Samih Ibrahim
So much ado about nothing. Usually the slow burn works because you don't know what is coming or you are enjoying the journey. This book takes the slow burn approach too far and goes into too much details that add nothing to the overall story. Add to that the tendency of the Quiet to intervene in their mysterious ways and for things to resolve itself and you have this book.
On one hand, the book is an excellent introduction to what makes anything considered as money and what is the different between good money and bad money. It also provides a reasonable place in the world for bitcoin (as the backing currency for banks not individuals) and goes into interesting thought experiments about what could threaten bitcoin. But on the other hand, the author is insufferable; too sure about his opinion (All the wars and the fall of every empire can be traced to the introduction of bad money?! really??), lots of personal attacks on Keynes, and uses pseudo evidence to support whatever claims he favors.
Just come prepared with an open mind, take what you can from this book and discard the rest.
A great saga about the human condition. Scifi for the sake of scifi over thousands of years. Great characterization and Neal isn't afraid of letting them die all the time. Moral; you can't ignore politics to focus on what matters. If you do, someone else will come along and sell a more engaging narrative than yours and take control from under your hand.
“I hear you, sugar. I'm not gonna say you're wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics'—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”
“Don't do what you can't undo, until you've considered what you can't do once you've done it.”
A book that reminded me of Lord of the Rings where magic just exists and we don't care about its rules but rather the world it exists in. The book has a slow pace that builds and ebbs in waves but generally keeps its gentle tempo. And its still manages to grip you.
Other memorable moments:
- Like the refrain of a ghastly song, the memories came again and again, the draft of cold air, the knife, the boot, the taste of my enemy's blood in my mouth, and the taste of my own.
- When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities. Consider them all, boy.
- It was an impressive display of good food abused in the name of fashionable cooking
- Sometimes, it is better to be defiantly wrong than silent.
- When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead. Let's start again.
- There is something I have observed about skinny men. Some, like Chade, seem so preoccupied with their lives that they either forget to eat, or burn every bit of sustenance they take in the fires of their passionate fascination with life. But there is another type, one who goes about the world cadaverously, cheeks sunken, bones jutting, and one senses that he so disapproves of the whole of the world that he begrudges every bit of it that he takes inside himself.
- But when all roads lead to death, there is no point to running down any of them. I would take things as they came.
A great read that is not about the events but the flow of them and how they are told. Very quotable :)
- It is not the business of gentlemen to have occupations.
- But imagining what might happen if one's circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness.
- The principle here is that a new generation owes a measure of thanks to every member of the previous generation. Our elders planted fields and fought in wars; they advanced the arts and sciences, and generally made sacrifices on our behalf. So by their efforts, however humble, they have earned a measure of our gratitude and respect.
- Manners are not like bonbons, Nina. You may not choose the ones that suit you best; and you certainly cannot put the half-bitten ones back in the box
- With so little to do and all the time in the world to do it, the Count's peace of mind continued to be threatened by a sense of ennui—that dreaded mire of the human emotions.
- “Sometimes,” Nina clarified, “everybody tells you something because they are everybody. But why should one listen to everybody? Did everybody write the Odyssey? Did everybody write the Aeneid?” She shook her head then concluded definitively: “The only difference between everybody and nobody is all the shoes.
- It took only a few seconds for the borzois to recognize the cat's tactic; but if attentiveness is measured in minutes, discipline in hours, and indomitability in years, then the attaining of the upper hand on the field of battle is measured in the instant.
- For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.
- If patience wasn't so easily tested, then it would hardly be a virtue
- Thus, in the ballroom of the Metropol Hotel on the twenty-first of June 1926, was the heretic, Galileo of Galilei, vindicated by a ping, a splat, a smash, a thunk, a thump, and a thud.
- And there you have him in a nutshell, my friend: a man who raced toward parties, and trotted from his own misdeeds.
- Young women only die of broken hearts in novels, Charles. She died of scarlet fever
- I think that both of your friends are very sharp. I mean it takes a good bit of dexterity to pull a thread out of the fabric all in one piece. But I can't help feeling that they're missing something.
