To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store, and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before” (61).

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. 1st Vintage Books ed., Vintage Books, 1993.

I wanted to read another recent horror release in the leadup to October/Halloween, and after doing some research, I stumbled onto this novel. The horror in this book was decidedly different from The Widows of Winding Gale in that it operated at a real human level. There were some fantastical elements that came into play with the reef surrounding the island where the story took place, but those elements took a backseat to the horror generated by the characters. I felt compassion for our main character, Celia:

She wondered what the kid wasn't getting in his diet, and immediately felt overwhelmed by the idea of trying to find a way to fix it (6).

She reached down and rolled up her yoga pants—the lightning motif ones from last December, which she hadn't been able to sell and ended up buying from herself to keep her numbers up—then slipped off her shoes (7).

Gailey dropped little details, leading me to dread what might be coming:

Her eyes fell on the zipper. She always put the tabs to one far side, so they tucked under the lip of the fabric on the corner of the bag and would be less likely to accidentally come undone. Now, the tabs were squarely centered, a finger-width gap between them (19).

The material was stained heavily with blood. Lots of the shoes donated by mainland researchers were like that. William said it was a natural consequence of confining oneself to deviant separation from contact with the earth (73).

I was quite disturbed by how realistically human the character interactions felt in this book, but not in a way that precluded my enjoyment of it. All those hints and details pulled me through the story, wanting to know how everything was going to work out. I'm excited to read more of Sarah Gailey's books and will keep an eye out for what they write next.

Gailey, Sarah. Make Me Better. Tor Books, 2026.

I was thinking recently about all the products I use where I don't understand how they function, the systems I interact with that existed before I was born where I have no knowledge of how they came to be, and habits I act on that I know are beneficial but don't understand why. I know we like to talk about the complexity of the modern world—and that's not wrong—but I still want to stay curious about how and why things work the way they do. When I communicate with friends and family, it's often through a platform. I might text a friend to schedule that night out; I might email a company to follow up on an order; I might Facetime a family member to hear about their recent vacation. In all of these situations, I'm not communicating directly with the person on the other end; I'm using an intermediary. That intermediary shapes how I communicate and implements certain technical and design decisions about how the communication should take place.

When I leave my house, I'm interacting with a vast system of roads, signals, cars, bikes and pedestrians. It's a blizzard of chaotic activity, and yet I don't really understand how it developed. I get frustrated when I look ahead at a stream of blinking brake lights and know that it will take that much longer to park my car and return to a deliberate slower pace on my feet.

When I brush my teeth, I know I'm taking care of my dental hygiene. I floss to keep my gums healthy and to remove the discomfort of that kale bit that refuses to escape the dreaded gap. But why are all these things beneficial? What does the dentist understand about how food and the environment interact with my mouth that I am oblivious of?

There is so much complexity in my daily life, and I don't want to explode my brain by just ruminating on every small detail. I do, however, want to remember to prioritize direct experience wherever possible. A beautiful photo of our trip to Yosemite can remind me of the peace I felt as the snow blanketed the trees outside the windows. I can look forward to the next time I lift a mug of warm tea and look upon it with my own eyes.

Once I got about six months into daily writing, the entries start to expand. I started to discover what I wanted to write about and actually allow myself to write about it. That second part was crucial. I also noticed that as the writing got longer, my hand started to cramp up before I felt like I was done getting my thoughts out on the page. That's when I discovered fountain pens. I had no idea how much pressure I was putting on my ballpoint and gel pens when I was writing and how tiring that was for my hand. Fountain pens are a totally different writing experience. Very little pressure is needed to write, so I can write for as long as I want to without my hand cramping up. In fact, the limit is almost always what I have to say rather than how long my hand can keep writing.

I thought fountain pens were snooty and would require a lot of upkeep and care, but I haven't found that to be true. Are they slightly more involved than a ballpoint or gel pen? Sure they are, but it's relatively minimal. I got an inexpensive pen to start and quickly switched to using a converter so that I could fill the pen from bottled inks. Ink cartridges are less work, but I wanted the experience of choosing different inks and learning about the filling/cleaning process.

I can't overstate how much of a difference this pen switch has made in my writing journey. I thought it would be an unnecessary luxury, a hobby that I could indulge in. It is partly that, but it has transformed the process of writing into something I genuinely enjoy.

It doesn't matter what you believe. The dead don't need your belief, no more than the sun needs your permission to shine. But to say you don't feel it, each and every year at this time, the tightening of the air, like a rubber band pulled to near breaking, is to fool yourself for your own comfort. This is when the veil is thinnest, and if you listen, you can hear them at the threshold, whispering (ch.7).

What a delightful, fast-paced read to ring in the spooky season! With a nod to John Carpenter and The Fog specifically, I hoped I was in for some atmospheric dread and that's what I got.

Burke sets the book in 1941 on a small remote island off the coast of Ireland. The story focuses on a small group of women whose husbands have not returned from a fishing expedition. As night comes and the fog rolls in, the women must survive whatever has been awakened.

The horror expands visually:

...he saw dark shapes passing over and around those blue lights. The silhouettes told him that at least some of them were kin to the thing they'd hauled aboard, but he glimpsed other things too, bigger things. Men, women. Human-like arms, barbs, open mouths with spindly teeth. Things that were like squid and octopi and manta ray and conger eel, and things that were like nothing at all. And then something bigger than them all, something bigger than the island, encroached upon that submarine world and blackened out the lights (ch.9).

Then, without warning, the story erupts into violence:

“How's the arthritis, Mammy?” he asked and snapped all her fingers at once (ch.8).

The characters occasionally speak in short Gaelic phrases to give the novella some specificity of place:

“Cá bhfuil siad, Michael? Bhfuil fhios agat? (Where are they, Michael? Do you know?)” she asked the grave now, the fog rising like steam from the gentle mound before her, but her brother had no answers (ch.7)

The Widows of Winding Gale is a novella, so the events move quickly and there's fairly little downtime in the story. I was pleasantly surprised that while the book captured the atmosphere of The Fog, it wasn't simply a retread of that story. The ending shoehorned in an extra element that I thought detracted from the focus of the story, but overall this was the perfect palate-cleanser after Augustus to transition into more Halloween adjacent reads. The book even takes place on All Hallow's Eve!

Burke, Kealan Patrick. The Widows of Winding Gale. Kealan Patrick Burke, 2026, e-book.

Augustus was a slow burn of a read. The narrative structure is so different from the previous two novels that I wasn't pulled in immediately. It was worth pressing on though, as this might be my favorite of the three books. Rather than just spilling out historical facts, we get a first-person view of each character's motivations and in the process it humanizes the history. Augustus Caesar doesn't even speak that much until the end of the novel. We mostly see him through the eyes of those around him.

By the end, I couldn't wait to pick the book up and spend more time with it. Augustus is a complicated figure, a dictator trapped within his own power. Why do we seek the love of the many, when the love of the few that have known us longest brings us the most fulfillment? It was an excellent read and one that will stay with me for a while.

Williams, John. Augustus. John Williams: Collected Novels, edited by Daniel Mendelsohn, Library of America, 2021.

He passed me by, but my attention lingered on his presence; initially, I formed a judgement: “Seems like an a-hole.” Then I felt superiority: “I'm glad I don't start my mornings like that, mad at the world.” I have no idea what was actually going on, and I'll probably never see him again. Yet, here we are a day later, and I'm still ruminating on it.

Do I see a little of myself in that man, a complete stranger? I have bristled and puffed myself up to protect myself. I've used body language to dissuade people from invading my space. When I walk in this protective mode, alone, I overlook the world falling silent. It has stopped speaking to me. I wonder: What else do the walls keep out?