Colin Gooding

I think I'm ready to give up on narrative non-fiction.

I've read a few acclaimed books with this structure, such as The Lost City Of Z (also by Grann) and The Devil In The White City, and they just haven't been for me. I find the subject matter really interesting, but the storytelling just puts me off.

There's something about the suspension of disbelief when true-life scenes are described in detail combined with the book usually covering so many things that happened in real life that may or may not be interesting. With movies about real life events I immediately accept that it is fictionalized to some degree and is edited down so that each moment is crucial to the story.

Anyways, there's definitely an interesting and harrowing bit of history at the core here and I'm curious to see what Scorcese does with this for his film.

I don't think I have actually ever re-read any of these books. I got the first three in a box set for Christmas in 1999 and then bought every other book on release.

I thought this would be a good first chapter book to read with my daughter, and after a few false starts over the last year or two, this time she really got into it and paid attention as I read. Her review: “That was a good book”.

This first book was always my favorite of the series. I just like the way the world and characters are introduced and I remember being blown away by the reveal at the end. There isn't a ton of side plots or anything, it's a relatively lean and quick story.

Looking forward to reading through the whole series again with my daughter. It's a shame that JK Rowling is a bit of a terrible person though, oh well.

Final note: The fact that the students care about the House Cup so much when the points are complete bullshit ala Whose Line Is It Anyway is absolutely insane.

I started off liking this book well enough, the military training section held my attention and seemed to have an interesting take on the price and hardship of military service, plus with the unique wrinkle of this world only allowing the right to vote for those who have served a term of that service.

But then it took a nosedive for me. Sometimes it can be hard to distinguish between the voice of a character and the voice of the author, but any scene where a professor or authority figure was monologuing to the main character in a class or where ever and convincing him of some shitty opinion on things like corporal punishment or inalienable rights it was just extremely preachy and pretty disgusting.

Aside from morally questionable content, I just got bored about halfway through as well. There are long drawn out sections where the chain of command and the general makeup of a platoon is discussed. I ended up skimming through a lot of the later parts of the book as I considered dropping it and I just couldn't be bothered to read through it closely.

Here's hoping I enjoy the movie more!

I really loved this author's previous book, Station Eleven, so I had pretty high expectations of this. And it's good, I just didn't love it.

I really enjoy her writing style though, similar to Station Eleven, we study in and out of several different character POVs without any regard for a chronological order. The prose to me is very soothing and understated for some reason, even when bad things are happening. I just like reading it.

However the story and characters here are just fine. There is a decent sense of time and place, but I was never super attached to anyone or waiting to see any particular plot points develop.

Still I did like this and I'll certainly read more by Emily St. John Mandel in the future.

I decided to read this because Brahm mentioned in his review that this was more breadth over depth, which was something that was opposite to his preference. I, however, don't read a ton of non-fiction and when I do I prefer a wide range of topics around a theme, such as Freakonomics or a Malcolm Gladwell book, so I grabbed the audiobook from the library.

This was a fun, easy read even if it wasn't super enlightening or anything. Each section on different parts/functions of body is generally basic enough that a high school biology class likely covered it, but almost every one of these sections also includes a fun anecdote about an early pioneering doctor or researcher that made discoveries in that area.

Things that did surprise me were the things that we still don't have answers for. Did you know that we don't have a good scientific explanation for why we sleep still? I assumed there was a specific regenerative process or something that I just forgot the details about when I wasn't paying attention in a class, but nope, we just need sleep for... some reason.

Glad I listened to this though! Was a great book to drive to and do chores to.

Murakami is such a strange writer to me because at one moment he expresses some element of the human psyche with such nuance and then he'll turn around and write some just ham-fisted like I'm-fourteen-and-this-is-deep style philosophizing, usually centered on women. There's one story here that starts “Of all the women I've known until now, she was the ugliest” that kind of hurt to read. A short story about how looks affect social status and personality and all that could have been interesting if handled correctly, but this was not that.

Anyways, not great. I still love Norwegian Wood though.

I'm not a huge fan of Seth Rogen, but he can certainly be funny and charming so I thought hearing stories from, especially about the film industry, could be entertaining. And they are, I really liked his behind-the-scenes takes from some movies or about certain celebrities. A lot of them are just very strange interactions that he seems to have been bewildered by. I'm not as big of a fan of drug trip stories though and that's about a third of this book, but you kind of have to expect that from a Seth Rogen.

Overall a pretty fun quick read and it was nice to listen to the audiobook narrated by Rogen himself and featuring a bunch of other actors.

This was a fun read with a few unique stories / presentations, but nothing really unexpected after reading the first volume. I'm still enjoying this series for sure though so I will definitely finish all 4 volumes.

I had no idea this was about a pandemic when I started this, which was interesting to read now. The way it tells the story of the pandemic and aftermath only through the perspective of a handful of characters, including jumping around in various points in time via very subtle links from one section to the next, was really unique and kept me wondering what the next subject would be.

I've read and enjoyed a fair bit of post-apocalyptic fiction (The Road is one of my favorite books) and most of them are written in a very desperate, bleak way. There are certainly moments of that here, but the writing actually feels very tender and contemplative. Often these stories are about the protagonists holding on to the bare shreds of humanity that they have left, this book felt more about how humanity changes when all the comforts and systems that have always been there to rely on disappear and a new world must be forged. It struck me as fairly hopeful and was a bit of a breath of fresh air.

If I had to nitpick, I would say there are only two things I didn't love. One was a major villain that was a little over the top compared to the rest of the story and goes a bit against what I was talking about in the previous paragraph. The other is that all the POV characters have interesting diverse backgrounds, but their core personalities are all very similar sort of “everyman” types where they are good people trying to do the right thing even though they have flaws and regrets. I think the characters still work, but I felt the voices really weren't that distinct when the POV switched.

I checked this out because the upcoming Hawkeye Disney+ series is supposed to be based on it. It's really good, kind of a gumshoe detective feel if that detective was also an expert marksman Avenger. The art and page layouts are great. I'm not really sure how that will translate to an MCU show, but the stories themselves are pretty fun too, so I'm excited.

The premise of this novella is great: two agents on opposite sides of a war leave notes to one another as they travel through time on their missions.

And some of that is really neat. And some of the purpose is very beautiful. Yet I found it a bit hard to follow and meandering, so it didn't really connect with me. I may have just been in the wrong headspace for it.

It's a fairly short novella, the audiobook I listened to was four hours long, so I think I'm going to take another crack at it sometime in print instead.

The majority of the reason I enjoyed this book is in the prose. There is a really interesting mix of this sort of melancholy tone interspersed with both strange humor and some sinister/forboding moments, all wrapped within a bit of film noir trappings. It almost feels like a few tonal steps away from something like the movie Fargo? It's fascinating to read, even though by the end I thought some of the writing patterns showed themselves a bit too plainly (but were still mostly effective).

I did love the choice to have the POV character never speak. It reminded me of a video game like Half Life or Chrono Trigger, and it added to that noir tone. It also forces the supporting cast to reveal their character a little more freely, I thought it worked extremely well.

The plotting here is very strange as well. It seems like the A plot is a slice of life story of a the struggles of small reserve community, and then the B plot is a grandiose billionaire murder conspiracy. Both are compelling, but I'm not sure that either of them were completely successful. I'm sure there are layers of the allegory I'm missing, but I still wanted to see what would happen next and tore through the last half of the novel, so it certainly worked at some level.

I'll have to add some more Thomas King to my backlog, as this was my first of his and he is clearly a talented writer.

I haven't been as engaged with a thriller book like this in a long while. I was listening to this via audiobook as I drove for half a day to go on vacation, and then when I arrived I kept sneaking in time to listen to more because I wanted to see what would happen next. The format of bouncing between the husband's perspective and missing wife's journals probably isn't really a new idea, but works well here to build tension and keep the reader guessing. These characters are really interestingly drawn as well, early on I thought some of the writing was a bit pretentious or eye-rolly, but quickly realized that was intentional characterization.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but unfortunately I kind of suspected some plot points just based on little comments or whatever that I have read about the movie unintentionally, I wish I had zero knowledge going into this, but it was still fun to second guess myself a bit and try to figure out how things would get to where I thought they were going.

An engaging read about a KGB agent who fed secrets to the British for over a decade. I like how a lot of this is both thrilling and rather mundane compared to a Hollywood “spy” story and the details of things like how the British were able to use the information he gave them without giving him away and things like how little miscommunications or inconveniences can derail a plan are really interesting.

I believe this author has written a few other real-life spy books so I'll probably check another one out in the near future.

I had an interesting experience with this book because I've been meaning to read it for a long time and didn't know much about the plot besides the setup... until just a few months ago where the whodunnit was casually spoiled for me in a Reddit comment or something like that. Which was a number, but reading through this was fun in the same way as rereading a mystery and looking to see where the clues for, which is something I rarely do.

I'm going to keep this next part vague as to not spoil anything, but when I got to the end I realized that there was an aspect to the spoiler I read that wasn't made clear to me, so the reveal still kind of caught me by surprise, which was neat.

Anyways, I really enjoyed this overall. The writing is really sharp, especially the characterizations, though that may be in big part due to the excellent narration by David Suchet in the audiobook I listened to. Every character has a unique voice and is just fun to spend time with. There's definitely some dated racial and sexist profiling going on in some of the theories, but the book was written in 1934 so it's easier to forgive.

At times the story just feels like a full length riddle or something, most of it consists of interviews with the suspects after the murder had taken place. There is very little action happening or anything like that, it's all just deduction. It's still very entertaining and is clearly an early mould of those types of riddles and stories that have come since.

I'll have to check out some more of Agatha Christie's work soon.

I feel like I've read a lot of books so far this year that I don't really have any strong thoughts on. This is another one of those. It's well written, but I don't think I was thoroughly engaged while reading through it.

I've had it on my to-read list for awhile and just picked it up because it's been turned into a TV show now and I heard something intriguing about the premise that I didn't realise before that sounded really neat, but ultimately I just thought this was okay. Oh well.

I generally like reading Star Wars books every now and then because the world is so iconic and vast that there's room to explore a lot of different facets of it without having to spend a ton of time on setting up the world. I was excited to try out a story set in an earlier era of Star Wars that was free of the weight of the Empire and all the characters from the movies.

This book was... fine? I mostly just found it a bit bland I think. There are a ton of characters and things going on, so I never really got attached to anything or anyone. A lot of it feels like suuuper stock-standard action too, early on several chapters end with a character being cut off mid-line by an explosion. There's some good stuff in here too though, I liked following a character that was uncertain of himself learning to become a Jedi and the hero that people expect him to be (which is also pretty standard, but works here mostly).

I would probably give this a completely neutral 2.5/5, but since I don't think I would actually recommend it to people I'll round it down to a 2. There are much better Star Wars books out there.

Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors. I've now only read four of his books, but I need to read more. The Remains of the Day is a masterpiece. Never Let Me Go has a specific moment in it that really stuck me and I still think about a lot. The Buried Giant built and interesting world and explored really interesting themes.

Klara and the Sun does a great job of slowly building out the state of the world without relying on an exposition dump. I love stories that throw you in and just let you figure out the rules contextually. The POV character has a childlike quality that works really well and really all of the characters are well realized and interesting, though I guess I was expecting more pivotal moments for some of them, I think the story tended to meander a bit at times.

I feel pretty similar to this book as I did with The Buried Giant. Ishiguro is such a gifted writer and takes on heady ideas, and while they don't always completely land, I'm still glad to have read it.

I like to try to read books that have movies or shows coming out soon, so when I saw that Netflix was making this with Amy Adams in the lead role I grabbed the audiobook from the library.

This was okay. It's an unabashedly Hitchcockian and pulpy thriller, and it does a pretty good job of it. There are twists and turns, and thrilling moments, but there wasn't anything overly inventive or memorable about it. Also the ending was stupid.

I think it'll make for a pretty schlocky movie, but there's enough talent involved that I hope it's a fun thriller at least.

A final note about the audiobook: After it was over there was a segment where the narrator did a Q&A with the writer. I wish more audiobooks did stuff like that.

This is about exactly what you would expect from the premise, which is simply taking background characters and small moments from The Empire Strikes Back and fleshing them out into short stories. Have you ever wanted to see the scene between Luke and the medical droid fixing his arm that must have occurred before the scene in the movie actually starts? Do you want to know what the citizens of Cloud City thought about the Empire's occupation of it? Would you like to get inside the head of the wampa that captured Like on Hoth? This book is for you.

It was generally pretty fun. Having a whole bunch of different authors (and narrators in the audiobook) made for a good variety of stories told from different points of views from both rebel and empire characters all the way to animals like the aforementioned wampa, the tauntauns on Hoth, and that big monster on the asteroid whose mouth the Millennium Falcon flies into. It wasn't quite as drastically varied in tone and style as I would have liked, it all feels of a piece of the movie, but it was still fun.

There are some drawbacks to having these all as completely disconnected sorry stories though. They are presented chronologically in line with the movie, so the conditions on Hoth are described in detail at least a half dozen times. Same with Han and Leia's open secret romance dynamic. There are FOUR stories that prominently featured the scene where Vader force choke kills that one Admiral while video conferencing with him early in the movie. Some of it just stuck out strangely reading these all back to back.

Still I liked this well enough and there's something fun, though cheesey, about realizing when a scene from the story starts to become a scene that was in the movie and recognizing specific lines and whatnot. There is another book like this about A New Hope, so I'll probably get around to that eventually as well (I just listened to this one first because it was available sooner via the library).

I really enjoyed this. It feels like a very personal take on what it means to be an Asian American, yet it is an extremely stylized telling as it's often written in the form of a screenplay AND in second person, which I'm not sure I've ever seen outside of short stories. And it GOES PLACES the further you get into it (which isn't too long, the audiobook was just over four hours). I still need to process my thoughts and do some reading / podcast listening to understand this better.

This is a beautiful, meditative sorry of Western epic fit into a short novella. I enjoyed just being taken along for the journey.

The audiobook was expertly narrated by Will Patton and definitely added to the tone and feel of the writing.

I really loved World War Z when I read it years ago because the journalist account of a fictional global crisis was such a neat idea and really well executed.

This follow up book is much smaller scale about one incident to one small group of people, but still tries to tell the story in a similar way with having a few different experts and related characters interviewed as well as the majority of the story being told in journal entries of a single character who was present for the events. It mostly just feels like a standard first person narrative though with this journal conceit clumsily fit over top of it.

The story itself is fine, some of it is thrilling and there are ideas here and there that piqued my interest, but it honestly took way longer than I expected to get rolling (the first third to half of the book is just setting up the community location and it's cast of characters) and it wasn't particularly interesting or unique.

Giving this a two because I wouldn't recommend it. Read World War Z instead.

I really loved Ready Player One. I know it gets a lot of criticism for just being a string of references, but I thought it nailed exactly what it was going for, it was fun, indulgent nostalgia wish fulfillment. I had varying levels of familiarity with the different references, but even the ones I had no attachment too were engaging because of the enthusiasm put into it.

When this sequel came out, I heard a lot of similar criticisms of the poor reference-heavy writing that I dismissed and queued this up to read soon. But then I saw people who liked the first book being pretty critical of this one as well so I decided to push it off... but then recently the audiobook became available through the library's Skip The Line program despite being reserved for several months, and I was between audiobooks, so I jumped on it.

** Spoilers **

Ready Player Two is not very fun. The main character isn't fun to be with, he's kind of a shitty person at a shitty place in his life and not happy about it. In the first book, he gleefully undertakes his quest and is a super fan of everything he experiences, in this one he barely knows anything about what he's doing and is just forced to do it quickly by the bad guy. I'm even more familiar with the references in this book than the last and yet they were far less fun.

The way this book tries to both bring up social and moral issues of the technology it uses, while also refusing to have any consequences of it for the characters is absolutely insane to me. The entire plot is about how a rogue AI based off of a real person neatly kills billions of people, but the conclusion at the end is that it was just a one-off occurrence and actually AI memory people are actually super neat? The main character spies on people without their knowledge, copies people's entire consciousnesses into these AI things without their knowledge, and at worst he gets a scolding from his girlfriend about that, who eventually comes around to it anyway because she has her grandma back digitally now. But at least the main character learned enough to not use this technology anymore, even though he continues to profit off billions of people still using it and also maintains direct communication with the AI created by it.

I don't think it's all bad, there's still some enjoyable moments that reminded me of what it felt to read the first book. I was probably wavering between a two and a three star rating while reading most of it. The ending definitely cemented it on the lower end that I was leaning to anyways.

I still think the first book probably holds up, as I outlined some of the differences above, but reading this makes me worried that I would have a lot of problems with it if I were to read it again today. Maybe I'll give it a shot sometime.

This was really well researched and written, it felt like a huge fact dump without the tedium that usually comes with it.

The points here are unfortunately not too surprising, almost universally products and ideas are designed with the average person in mind, but the average person is actually the average man. In examples cited in this book, the failings repeated the most seemed to be the unaccounted for difference in size of the average male to the average female and the fact that women are far more likely to be the primary caregiver to dependents, though the book also dives into much more specific sex-based differences as well. Often times, it just reads as an inditement of capitalism in general, just point out that it treats women extremely disproportionately worse.

I like to think that I consider this sort of thing in my day-to-day life and work, but this book will certainly make me think harder about it and be more aware.

I listened to this via audiobook narrated by the author herself, which was really well done and felt more personal for it, I think. Highly recommend.