Oliver Howard

🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕 Going into this series, I had preconceived notions that it was not real literature or good writing. While it's not beautifully written, it has that X factor that just makes it so damn readable. This is a book I sat and stared at a wall for hours while listening to the audiobook. I had so much fun with it it's insane. It's definitely a derivative work, taking a lot of inspiration from other successful franchises like The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, and A Song of Ice and Fire, but Pierce Brown just makes it work and stand on its own. I can't remember the last time I've been so eager to read the next book in a series -- it feels like a TV show I'm binging. It's not literary classic, but bloody damn it's entertaining.

The first 50% of the book didn’t capture me right away, but beyond that I was hooked. Abercrombie takes his time with his characters and before you know it, you know each one intimately. Very good introduction and setup to a trilogy, excited to keep reading.

Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain offers practical and actionable advice on how to create a digital system that supports your creative potential. His CODE framework for processing information keeps it simple and easy to follow along. The PARA organization system focuses not on a top-down, structured file system. Instead, it prioritizes actionability and relevance, leading to a more intuitive workflow. This organizational system worked for me, but I can see it being harder to apply for certain people. I personally found part three of this book not very helpful as it went from giving original and effective advice to more generic productivity advice that you have seen in countless other books and YouTube videos. I felt I could have skipped the section entirely and still come away with the same value from the book. Overall, if you are someone needing a digital reset, or are just curious about other digital management systems, this book is for you.

Stephen King has the uncanny ability to make me feel like I am living through his main character. I think it may be the inclusion of redundant details in his writing that make his worlds and characters feel like real things, rather than mere set dressing. To me, 11.22.63 exemplifies this skill more than any other King book I've read. I felt Jake's struggles, and more poignantly his triumphs. This book has an A and a B plot, but by the end King has masterfully intertwined them, creating one beautiful story of love, sacrifice, and small-town charm. I went into this book for the time travel plot, but I left wanting more of Jodie and its inhabitants.

"For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark."

While I felt the beginning dragged a little bit, I was fully engaged throughout the rest of the book. This book is long, and it feels long, but the result is a more fulfilling story.

First half of this book was outstanding. Gave a great introduction to Python and was super easy to follow. As for the bigger projects in the second half of the book, I found 2/3 of them good. I ended up skipping the game creation because I didn't really feel it helped build any useful skills