Blue sky, green trees

When I watched the movie "Into the Wild" many years ago, I was very moved by Chris McCandless and his adventure-gone-wrong. He seemed earnest and moved by the beauty of nature and he fucked up just a little and the consequences were total. However, the Chris McCandless in the book is something completely different. While he still seems earnest and moved by the beauty of nature, he comes off as arrogant and insufferable, gazing at everyone from heights of self-righteousness; I loathe self-righteousness. Yet somehow everyone who met him (in the book) thought Chris was the greatest person ever. I would generally have guessed that the author had a general dislike for McCandless and that it came through in his writing, but over the course of the book it becomes very clear to the reader that this isn't the case at all, and I won't say more in case it borders on spoilers.

So, an interesting book for sure. And I quite like how Krakauer writes, and how he looks at things. I just didn't like Chris McCandless.

The author lays it on a bit thick, but it's still a fun read.

Just...kind of...boring.

I'm not into video games and don't really know much about them, so if I hadn't been given this book as a Christmas present I never would have known about it. However, I was game (ha!) to give it a try.

In general, it was a fun read with a good mix of action and heart. It definitely will speak more to people who like video games because it is basically a book version of a video game, complete with loads of stats, loot boxes, and lots of gaming terms like NPC, debuff, grinding, and mob (it doesn't mean a group). The book's feeling is weird because it's kind of repetitive - fighting monsters, going through loot boxes & achievements, repeat - but it also has variety in the interactions and encounters Carl and Donut have aside from the monsters. The descriptions of the various loot and spells and monsters was a bit grating, and I started skipping over that stuff because they tell you about it again when the stuff gets used or when the fight with a monster gets going. One of the biggest weaknesses of the book is that it's the first in a series of 8 (as of 2026), which takes away any suspense about if they'll survive the battles they face in this first book.

So will I read the second book? Meh, probably not. Glad I read this first one, but the plot and characters just aren't compelling enough to make me come back for more.

Somehow I had the idea that this book would be more of a portrait of a selection of books that American soldiers were reading during WWII, with anecdotes and information and quotes from soldiers about each selected book. I had planned to use it as a curated reading list, to be honest. Well that's not what this book is about at all, thankfully, because what it actually talks about is something that I would never have imagined: a program for getting books into the hands of every soldier, books of all types and all across the globe. It talks about how this program was seen as vital to the war effort, and the obstacles that had to be overcome to make it a success (and it was a runaway success).

This book was a real eye-opener for me on multiple facets of WWII, both for the soldiers and for those back home. And thanks to the handy appendix listing every single book that was part of this program, and the anecdotes about individual titles sprinkled throughout the book, I do have quite a nice reading list to dig into.

Overwritten. It was a barrier that kept me from getting into the book, and while I'm still interested in the story I just can't get past that writing.

Phenomenal book. It tells the story of 4 members of the "Arab Section" of the Jewish paramilitary group Palmach, whose members looked Arab, whose mother tongue was Arabic, and who were born and raised in Arab countries like Syria or Egypt. It was a history that I'd never heard before, and it really expanded my understanding of the early days of Israel's espionage programs as well as the Mizrahi experience. Enlightening and entertaining, highly recommend.

It feels like nothing happens at all in these stories, which is a very odd feeling because things definitely do happen, big things even, but it is all just very blah. It's as if someone was telling you a story very slowly and in monotone. I managed to get halfway through, and that is a true testament to how much I love my book club because this book is deadly dull.

Every sentence was perfection. No notes.

100% recommend to everyone.

Flauschiger Krimi steht auf der Vorderseite, und das ist nicht nur eine Wortwitz sondern auch eine gute Beschreibung des Gefühls. Aber im besten Sinn, finde ich. Meine Nachbarin hatte mir einen echt gruselig Krimi ausgeliehen, diesen Scandi-Noir-Torture-Porn-Bücher kann ich gar nicht aushalten, und direkt danach habe ich dieses Miez Marple Buch gefunden und es war eine Art von Palate-Cleanser. Leicht, einfach, aber auch witzig und unterhaltsam.

The writing is clunky. The author puts Cardell in an inescapable position - a giant pins him to the ground by sitting on him, then proceeds to beat him senseless with the intention of killing him - and then skips over the miraculous escape, just having Cardell show up later having fought his way out. It's a cheap trick. Another instance of clunky writing: part 2 opens with a letter from a brother to a sister, and he has to say things like "Stockholm is so different from Karlskrona, where we grew up." The sister needs reminding that Karlskrona is where she grew up? Of course not, nobody would actually talk like that, but why doesn't the author understand that nobody would talk like that? Also, a brother wouldn't describe his morning poop to his sister in a letter. I don't know if I can say that the writing is generally bad, but it certainly isn't flowing the way a novel should.

I'm not finishing this book because aside from the clunky writing I'm not interested in the story, in fact I don't like the Scandi-Noir/torture porn genre at all. I wouldn't have picked it up on my own, a neighbor force-lent me the book and I felt obligated to at least give it a try. After 150 pages I can say that I'm not the reader for this book, time to move on.

I would give this book 10 stars if I could, it was perfection.

Unreadable. Maybe if I tried to read it in Englisch it would work, but the whole point is to improve my German so I'm moving on from this one.

Given that it's only January this feels a little wild to say, but I think this is a contender for the best book I read this year.

Started off energetic enough, talking about the affair between Hepworth and Nicholson. Very spicy stuff, with the mistress and the wife both declaring that they were fine with sharing their man, but each also assuming that in reality he would spend most of his time with her and getting upset when he spent time with the other. Good stuff!

This level of energy abruptly halts when we switch over to other artists and artist-couples, with the book quickly becoming just a list of artists and their projects. It's all dry as old toast. Giving up on this book, life's too short for old toast.

Unsettling, because of all the ways the brain can suddenly "go wrong". Baffling, because their realities are so unutterably alien. But above all fascinating, because these stories are true and these people are real and these unsettling and baffling lives were actually lived.

As another reviewer said, it starts well but sags in the middle; however I would add that it ends strong. Pretty good read.

It's a novel about a 20-something who is bored and restless, and as a reader I also felt bored and restless.

Someone once told me novels act as mirrors or windows, depending on the reader. Well, I think that if you are a person for whom this would be a mirror then I think it will be a good read; I can see how it would feel validating, and perhaps nostalgic, to see your struggles and frustrations reflected back at you. If this book would be a window then it's more likely to be a dud because nothing really happens, and that is hard to connect to without a personal angle.

Well I never thought there'd be a book about dolphin rape, but here we are. I don't really know what else to say about that, except that there's a lot of it and it's completely unnecessary for the plot.

In between the dolphin rapes readers can look forward to reading about a traumatized whale and various fish who have lost everyone and everything they knew and loved. You might hope that the writing itself would be beautiful to balance out this horror, but it's pretty bland. The whole thing is like the writings of a disturbed teenager, focusing all their energy on the most graphically violent parts and only sketching in the rest.

All in all a brutal book.

It's famous for a reason.

1st attempt: the language level was a bit high for me, and that's tough with a book that is more about evocative writing than "grab you" plot. But I'm not willing to give up, so I'll hold on to this and hopefully revisit it eventually.

We pop into the lives of these four 60-somethings, and we pop back out. There isn't a rise in drama into a climax, nor is there a tidy conclusion, and this is a strength; it's what I like about it.

Not at all what I expected. See, it was chosen by my book club so I knew it was about an early exploration of Antarctica but nothing else; I simply ordered it and didn't give it another thought. Well the book that arrived was very slim, surprisingly slim given the subject. My second surprise was regarding the structure of the book, specifically that we don't reach Antarctica until the 3rd chapter; for such a short book I assumed we would be plopped down on the ice ASAP.

Once I understood what the author was doing I was captivated. Enthralled. It is such a beautifully written book, and the characters so vivid. Highly recommend, absolute must-read.

I liked it well enough, but my enthusiasm for computer history petered out and I just don't feel like continuing. Glad I read what I did, it was interesting, but I'm in the mood for a novel and so it's time to move on.

I liked the plot a lot, and many of her points about group-think (especially on the left) really resonated with me. However the writing style was really hard for me to get into. The main character is very neurotic, and the author does a great job of showing us this through lots of paragraphs of her inner chatter; kudos for showing and not telling, but it doesn't make for good reading. For example, there will be 2 full pages of her spiraling thoughts between when someone says "hello" and her replying "hello". This might - might - have worked if those neurotic, scattered, spiraling thoughts were interesting, but they were not.