Kostas Konstantinidis

The narration by Steven Pacey is out of this world. Never in my life have I encountered this level of performance. Outstanding.

This book is alive. The characters pop out of the book. You will laugh and you will be reading furiously until you finish it. Pick it up now.

A scifi masterpiece. I really enjoyed the philosophical elements bundled into this one.

Must read.

Just read it.

Some books convey to you knowledge and maturity that would otherwise take decades to attain.

This is one of those books

An excellent follow up to Dr. Peterson's “12 rules for life, an antidote to chaos” book. Might just buy them as hard copies and plant them carefully in our family's library hoping one day that my children will stumble upon them.

That said, I'll do my best to convey many of the teachings here as part of their upbringing

As an atheist, I realised in the last decade that without religion, a human needs a framework. One that will act as a compass but also as a fortification when hard times (inevitably) hit. This book contributes to my quest in devising my own framework to navigate life, in my world without religion.

Be advised that this book much like the previous one, has many references to Christian literature such as the Bible. It draws a lot of symbolism from there. You probably expect me to say that I was put off by that. Instead, I was fascinated with many of the hidden meanings that I knew religion had embedded in it. I was baptised as a child to be a Christian Orthodox but never quite deciphered many of these meanings and secret messages baked into Christianity.

One of the points the author made in the first book that really stuck with me is the symbolism between yin and yang. Between order and chaos. The line where the two worlds meet is where progress happens. Too much stability is bad, too much instability is also bad. You got to have them both in order to find meaning and happiness.

You see, it's easy to rest on your laurels. Easy to be complacent or afraid to go after hard things. Go after the uncertain. We have a tendency to cocoon ourselves to whatever “order” we created. Just stay there and hope for the best. Yet what the author suggests is excursions into chaos. Go after or encounter whatever might make your life better. The things that worth it are hard most of the times.

Hope the above inspires you to check out Dr Peterson's books

Initial mindfulness bits are good.

After the first half, the spiritual/religious mixing with mindfulness, though put me off, to be honest

I really enjoyed this book

As a scifi / science addict, I found that this book short of combines the two plus my other hobby. Self-improvement.

This book will give you a better perspective on why:
- Having a dream and relentless perseverance matters
- Nothing is impossible
- You should be trying to be good at work and not actively the STAR
- When faced with difficult situations you should focus on the positive things left to you
- The importance of a good marriage and the sacrifices spouses do for each other
- How a journey from start to finish looks like for an ISS astronaut
- How a path to be come an astronaut looks like

Definitely one of my top picks for 2020, unexpectedly so to be honest.

This book will fundamentally change you.

I didn't read this particular version. I bought it but then realized that Marcus Aurelius wrote this in fact in Ancient Greek so a read in Greek seemed more appropriate.

So I bought a great version in modern Greek which had a glossary and notes about different terms and phrases.

Nothing prepares you for life in this world and its inevitable dark sagas that you'll have to go through. I had my fair share of dark moments in my life that now make me wish I read more about this book and stoicism in general before hand.

We are getting raised with stories and movies that in their majority have happy endings. You go out there expecting the world to be your oyster and especially when young, you feel indestructible. That is, until fate decides to show the other side of the coin.

I don't own many physical books. This is going to join a collection of physical books that I want my children and to have access to.

I wasn't particularly interested in some of the more religious aspects of stoicism - as an atheist - but I read everything in context of when it's written and by who. There's an element of that in case you are a person that is getting put off by this fact.

I think the world would be a better place if most people read this.

Pretty good book. A bit dragged with the examples though.

Borrowing from the book

Did the education system teach you anything about the benefit of fitness?
It probably did..

Anything about the benefits of a good diet?
It probably did..

What about the benefits of good sound sleep?
No? NO?!
What kind of school did you attend?
Well, who am I kidding, neither did mine.
The core principles of this book need to be taught in schools.

That's how important this book is.

This is legitimately one of the best scifi books I've gotten my hands on for a while.

Immediately bought the second one in the series(there are four)

For any topic of expertise, understanding why something works is a mixture of experience and understanding of the mechanics involved in its inner workings. This books better explains why startups succeed, why they fail and provides a framework to evaluate your business and guide it by setting up proper foundations.

This book was probably /just/ good when it first came out but for today's standards it just didn't deliver. After many, many hours of investment in hope of the story actually becoming interesting I found myself with an ending as boring as the rest of the book.

Save yourself some time and read something else.

Dark business, war that is.

This book kept me busy during my holidays and it was something different in Joe Abercrombie's saga.

One of my favourite segments follows:

“This is a black business. Bakers make bread, and carpenters make houses, and we make dead men. All you can do is take each day as it comes. Try and do the best you can with what you're given. You won't always do the right thing, but you can try. And you can try to do the right thing next time. That, and stay alive”

Concise and to the point. “Down to earth” examples that you can understand without a degree in Economics. Read this first before trying out Eric Evan's.

Can't remember the last time I got so bored with a book.
The search for proper DDD material continues..

Good read. Disappointed somehow by the lack of patterns in relation to workflows and business logic when it comes to messaging. I would say that 80% of the book is things that probably you won't have to implement yourself nowadays unless you build your own enterprise messaging bus.

I enjoyed learning about the patterns which are applicable to business processes such as the ‘process manager', the ‘aggregator', the ‘routing slip' and ‘scatter-gather'.

I have to say that after 3 books, Children of the Mind was a bit hard to finish. I don't know if it was me, or the writing style of the author, but at certain points(or even gasp chapters) I was thinking of just putting down and moving on.

The depth at which situations and character exchanges are analyzed becomes tiring after a while.

The book certainly has its moments. The decisions that the characters are making and the perspective that the author provides about certain situations are interesting to say the least. I am glad that the book provides a sort of closure for the Ender era cause I don't think that I would be patient enough to look for it in the next one.

I generally liked the way that this book is presented. It gives you a new perspective at potentially how kids could be developed under different circumstances. I found the ending a bit unrealistic for my liking but I guess that must be just me :)

In my attempt to familiarize myself better with the Warcraft lore, I picked Tides of Darkness up.

In terms of chronological order, this is one of the first books that you want to be reading, right after the events at Karazhan and the unveil of Sargeras' scheme through Medigh. The book picks up right after the Horder enters Azeroth and is focused around their efforts to take over the known world to them. Some of the noteworthy characters that make their ‘debut'(or have their spotlight moments) in this one include Turalyon, Luthar, Uther, Kudran, Alleria and Terenas.

After the events in Draenor and the Horde's corruption, Doomhammer climbed to the top of the food chain and became the Warchief of the Horde. Given the preceded events, he wants to re-establish the honor of his kin and discard the taint of the ways that Gul'dan instilled upon them. On the blue corner, Luthar along with Turalyon and Khadgar jump start what is later known as the Alliance and try to drive back the Horde from whence they came from.

There are a lot of battles in this one as well. I was really pleased by how the author described them and how I was able to visualize them at times, really vividly in fact.

A small warning to Horde fans; you may want to skip this book if you genuinely dislike Alliance books. If you like to read fantasy books objectively though then I think that you will like this book and the kind of spectrum it provides on the initial state of the Horde.

PS. You also get to known who's is the erected statue on the base of the Blackrock Mountain and why its there of all places.

I think that the first one had me guessing more than this one. Being a foreigner with a limited vocabulary I have to say that this one was a bit harder to read than the previous.

A good read overall, it will grab you from the face at times and bore you on others.

The story was well written and even though I am somehow familiar with the lore i couldn't foresee some of the twists. I was set back by the abundance of new words that I had to learn while reading this; it's a much harder book to read than those of Christie Golden.

Μια υπέροχη συλλογή ποιημάτων. Διαβάστε την. Μερικές ιστορίες πραγματικά βρίσκουν πατήματα σε προσωπικά βιώματα. Περιμένουμε το επόμενο κύριε Δάσκαλε.

Ένα βιβλίο που θα χρειαστεί να ξαναδιαβαστεί. Αρκετά δύσκολο εξαιτίας της λυρικής του φύσης. Το νόημα στον πυρήνα του όμως είναι εύκολο να διακριθεί. Ένα νόημα που ενδεχομένως να σας αλλάξει τον τρόπο που αντιμετωπίζετε την ζωή σας πλέον

Διαβάστε το.

The advice you are going to find in this book is, in majority common sense.
That said, sometimes you need someone to provide to you a perspective over certain things and practical examples of how some theories can be put to practice.