Going Postal”, you will like this one too. Same character, same kind of story, same humor.
That’s all for now
Fourteen books in one post is a lot to take in - even for me writing it. Some of them stayed with me longer than others, and I tried to capture at least a trace of that feeling in each review. As always, I won’t promise anything about the next post in this series, but I’ll try not to let another year slip by.