Rúnar
There's a cool thesis in here, and it's definitely illuminating on the inner workings of the German economy during the Nazi regime, but it's all rather let down by the fact that this book is relentlessly boring. There's too much detail, too many side quests, way too many passages like “in december of 1934 the industry producing aluminum tubing totalled 900,000 reichsmarks, but by June of 1935 this had increased to 1.2 million reichsmarks”. Could be overall improved by being maybe 80% shorter.
I got this book by accident, believing I was buying a different book with the same title. No regrets though, as I thoroughly enjoyed this one. The pacing is top-notch, and the sci-fi element is plausible enough to activate my suspension of disbelief. Overall I thought the author's handle on technology was good, and didn't devolve into technobabble like books in this genre often do. All in all a tasty book snack, and I want to read the sequel.
DNF half-way through chapter 3. There is little new for me here, and what little there is is not very interesting. The author's insistence on categorizing science and philosophy as “shared myths” is extremely grating, and the whole thing has a cynical condescending tone. Seems written for a pseudo-intellectual audience. Hard pass.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Stefan Zweig's memoirs of the world that was lost in the wars of the 20th century. There are things I wish we could reconstruct, like the sense of hopefulness for human progress and appreciation for the arts that permeated the culture. But that culture also contained the seeds of its own destruction: socially stagnant, dismissive of youth, and morally repressive. Through Zweig's eyes you begin to see how inevitable the Great War was, given that culture.
Zweig also (unknowingly?) chronicles the absolute impotence of the pacifist movement. He and many others of the time dreamt of a world government, and their ideas are what led to the League of Nations and later the UN. I wonder if Stefan Zweig ever changed his mind about this, or if he would if he could see the clown show that is the UN today.
And it makes you wonder, could anything have been done to save the world from war? Maybe so, but not with the intellectuals they actually had.
Some of the personal details of Zweig meeting other artists of the time are worth the price of entry alone. I found the account of his meeting with Auguste Rodin completely electrifying.
Suggested subtitle: Hometown jock makes good, somehow.
Meh.
There's very little interesting in this book. There are no great business insights. It's like listening to an uncle who goes into a little too much detail at the family Christmas party. You politely nod and go “huh,” but it's not an enriching experience.
I should have expected this from a book by a sporting goods company founder, but there are too many sports references in here. I skipped through pages and pages of recounting some football game or other.
When he does get down to describing his business, I get the distinct feeling that Phil Knight was pretty dishonest, a little underhanded, and definitely not the kind of person you'd want to work for.
Not recommended unless you are really into sports or Nike for some reason.
Junior high school teacher turned reluctant astronaut uses his mind to survive in space and save humankind from climate catastrophe.
It's been a while since I've read a book that I enjoyed this much. There were times when I couldn't put it down. The story consists of the first-person internal monologue of an amnesiac who finds himself on a space-faring mission. Through his gradual recall of past events we learn what this mission is about, and we follow him in the present tense as he carries out his mission and solves seemingly insurmountable problems with science and grit.
There are some problems. The last act was a bit of a slog. It took me out of the story a little bit when the author piled on just one too many problems for the protagonist to solve. It was a little exhausting, especially when you already know that the problem is going to get solved somehow. We all know he's not going to die.
A couple of scenes could have been cut entirely and it wouldn't have affected the story at all. For example, there was a flashback scene to a courtroom which seemed to serve no purpose other than for the author to beat us over the head about how bad copyright lawyers are.
The heavy-handedness about self-sacrifice and duty is something I could have done without as well. Andy can't imagine that it might be entirely selfish for a human being to risk their own life to save everything they care about. Or maybe he can, and that's why he has to reminds us in a couple of places that it's all really sacrifice and duty and selflessness. He wouldn't want us to come to our own conclusions about that.
A more serious problem with the plot is that the catastrophe is not really believable, given the technology available. We're told that there's going to be famine and war, 20th-century style, if the mission isn't a success (and maybe even if it is). But at the same time, humanity has access to basically unlimited energy (which is how they can send the mission in the first place). We're supposed to believe that if humankind had access to a cheap clean energy source that's a trillion times better than anything we have today, that this couldn't be used to make food? Weir shows no understanding of the connection between energy production and food production. The extent to which this is addressed in the book is just an NPC explaining the author's half-baked ideas about this.
Even with those flaws, I really loved this book. It's a story about using your mind to survive, to live, and to save the world.
DNF after 30-something chapters.
I don't know what to say; I wasn't enjoying this. There's probably a decent story here, but it needs deep editing. More than that, I think the whole concept is flawed. The parahuman powers are just too much, and there's far too many of them. The wordcraft isn't great.
This was alright. Short, and dense with concepts. The Buddhism was a letdown, but the advice on creating wealth was presented in a way I've not thought about it before. Some of the advice is terrible for most people though. Anyway, I'm glad Naval exists and that this content has been collected in a book like this.
Musashi is too long. It suffers a bit from being originally a serial, and I'm guessing the author got paid by the word.
The story in here is a great one: Two small-town boys set off to war and return to very different post-war paths. One becomes “Musashi”, the greatest samurai there ever was. The plot-theme of the work is: Musashi overcomes himself on his path to personal enlightenment through the art of war.
There are moments in here that I felt were absolutely worth the price of admission. Takuan hunting for Takezō on the mountain. The peony stem. The ambush at Hajima plain. The final showdown with Kojiro. Descriptions of the fighting are, unlike the rest of the book, swift and efficient like I'm sure these fights actually were.
The characters enter and leave the stage constantly, coming into contact with one another with preposterous serendipity. The whole book reads as a symphony, with different characters coming together in “chords” to tell us something.
For anyone reading this, I recommend paying close attention to character introductions. The author tells us what the purpose of each character is, what tone they'll represent in the chord, and how they fit into the story as a whole.
The voice standing out most is obviously the character of Musashi; his strict adherence to principles, and his simultaneous total disregard of “the rules”.
Another standout for me is Takuan. He comes off as a bumbling fool, but he's a long-range actor. It seems that everything goes according to Takuan's ineffable plan. I feel that he represents “god's plan”, and indeed the author casts him as the Buddha in an early chapter. Going back to read that chapter, where he asks for a “drying pole” sends shivers down my spine.
A heartwarming, gut-wrenching, and hilarious autobiography. Coming from a family with little means, I could relate to a lot of the stories, although I was always what he calls a “cheese boy”. I found myself laughing out loud at a chapter titled “Go Hitler”. I cried once or twice during “My Mother's List”.
This is a quick read—you can go through it in an evening, and there are no boring moments.
A detailed history of the personal computer, from the first analog ballistic computers to the Apple Macintosh. There's a lot of interesting history here, and the book explores important ideas through the eyes of the people who invented computing. But at times it all feels a little too detailed. Still, I'm glad I read this and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in knowing more about the pioneers of computing.
I picked this up because I had heard good things about it and decided I needed a lazy summer read. I could not finish it. It started out promising, but went deep into young adult pulp territory by the middle. I found the prose trashy and the dialog awkward, both in what the characters say and also how they say it. People “tawk ‘bout sump'n'” rather than talk about something. All the dialog is like this. There are lengthy descriptions of the environment where the story takes place, but Delia Owens is no Anton Chekhov. There were a few paragraphs that made me stop and think “ok, that's pretty nice”, but ultimately it was uninspiring.
A good yarn, although it was a bit too long. As this is the “author's preferred edition”, a lot of filler material that had been edited out has been added back in. The events in this book are a lot more interesting than the tedious political engineering of the previous book. Particularly enjoyable here is watching the main character as he undergoes a tremendous transformation. And we actually get to see the world on the other side of the rift.
There are some negatives. Particularly infuriating is the deus ex machina of the “Great Wizard” (think Gandalf or Elminster) who's puppeteering everything behind the scenes. This is used to explain away the fact that power comes far too easily to the main characters.
Classic epic fantasy, but not a must-read by any means.
Starts out promising, then after about 50 pages gets really boring. Most of the book is an account of a trip from one end of the kingdom to the other. It gets way too deep into the politics of the realm, which ends up not mattering at all. Picks up in the last 100 pages, enough for me to want to read the next one.
I read the “Author's Preferred Edition”, which re-introduces a lot of plot threads that were cut out for brevity in the originally published edition. I kind of think they should have been left out. They're just not all that interesting and they obscure an otherwise good story.
The author is a painter, and it shows. Quent Cordair has the ability to vividly describe people and places in concise prose. This book is brief, as the first part of a longer story, but it's a complete short story in its own right, like a painting in a collection. I've read many of the author's other published stories, and this is his best work so far, by far.
A pretty decent fantasy novel
Blood Song has some good moments, and a fair bit of terrible writing.
I've seen this compared to Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, and that's how it was recommended to me. Blood Song is just not that imaginative, and Anthony Ryan doesn't have the same command of prose as Rothfuss.
It was alright though. It didn't leave me eager to pick up the sequel, but I'll probably pick it up some day.
Includes the basic rules of D&D, an adventure for 1st-level characters, a set of pre-made characters for those who don't want to make their own, and a quality set of dice.
The rules and pre-made characters are available for free online, so what this box gets you is really just the packaged adventure: Lost Mine of Phandelver. It's actually a really good D&D adventure, well worth the price of admission. Written for four or five 1st-level characters, this sandbox-style adventure offers well over 30 hours of play, bringing the characters to 4th or 5th level by the end. There's also ample room for expansion and improvisation on top of what's provided.
Everything needed to run the adventure is included, and it's aimed at beginner dungeon masters so it often expands on D&D rules when they come up for the first time.
Highly recommended.
