nonfiction

Books Read in October 2025

/ austinfey / Leave a comment

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers 

Published 1935

This is one of my all-time favorites, so it’s difficult to review it and not just encourage you to read it! 

Ostensibly a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, this book is written primarily from another character, Harriet Vane’s, point of view, and she is really the main character for a change. While the is a mystery (and Lord Peter gets to the bottom of it), this book is more interested in exploring human relationships and vocations. 

Harriet Vane agrees to attend a gaudy (a reunion weekend, for those of us not part of the British education system) at her (fictional) Oxford college, Shrewsbury, one of the first women’s colleges at Oxford. She discovers that someone is sending poison pen letters and occasionally destroying college property and generally making an embarrassing mess that the college is trying to shield from view by handling internally. Harriet’s old college friends ask her to investigate, fearing that calling in the police would reflect negatively on the project of educating women, already precarious. 

Harriet temporarily relocates to Shrewsbury College, enjoying the peace and quiet of working in an academic atmosphere, and contemplates her writing and her life generally. This opportunity to reflect on the work she feels called and gifted to do, versus doing work that may be noble but she doesn’t feel is “hers” to do. It also gives her an opportunity to reflect on her relationship with Lord Peter and the way she is both attracted to and afraid of the idea of marriage. 

After a failed relationship and a murder trial, she was naturally skittish about Lord Peter’s proposal, but as time as passed, she feels differently. 

The poison pen letters and her conversations with the single and married women around the college make her think about her feelings about romantic attachments. It is especially tricky for intellectual women, as expectations about how marriage should be and expectations about women’s roles complicate the question. 

While things have changed to some extent (female professors and professionals are not expected to be single now), questions of “the role of women” or “a woman’s place” and a suspicion in some quarters of women in intellectual and/or authoritative spaces are still contested, and figuring out a marriage of equals is still fraught today. 

Birds of a Feather, by Jacquline Winspear

Published 2004

This is the second in the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. I enjoyed the historical setting (set in London after World War I; Maisie was a nurse in the war), and the books definitely fit in the “cozy without being ridiculous” side of the mystery genre. 

In this installment, Maisie has an office and an assistant, Billy. Maisie is called in my a wealthy businessman to find his adult daughter, who has disappeared. As the case unfolds, Maisie begins to suspect that the disappearance is related to the murders of several women—and the girl who vanished knew them all. 

Maisie presents herself as a “psychologist and investigator,” and she often tries to imagine herself in the place of a person she investigates or works for. It’s sort of “I’m really great at picking up vibes,” and these hunches are taken as accurate. It reminds me of Sherlock Holmes, except she’s supposed to “read the room” instead of being hyper-observant and making deductive leaps like Holmes. If that bothers you, move along, but if the occasional psychological reading doesn’t bother you, carry on. 

The mystery is interesting, but also interesting was the setting and I appreciated the depiction of life after a devastating war that left society dealing collectively and individually with many losses and the trauma attached to a post-war era. 

Maisie herself started as a maid to a wealthy family who saw her potential and had her educated, so the slightly fluid social environment is also interesting (if slightly unbelievable). 

I enjoyed the characters and the mystery and recommend it for fans of the cozy mystery genre who don’t want explicit details but want a satisfying ending. 

Enshittification, by Cory Doctorow

Published 2025

While the title of this book is, ahem, colorful, the concept is one that makes sense. You may have come across this term if you’ve read any of Doctorow’s essays or read other critiques of the way the internet (particularly social media) seems to work now.

Doctorow points out that most of us are unhappy with the way we experience using internet platforms and technology, and it is spreading out into our “real” (offline) lives too. 

He describes the enshittification process of some of the biggest name social media/ tech companies as this: 

  1. “First, platforms are good to their users
  2. “Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers
  3. “Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves
  4. “Finally, they have become a giant pile of shit.”

Doctorow explores these phases by looking at Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, the iPhone, and I’m sure you can think of other platforms and services that you once enjoyed but now grudgingly use because they reached Stage 4 of this process. 

It’s not just things on the internet: it is also many companies that go through this process, or companies that are acquired by big companies or venture capital that make programs, platforms, and services worse (this extends to restaurants as well; the problem is pernicious). 

After diagnosing the problem, laying out the ways that the death of competition and regulation have accelerated the problem, Doctorow does give some ideas for a way out of our rest seeking and techno-feudalist problem. His four forces pushing against enshittification are: 

  1. Competition (real competition, not just buying your opponent)
  2. Regulation (tech especially as avoided antitrust laws because the sector is new, complex, and evolving and regulators are slow and the average age of our legislators is…high)
  3. Interoperability (allowing repairs by third parties and allowing things to work with other things—for example, this would mean Apple devices allowing non-Apple third parties to repair phones without voiding warranty, etc.) 
  4. Tech worker power (I think this could be expanded to other industries; America has a terrible recent track record with unions, which I think is a huge problem. When the bosses are the only ones with power, we’re in trouble)

Doctorow says there are reasons to hope, all is not lost, and we can work together to raise awareness and demand change so the internet—and other real-life companies—must take notice. 

Various other countries are also passing regulations that gradually are trying to reign in tech companies. The Biden administration was unpopular with tech in part because Lina Khan (I’m a big fan) and others stood up to them. 

My personal theory about why so many younger people are so down on “capitalism” is that what we are living through right now is not strictly speaking, capitalism. Ostensibly, yes, but really it’s more of a techno-feudal society that has sprung up under the guise of capitalism. This is not to say that I think unfettered capitalism is great, but I think our economic structure right now has shifted quietly (see page 194 and following in the book for more details). 

I have so many thoughts on this book, and I think it is an incredibly helpful frame for considering why we have a lot of discontent about our lives and feel uneasily that they have gotten worse/ harder despite having access to so much. 

While we do have access to quantity, the quality has gone down and we feel trapped in systems and using products where true competition and customer protection have been sidelined for years, allowing greed and anti-competition to win the day. 

I would love to be part of the movement that unsticks us from the current enshittifying trajectory! Surely we can find a peaceful way to take our power back and move into a new era of small business innovation and freedom. 

2025 Reading Year in Review (and Best Books)

/ austinfey / 1 Comment

Quitting my full-time job and studying for (and passing!) the CFP® exam meant I had more time last year to read books. Finishing my two-year study journey meant I finally had more capacity to read non-fiction (previously, my non-fiction brain slot was taken up with reading about tax, estate, retirement, insurance, investment, and general financial planning).

I read some non-fiction bangers this year, many of them on themes of politics, wealth, society, technology, and how these impact our lives. 

I also read a lot of mysteries last year to wind down while studying in the first half of the year, and read a mixture of other fiction over the year. 

I finished 45 books last year, and while I fell off a bit on the blog with my month-in-review posts in the fall (which was busier than anticipated and also I got sick a couple times; I have drafts and will go back and publish these later), I feel pretty satisfied with my reading life. Of course, I would like to continue to push back against the machines and spend a little more time reading, so that’s a 2026 reading resolution, but I’m excited to keep reading this year! 

Choosing superlative “best” books of the year is a little fraught, but it’s helpful for me to look over what I read last year and see what stuck with me. Keeping track of my reading helps me remember what I have actually read, and helps the themes, characters, prose, and ideas stick with me more than just reading and immediately moving on from a reading experience. I don’t want to just consume books mindlessly; I want books to be a part of me in a real way, and I want to be in conversation with them. 

So here are my Top 10 from 2025:

  1. Enshittification, by Cory Doctorow 
  2. The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel
  3. The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans 
  4. Careless People, by Sarah Wynn Williams
  5. The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman
  6. Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner 
  7. Dissolution, by Nicholas Binge
  8. The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett 
  9. Parliamentary America, by Maxwell Stearns 
  10. The Haves and Have Yachts, by Evan Osnos 

Honorable Mentions: The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien; The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison; The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner; and Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers. These are honorable mentions because they are all re-reads of books that I love, and I really enjoyed them once again, I just wanted to give a chance to some new-to-me books. 

What were your favorite books of 2025? What are you looking forward to in 2026? Any book resolutions? 

Books Read in September 2025, Part 1

/ austinfey / Leave a comment

Sorry for the delay getting this out. My scanner was not cooperating, and then I got busy, time passed, and it’s November already! But here are the first two books I read in September, which was an interesting reading month.

Parliamentary America, by Maxwell Stearns 

Published 2024

As a constitutional law professor, Stearns thinks that we are living through a third constitutional crisis (the first when the constitution was written, the second after the Civil War), a crisis that calls for action to repair our democracy and update our founding document for the challenges we face now. 

After laying out the problems of our two party system, especially legislative gridlock and a presidential office which has consolidated power, he takes us on a world tour to examine other forms of democratic governance. Stearns notes that many (most?) of their governments are organized as parliaments with a prime minister and/or president, not like our two houses of congress with a president (even when we have exported democracy, other countries are choosing parliaments instead of our system, which is telling).

Then Stearns proposes three constitutional amendments which would transform our system into a parliamentary system, which he believes would serve us better as a form of government, while still keeping most of the rest of our founding document in place. 

  1. Expand the House of Representatives (to about double its current size), which would mean that each representative would have fewer constituents than they currently have. 
  2. The majority party or parties would select the President (similar to the way that the majority party in, for example, the UK, selects their Prime Minister). 
  3. Give the House the power for a “vote of no confidence” to remove a President who fails to perform their duties (the bar is “maladministration,” which might allow for removal; our current impeachment method clearly is not working; the bar is set too high). 

Is amending our Constitution to transform into a more Parliamentary form of government radical? Yes, but also, as Stearns takes us through the world tour of democracies, he notes that pretty much all other democratic nations have some sort of Parliament.

I would love to see some dramatic reform like this, though how feasible it is is anyone’s guess. 

Our current system, however, is failing us. Stearns says (and I agree with him) that our current system has locked us into having only two parties, and those parties tend to pull to the extremes. We’re also in an era of extreme Presidential power. Power has been consolidated to the Executive branch at the expense of the other branches of government (and, I think, at the expense of the American people). 

Stearns says the political unhappiness of many Americans is feeling unrepresented in Congress, and as we are seeing in Trump’s second term, Congressional Republicans have ceded much (most?) of their independence to Trump anyway. Stearns posits that many Americans have more moderate political views, and that a multi-party Parliamentary system would allow more viewpoints to be represented, and would also allow coalition-building and incentivize moderation and compromise to get things done in government. 

I agree that his system sounds much more functional, but what I don’t know is if we have the political will to push dramatic changes through. Our government is currently being dismantled as quickly as the Trump administration is able to do so, which may give us an opportunity to rebuild something different (assuming we make it to the other side of this administration with our democracy intact). However, I think it will take some real political leadership and a strong push to make something like this happen. I am very interested in the idea of Constitutional reform, and I would love to have more viable parties to represent political interests (two parties are clearly insufficient for the task with a population of ~340 million). 

I have so many more thoughts on this and our current political situation, but those probably belong in a separate essay. For the purposes of this review, I think the ideas are interesting, I like that someone is out there with some bold suggestions for how we move forward out of our current malaise and the death spiral we currently seem to be locked in, and I hope that this sparks conversations and actual action to move us forward as a functioning 21st century country. One of my biggest complaints is that we have real issues to address and clearly a government that is not interested in addressing most of them. Our current Congress seems mostly uninterested in governing, and even if you think that government should mostly leave people alone, I think that most of us could find some agreement on a few issues where government is what we need to address some collective issues. Our current leaders mostly do not seem interested in tackling issues like adults, and I really want some adult people to work together to help us move forward. I’d love to talk about this book or other ideas! If you have read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts! 

The Sittaford Mystery, by Agatha Christie 

Published 1931 

Apparently this was originally published with the title “The Murder at Hazlemoor,” and I am really not sure why it was changed. Either title sounds equally interesting to me personally, but I’m also not a 1930’s publishing house. 

This is another Christie novel without including one of her best-known detectives. It is a standalone and I don’t believe any of the characters show up in other books. 

Mrs. Willet and her daughter Violet are renting a large country house in the winter (which everyone finds odd), and one evening they host a séance in which a “spirit” tells them that their landlord, Captain Trevelyan is dead. 

One of the Captain’s old friends, Major Burnaby, is alarmed and says he will go on foot (the roads being impassible due to snow) to check on his friend. He discovers (of course) that the Captain has been murdered! 

A police Inspector Narracot investigates the crime, and a young and extremely capable young lady, Emily Trefusis, also investigates on behalf of her fiancé, a nephew of the murdered man (an heir and a suspect). 

While I did not particularly enjoy the last standalone Christie I read (The Man in the Brown Suit), this is a more straightforward mystery which I did enjoy. There are the usual red herrings, people behaving suspiciously, people suspecting and trying to shield one another from suspicion (and therefore being stupid), and a clever murderer who was not quite as clever as our detectives. 

This makes the book sound formulaic, and in some ways it is, but I enjoyed it as a classic Christie novel that is fun and a worthwhile read.

Books Read in August 2025, part 2

/ austinfey / Leave a comment

Dissolution, by Nicholas Binge

Published 2025

Maggie is eighty-three years old and her husband, Stanley, is in a memory care facility called Sunrise because he has dementia. Sometimes he remembers Maggie, and sometimes he doesn’t. 

The story opens with Maggie in a strange interview with someone named Hassan who tells her that actually the problem is that Stanley isn’t forgetting things, his memories are being taken from him. Hassan needs some information from Stanley’s mind to help him stop some baddies who are erasing Stanley, and he needs Maggie’s help to get into Stanley’s mind to retrieve the information before it is too late. 

The story unfolds in the present and the past, delving into Stanley’s early life for the seeds of his discoveries about time travel via memories. It also chronicles Stanley and Maggie’s life story and their deep love for one another. But as Maggie goes deeper into her journey through Stanley’s mind, it becomes clear that Stanley is hiding things, even from her. 

Time travel and memory are also a little mind-bending subjects, and this was a fun ride as well as a sweet love story. The stakes do get raised to “oh no this could affect the world in bad ways if we aren’t careful,” but it does not get to the “and now we’re in a complete dystopia” level that it would if this was a Blake Crouch novel. 

That said, if you enjoy Crouch, you will likely enjoy this novel, and it also avoids some of the annoying time travel tropes while making use of some others. It just depends on what annoys you about time travel if you’ve read other books in the genre! 

The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben

Published 2015

Written by a German forest manager, this book is designed to evoke wonder and delight around forests and trees. Wohlleben describes trees in extremely anthropomorphic ways which I found overblown or slightly distracting at times, but I also appreciate the technical knowledge he has about tree communication and the ways that trees compete and cooperate. 

Overall I found the book delightful, and while I imagine I might have been irritated by the ways the author describes some trees as “street kids” and “immigrants,” as a lay person some of the analogies were helpful. 

Trees are pretty amazing, and I appreciate that someone is out there trying to convince people that forests are great and we should allow more forested areas to thrive on their own without our intervention and without trying to make all land “productive” for human purposes (even the language of “productive” and “unproductive” creates a value judgment that isn’t helpful). 

Part of being a good steward as a human is caring for the beautiful planet we call home, not simply stripping it for parts, and living more with nature instead of opposed to it, is an interesting topic of much discussion and debate. I loved learning more about networks of trees that make up a forest, how they coexist with other organisms, and how trees work to create a beautiful ecosystem from which we all benefit. 

Books Read in April 2025

/ austinfey / Leave a comment

The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel 

Published 1951

This is a book I’ve heard referenced several times, often by people who seem pretty smart/ able to handle academic treatises well, so I assumed this would be a 500 page tome that I would crawl halfway through and hope to glean some wisdom from the pages I could handle. 

I bought the book and was surprised to see that it is only 100 pages! But reports of the wisdom and poetry of this slim volume on the Sabbath were not over-hyped. 

While I am not Jewish and some of Heschel’s interactions with other rabbis and a chapter that is an extended parable went above my head, his meditations on the meaning of the Sabbath day were both beautiful and profound. 

“The Sabbath…is not for recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the coming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.

“The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.”

I grew up and am in a Christian tradition that has a somewhat uneasy relationship with the Sabbath: as Christians, our holy day is Sunday, not Saturday, and while the other 9 of the 10 Commandments are treated as rules one should follow, remembering the sabbath day to keep it holy is treated more as a suggestion. There are all kinds of complicated reasons, historical and practical and cultural, and I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert. But we could learn a lot from Heschel and his meditations on the holiness of time. 

He says “[The Bible’s] premise [is] that time has a meaning for life which is at least equal to that of space…. Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogenous, to whom all hours are like, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time.” 

This book is beautiful and thought-provoking, and there are portions that I didn’t understand at all, especially parts where he is clearly in conversation with other rabbis and I’m missing a lot of context. But his insistence that the Sabbath is supposed to be a gift and an invitation into holy time is really lovely and something for me to think about. 

Part of what is difficult is that for observant Jews, Sabbath is an agreed-upon communal different (holy) time. Protestant Christians do not have a similar agreed upon view of Sundays, and it is difficult to Sabbath alone. Not impossible, perhaps, but certainly not the same. 

There is more to say, but I am sure I will come back to this book to try to absorb more of its wisdom. 

Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Published 2025

Whew, this book was a ride! This was a tell-all memoir about one of the biggest tech companies in the United States, and I’m sure Facebook/Meta is trying desperately to sue the author for all she’s worth because this was not a flattering portrait. 

Sarah Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook in their global policy department, a job that she basically invented because she saw that as it became a global company Facebook could shape global discourse and would need a team to think about how to interact with other countries, not just the United States. 

I already had a fairly low opinion of Facebook and its founders and leaders, and Wynn-Williams does not hold back in her critiques via stories of how clueless and careless they are. Tech start-up culture also sounds terrible and all-consuming. To “succeed” in that world, you sacrifice everything: your time, relationships, other interests, to work all hours and be available at any time. This is not completely unusual, especially for American tech companies.

The work culture was interesting when compared with my last read: The Sabbath! 

There were so many stories about interactions Wynn-Williams had with leadership where she advocated from a public policy background trying to encourage the leaders of Facebook that they could do so much good in the world connecting people, and the leaders just…didn’t care. They didn’t get it or understand what they might do as creators of something with moral implications. They were not curious about other countries, or other ways of life.

They saw their creation as a tech product and payday. Unending growth and unending wealth were the goals, and any other expectations were secondary. Sacrificing so much of oneself to unfettered growth and money-making does not leave a lot of room for personal growth, reflection, or thoughtfulness. Commitment to profits alone means moral equivocations, if indeed morals matter at all. 

Working in such an environment meant that Wynn-Williams herself made moral choices that I disagree with, and while she definitely stayed much longer at the company than she should have, she seems to still have a somewhat working moral compass. Enough to write a book pointing out that we have all opted into social media platforms created by people who do not care about us, especially if we are not wealthy or powerful enough to offer them something they want. People are expendable to them, dollar signs to exploit. 

How can social media be a public good when the creators do not care about public good in any way? How can a platform really work to connect people when its creators do not care about other people?

There were definitely some shocking stories, and I am even more convinced that there are levels of fame and wealth that are extremely corrosive to the soul. We all think we want to be rich, and certainly there is a level of wealth that will solve problems and create comfort, but beyond that, it shackles the wealthy, blunts creativity, creates moral wasting. 

Reading this book was like watching a train wreck I couldn’t look away from. Fascinating, maddening, and worrying when I think about all the ways that social media is tearing us apart and magnifying the dysfunction in our relationships with one another. 

I listened to the audio version of this book, which is read by the author in her delightful New Zealand accent, so I recommend that if you enjoy audiobooks.