By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes  Much like my rereading of Battleaxe and Enchanter , I was surprised by how little of Starman actually featured Axis (the titular "Starman").   Axis is there, obviously. He is central to the Prophecy and to the defeat of Gorgrael. But so much of what actually makes this novel work happens around him. It is about Azhure and Faraday. It is about the Sentinels and what we come to understand about them. It is about WolfStar gradually moving from this barely understood presence at the edges of the first book into someone who is actively reshaping how we understand the entire story. And I appreciate that much more now than I did when I first read these books. I remembered Starman as a novel of big events. There are battles with the Skraelings. There is the confrontation with Gorgrael. There are gods ascending, children being kidnapped, prophecies coming to fruition, and revelations about the history and magic of Tencendor. But rereading it, I...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes One of the things John Green consistently does well is tell stories that never lose sight of the people at their center. Everything Is Tuberculosis may be about one of humanity's oldest and deadliest infectious diseases, but it never lets tuberculosis become just a collection of statistics, historical milestones, or public health recommendations. Instead, Green carefully balances the long history of TB with the story of Henry, a young man from Sierra Leone, and it's through Henry's life that the realities of the disease become impossible to ignore. That balancing act makes Green's work so meaningful and enjoyable. He moves effortlessly between history, medicine, economics, and deeply personal storytelling. We get the data, the history, the facts, and the significance of tuberculosis on a global scale, but we also see what those realities mean for one person with dreams, relationships, and a future. Green even resists telling us Henry...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Selfless: The Social Creation of “You” begins with an idea that could easily become too philosophical or abstract: the self is not something sealed inside us. It is real, but it is also continually constructed and informed by things we can see and things we do not even realize are impacting us. I had some hesitation at the start about whether Brian Lowery’s argument would remain too theoretical. Fairly quickly, though, he grounds it in universal and easily accessible examples. He makes the argument clear, useful, and connected to day-to-day life. His writing helped me further articulate something that has become part of my operating system. Lowery’s ideas reminded me of Sam Sommers’s Situations Matter , Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind , and especially Nicholas Christakis’s Connected . All of these books, in different ways, challenge the idea that we are self-contained individuals. Selfless did not necessarily give me something those books did n...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes One of my first responses to rereading Enchanter after decades away from it was: wow, Axis is a dick. I don’t think that’s necessarily a failure on Sara Douglass’s part. In fact, I think she does it on purpose. But reading this as an adult rather than as a teenager or even in my early twenties, I was much less impressed by the way Axis deals with both Azhure and Faraday. He feels compelled by both of them, knows his own mind but refuses to own up to it, and can’t simply be honest with the two women in his life. For a character who has to fight his brother to the death and somehow unite three races that have been at odds with one another, it’s strange that emotional honesty is apparently beyond him. That contrast is on the more interesting parts of Enchanter , the middle novel in Douglass's Axis trilogy .  The first book is largely about Axis discovering who he is and finding his parents. Enchanter is about him building on that discovery, for go...

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes This has been cross-posted on my Substack . Awards are strange things. I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be in this spot at this time in my career . From the moment I received the call about receiving this award, it’s been surreal; much like what the last few years of my career have felt like. On the one hand, I get it and can see why these opportunities and moments have come about. I have fifteen years of accumulative practice, involvement, and relationship-building which creates a lot of compound interest of opportunities.   There’s immense appreciation in being acknowledged for your work; there’s deep joy in celebrating with family, friends, and colleagues; and there’s real humility in being seen in ways you (or at least, I), don’t always expect to be seen. For me, there’s also ambiguity with these feelings because they are also tempered by: a sense of randomness that in another year with a different pool (of nominations and judges) wou...

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Yiyun Li’s boldness in Things in Nature Merely Grow sits with me long after reading, p articularly her willingness to grapple with the suicide of her son James without giving in to deep emotional wailing. That kind of emotional outpouring would be entirely valid, and there should be books that approach grief that way. But Li does something different. She examines the loss with method and intention, trying to reach what she calls radical acceptance: there is nothing she can do to undo James’s death, so what can she do to accept and memorialize him? That question feels even more powerful because James was Li’s second child to die by suicide. She had already lost her son Vincent and written about that loss ( Where Reasons End ). Now, she has to confront James’s death without pretending that Vincent isn’t already part of her experience as a parent. James and Vincent were part of the same family, and Li cannot write this second book without having written ...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes I came to The King’s Fifth in a roundabout way. As a kid, I watched this quirky animated show called The Mysterious Cities of Gold . Almost nobody else seemed to know it existed. I think I’ve met maybe two or three people in my entire life who watched it. But it stuck with me, and it probably had as much influence on me as Star Wars, for I remember watching it ceaselessly when I could. Decades later, watching a YouTube video about the show , I discovered that it was very, very loosely based on Scott O’Dell’s The King’s Fifth , a children's historical novel from 1966. The novel’s Esteban Sandoval is very different. He’s a fifteen-year-old mapmaker who gets pulled into an expedition by Captain Mendoza, a man obsessed with finding the legendary cities of gold. We already have some sense of where this is going as the story moves from the present to the past.  In the present, Esteban is imprisoned in Veracruz, awaiting trial for failing to deliver...

Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes So it's that time again. For those tuning in, each year on my birthday, I do a bit of account and reflecting on the year. This is year #10. You can check out previous years below: 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 As always, the details: Home : Cranston, RI Relationship status : Married (12+ years) Cats Owned : 3 (Bear, Imani, & Buster) Other Pets : 0 Degrees earned : 6 (1 PhD, 3 masters, 1 bachelor, 1 associate) Reading since September 13, 2025 : 265 (Latest reads can always be found on Goodreads ) Work : Senior Associate Director of AI in Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University (full-time) Consultant Facilitator, Speaker Weight : 235.1 pounds Longest Distance Run This Year : 12 miles Fastest Pace This Year : 9:13 minutes (for 3.36 miles) Runs in the last year : 219 Miles run in the last year : 1085 miles Miles on the bicycle in the last year : 332 miles Blog Posts on Blogger in the last year: 21 Blog Posts on my Substack : 56 ...