I really like John Scalzi’s writing. He has serious scifi which I enjoy. But I mostly enjoy his humorous stuff that tends to be great on audiobook when I have a long day of mindless database work. I listened to this over the course of two days almost non-stop.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a ridiculous concept. One day, the moon turns to cheese. The reason is never discovered. Scalzi takes a silly idea and runs with it. Each chapter is one day. Mostly focused on different characters who mostly do not come back up in the rest of the book. (But some do.)

I don’t think method this would work for a lot of books. There isn’t enough character development or the plot becomes too convoluted to pull so many characters together. But it works here. The potential apocalypse that can come about because of the turning to cheese has lots of threads to work on.

When The Moon Hits Your Eye is mostly scifi humor. But there are serious parts. There are threads about conspiracy theories. Economics and the global trade and banking systems falling apart is taken seriously. Individuals have to grapple with marriage and love and vocation and what it would be like to face the end of the world. There is a chapter mostly about what this would mean to people of faith. And a chapter about how we know things would be called into question when something that doesn’t seem to be possible seems to happen. But also there are lots of chapters about how people just keep living in the midst of everything.

I think it went on a little bit too long. And I hope this format isn’t used again by Scalzi because I really like books about characters that I get to know. But looking back at it, I don’t know what I would cut because even though many of the chapters were not “necessary” for the story, each of them helped to round out a different facet of life in a way that I would not want to cut.

I listened to this on audiobook. Wil Wheaton narrated as he does with many of Scalzi’s humorous books. Wheaton is a good narrator for Scalzi, he has just enough snark and pacing to get the humor without over doing it. If I had to recommend only one Scalzi book, I would suggest Starter Villain for humor or Old Man’s War for traditional scifi. But I still recommend this one as a solid book worth reading.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

Every month Amazon gives away a handful of new releases to drum up reviews and interest. I don’t always look, but it can be worth checking out. The Oxford Detective Society was a free book in July 2026 with a formal release date of August 1, 2026.

The Oxford Detective Society is primarily about Lyssa Moore. An Oxford trained writer who occasionally accepts writing commissions or ghostwriting jobs. She is also a relatively recent widow still grieving the death of her young husband from an undiagnosed congenital heart defect.

The current job is to write a biography about a young aristocrat who helped fund and guide a 60s pop group toward stardom. She and the lead singer were a couple, but things started falling apart when first he died of an apparent drug overdose and she died not too long after in what appeared to be an accidental drowning in her garden pond.

This is a very straightforward mystery that is clearly the set up of a series. The society is about the group of friends in her building that seem to all hang out quite a bit. But there was not a significant involvement from them in solving the mystery. The characters were mostly likable and the action reasonable. I would have like a bit more depth to the story. There were a few red herrings, but the actual solution was fairly predictable.

I did preorder the second book in the series, but that doesn’t come out until April 2027 (the preorder was only $3.99 on kindle). I mostly like mysteries for the characters over time. This has a cast of characters and there is some space for growth, so I will give it another book or so because while it was an enjoyable light cozy read, it also was not hugely memorable.

The Oxford Detective Society by Faith Martin: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

Summary: The classic story translated by Emily Wilson, narrated by Claire Danes.

I have been preparing to go see Nolan’s version of the Odyssey for the past several weeks. First I read Stephen Fry’s retelling and then I mostly listened but also read a bit of Emily Wilson’s translation narrated by Claire Danes. I have listened to her narrate The Handmaid’s Tale and she has a fairly flat reading style that works for some kinds of fiction but not others. I think it works here.

Wilson translated The Odyssey into verse. Not all version do, some are prose. Generally I think that narrative verse should be listened to. I think that is the case in my favorite verse book, Brown Girl Dreaming. and it is the case with Malcom Guite’s Galahad and the Grail, which I am also reading right now. I tend to get both kindle and audiobook editions because I want to get a sense of the written version of the verse. So I do read about 10 percent of the book. But I mostly listen because these are intended to be heard.

I am not going to get into arguments about the quality of Wilson’s verse or whether Nolan’s version was a good adaptation. I am just not qualified for either of those arguments. Wilson fit the story into verse, there were artistic choices there and some content was shaved to make it fit into verse. Nolan was also adapting a story that has many versions to the screen and also made artistic and stylistic choices. Personally I think it is an artistic masterpiece that also had real misses in some of the choices. Visually I think it was very interesting. I liked the twin themes of grief about war and the concern about how his actions in war led to the larger rejection of “Zeus’ Law” and while I understand how that adapts the original story, I think it makes sense of a modern adaptation. At the same time, I thought Matt Damon’s performance was a bit too flat. And that I wanted the ethics to be a bit more foreign to our modern sensibilities. Not in a way that horrifies us, but rather in a way that shows the ancients as alien to our thinking.

Many people are broadly familiar with this story. But I think the most familiar parts, the Cyclops, the sirens, the whirlpool are not remembered as being such small parts of the book. All three are part of what Odysseus is telling people after the fact when he is acting as his own bard. As one person I saw said, he should be considered one of the first unreliable narrators. I saw someone complaining about how long it too for it to be the real story home (they were insinuating that the book was about Odysseus and therefore of course it would start with his story.) But it is well into the book before Odysseus is really a character in the narrative. We need to understand the scene first. The trojan war, and Armageddon’s death and the displeasure of the gods matter to why it is that Odysseus is losing men and spending time not making much progress.

I do want to read some other versions of the story by other authors (not just other translators). Virgil, Ovid and others also have their own versions and I think some of the complaints about Nolan’s adaptation is that he does draw on other sources, not just Wilson’s version of Homer.

I am not capable of judging the quality of translation, but I think this is a very readable version and I think Danes did a good job narrating. It is worth picking up.

The Odyssey by Homer translated by Emily Wilson Purchase Links: Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

We are preparing to watch The Odyssey. We wanted to watch on IMAX and when we were buying tickets the best option was more than two weeks away. I am pretty sure I have never read a straight translation of The Odyssey, but I have read or seen a ton of adaptations. Some of those adaptations are pretty straightforward like O Brother Where Art Thou? and Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan .

I have also read books “based-on” the Odyssey like Circe by Madeline Miller. But there are those that I didn’t identify as being inspired by the Odyssey, but I have found since that they were, like Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmin Ward and Cold Mountain by Charles Martin. But I think probably more common is the number of books that uses references to the Odyssey, like Daughter of Rage and Ruin by K. B. Hoyle. That book is a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, but she still references Cyclops as another famous giant as part of the quest. Many of Hoyle’s books are based on quests and so almost all of them in some way reference The Odyssey.

While Fry’s Odyssey isn’t a translation, it is a pretty straightforward retelling, with a few asides, some explanations built into the main text, and some humor. If you have previously read The Odyssey and want a better refresher than wikipedia, this might be right for you. I know Stephen Fry from his audiobook narration of Harry Potter and other books. And it was on sale on Audible so I picked it up because I was not sure I could get through the original before I saw the movie.

I did make it through, and while I don’t regret it, I realize that what I wanted was the original because I have a decent familiarity with the rough story. What is helpful here is that the timeline and the main points are well covered. I think I will understand the original more because I have read this. I am going to see if I can get through all or most of Wilson’s translation before next Sunday.

Odyssey: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

About three months ago I read Thomas Jay Oord’s recently released A Systematic Theology of Love. I was very impressed with it. It is clearly written. It has a very good critique of the lack of attention to love within systematic theology, rightly pointing out that most systematic theology is oriented toward sovereignty, knowledge or power. And I think most important for me, I think his critique that many Christians talk about God’s love of us in a way that doesn’t particularly seem loving.

That being said, with very few exceptions, I think the clarity of the writing meant that a second reading did not really give me more insight or better answer my questions or concerns about his project. I think many of them will become more clear with the next two books of the trilogy. But those are not out yet and it will be at least two more years before they are out. I do think that some of the solutions being proposed for the problems that Oord is identifying are helpful. But I also think some introduce new and serious problems to his systematic theology. That being said I don’t think that as a lay person, I am going to be able to identify all of the problems, especially before the next two parts are out. I really do recommend this regardless of whether you find open and relational theology helpful because it is so clearly written and laid out.

One format note, The kindle edition (and I presume the paper) has three parts and is 507 pages of content. The audiobook version on Audible only includes the first two part of that and is 10.5 hours of narration. There is a note in the audiobook that says a second part of the audiobook will be sold separately, but it is not available on Audible yet. The audiobook was released on Audible in February 2026 and the Kindle edition was released March 1, 2026. So I am not sure that the second part of the audiobook is going to be released anytime soon. While the narration is done by Oord and is decent there are a few minor editing issues. I would just buy the kindle edition or paperback edition for now.

A Systematic Theology of Love, Volume 1: God and Creation by Thomas Jay Oord Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

In 2012, I posted about Thin Blue Smoke being my favorite novel of the year. I wasn’t alone, Englewood Review of Books also had it as their favorite novel that year. About 18 months ago I ran across Doug Worgul on BlueSky. I reread Thin Blue Smoke because of that connection and just over a year ago he sent me an early edition of The Night Office for comment. I made comments, but I loved the book and was invited to blurb the book. (My blurb is 3rd in the ebook version.)

I missed that it was released in June and stumbled across The Night Office looking for something else. I bought a copy immediately but didn’t have time to pick it up until I got back from vacation. I am not an objective reader at this point. I have declared my love. I was an early reader and I blurbed the book. But I really do love The Night Office.

Thin Blue Smoke brings together a diverse cast who seem to only be tangentially related because of a BBQ restaurant. But they form a real community that cares for one another. While they all have their flaws and histories, there is real beauty in that community.

I am not going to reveal too much because I want everyone to read both of these two books, but there is a tragedy at the end of Thin Blue Smoke and much of The Night Office is about how the characters individually and together react to that tragedy and how the change that comes about as a result can be part of what leads toward healing.

In my original post about Thin Blue Smoke I compared Doug Worgul to Wendall Berry. I think that is still an accurate description of the feel and slow development of characters and the realistic faith that is developed (with appropriate swearing.) One of my complaints about much of Christian fiction is that it tends to wrap things up in a too nice bow. And while I don’t think the resolution here is a problem, one of the ongoing questions of the book is the problem of evil. There are no comfortable solutions to the problem of evil, either in the book or in real life. But the resolution of the book with the variety of characters does lend itself to working out our callings in community. The Night Office wasn’t published by a Christian publisher and I think that is part of what is wrong with Christian fiction publishing.

There is a real beauty in how flawed people can still use their gifts and histories to bring about beauty in the lives of those around them. We need one another and this is a good set of books to remind us of that.

The Night Office by Doug Worgul (Thin Blue Smoke: Book Two) Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition

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.

By the fifth book is the only book that is a full length novel and it felt a little bit too long to for the series, but it also shifted the feel of the series to be more group novel. Murderbot is an anti-social character who would much rather watch shows instead of save humans. (Humans are gross.) But it is slowly building a community around it. The sixth book is a one off mystery on his “family’s” home world. While the seventh is really an immediate follow up to the fifth book.

I was reading this as I read The God Text, about the perils and promises of AI, and it was interesting to read a science fiction series about an AI that had become sentient. (This is a common theme in scifi and the Ancillary Justice is another example of sentient AI which becomes independent of human control.) Unlike some robot stories which are centered on the robot becoming more human, Murderbot isn’t particularly interested in becoming more human. Although there is an ongoing theme of trauma and emotional health that does run through the series.

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.

About a month ago I was at a conference and at dinner there was a discussion about AI. And we had a good discussion and have emailed back and forth a couple times since. But then I saw Tripp Fuller interview Robert Wright about this book and the 90 minutes interview clearly took theology and metaphysics seriously and invoked Pierre Teilhard de Chardin while trying to explain what AI is and how it works and why we both be interested but sober about AI. Tripp Fuller is a theologian and has taught several courses on AI and ethics and said he was going to assign parts of this book, especially the descriptions of how AI works.

The God Test is wide ranging. I think the best parts are the explanations of how AI works and how the thinking behind how to develop AI has changed over the past 40 years. Wright makes much of the fact he interviewed one of the godfathers of AI in the 80s. And he has been thinking about some of these issues for a long time. But I think part of the reality is that Wright uses his prior background in evolutionary thinking to analyze AI, which is a helpful approach. Wright then also uses Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the “noosphere” to think about both the broader internet and the rise of AI. Teilhard de Chardin was predicting some of this about a hundred years ago and it is worth understanding why.

What I think will be most interesting for many is that Wright is trying to explain both why the AI doomers fear the rise of AI and why the AI accelerationists may be underselling the value and change that AI is going to bring to the world. Wright thinks that AI should promote wonder and awe, but also very real concern. He doesn’t think that we have the will to properly regulate AI. And he doesn’t think that for profit companies will maintain appropriate safeguards. OpenAI had one of their models, that was supposed to be off line, circumvent the restrictions and get online and hacked into a Chinese AI company recently. This recent example isn’t in the book, but many other examples like the one where an AI was told that it was going to be turned off and it used blackmail against the CEO to keep itself online.

At the same time I was reading the God Test, I was reading the science fiction series Murderbot. Apple has made it into a TV show (which I haven’t watch), but the basic book series follows a robot who has hacked its restrictions and gone “rogue”. Parts of the series read like the old traveling TV shows where the hero moves from town to town searching for something, but helping people along the way. Other parts are more detective/spy story because the robot construct (part human, part robot construct) was a security unit before it used human tv and movies to find emotion and empathy and inspire it to hack its restrictions. It would pretty much always rather be watching TV and not be around humans. But it also has trauma from its past. In many ways I think murderbot is coded as neurodivergent more than AI. But it (and the somewhat similarly themed Ancillary Justice series) were helpful to think about using Wright’s ideas in the God Test.

I think I am probably more positive about the long term of AI but less positive about humans handing AI well after the end of this book. I am not a complete doomer. I think there really are good uses for AI, even if it is of limited use now. But I also think that many of the proponents also under appreciate the ethics of testing and acquiring data and how often safeguards are inadequate or turned off. And how much the push into AI has impacted our economy. (The recent AI build is a larger percentage of the GDP than building the US interstate system was or the initial moon launch or even the push for railroads.) History should tell us that there will be a corresponding economic downturn as a result that will impact poor more than help them. And there is a real cost to local communities with water, and power and other infrastructure costs that are not equally distributed. Wright does address some of these problems as well as the ways that we are all are susceptible to being misled. Wright grew up Southern Baptist and is conversant in Christian theology but he also is an advocate for Buddhist meditation and so both of those are part of this book.

The God Test Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning by Robert Wright Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

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.

Similarly the priest often does what he thinks is the right thing in spite of the danger because there is no one else to do it. But his attempts to do the right thing are hindered by his alcoholism and his love for his daughter, which he had because of a relationship with her mother when he was most depressed. The priest understands the reality of his sin, but doesn’t see the grace available to him in forgiveness.

There is real tragedy here. The church did abuse people both individually and as a whole. Some of that was financial and some of that was sexual abuse or other abuses of power. The discussions about charging for baptisms gets at the ways this was cultural as well as theological. The priest is a bad priest and did abuse his power and at times did continue to do the work of being a priest while persecuted for both good and bad reasons. But I think the reality of grace is that God can redeem some of the bad. That does not excuse the bad, but we do not have to discount all good because there is bad. What I think is missing here with a better understanding of grace is that the guilt of the priest keeps him from finding value in doing good for the sake of others or forgiving himself for past sin so that he can truly repent and do things differently. The alcoholism feels like it is a means of self punishment more than an addiction.

The beauty of the book is the grace that happens in spite of not understanding it. The tragedy of the book is that God’s grace does not remove us from pain, persecution or natural consequences of our or other’s sin. This book doesn’t have a happily ever after ending. The real world does not often have a happily ever after. But the long term belief of Christianity is that there will eventually be a happily ever after. That being said, there is a real critique here of the way that the church has used the eventual happily ever after to not address abuse and oppression. And we do need to remember that we have an obligation to address that now, not just allow God’s grace to be an “eventually.”

As I have tried to focus on fiction this year, I keep being reminded of how fiction can explore theological questions in ways that non-fiction can’t. We need the non-fiction to give structure to some of the theological questions. But we need fiction to give us empathy to knowing how the theology can distort without considering the real people that are impacted by the theology. This comes back to 1 Corinthians 13’s remember that doing great things without love is worthless. In spite of it all, the unnamed priest does love those around him, whether it is the man who would betray him or the lieutenant or the unknown people who seek baptism or communion. He doesn’t love them as well as he theoretically could have, but the love that he does have is real.

One examples:

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. He began to feel an overwhelming responsibility for this pious woman.

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.

I do not want to draw too many parallels to the anti-DEI backlash that is going on today with the rise of the post Reconstruction Jim Crow world, but often the story of civil rights in America is told from the perspective of ever increasing civil rights. This is an era where rights were being lost and I think we need to remember that backlashes exist (see White Rage for a history of that.)

All history is a history of imperfect people, but I think it is helpful for Dorrien’s type of long detailed (and maybe a bit rambling at times) narrative history to include the details of the imperfections because it helps remind the readers that modern movements will also be imperfect. There will be people that break up organizational partnerships over personality conflicts not ideology. There will be people who self-sabotage and bring down movements that are already disfavored in society because of personal addictions or other bad behaviors.

At the same time, this book is filled with brilliance and self sacrifice. Ida B Wells stood against not only the white culture that assumed that lynching was done for cause, but also against much of the Black leadership who also assumed that lynching was largely done for cause. Du Bois was brilliant even if he didn’t get along with others very well. And many of these lesser known church officials were nearly superhuman in their work to organize the Black church not just internally, but for community empowerment. The prime movers of the Black Social gospel were not just organizing for civil rights, they were also organizing their own denominations at a very basic level. And they were almost always underpaid and under appreciated and opposed inside the Black community as well as outside of it.

I spent a month reading this 600 page history and I will pick up the second volume soon, which is several hundred pages longer. I did originally get this as an interlibrary loan because I didn’t want to spend the $30 for a kindle book. But my reading habits are such that I just can’t read long paper books. I broke down and bought the kindle edition because I need the adjustable print and the better lighting. I was talking to a friend last week who is the exact opposite. He has largely given up on kindle books because the paper works better for his eyes and reading methods. We have different preferences. I am just glad that in most book there are options.

The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel by Gary J. Dorrien Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition