ASRC 2022 Week 11 - Final Week (8/29-9/2/22)

Hello and welcome to Adult Summer Reading Club 2022 Week 11! We did it folks. We made it through 11 weeks of rolling and reading. Thank you all for reading along and for commenting week by week, even when it took a couple weeks to get a book read.

If you need a refresher, here are the rules. For any newcomers, you're in the right place. You can comment on this week's (or the most recent week's) post. No need to go back to week 1.

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Week 11 Board

Here are our staff reviews for the week:

Elias: I shouldn't have talked about how I got off easy last week because I ended up rolling a 6 for my final go around and landed back on Hobby, a category I'm still not sure what counts for. I may have stretched things like last time but sometimes that's how things go, especially during the busy summer season. While I have yet to finish it, I started Ryan North's How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain.

I love North's fiction writing but I may love his non-fiction stuff more. It's bouncy, it's informative, and deeply engaging even when getting into tricky, math-heavy subjects. Much like his previous book, How to Invent Everything, How to Take Over the World uses a thought-experiment framework (time travel for the first, being a supervillain for the latter) to not only answer the questions posed by the thought-experiment but also to educate readers about some really wacky or cool bits of reality & history and the science behind anything and everything tangentially related to the topic.

For example, chapter 1 is all about secret bases but is really about what is needed for self-sufficiency for either you or a group, how difficult is it, and why Volcano Lairs are truly an awful idea with asides into power generation, Biosphere 2, and fraught attempts to create floating extra-territorial microstates. Wild! And he's only getting started.

Now, maybe it helps that I already have a base knowledge and interest in the science behind many of the topics North discusses. I suspect, though, that anyone coming to this book, from the math geeks to the math averse, will have a great time. If The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl could actually get me interested in computer science and make it understandable, then I think anything is truly possible if written by him.

4/5 stars, only because I have yet to read the rest of the book.

Thank you all again and don't forget to get your final books in for our raffles next week!