Phil Denhoff
Not for me. No surprise there. Felt like a caricature of a good romance novel, or at least an amateur novel. It’s middling. Unimpressive. An interesting and good idea but with poorly formed characters. In theory, the story should have been great, but I think every scene was too rushed and not given enough time to sit and develop. The characters were relatively flat. Frances had wonderful development near the end but it was like the author had a chance to make this complete character, got right to full character development, and never used her again. Frances is smart and full of punk energy and then we don’t see her again.
Listen, I’m roasting a romance novel — I’m well outside my normal genre. When Emily asked if I’d read it with her I said sure, but I think part of me expected the book to be a modern classic. Excellent writing. I didn’t know I was in for pulp space romance fiction.
didn’t like as much as the other books in the series. I can’t help but feel that Dinniman sets up little plot points over the knock them over with the smallest amount of effort. Book 7 did a decent job at setting up and working through battles. However, the amount of Deus Ex Machina and sudden, spontaneous victories mean the wins rarely feel earned. Pain is sometimes felt, and understood, but the impacts and horrors of what our characters face is not felt equally across moments.
However, beyond that, Dinniman’s writing is enjoyable and fun. Jokes are good. New characters are often interesting. It was decent! Would not read again!
Slow Productivity reads like a collection of haphazardly and lazily tied together anecdotes, just long enough that it could be published. While I’m familiar with books in the genre that are similar, this comes across as perhaps the least effective or moving of the bunch. As an argument, it’s wholly lacking in substance.
The crux of the book is do fewer things, work at a “natural pace” (hopefully you know what that is!), and obsess over quality. You got the thought in one sentence. There is some discussion that slow productivity is like slow food, but you’d get more out of reading about the history of slow food than from this book.
it was good! There is a definite lull midway through, but the start was intriguing enough, the ending good enough, and the lull short enough that I don’t mind too much. It makes the race to the end ever more enjoyable!
It’s an interesting world to tell a story in and the writing was layered deeply, which I admire.
it’s extremely rare that I finish a book I dislike but Phillip Reeves provided the displeasure of writing a book that, beyond disliking, I fucking hate. The Mortal Engines is a convoluted, confused novel about a sad nobody, a sad nobody, and a happy nobody, and the most that any of them ACTUALLY contribute to the world around them is, as far as I can tell from what words I read on the page, distracting the antagonists for long enough that the antagonists just MAKE ONE MISTAKE and blow themselves up in the process. An earthquake, a loud bang, or a sudden sneeze would have had the same impact on the world.
While these bumbling morons may have had little impact on the story, perhaps they had some sort of interesting story? A life well or poorly lived, was not what this write had in mind for our characters. They seem to float from one location to the next without care, without interesting character development, without insight to the world around them.
To be frank, I saw the movie adaptation and thought I could go to the book for a better experience. Unfortunately, little did I know that the shit movie was in fact the better option of the two!
The best that can be said about this book is that it was published.
Contains spoilers
It’s a half decent intro to Workers, ServiceWorks, and worker_threads.
That said, it relies pretty heavily on examples and is somewhat of a cook book for using the tech. It’s very much multihtreading WITH JAVASCRIPT. If you want an intro to multithreading in general, you’d be wise to rely on another resource.
That said, the book covers solid ground and has some good suggestions or topics I hadn’t previously been exposed to. Having good example code for how to get threading is nice, although I would’ve preferred to see an appendix with production-ready code. A large question I had going in, and still have leaving, is how do I execute TS code in a worker. I have to referenced the built JS file, but what’s the best way of doing that? Hard coding it in my source code?? Doubtful.
Anyway, read up on multithreading and then come here to see how you can apply it in JS.
Ender, Katniss, now Darrow. And yet, as corny as that is, it feels true. If I had read this as a teen in high school, it would've made a big impact on me. Jealous of kids today for being able to read it, but I'm glad I finally cracked it open. I expected it to be some fantasy book originally but the space aspect (albeit very, very minimal) hooked me at the start. I got chills once I heard where the story took place.
The core of this book is 4 parts that are very straightforward: make habits obvious, make them easy, make them attractive, make them satisfying. Those four pillars are the foundations of making a good long-term habit, but Clear’s underlying point is that habits, like people, should be growing and responding to their environment. Clear’s habit forming system applies Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s anti-fragility to everyday life. Your everyday life and habits should improve, one percent every day. And if you can’t grow them 1%, then you need to tune the habit to make it easier, to make it achievable.
Clear tells us this at the start of the book. If you aren’t achieving your habits, it’s not a personal failure. Your habit system is failing you. So everything else comes from — you’ve built a habit system that doesn’t grow in the face of resistance. What can you change so that it does? And while not a long book, I think atomic habits answers this question quite nicely.
Definitely worth a reread
