Colin Gooding

China Miéville is one of my favorite authors even though I find a lot of his books to be pretty hot and miss, just because he swings for the fences a lot and has a wonderful imagination.

Unfortunately, this one was not a hit. I probably would have stopped reading it had I not been listening to it via audiobook, instead I just listened passively as I did other things. The concept and characters just didn't grab me (though there are some interesting ideas) and I never really ended up paying close attention to the rest of it. I might give it another chance sometime with more focus.

Not my favorite King, but still good. Certainly has its moments, most of which are ingrained into the popular culture via the movie (which I still haven't seen), but the structure of the story and some of the characters were a bit messy for me.

Listening to the audiobook narrated by Sissy Spacek was a nice touch.

I've really liked this series, but this one clicked more than the others for me. It presents some perspectives that we haven't really seen up until now and there are some fun and interesting character interactions that really drew me in, like Navani and Raboniel. There are still a lot of archetypical hero moments and repeated story beats, but they are well done and fun to read.

I still think these books are way too long for my taste, but this one felt like much less of a slog compared to parts of the last book, Oathbringer. I'm not entirely sure why, it felt to me like chapters were pretty short and switched quite often to almost completely different storylines, so I never felt bored in one place for too long.

I find a lot of the god-tier rules and stakes really confusing though, and I'm not sure if that's on me or if it's because I don't know much about the greater Cosmere beyond this series or if it's intentionally opaque. I can understand the effect of certain things on the characters in this story, but a lot of the details and implications of them are muddled to me.

** Minor Spoilers **

The occupation of the tower is really well done and gives a lot of insight into several different types of characters, and allows interactions that we haven't seen before. Not everything is black and white in the conflict. Also, having Kaladin basically Die Hard-ing throughout the tower was fun.

I like almost all of the main POV characters. Adolin trying to prove himself in a world where his main skills have been rendered nearly obsolete. Shallan's personalities could have been very eye-rolling, but it works as a blunt representation of inner conflict. Dalinar is just a well written character who provides a good path into a lot of the macro-story. Navani teaches us a bit more about how the world works and is a more clinical insight into it. Venli lets us explore a lot of unseen history, allowing us to understand and sympathise with the “enemy”.

** Major Spoilers **

I'm kind of surprised that the three main storylines (Shadesmar / Dalinar at War / The Tower) didn't really converge to a finale. I thought that would bother me, but I kind of liked having them all with their own concerns.

The big fight once again being resolved by swearing a new ideal is a little bit much, but it was enjoyable still. The power creep in this series is getting wild though.

I read this because I've been enjoying the WandaVision tv show and I wanted to see what influence this book has/will have on it. I'm guessing not too much?

Was fun overall with a few big moments, but didn't feel like a must read or anything to me. Does make me want to get back into super hero comics though.

Whenever I read a Stephen King book I am almost already enthralled by it, and I try to look at what makes it so compelling. Is it the prose? It's usually solid enough, but there aren't any specific passages or turns of phrase that jump to mind. Is it the characters? Again, solid. Serviceable. They are sympathetic or despicable or whatever else they need to be and often pretty archetypical, they serve the story well. Is it the plot/ideas? This is probably a bit stronger than the other areas as his books generally have pretty interesting premises, but I'd argue that is mostly his later books that have the more clear elevator pitch high concept plots.

So then I think what really works for me is the pacing and execution. The tension builds and the story unfolds with nary a wasted scene. Information is doled out to the reader and held back in equal measure to keep the pages turning. It's just really fun to read (or in my case, listen to, as I think his style is perfect for audiobooks).

It's hard not to think about this book outside the context of the movie. Reading it, I pictured the hotel from the movie, but I didn't really picture the characters the same way. I remember reading that King was upset with Kubrick's take on The Shining, and one of the reasons is that from frame one Jack Nicholson looks mentally unhinged. I thought that was fine in the movie, but having read the book I totally understand. Jack Torrance in the book is sympathetic, he's had some struggles and is trying to piece his life back together and be a better person. As we spend more time with him we realize that maybe he is an unreliable narrator and maybe his motives aren't as clear as he would like us to think they are, but perhaps he's still a redeemable hero? Anyways, the character is much more complex in the book than in the movie certainly, so the book feels familiar but fresh at the same time. I'm glad I read it!

A final note: King's weird adolescent obsession with sex so strangely stands out to me in this book and others of his. He'll just describe things in a suggestive way or have explicit sexual references as kind of window dressing that feels so out of place. I'll give him a little bit of credit and say it does add to the unsettling feeling of a lot of his stories, but I think that's a bit of a stretch in a lot of cases.

This is the second book of Saunders's that I've read now, or more accurately, listened to. And I have similar feelings to it as I did the other (Lincoln In The Bardo), I think Saunders is a really interesting writer... I just can't quite get into his work for some reason.

This short story collection has a couple tales that I liked, in particular one about a prisoner in an experimental facility forced into radical behavior testing. A lot of them kind of just washed over me though, or were a bit aimless and never really hit me in the right way.

Maybe if I read Saunders again I'll try to skip the audiobook and just read him. I'm not sure if it's just an attention thing.

Also, I really want to read a good short story collection this year, so if you read this and have a suggestion, please let me know!

I feel like a had a pretty broad, but shallow understanding of Leonardo da Vinci's work before reading this (I used to play an old CD-ROM game on our Power Mac all the time when I was a kid that was all about his inventions and ideas). It was nice to have it filled out a little more.

I especially liked how this book highlighted his curiosity as a scientific mind and how it went into how he was received but others people at the time and how he interacted with them.

This was a totally fine little novella with some fun action and decent archetypical characters, but wasn't really anything more than that. I might continue the series just because they are so short.

I actually thought the first two thirds of this book were alright, the Hunger Games are fun (even though everything about it is kind of fucked up, it still is just kind of silly fun for some reason) and seeing them from a perspective outside of the arena was a bit novel, but maybe if I had read the original books more recently it would feel a bit redundant again.

And then the last third of the book is just... kind of boring? I didn't really care about Snow as a character at all. Maybe I'm forgetting details from the original trilogy but it seems to barely matter that he is Snow at all. This isn't even really a fall from grace story, he's kind of a shitty person on a shitty path the entire time. He briefly flirts with being not shitty, not even good just not shitty, and then decides to be shitty.

I actually liked a lot of the prose in the book, it's easy to read and it's evocative without being overly descriptive. Just nice light reading. But there are a lot of terrible story beats that repeat over and over, like Snow having a secret or something and being sure he was going to be found out, being confronted by someone, and then oh actually they didn't know and he's actually had this good thing happen! Or vice versa where he was sure he got away with something, but oh no, he's caught! The inner monologue he'd have leading up to these events so clearly laid out that it would twist the other way every time. Ugh.

I had fun with this, it was full of character and even had a good handful of scenes written in such a way that they played out really well cinematically in my mind's eye. I find myself without too much to say about it, I enjoyed it and I might read something else by McBride now, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend running out to eat this.

This was a really fun little adaptation of one of my favorite podcasts ever.

Early on, it wasn't working as well because I'm not sure that it can really capture the off-the-cuff goofs that work so well in the podcast (though it does a decent job at still keeping the tone in the spirit of that), but near the end as it got more info the meat of what would become the overall story of the podcast I really liked it. I'm looking forward to reading the next one.

Also, Barry Bluejeans is maybe my favorite character name ever.

This was well written enough and easy to read, but just felt pretty muddled and I never was really invested in anything.

I've been listening to podcasts and other things instead of reading lately, so I thought this audiobook would be a good transition back, it's produced like an episode of Gladwell's podcast.

I like Gladwell's ability to find interesting stories/people and draw broad conclusions from them. He generally stays on a topic just long enough for it to remain interesting before moving on to a tangentially related but fairly different one.

I enjoyed this book, but it didn't interest me as much as some of his other's. Concepts such defaulting to truth or mismatched presentation were well explained, but I didn't think the conclusions that were reached from some of the stories told about them were as thought provoking as I hoped they would be.

I almost didn't want to give this a rating because I don't think I really gave it a good effort. I listened to the audiobook on loan from the library and it just didn't really hold my attention, to be honest.

There's some nice passages in here and I enjoyed the narration by the author, but I could barely even tell you what the plot was if pressed. It was quite short (~6 hours), so I actually might give it another shot sometime and come back and revise this.

I remember a few summers as a kid when I was obsessed with Greek mythology. I had one of those Complete Idiot's Guide books about it that I loved that covered a lot in an interesting way.

This book seems extremely comprehensive, but isn't nearly as interesting. It's pretty studious in the way it presents the tales, often just laying out the “facts” of the story with very little insight added (though I did like how the beginning of a section often outlined the source poems/writings from which the author pulled). I thought this worked really well in some cases, but it made certain sections feel like more of a chore as it read as of some uninteresting stories were just bullet pointed in in order to not be missed.

I bought this on sale for Kindle, but I know there is a beautiful illustrated anniversary edition and I kind of wish I bought that as a coffee table book to occasionally browse instead of reading through this entire thing at once.

I really enjoyed this. It's like a bit more of a jovial Remains of the Day, in a way? I'm a sucker for tales of duty and social obligation like this, and the sophisticated dry wit is also right in my wheelhouse.

The narration in the audiobook by Nicholas Guy Smith is perfect. He speaks in an pleasing upper class British accent throughout (he doesn't really attempt Russian as I think it would come off strange), but also does some subtle and not so subtle changes when other characters speak. It definitely set the tone for the entire story.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I generally don't have a problem with broad tropes and cliches when a story has some fun with it, but there was very little levity in this book and it felt like it was trying to make profound statements that just came across as very dull.

Kya is a dirty swamp dweller who is actually alluringly beautiful. She's uneducated and illiterate, but actually a brilliant scientist and author. She even manages to find herself in essentially a classic racial prejudice story, but she doesn't even need a white saviour because she herself is white (what?).

The character Tate leaves part way through this book seemingly only to cause tension for the plot. The central murder is too unexplained by the last five minutes of the book for the reader to not expect something to happen, (and really only Kya or maybe Tate could have done it?) so it takes the punch out of something which maybe could have been a nice little reveal.

There's a serene quality to much of the writing that I enjoyed and a few plot and thematic sort of callbacks (though the effect was often lessened by an exact explanation as to its meaning the moment after). I thought the interweaving of the timelines mostly worked as well.

I've read a few Chabon novels now, and while I've never really loved any of them there's always something interesting there and the prose itself is very good.

Here, I liked the prose again, but I couldn't get into the characters or story at all. I probably would not have finished it if it were longer. I think it's just not my type of book, it reminded me of something like On The Road.

I find rating a book like this difficult because a lot of the opinions expressed in it around how to foster an effective working environment are already practiced at my work place, so I find myself without a lot of new ideas coming out of it. I'm not sure if these things were as widely adopted six years ago when they were written, but they certainly are now.

The book is well written and charming though, and provides some neat insights to the process at Pixar over the years (though again there are a few stories I had already known, perhaps just from other sources referencing this book).

I already knew a fair bit about Weinstein's story before reading this, but the thing that is emphasized here over and over again is just how many people were willing to actively defend and support the behaviour of this terrible human being (and others like him). Some of these people felt they had no other choice due to the power dynamics at play (including many of the victims), but there were also many others also in positions of power who acted purely to maintain the status quo. Very disheartening.

The author is the main character of the story here, it's told from his perspective and shows the journalistic process behind exposing a story like this, which is very fascinating to me. It isn't as simple as just printing what people tell you. I need to find more books about this type of work, but it reminds me of movies like Spotlight or All The President's Men.

I listened to this via audiobook from the library's Libby app through a neat program that I didn't know existed called “Skip The Line”. This is a popular book with a long waitlist, but it has at least one copy that when available is presented to people in the hold queue to take out immediately as long as they act quickly, and the loan is for a shorter period with no option to renew.

The audiobook itself was narrated by the author himself and for the most part well done and engaging... however he does voices/accents any time someone else is speaking and it is incredibly weird and cringey, I don't understand why he felt the need to do that.

This is going to be more a review of the audiobook than anything else.

This thing was all over the place for me. There are scenes/ideas/characters in here that I loved, but other parts that felt a bit aimless.

The huge cast of recognizable actors is great and helps to keep the multitude of characters distinct, but I still often had a hard time focusing on what was going on. Many chapters consist of quotes from historical accounts (real and fictitious) complete with citations, that are handled fairly well here, but still feel jarring in audio as something that I would naturally skim over when reading.

This might actually be something I try reading again later because I think it will be an entirely different experience.

I picked this book up after listening to the New York Times Top 10 Books of 2019 and hearing it was by the author who wrote the story that the film Arrival was based off of.

I absolutely loved the first story, which is kind of a fable set in medieval Baghdad that uses time travel to explore fate. There's another great story later on that deals with memory, language, and writing by contrasting new technology and old customs.

However, about a third of the entire book is taken up by my least favorite story here, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which was just a dull story about the morality of our treatment of AI that never really went anywhere interesting.

Overall though, this is a great little set of philosophical sci fi stories that I'm glad I read. The author even had a short little blurb at the end of each story to explain what motivated him to write each of them, which I found very insightful.

After I finished reading and loving Kevin Wilson's latest book Nothing To See Here, I started looking through his previous work and immediately marked this to read next after seeing the first line in its description: “‘Wildfire Johnny' is the story of a man who discovers a magic razor that allows him to travel back in time.”

The way Wilson writes just pulls me right in and I'm not sure why. His characters are fairly archetypical, but he brings them to life with a certain nuance and believability that I just enjoy spending time with them.

I liked all of these stories and I think each of them had something interesting to say, but a lot of them felt a little slight or unfinished by the end. None of them hit me as a great, complete story. But I'm not sure that they were supposed to, they are all thin slices of a theme, and sometimes that's okay.

I knew a little bit about this story before beginning this book, but the absurdity of what these people got away with for so long is fascinating. CEO Elizabeth Holmes and COO Sunny Balwani are cartoonishly evil, constantly intimidating and manipulating people internally while outwardly projecting a completely different persona to stakeholders and the public.

I actually thought it felt a bit too editorialized in their portrayals. There's a little bit here and there about how charming and intelligent seeming Holmes is, but none of it was as specific as the bad things she does, so it was hard for me to understand how she got away with some things without filling in a lot of blanks. Balwani meanwhile seems to have no redeeming qualities besides the fact that Holmes likes him. He comes across as a pure thug.

The accounts of all the goings on in Theranos are crazy though and described in great detail, clearly a lot of research was done and many people consulted. I listened to this via audiobook from the library and the ~12 hours blew by, I listened at any chance I had. I'll be checking out the HBO documentary and maybe the podcast soon as well.

I'm not sure why I didn't like this more. I liked the tone of the book, the author is quippy and flippant while still reporting on whatever the subject at hand is. And I thought the idea of the subject matter was interesting. I think the actual content that was focused on just didn't hold my attention. My digital loan from the library for this audiobook lapsed twice because I didn't finish it when I had taken it out, I just wasn't super compelled to listen to it for the most part.

I don't think this was a bad book, just not really for me.