Alex
Actually a surprisingly good book. It's a medical thriller and quite intense in the first half.
Hard to say anything more without spoilers and I'm not going to repeat the book's description but it's an absolute page-turner and very easy to read. If you like thrillers, suspense and plot twists - this book is for you.
I enjoyed the unsettling feeling following Eleanor's thoughts - it's always interesting to glance at what madness looks like.
But other than that, wow - so boring. I guess it's a feature of the book to have almost zero action or have it off the stage but I actually fell asleep listening to the audiobook (no nightmares though).
Extremely interesting book which challenged a lot of my views on equality and meritocracy. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you are even slightly interested in sociology and/or philosophy. Very easy to read and understand.
It's a little bit too US-centric but that's expected and most of the ideas are applicable to any society.
It's not really a book but a collection of essays from a Russian journalist. All of them have the same theme: shitty life in Russia. My favorite is about villages along the high-speed railway between Moscow and St Petersburg. They're not all great but all very sad.
It has a powerful ending but wasn't what I expected (I thought it's mainly about recent events).
If you have no idea how life is in Russia outside Moscow - this book could be for you.
3.5/5
There are extremely interesting parts in the book about the bureaucracy of murders or about life in Paris and Berlin during WWII. Fascinating, but the book is enormous (40hrs English translation audiobook) and there is some pretty bizarre stuff going on at times (for example at least 1.5hrs in the audiobook the main character masturbates in some very inventive ways) and I'm not sure what that adds to the book or the story.
The audiobook narration is average, a little bit too monotonous, though I admire the narrator for reading with a straight voice how obersturmbahnführer Aue inserts something into his ass for the second time on the same page.
The idea of anti-memetics is good and it starts really good but then devolves in an absolutely bizarre story very far from the SCP spirit. The ending is rushed and, I would go as far as saying - nonsensical.
I listened to it on YouTube from some dude doing the SCP Un[REDACTED] podcast, he is really good and I appreciate that he put so much effort into voicing this this.
A very long book but it is worth it. The story of the revolution through Soviet people, not that heavy on ideology, I had to check with wikipedia who wanted what.
I was surprised to learn that the majority of the leaders of the revolution were quite young and very educated and that almost all of them died by 1938, some by natural causes, the majority were killed by the regime they helped to establish.
The third part is very heavy - the final dismantling of the dream of classless society and turning it into murderous tyranny.
There are some bizarre pieces about religion (“Chapaev just like Moses was destined to see the promised land” WAT?) and some very obscure literature, otherwise it's perfect. I listened to it in Russian but English is supposed to be the original and should be great as well.
Ну чёт я не особо угорел. Мрачные и интересные моменты есть, но в целом так себе.
Не могу указать пальцем что конкретно не понравилось, но кажется как-будто много кринжа с этим Берлином, с бладборном, с данные извлечены.
Сам мир юга России более-менее, но мог бы быть и получше прописан.
Аудио озвучено хорошо, но звуковые эффекты часто не в тему.
3/5 можно читать, можно не читать.
Quite interesting and feels even more relevant today than it was at the time it was written. Not all parts are applicable today and it's a chore to read through them, the language of the manifesto itself is obviously less than modern, but I guess they're important for historical context.
The annotations help a lot in understanding the text. I highly recommend reading this version and not just the manifesto.
The idea is interesting but for some reason I didn't like it. It's slow and the characters are very shallow. It's just not entertaining. The nature of Maine is OK though.
The audiobook production is also quite bad, the narrator is great but lots of words just cut at the end, it happens quite often and you never get used to it.
Запретная любовь на фоне хрущей и серости России начала 2000-х. Не всё мне прям понравилось, но общая идея, бытовой алкоголизм и токсичная маскулинность (и фемининность? есть такое слово?) сделали книгу для меня. От некоторых моментов почти физически было больно.
Аудио слушал на x2, неплохо начитано.
I didn't like it. For the most part it's a very generic adventure book, admittedly written by Ishiguro's very beautiful language.
I got the overarching idea but the book is very boring and it's even worse when you get through it and realize that all this boring stuff was for nothing - the plot easily could be 10 times shorter without losing anything.
I actually just read a review in The New Yorker, it has a short plot description there and I liked the review more than the book.
I absolutely do not recommend reading it.
Fascinating book mostly about Ray Dalio. Not the first book about billionaires who entirely lack empathy and behave almost inhumanly but still quite interesting, especially in contrast to Ray Dalio's Principles book where he omitted important details from his biography. Principles read like the real world “Atlas shrugged” and from this book we learn that it was similar in also being total bullshit. Absolutely worth reading.
Мне книга очень понравилась, персонажи (причём не только главные) простые, но очень “красочные”. Несмотря на наличие древнего зла, серийных убийц и насильников, самым жутким персонажем для меня был обычный дядя Гена - любовник мамы одного из ГГ.
Древнее зло тоже крайне классно сделанный персонаж, не плоский как это обычно с такими бывает.
Надеюсь когда-нибудь автор соберётся перевести книгу на английский и я смогу её рекомендовать англоязычным друзьям - думаю им будет интересно.
In this book my imagination wasn't enough - I just couldn't imagine a lot of what was going on. Also, increasingly convoluted schemes of Carl in an insanely complicated setting didn't help with immersion.
It's still cool but my retelling of this book would be like 20 words and I wouldn't be able to tell more because I don't remember a shit, only that it was very complicated.
Audiobook production is still amazing and the final ad was actually really funny.
Exceptionally beautiful language but a little bit light on a story. It has a very long part in the middle where almost nothing happens.
I certainly enjoyed Andrić's depictions of Bosnian nature and Višegrad but the book is quite long and it's hard to be engaged in the non-events in the middle.
I didn't notice any anti-muslim sentiment (Andrić is almost universally disliked by Bosnian muslims for Islamophobia) and the last chapter is definitely sympathetic to a mullah who laments Christianity which mindlessly rebuilds everything around.
I bet it would be better in an audiobook form but I don't think it exists.
