July 2025 Reading

Published: 2025-08-01 10:00 AM

Category: Books | Tags: facebook, sarah wynn-williams, cixin liu, science fiction

Only a couple books in July - I was pretty tired each night, so reading was pretty slow.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism - Sarah Wynn-Williams

I picked this up after hearing about the legal battle over its publication earlier this year. "Careless" really runs through the entire book. Facebook leadership is careless in how it approaches problems. They care careless over how employees are treated. They are careless over very clear, very real impacts the platform has on the world. The stories are heartbreaking and illustrate the toxicity of power when there are no checks in place.

Sarah's credentials makes the entire memoir credible and gives a deep look into one of the most influential companies in the world. The details of her trauma are hard to read, but give acute insight into the attitudes and behaviors of top leadership at Facebook.

Interestingly, after finishing, I had an exchange with someone on Mastodon about the author's own lack of responsibility for what happened during her time there. I think I read this with a little bit of a lens already in place and I missed that angle.

The Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu

After seeing the trailer for the Netflix series, I grabbed a copy from the library and set in. It took me a little while to get oriented to the main characters, but once I had each of them straight in my mind, I enjoyed the book more. It's a difficult book because of the complexity of the Chinese cultural revolution in the 60's and how it affects characters later in life. Given that it's a translation, I'm not really surprised to have struggled with different aspects of the narrative. There is a thick portion at the end with a lot of high-level physics detail that could have been simplified, but it also set up the scope of the main conflict, so maybe it was done correctly.

I didn't know this was a series and I'm not sure I'll continue reading. Given that there are two more books, this ending felt like it could've been standalone.