Rough Justice
Alex Ross

This was a good art book, especially if you’re interested in sketch art and process work. There are some beautiful sketches in there that aren’t just Kingdom Come. It’s definitely worth a look if you like Alex Ross’ art.

Cover Run
Adam Hughes

This was a showcase of Adam Hughes’ covers. A big interest for me was his Catwoman covers, because his face reference for her is Audrey Hepburn. I have to admit, I’m not really a big Hughes fan. I find his art a little too cheesecakey for my tastes. There’s one Catwoman cover he did that I swear I’ve seen in porn fanart done better. Still, it was an interesting look through.

In the House in the Dark of the Woods
Laird Hunt

This book is like having someone tell you a dream that they had. Like, it’s interesting in a sort of WTF way, but at the same time, trying to follow along with it is like being on a winding path in the fog. You never learn the name of the main character you follow. But you follow her through getting lost in the woods, meeting the inhabitants of the woods, and watching a cycle go on that apparently goes on forever.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou

I desperately need every one of you to read this, because this is the most fascinating book I’ve read in a long time. A Wall Street Journalist’s investigation of the sham company Theranos (which you might remember being big news in the last years of the Obama presidency), this book delves deep into the corruption, mismanagement, and outright lies the company spread in its quest to raise money for a non-functional blood testing machine.

Run by a college dropout whose life goal was to be a billionaire, Theranos claimed it was going to take the medical field by storm with its new single-drop finger-pricking blood tests. None of its machines worked, none of them even reached past raw prototype stage (certainly none of them were functional enough to work without crashing, breaking, or malfunctioning), and even though they had no product, they managed to get the non-functional machines into a few Walgreens and almost into Safeway.

This book reads like a novel. It’s fast-paced, invigorating, and desperately makes you want to learn what’s going to happen next. Watching Theranos rise and fall is especially interesting if you even vaguely followed it in the news in 2015-2017. The leaders of Theranos are now facing criminal charges, as well as a host of lawsuits.