Eva
Child-like, epileptic Prince Myshkin returns to Russia and gets tangled up in a doomed back-and-forth love obsession, into which he pulls another teasing girl to complete it to a very flighty love quadrangle. We have to see him be pushed around by his own naive emotions and endless good will towards everyone, and by manipulations of his friends and foes. And in between it all we meet a wide range of characters, having long wordy encounters. Even though Dostoyevsky is obviously remarkable with his character descriptions, I have to only give this 3 stars because despite the novel's concise message, I found most of its characters and their often too-long monologues very frustrating. Some characters and plot-lines that were only supposed to be side-stories, expanded and took over whole parts (especially the inheritance plot in part 2 and the very tedious Hippolite in part 3).
Tim O'Reilly draws us a map of a future where finally everyone realises that the evil is not technology itself, but the people in power who use technology for greed only, lacking any altruistic motives.
The book sits on the intersection of tech and economy, it talks about new technology-enhanced markets (uber, lyft, airbnb), but more importantly it draws a roadmap for how governments could learn from these new platforms. Become a platform itself, open up its data, speed up it's upgrades. Same as a software that's out on the market is constantly finetuned and debugged, government and its rules should constantly be finetuned and debugged. To fight those who are trying to game its system (like Google fighting the hackers).
I especially enjoyed the parts where O'Reilly focuses on the rottenness of the financial markets and how it leads to income inequality. He calls out the financial market with it's drive for constant shareholder value creation as the evil master algorithm. And criticises how big companies cash out on “thin value” (term coined by Umair Hague) which is any profit extracted through harm to others (tobacco industry, oil companies, unhealthy food, ..).
For anyone who fears that automation is going to eliminate most jobs, O'Reilly points towards all the challenges we are facing that could lead to the creation of so many new tech-supported work opportunities in the medical field, or combating climate control and it's effects.
I wish for a lot of CEOs to read this book and to have that soul-searching moment.
I liked all the big-picture talk, how the Anthropocene is (has been) causing a new mass extinction event, but my attention kept dropping at the stories of all the specific biological examples of endangered species. This is still a good book, and important, I just feel I already got the important parts from a chapter in Yuval Noah Harari's [b:Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind 23692271 Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1420585954s/23692271.jpg 18962767].While I am here:1. End Ordovician extinction, 444 million years ago, 86% of species lost2. Late Devonian extinction, 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost3. End Permian extinction, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost4. End Triassic extinction, 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost5. End Cretaceous extinction, 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost [source]
There's a kinship between this book and Elif Batuman's [b:The Idiot 30962053 The Idiot Elif Batuman https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474782288s/30962053.jpg 51577226]. Both have young female protagonists who just entered adulthood, and both built heavily on conversations (the face-to-face and the email/messenger kind) to show the frail and complex dynamics in human communication. While Conversations with Friends lacks Batuman's wit and somewhat the likeability of its heroine, it does add a very seductive dose of sexy. Despite the characters not being the easiest to like due to their slightly pretentious vibe, I quickly warmed up to them and was pulled in (3-day read!). A lot of the story deals with the facades they (we) built to hide true emotions and when to let down those shields to let others in. The core relationships in focus are Frances and Nick, who start an affair based on attraction and sex and then very slowly transform it into something more, and Frances and Bobbi, who are long-time-friends (exes? friends? something completely new?) and share a deep love and co-dependency. I also thought the dynamic between Frances and her parents was particularly touching (I loved her mom). I was intrigued by where the story took Nick, it felt like a novel kind of character. One that is somewhat condemned for his passivity (Melissa's angry email!!) yet also showed a self-awareness and acknowledgement that seems to allow for every sort of character. I am still slightly perplexed but also charmed by that last phone conversation and it's outcome. Another surprising detail that I very much appreciated was how Rooney wove endometriosis into the plot.
The follow-up to [b:The Martian 18007564 The Martian Andy Weir https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1413706054s/18007564.jpg 21825181], which is a lot of pressure. And now that we're past it, maybe his next book can be better again? This one only paled in comparison. It has similar elements - a setup in space, lots of science, technical procedures, high stakes - but is lacking in character and story. Once I got past my first disappointments with the book, I re-adjusted and still managed to enjoy the ride, but then somewhere in the last quarter I lost that joy again due to some character choices that kept bugging me. For example, I don't quite get why forcefully stealing a legal contract from a crime syndicate wouldn't lead to even more violence in the future? It felt like no one involved in the plot fully thought this through? And everyone was just too forgiving with Jazz and all the fuckups she caused. She got to stay so she can regulate the contraband underworld, really!?There was a little segment where the leader of the station talked about economics and the station's future, which I thought would have been a great subject to put some more meat into this. 2.5 and I am only rounding this up to 3, because I found it quite charming to imagine a not-so-distant scenario of the moon as a tourism destination.
This is the story of 4 generations of a family that immigrated from Korea to Japan in the early 20th century. We follow their battles with hunger, war and prejudices, and witness how mistakes early in life can have long lasting repercussions. Besides the family connections, Korean culture and traditions, the other thread through the book is the very informative history of the ongoing discrimination of Koreans in Japan.
The writing was fantastic, the multi-generational story was told in short chapters each depicting a moment in life, yet it never felt too episodic. The writing style somehow has weight and levity at the same time, and I especially loved how the last sentence/paragraph of each chapter, and the way it was left hanging, often had a very poetic quality to it.
The reason I don't give it 5 stars is, that despite all the good above, I never quite found my emotional connection to it. Or I would have wished for it to be longer, to reach the magnitude of a historical epic.
It started out okay, and it hits one of my sweet spots after all, by being the life-story of a scientifically-minded 19th-century woman obsessed with botany, but then I first grew tired of Gilbert's over-florid over-cheeky unnecessarily-long prose, that stretched my patience very thin occasionally, and then I also started to dislike the heroine more and more. Her ignorance, her obsessions and fixations just grew boring. And in the end the narrative also forced her into being another Alfred Russel Wallace. I just eyerolled along at her stubborn insistence to not publish, just in time for Darwin to publish his, of course. As always, I mainly finished this at all, because I did the audiobook.
A great analysis of the role social-media played in networked protests within the last decade, by an activist/academic with first-hand experience. Tufekci examines how digital networking tools - Twitter, Facebook, etc - help speed up and empower protests movements, that later mostly fail when it comes to collective decision-making, as their short timeline never allows them to develop those skills.
Looking at Tahrir Square, Occupy Wallstreet, Gezi Park, the Umbrella Movement.. she examines their origins, how technologies helped them to organize, to activate the masses. She looks at the political repercussions of Facebook's real-name policies. How anonymity for activists doesn't allow them to attract followers, while non-anonymity leads to harassment. How social media sites give activists and citizens a chance to report disturbing news from within their own country that nationally-controlled mass media stays quiet about. Yet also how the algorithms on these same sites increasingly drown out those news stories / cries for help by favoring likes and happy stories.
Sometimes some of the content felt repetitive, but all in all this is an important book about the overlap of social media and political activism.
A book of two civilizations and the structures and rule-systems they evolve into. One is a civilization of corruption and hierarchy and income-divide, living on a lush resource-rich planet, the other is a splintered-off planetary experiment of communism in a harsh and meagre environment. Both of them are born from revolutions and are the brink of further revolutions, despite their else many differences. The protagonist is a theoretical physicist who leaves the exile of his bleak home planet to find a richer intellectual environment for his thoughts on the mother planet. In alternating chapters we follow his immersion into a new and foreign culture, while also learning of his upbringing and his home planet. Le Guin's books always read more as books about politics and the human condition than as what one might expect of traditional “scifi” books, and that's what makes them so brilliant. But I wasn't as moved by this one as by [b:The Left Hand of Darkness 18423 The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4) Ursula K. Le Guin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1488213612l/18423.SY75.jpg 817527], even though they felt similar, but somehow I missed a more emotional component.
Un autre ecrivain quebecois. Le mur mitoyen a trois/quatre histoires qui sont vaguement reliees. Decouvrir ces liens fait partie dy mystere mais pas important. Chaque part raconte une histoire de liens familiaux - de maternite, de fraternite, d'origine inconnue - avec un “twist”. Ils sont aussi des histoires sur des debouts et des fins.
J'ai suis pas un fan de histoires courtes ou de livres avec d'histoires trop separees, parce que c'est difficile a suivre et attacher a tous les different protagonistes. Mais j'aime bien Leroux's ecriture et les sentiments qu'elle decrit, meme si c'etait parfois trop difficule a suivre en francais (pour moi) a cause de trop de langage poetique. C'est encore plus facile a lire les passages de l'intrigue pur.
A graphic novel on Bertrand Russell's life and on the battles about the logical foundation of mathematics during the first half of the 20th century. With a dash of the madness of the brilliant. We (and Russell) meet all the important players along the way: Whitehead, Frege, Hilbert, Cantor, Poincaré, Wittgenstein, Gödel... The story of this quest of mathematics and it's importance is cleverly told on multiple levels, as the narrative jumps between Russell's life and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the graphic novel.
This was a great binge-read for a weekend. It's the captivating adventurous story of a headstrong and wide-travelled young woman. There's secrecy, an eccentric father, a violent ex-fiance, a mystery, an escape, a new life, a reinvention, a new freedom, a love story, all set in the early days of the 19th century in America. The side characters were well sketched and intriguing, I especially enjoyed cold Henning and his soft spot for Dulcy.
3 portraits of 3 generations of circus/zoo polar bears that are part of a surrealistic world where bears (sometimes) can talk, write, get publishing deals, rent apartments, write emails, communicate through dreams, ... Each of the three parts are different in style of narration and level of magical realism, which feels inconsistent but could also be intriguing, if I wasn't so surprised by the inconsistencies at first. I liked the first part the most as it was the most adventurous the most absurd, while the second part was only half a story of a polar bear and strangely rather an autobiography of a circus worker, and then the last part was good but sad as it had the most realism in presenting the life of a zoo animal.
A short poetic Icelandic novella that's a bit like a fever dream. It's 1918 and our protagonist, a 16 year old gay boy, sleeps with men for money and daily escapes into the 2 cinemas in Reykjavik to avoid society. But then the Spanish Flu is overtaking town and the boy is made to help.
I liked this, but as always with novellas it felt too short to attach to the character/book much. But it had haunting qualities.
This little book is subtitled “A Manifesto”, and it contains 2 speeches-made-into-essays that Beard gave in 2014 (The Public Voice of Women) and 2017 (Women in Power). Drawing on examples from Greek and Roman mythology (Beard is a classicist) she elegantly and concisely demonstrates how women's voices have continuously been oppressed and ridiculed. How the notion of power is inherently male and how women breaking into positions of power have to adopt maleness. Ending on the manifesto part, Beard calls for a redefinition of power itself.
This is a very quick and excellent read, and and at the end you're left wishing she had added on another essay with an outline for a path on how to get past these still existing culturally indoctrinated prejudices.
This is the story of Bjartur of Summerhouses and the story of Icelandic farmers and their politics during the early-mid 20th century. Bjartur is the most stubborn of sheep farmers, valuing his independence and economic freedom above all other things. His life and the life of his family is harsh, there's death and sickness and not much kindness. Every man fights for himself, and that also applies to all members of his family. But he's also a poet and there's much poetry in his stubbornness and his dedication to his sheep and his land.
It took a while to get into Laxness' writing style, as he sometimes seamlessly morphs narration into dialogue into poesy. There's equal parts harsh-life reality and equal parts dreams and hopes in the story, and the writing manages to pass that on beautifully, giving you occasional segments that fill your heart with love for the cruel and tender relationship between man and nature and beast.
This was a very pleasant surprise, it's a quick and entertaining read about a young programmer who comes into the possession of a sourdough starter and subsequently figures out how to bake, how to build an baking oven and then enters the SF food and tech scene. There's a Soylent stand-in named Slurry. The right mix of fun and geeky.
I love Ellen Ullman's writing and personal anecdotes on coding culture, the allure of algorithms, about falling into the zone and about becoming closer to the machine. She's been on the scene for 40 years now and has the ability to zoom out, and reflect on SF's startup culture, not to trust the bubbles and the bursts, how the web revolution got rid of the middleman. Plus, she's had a unique voice about the industry's geek guy culture (she demonstrates how present it is even in mooc classes) and its inherent sexism for a while already. This new collection of essays falls well in line with her previous work. The only thing out of place is the mid-section about Artificial Life, as it feels detached from the more personal narrative of the other chapters.
A story about a family struggling with the racial injustice of the South, crime and poverty, and the close presence of ghosts and demons of the past. Told from 3 different viewpoints, Ward's writing is lyrical and powerful, yet at the same time makes it sometimes hard to follow. Maybe I needed to spend more time with the characters, but besides Jojo and Kayla, I don't feel like I attached to them. Plus it took me a while to accept that a surprisingly big part of the plot was dedicated to beings from the astral plane :)
3.5
I was utterly charmed and wrecked by this book. It's an account of first love during a summer in Italy. Elio is a wise youth, Oliver is the house guest. They connect over a shared love for literature, music, the arts. There's an immediate intense bond, a push and pull ensues, mixed with the nervousness of youth, the intoxication of fear, shame, longing, the forbidden. The writing is sensual and lyrical, a beautiful love story.
The saga of the Chance family, Hugh and Laura and their 6 offspring, battling and torn apart by the family's two loves: Baseball and Religion. And because it's an American novel set in the 60/70ies, at some point the Vietnam war makes an important appearance. The characters are vivid and alluring, slightly too wordsmart, the writing is funny, sometimes a little bit too cruel. I was all ready to love this a lot, but somewhere in the middle it becomes a bit too meandering, too segmented. And I wasn't really a fan of the reveal about the mother in the end either, but by that point I was very invested in everyone's happiness again.
A novel about the 1st and 2nd generation immigration experience in America. Through the eyes of illegal immigrant mother Polly, and her son Deming/Daniel, who ends up in adoption and is torn between two cultures. This is well written, consistent in content and quality, it managed to make me emotional at least once (the skype conversation at his birthday), so all in all solid, but not overly exciting.
3.5 stars