Book Reviews

Murderbot Series by Martha Wells

July 25, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: Now that the main characters have been introduced, stories can be told.

I needed something to listen to as I was doing some mindless work and the first two books in this series were available to listen to from my library. The series starts out in the novella length (about 150 pages each) before getting a bit longer in the later books.

As a series that starts with novellas, each of the early books does build and feel like “chapters” of a larger story.

I won’t reveal too much about the books, but the first book introduces “Murderbot” the Artificial Intelligence in a part robot, part humanoid body which is described as a “construct”. As a construct, “Murderbot”, a security unit primarily working to protect human exploration or mining projects, is deemed expendable. The first two books describe how it freed itself from its software restrictions and reveal that it was actually free to do what it wants to the humans that it needed to save.

And then it escape from the planet and went on the run from the corporation that own it, all the while trying to investigate its own history and what had been wiped from its memory. These middle books (2 to 4) feels like a 1970 or 80s wandering hero tv show. The hero is on a quest, but along the way helps people who are in need of help.

The God Test Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning by Robert Wright

July 29, 2026July 24, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: An exploration of Artificial Intelligence through a evolutionary and metaphysical lens.

I am not particularly interested in AI. I do not trust it to handle important data. I have used it primarily to test it for handing data at work and I tested it in a few personal projects, like this blog. There is lots of evidence that we should not hand over important work to AI without testing the result. One of my tests I asked Claude to look at my blog. A couple years ago I changed hosts and a lot of my image links broke. I have been changing them as I linked to older reviews, but it was just not something I cared about enough to spend the time to change hundreds of images. But that is a good project for AI. So I had Claude identify what posts needed updated images, I title my posts the name of the book being reviewed, so I had clearly identified book. I told it to size the image about 200 by 300 pixels. It took a while to get the right access to my blog and it took a couple of passes before it finished, but it made about 700 images changes to my blog. The vast majority were good changes, exactly what I wanted. But I had a means to test, by going to the media page on my blog and just scanning the images for obvious errors. It took me about 90 minutes to change about 10% of the images. There was one random red car picture. There were a handful of covers that were the right title, but the wrong book. And a good number that were the wrong language cover or where an image of a random page or the title pages in stead of the cover image. But I also had about 10-12 that were a random cover of the book of Common Prayer.

I have done a number of other similar experiments. And pretty consistently AI can get it about 90% right. But 90% right isn’t good enough for my work and it isn’t good enough for many other people’s work. While there was a recent study that tested AI against law professors to see who better explained cases (the AI won), there have been hundreds of cases where judges have been sanctioning lawyers who use AI and don’t check the citations because AI so commonly hallucinates. All of that is to say, I generally am interested in tech, but I don’t trust AI.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

July 12, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A bad priest tries to evade the police during anti-Catholic persecution in early 20th century Mexico.

I read this for the first time about eight years ago. Before I read The Power and the Glory the first time I had already read Silence by Shusaku Endo two or three time and I knew about the broad thematic connections. I am not going to repeat myself about the connections between the two books, but I do think the books should be read together.

Both this time and last time I alternated between listening to the audiobook and reading the kindle edition. Last time the narrator was Bernard Mayes, a very British narrator who didn’t really match the low born Mexican priest from the early 20th century. The new narration by Johnny Rey Diaz published earlier this year I think is a better match to the content.

I slowly read this around several other books. I broadly remembered the story so I was trying to pay attention to how the story was structured and how the characters fit together. Largely the book follows the unnamed “whiskey priest,” but there are several other characters who are given first person perspectives. I wish some of those were developed more. They are largely present to give context to the setting and help the reader to know the thinking behind those who are after the priest. The young and ambitious lieutenant who is primarily leading the search for the priest opposes Catholicism because he believes it is hindering the development of the native Mexican population. There are vague accusations of abuse of the people by the priests (largely financial), but those are more abstract than personal. What is clear is that the police lieutenant believes he is doing the right thing.

The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel by Gary J. Dorrien

June 24, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A sweeping history of Black Social Gospel movement from the end of the Reconstruction through the 1930s.

This is the first of Gary Dorrien’s long books that I have read. I have read his memoir, which I think is one of his shortest books. And I took Homebrewed Christianity’s class on Gary Dorrien, Theology for Troublemakers. I have the second book in this trilogy as well as The Spirit of American Liberal Theology. But that is just scratching the surface of his writing. A friend I talked with last week recommended his The Remaking of Evangelical Theology and I want to many more including his book on Anglicanism.

I think that The New Abolition is going to be too long and detailed for many readers, but this is a nuanced history. There are a lot of players to the story, some that are fairly familiar like Booker T Washington, Walter White or Ida B Wells, but many are lesser known like Bishop Reverdy Ransom or educator Richard Wright.

Raphael Warnock’s book tells a shorter history of the tension in the Black church between personal piety and social activism, but this is a much thicker history that grapples with ways that often the same people changed over time. WEB DuBois argued against Washington’s accommodationist tendencies but at other times used very similar rhetoric. Washington preached accommodation, but also quietly supported more active community organizing. Many arguing against the white supremacy of the time still accepted some level of racial hierarchy. Similarly much of the Black Social Gospel movement was either patriarchal in its assumptions, or was in favor of women’s suffrage, but still assumed a gender hierarchy or opposed gender hierarchy had regular affairs. There was a number of the social gospel proponents who were holiness absolutists who had very high standards of morality that seem to suggest a type of politics of respectability which also assume hierarchical class assumptions. And it was fairly common in this history to see alcoholism, which I think is in part a trauma response to the reality of this history.

James by Percival Everett (2nd Reading)

June 23, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: Retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim.

I have hosted an online book club for about six years now. James was the first fiction book we have read and it was very well received. When we started most of the group had read Huck Finn, but no one had read Huck Finn within 20 or 30 years. (I had not read Huck Finn when the group started reading James.) As we read both myself and another person read Huck Finn. And as much as I did not like Huck Finn, I do think I understood James better because I read Huck Finn.

I am not going to repeat my previous post on James, but I am going to repeat that the act of discussing a book in a group will cause you to understand it more than reading it alone. (My one negative is that I pretty consistently have found that I love a book that I have read on my own, that I often like it less after reading it with a group.)

While much of the book is constrained by the framing of the original Huck Finn story, I was surprised by how much was different. In both Huck Finn and James, I kept being irritated by how naive Huck was portrayed in one scene and then how mature he was in another scene. I do think there is a sense of truth in that because teens can be both mature and childish. But I also think that this was a bit of a crutch because the a lot of racism was hidden in that naiveté.

Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead by C. Robert Mesle

June 13, 2026June 13, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: An intro to Process Philosophy.

As I have said a number of times, I don’t feel like I have a great philosophy background, especially modern philosophy. I picked up Process-Relational Philosophy after reading Thomas Oord’s A Systematic Theology of Love. Oord is a Process Theologian and as much as I thought his book was clearly written, I thought that I needed more understanding of process philosophy to better understand Oord’s positions.

Process-Relational Philosophy was the most recommended intro that I came across and I can see why. It was helpful and relatively short. And even thought it avoided the technical aspects of Whitehead in the main text (there is an appendix that attempts to get much more technical after the main text), I think that a good number of concepts were related well. My only complaint is that I think I wanted about 50% more book because I felt like it may have been too introductory. I think that after the descriptions of Oord and then the descriptions of Mesle, I think I can go back to Oord and reread it with better understand.

The Adventures of Huck Finn by Mark Twain

June 11, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A quest style adventure with a bit of satire.

Last year I read James by Percival Everett. This year my book group chose to read it and I decided that I needed to read Huck Finn as well. I have not previously read Huck Finn, and while a number of the group had read Huck Finn in school, no one had read it recently when we started. (Although two others read it as we read James, just like I did.)

I HATED Huck Finn. I like the book James. But I honestly can’t figure out why so many people love Huck Finn. Maybe it is simply that it was a young adult adventure book when that was fairly new and so people have fond memories of books that they read as children. I have reread a number of books as an adult that I remember fondly from my childhood. Some of them still work, but some do not.

Tom Sawyer is an awful character. I can’t read the end of Huck Finn with Tom Sawyer’s foolishness without wanting to throw the book across the room. There is no sense of Tom having thought for Jim as a person. While at times Huck has naive wisdom and plays like he knows the Duke and King were bad men, his continued desire to save them or go back to them did not make any sense. Huck at times treats Jim as human, but much of the time Jim is a pet.

All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries #1 by Martha Wells

June 11, 2026June 7, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: A sentient security robot who would rather watch soap operas than interact with humans, has to save the humans who are on his job from both the planet they are surveying, and those who are trying to keep the secrets of the planet.

I am in a season where I have too much data entry work to do, and I have been reading long heavy books recently. With the interest in Project Hail Mary and the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, I have been seeing a lot of social media posts asking for suggestions for science fiction books recently. A series that I have seen frequently recommended is the Murderbot series. All Systems Red is the first book and it was novella length and available from my library and I finished it in one morning.

The robot refers to themself as “murderbot” but doesn’t have a name. The narrator is male, but the book says they are not gendered as a security robot (only sexbots are gendered, the rest are not.)

After an accident where murderbot, I think accidentally, killed a bunch of people on a previous job, the robot figured out how to hack its security system so that it would not be required to follow orders from “the company”.

Bones at the Crossroads by LaDarrion Williams (Blood at the Root #2)

May 23, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: After the death of his grandmother and the revelation that his mother (who he thought was dead) is behind a number of murders, Malik tries to settle into college and figure out how to try to have a normal life.

Blood at the Root was a bit of a surprise hit. I read it about 9 months after it released and a number of friends or acquaintances had been recommending it. Blood at the Root was a very good opening fantasy book. There was good world building and character development. I alternated between ebook and audiobook for that first book and then I just listened to the audiobook for this second book.

This series is clearly producing audiobooks with the intent of drawing in the YA audience that is used to TV and movies. I don’t traditionally love sound effects and music in audiobooks because I think it often sounds cheesy. And there are definitely some aspects of the audiobook production that I think lean in (intentionally I think) to the cheese, especially during fight scenes where magic duels sounds like star wars blasters being shot back and forth.

As I skimmed through reviews on goodreads, there is a clear split between people who are five stars (“it was great”) and those who thought it dragged. I both really enjoyed it as a whole and thought that the middle dragged and that the book as a whole was trying to do too much. This is a second book and they need to develop differently from first books. I get the point of why it was slow in the middle. It was oriented toward character development and complicating the story by exploring the motivations for a variety of characters to keep them from becoming too cardboard. But I think this is where Ladarrion Williams shows that he is a fairly new writer. He is skilled in plotting and I think he has great intentions with writing a complex story, which I appreciate; but that complexity needs to be shown without as much explicit explication. I agree that the middle of the book drags. (The second book is about 1/3 longer than the first book and I think with some better editing it would have been better if it had kept to the length of the first book.)

For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional by Hanna Reichel

May 23, 2026May 6, 2026 by Adam Shields

Summary: Not really a devotional, but more of a Christian version of On Tyranny.

I listened to this as an audiobook. I put it on in my car and listened when I had short drives by myself. It wasn’t a “one chapter a day listening”, but it was roughly about a month of occasional listening.

My initial impression is that this is a book about discernment more than anything else. There are definitely chapters that are explicitly about discernment, but most chapters have some aspect of understanding the world how it is.

Hanna Reichel is a German academic and theologian with a history of studying the theological response to WWII. There is one other book she has in english about theological method, but otherwise her books and articles are in German. She most recently is a systematic theology professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. That matters to the context of this book because she is writing particularly to United States Christians from her background. She is widely familiar with Bonhoeffer and Barth and other Christians within Germany who responded to Hitler. I know that the comparisons between pre-WWII Germany and current US can be over played, but there are a number of academics who study Germany who think that the parallels are worth drawing, as this Bonhoeffer scholar does.

I saw that one reviewer on Goodreads suggested that this was a Christian version of On Tyranny and I thought the same as I was reading it. I thought On Tyranny was worth reading and I think this is worth reading. So that is not a complaint, but I think you need to know that going in, it is not a devotional in the traditional sense. Although the chapters are very short and devotional in length, each was about 5 to 7 minutes in audio.