Emma Goto

The Wager is a non-fiction book covering the improbable story of the 1741 shipwreck and mutiny of the crew from the English warship HMS Wager. Remarkably, after the crew mutinies and split into two groups, both manage to make the long voyage home to England. Along the way they live as castaways on an island, traverse dangerous seas on a tiny boat, and some even end up being captured by the Spanish. Albeit of the original 250 crew, only 36 make it home - the rest perish by some combination of starvation, drowning, murder, scurvy and typhus.

One of the more famous names to survive this journey is a Lord John Byron, who was only 16 when he embarked on this voyage. Of course you might immediately wonder if he's in some way related to the famous poet Lord Byron and yep - he was his grandfather. Although the two never met, the poet Byron was inspired by the book his grandfather published about surviving these "great distresses" and there are references to him in some of his poetry.

Journeys like these are not always just about a bunch of white people, so Grann also does try to provide glimpses of other perspectives where he can. He points out that the survivors of the Wager could surely have only survived due to the generosity of some of the Indigenous people in the area. Notably the Kawésqar people, who were a nomadic people, mostly living in their boats. They used dogs to herd and catch fish in nets (pretty cool), and gave food to the shipwrecked sailors. Sadly he also notes the fate of a black sailor named John Duck. Although he survived the initial shipwreck, he was kidnapped and sold into slavery whilst on the long journey home.

The book could almost read like a fiction book - it's not dry at all - but is very much backed up by the huge amount of research the author David Grann has put into it. You might question how he was able to get such detailed firsthand accounts from sailors spending years at sea, but this was thanks to the tradition of writing daily logbooks, where its authors would note down all the things that happened - who died, repairs required on the ship and other observations - and at times might inject a bit of their own personality into it too. If the author was of a high-enough rank, when they returned home they might publish the logs into a book. Of course, after both parties from the mutiny returned home, there was a rush to try and woo the public into believing their side of the story (was the choice to mutiny rightful or not) and additional accounts were published which would have been useful sources as well.

As well as being useful for historians/authors today, the logbooks were also a valuable resource for sailors back then. The HMS Wager had a copy of John Narborough's book from 1671 detailing his voyage around South America, and they used the landmarks described in the book to attempt their own navigation of the Strait of Magellan.

Although the book mainly focuses on the Wager, it was actually part of a larger fleet of six ships led by Commodore Anson who was setting out to steal gold from the Spanish. Although the Wager shipwrecked, three of Anson's ships managed to continue on with their intended journey. Anson eventually published his book A Voyage Round the World, and as a final fun fact, a copy of this book was kept aboard both Captain Cook's Endeavour and Charles Darwin's Beagle.

Although this tale may be mostly forgotten now, David Grann has lovingly helped to bring it back to life. Considering that one of his previous books Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI was made into a movie, maybe this could be a future contender? As it turns out, Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio acquired the screen rights to this book even before it was published, so we might end up seeing it sooner rather than later.

I enjoyed Weir's first book about a science dude on Mars, but decided to give his second one a miss after hearing lackluster reviews about his attempt at a female protagonist.

For his third book, he's gone back to his tried-and-true approach of having a science dude talk about a lot of science shit and although my eyes glaze over as all the science shit happens, it was a fun and heartwarming read.

Heartwarming isn't the first word that comes to mind when the plot centres around him waking up alone on a spaceship but it really does turn out that way, somehow.

I don't want to spoil it any more than that, so give it a read if you like sci-fi (I would love if they could turn this one into a movie too).

——

Edit 2026/04/03:

I watched the movie, so I decided to give this one a re-read! I think the movie did such a good job of adapting this to the screen (and to be honest, removing a fair amount of the scientific explanations which weren’t that necessary to the core of the story). And considering you need an actor to basically act to himself alone in space and carry the whole movie, Ryan Gosling did a perfect job.

On a second read, and comparing it to other books I’ve read recently, I will say that the writing style itself maybe isn’t the most beautiful, but it gets the point across, and nonetheless the core plot points still make it a really fun read.

Empire of Silence is a sci-fi / space opera set in the distant future, where humans have colonised the galaxy and are now fighting a war with an alien race known as the Cielcin. At the book's opening we get a pretty strong hook - the protagonist Hadrian Marlowe is set to do terrible things in the future, killing a star and gaining the infamous moniker "The Sun Eater".

Quite amazingly this book was author Christopher Ruocchio's debut novel, who was only 22 at the time, which is hard to believe considering the dense scope of this book. It's the first of a 7-book series published between 2018 and 2025, and it seems it has had a more recent resurgence in popularity after being picked up on BookTube. Personally I had never heard of it, which is kind of surprising to me for how good it is.

Hadrian is only in his 20s in this first book, so I suppose you will have to read the whole series to find out where it all goes wrong. As the firstborn son of a noble family (distantly related to the Emperor), Hadrian is chafing at his role of presumed heir, while excelling in learning languages from his tutor and generally being just a bit immature like you might expect someone in their early 20s to be.

Unlike a YA book where immature characters are annoying, though, his naivety is framed by the perspective of a Hadrian 600 years into the future (yes, that's how long he's going to live) who knows he was annoying and immature, which makes it interesting more than anything else.

Along with the Cielcin, one of the other major forces in the book is a religion known as the Chantry, who believe that humans are "the" dominant species in the galaxy. The idea of even attempting a peace treaty with the Cielcin is considered heresy, as the Cielcin are considered subhuman and not worth dealing with. Our protagonist Hadrian has learnt how to speak the Cielcin language, and has some heretical thoughts of actually communicating with these guys. 600-years-later Hadrian occasionally throws in hints about how much of a mistake that that will end up being, though, which makes me pretty curious to know what is going to happen.

Although I'm not so sure if I'm curious enough to actually read the remaining 6 books! (That'd be quite the commitment). But an entertaining read nonetheless.

Death of the Author is about a Nigerian American author named Zelu who gains immediate worldwide popularity when she publishes the sci-fi book Rusted Robots. The book jumps between the main plot as Zelu becomes famous, with flash forwards to interviews with Zelu's friends and family, plus excerpts of her book. The other theme running throughout this book is that of family relationships, as Zelu had become paralysed at a young age. She hates how they don't seem to be proud of her newfound successes as an author, nor do they fully respect her want for independence. From the family's POV, she's seen as a rather flighty and at times selfish daughter.

The two sides of the POVs almost felt a little bit jarring, like surely her family would be a little bit happier for her successes. But maybe the author Nnedi Okorafor (who is similarly Nigerian American) is drawing on her own lived experiences here. (Notably Okorafor also wrote the sci-fi Binti trilogy, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards back in 2015).

I did find the beginning parts of Rusted Robots excerpts to be the weakest - the writing style was different so it almost felt jarring to be pulled out of the main story and into this robot world - but its story came to grow on me as the book progressed. The story-within-a-story is set in Lagos, Nigeria after the downfall of human civilisation, focusing on the two Robot and AI factions (the former always making sure to inhabit a body, the latter dismissing it as a human construct).

The flash-forward interviews also seem to hint that something bad happens to Zelu, and not to mention the book coming with a title that quite literally spells it out - so you are kept on the edge of your seat as you come towards its ending.

It ends a little bit ambiguously - Zelu doesn't seem to die, although I'm not sure if maybe they left that out of the book to leave it up to the reader. In the final twist, it turns out that the protagonist of Rusted Robots wrote a book about Zelu. Did Zelu self-insert herself into the Rusted Robots book, or was her story the one that was fiction all along? Is the story of Rusted Robots the the reality? I saw another review mentioning the two stories as being like a mobius strip which I thought was a rather apt comparison.

The Pathless Path introduces the concept or the "default path" or life script that most people tend to follow, or aspire to follow. Get a university degree, a 9 - 5 job, marriage and kids. After a period of illness, the author Paul Millerd discovered that this path was not for him, and instead embarked on what he's dubbed the Pathless Path.

As someone that got laid off from their tech job earlier this year, some of what he wrote really resonated with me. Generally humans see their job as a "worker" as a core part of their identity (heck, I still identify and call myself a "software engineer" since that was my job for so long). When you are making smalltalk with strangers "what do you do?" is a common topic that gets brought up almost immediately. Having gone to a couple of tech meetups after being laid off, it's a pretty awkward feeling to say you are unemployed, or that you aren't jumping straight back into the job search. Millerd notes that it can be scary to quit your job - as you don't know how your friends and loved ones will take it, and I can resonate with that too. How would my husband feel about me being unemployed? Would he think I was lazy?

Millerd lays it out plainly that this book isn't going to give you a solution for how to make the Pathless Path work, and it doesn't. In that sense it's not very realistic - people need money to survive. And moving away from the default path leads to a lot of financial uncertainty until you can figure out a way to make it all work. To do the work that makes you passionate and make a living off of it at the same time is a hard thing to figure out. I love blogging and going hiking, but do I make money off of it? Not at all.

But the point that Millerd tries to make is that taking time away from a regular 9 - 5 gives you the time to be more flexible, connect with new people, try new hobbies and be more creative generally. Rather than saying "yes" to the first financial opportunity that comes your way (i.e. a new job) you should say "no" and instead focusing on finding the work that you really want to do, rather than the one that brings in the most money.

He sums up some of his core beliefs at the end rather nicely:

• We are all creative, and it takes some people longer to figure that out
• Leisure, or active contemplation, is one of the most important things in life,
• There are many ways to make money, and when an obvious path emerges, there is often a more interesting path not showing itself.
• Finding the work that matters to us is the real work of our lives

I think jumping on the Pathless Path forever is rather a hard sell, but in the case of someone like me who is already unemployed anyway, the idea of taking a proper 6 - 12 month sabbatical rather than jumping straight into your next job sounds like a fairly reasonable take (depending on your financial circumstances). And even if you are employed, I think there is some merit in stepping off the default path once in your life, at least for a little while, in order to explore your options.