The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

“Jesuits leading a mission to aliens” is already such a fantastic premise, but then I was immediately hooked by this line in the prologue:

The United Nations required years to come to a decision that the Society of Jesus reached in ten days. In New York, diplomats debated long and hard, with many recesses and tablings of the issue, whether and why human resources should be expended in an attempt to contact the world that would become known as Rakhat when there were so many pressing needs on Earth. In Rome, the questions were not whether or why but how soon the mission could be attempted and whom to send.

The Sparrow is a story of so many good intentions going to absolute hell. It’s not just an exploration of what first contact would likely look like–bad–but also our relationship with God, gaining and losing faith, anthropology on alien life forms, and the dangers of sticking your nose in cultures you truly do not understand. While overall it’s a bit of a slow burn, Russell keeps it interesting and suspenseful by cutting to the post-mission fall out, dropping little hints of how everything goes wrong. And everything pays off in extraordinary, heart-rending ways at the end. Give it a shot

Linux Administration: A Beginner’s Guide by Wale Soyinka

I’m finally skimming through this linux tome that I bought a few years ago, and am about halfway. It’s definitely a reference I’ll go back to in the future, but I think it’s useful to quickly read through reference books like this to get an idea of what’s in there and where. While linux administration is definitely useful for a software engineer, my main goal is to learn what’s possible for my home lab and pick up best practices. So far, I’ve learned a lot of valuable stuff, like sharing drives across LAN (including with Windows), setting up firewall rules, package management across a few different distributions. It also spends time describing very basics of networking, which is a weak point for me, so it’s been helpful.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

This is the author of A Man Called Ove, which is a great, good-humored book on love, loss, and appreciating the elderly. Anxious People follows the same tone as Ove–funny, fast paced, with lots of emotion packed in–but this time Backman puts us in an unusual hostage situation. I thought it was a fun book that skirted some pretty dark themes (also like Ove) but overall is pretty lighthearted. At times it was a bit too sentimental for my tastes, but it is a quick, fun read.

When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson

This is a series of essays by novelist Marilynne Robinson. I enjoyed her spiritual meditations in the novel Gilead, so I thought I’d give her essays a shot. Robinson explores ideas like how social sciences tend to be reductive of the complexity of humans, how community and imaginative empathy go hand in hand, and how despite its reputation, the Old Testament has a surprisingly consistent theme of being charitable. These essays all deal with, in one way or another, the state of spirituality and religion in the United States, so they may not appeal to everyone. But Robinson writes beautifully, so if nothing else it’s worth reading these essays for that. Here’s a sampling:

We live on a little island of the articulabe, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view.

The frontiers of the unsayable, and the avenues of approach to those frontiers, have been opened for me by every book I have ever read that was in any degree ambitious, earnest, or imaginative; by every good teacher I have had; by music and painting; by conversation that was in any way interesting, even conversation overheard as it passed between strangers.

I’d say if any of those quotes capture your imagination or interest, you’ll probably like these essays.