Peter Souter

A great tale of the rise of NWA and gangster rap, marred by constant name dropping and random tangents about the authors brush with the famous in the 60s and 70s.

Whilst mainly about Red Hat's creation, it's got some nice background on Linus, RMS, GPL vs MPL and the like.

A bit dated now, as it was released in 1999 and a lot has changed since then (“Java Script [sic] was a non-starter on the server side and what we should have done is got behind Perl in a significant way” - oh how the tables have turned!), it's still a great origin story of Unix, the companies it helped establish, how to make money selling OSS and the GPL vs Proprietary debate.

I'm kinda torn with this book. I really liked Kelly's first book [b:The Girl Who Would Be King 16050500 The Girl Who Would Be King Kelly Thompson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348778051s/16050500.jpg 21832796], so as soon as I saw she had another book in the works I backed it. However, this somehow feels like . Maybe it's because this does feel a little more a like a YA style of book. Plus the idea does feel a little too close to [b:Fables, Vol. 1: Legends in Exile 21326 Fables, Vol. 1 Legends in Exile (Fables, #1) Bill Willingham https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1375392441s/21326.jpg 1138855], even including Big Bad Wolf as a main character...In the end though, after you get past a bit of a slow, clunky start I was fairly hooked and I'm looking forward to a sequel.

Okish

Edgy and bloody as Millar always likes doing, but leaves you feeling mostly pretty empty. Tying it into the extended Millar verse doesn't help...

I'm kind of addicted to reading books adapted from films after seeing the films, then there's always a thing in the back of my head going “They should've had this bit in the film...this bit should've been removed...” over and over. I know you should generally review in a vacuum but I can't help it!

As a book, it's a pretty interesting tale and I enjoyed it. Ben Mezrich has a knack for taking non-fiction and wrapping it up to make it feel like a good fiction narrative. He's a good storyteller, and it's really interesting to see how the the collective hijinks of 2 university students ended up creating the largest social network ever was built.

Like I lot of people I found out about this book based on it's insane synopsis (as revealed by this tweet):



I looked it up on Goodreads to see if it really was as crazy as people said it was, and I noticed it was on offer on Amazon for £1.

So I bought it.

It's such a strange read. The tone and pacing changes are whiplash inducing. People randomly go on strange tangents and talk to themselves, time-travel, plot-strings that go no-where or are solved in one paragraph, random life-lessons and snide commentary (“ISIS take over Ranch in America because of political correctness”... wat). Plus sex scenes.

And yet...

And yet...

And yet, I enjoyed it. It's a short read, and I burned through it in two sittings. It's like junk food or reality TV. You know it's not good for you and there's lots of other things you could be consuming instead, but you keep flipping pages.

God help me, I kinda wanna read the whole series and find out how it got to this point...

A perfect end to the series. Crazy to think I've been reading this on and off for over 16 years now! I remember picking up the first collection when I was still in high school...

A rare misstep from Coben.

I got into the Myron Bolitar series from reading the third in the series paperback from a loan-library at at station when my Kindle ran out of power. Even though it was halfway through the series, it was a fairly interesting thriller with some snappy lines. After that I managed to power through 1-9 in a matter of weeks. They're all fairly short books, with enough chapter-end cliff hangers and twists to make you want to keep reading.

But another review puts it best: this book feels like another plot that got bolted onto a Bolitar book. And the events in this one just seem a little too farfetched. That says a lot for this series.

I mean, I can deal with murder and mob-related conspiracies. I find an international decades old terrorist group being single-handedly taken out by a sports agent just a bit too far.

There's a few interesting spots, such as the slight digression talking about how things that seemed cool in your twenties seem a lot less so when you're older, particularly relevant when you remember Win is basically 40-something and hiring 18-year old sex-workers.

But even with all the silliness, and the ridiculous plot dealing with international terrorists, UK and French police and home-land security, all quickly brushed off into ridiculous deus-ex-machina situations where Myron's amazing fighting powers and Win's almost super-natural ability to arrive with a sniper rifle at the last minute...

I still enjoyed it. I want to give it 2 stars for all the lazy-writing, over-the-top plot, weird torture justification and tired Win dialogue, but I can't. I did enjoy reading it, I just wanted things to calm down a bit! So it's 3 stars.

I hope Coben returns to Myron being just a sports agent. That was half the fun: the weird sports facts and intrigue. We'll see with the next few books.

3 better than 2

Pretty ho hum Miller edginess. You can see the bones they picked over for 2, but his ideas for 3 were way better

Pretty good plane read, but it suffers from being a collection of blogs squashed into one book.

As someone who hasn't watched wrestling since he was a teenager, this a great read about an era in wrestling that was over long before I ever started watching recorded late-night RAW on Sunday mornings.

This is probably the most stupid book I've ever read. But Dan as such in the notes, and I have to admit I did laugh out loud at some of the more ridiculous lines.

A fantastic read, really brings out the true horror of the “Rattenkrieg” (“war of the rats”) that happened in Stalingrad, and the grim toll on all sides, soldiers and civilians.