Ben Saufley

Chewed through the audiobook in two days so that's gotta count for something. Not necessarily a stand-out thriller but it had me hooked all the same.

I think this reinforced a lot of my existing feelings about Facebook and Zuck and despite my disdain for hand-wringing about "echo chambers" I do have alarm bells going off off when I notice that type of thing is happening: am I receptive to this info because it's compelling and legitimate or because I want it to be true? I did not go in with any real preconception of Sandberg and her portrayal here was pretty shocking. Started out as a kind of "well I guess it makes sense that a powerful person behaves this way" but it gets worse and weirder as it goes on.

I intend to seek out some more info about some of the stuff in this book, but I will say very little in here seemed on its face to be unlikely to be true given other things I know or have heard—or if not "true" then at least an honest recollection of events.

This has been getting major marketing and though the cover had me interested right away I was a bit skeptical for that reason (that and it was presented in one store very closely connected to the now-poisoned HP franchise). But boy, I really enjoyed it. It's comfortable and built on a lot of tropes, but in a really nice way. The world felt distinct, and the characters were charming. The writing is smart and not at all cynical, and it's hard to write without cynicism and not come off as saccharine. Definitely recommend.

Lots of interesting stuff in this book. Oddly though the actual title of the book seems to be … not really the main thrust. The main thrust is all the things that need to be done; how those things are paid for seems to mostly be "it's not actually that important" and I think that's fair but it makes the book title kind of funny.

The synopsis had me really interested but I think this book has maybe made me realize I'm not as big on the "space opera" subgenre as I thought I was. The book has some of the trappings of "hard" sci-fi, but is really just a fantasy book with a coat of sci-fi paint. The technology is magic; the near-lightspeed travel – although I'm sure the author had it all worked out – definitely _felt_ squishy as far as what it meant for who was where, when. My order of interest went 1. Terrence, 2. Finn, ....10. whoever was in the palace intrigue subplot.

If I'm going to be reading a book like this, I want to care more about the individuals and I'm less excited by "fate of the universe" stuff. When the stakes get too high and the settings, tools, weapons all become too distant from the "real" world, I zone out. I can't get invested. Maybe paradoxically, this book felt to me at times too distant from anything I could relate to, and also too close to present-day humankind to be believable as 30,000 years in the future.

I didn't hate it. I liked some of the concepts that were toyed with, and at times I found myself rooting for characters. But I mostly found myself counting down until I could put it down and pick up something else.

This came highly recommended from a few people but it didn't do much for me. It was fine. I listened to it on audiobook and like six of the nine recurring characters are pendry/hendry/tendry or something? Why do that?

Quite an adventure. A pretty quick read, but its age and style present some interesting words and phrases that are less-familiar in modern English.

I was really enjoying this book and then it ended before it resolved. What? A whole lot of loose threads at the end of this one that I wasn't prepared for because the book was overall so meticulous.

Not quite what I expected. Witty and interesting. A bit disjointed (although it's clear that that's intentional). I wish some of the things she explored were fleshed out or explored a little more. I also think Atwood walked a tough line between accepting [b:The Odyssey 1381 The Odyssey Homer https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390173285s/1381.jpg 3356006] as truth and treating it as an unreliable narrator.

It's a decently entertaining sci-fi read but it's pretty bad with women and that only becomes more apparent as the book goes on. Three men of varying degrees of gruffness race to save the universe and also obsess over women who have no real agency except as motivators and plot devices.

By the end I really liked this but the arc is kind of weird: it feels like it's still getting started and then very quickly it resolves and is over.

Honestly surprised at how moderate it felt. With such a bold title I expected more extreme stances. But it seemed pretty levelheaded and a lot of its points were not specifically related to abolition, but more to the problems faced and the things needed to fix the problem even partially. One could easily read this book and come away with a strong advocacy for reform, rather than abolition. But all the points combined certainly paint a picture of a situation that is very hard to fully address with reform (and in fact it points out a lot of the ways attempts at reform fail). Quick read, full of good (if depressing) examples of the problem we face. Recommended most for people who are new to these issues.

I was entirely prepared to give this book five stars but she totally lost me with the pitch to give up (??) affirmative action near the end. I never really got the crux of her argument there so it's possible I just entirely misunderstood it, but it felt way off base, especially on the heels of a section about how “color-blind” policies will never solve these problems.

Nah, I'm giving it five stars anyway.

Regardless of that concern this is a very, very important book and I would recommend literally everybody read it. It's even got a little dig at Joe Biden, who currently appears to be preparing to ride Obama's popularity to a Democratic nomination, when in fact he's been a big part of the problem for years and years.

She comes at the issue with a level head and does a very good job addressing a lot of counterarguments and proposed half-measures. In that evenhanded approach, she does have a bit where she concedes that society has mostly moved past overt racism, which already feels incredibly naïve in the era of Trump. But you can see where it came from.

Read this book. Even if you feel like you know, you probably don't know just the extent of the systemic injustice at play in the modern justice system and governmental structure. I thought I knew. I did know some things. But man. Read this.

Quick and entertaining. A simple and interesting premise. Pretty funny. Picked it up on a whim. Mostly listened to the audiobook, which was well-done. Bought the sequel immediately. I'd recommend it, for something light.

Better than the first one, at least. We'll see if it continues to improve.

It's fine. Nothing special. And the very end of the book drives home how it's full of things that take you out of it and feel like author interference.

A lot more food for thought (no pun intended?) than real prescriptions or proscriptions. Interesting, easily readable. A little more geared to the middle class, further on in life than I am - I essentially still live a college lifestyle still: no dining room, roommates are strangers, little room in the fridge or time to cook it because of social and professional obligations, and definitely nowhere to plant a garden. But that's a lot of excuses and his advice is still sound. It's a lifestyle change and it takes a commitment, as Pollan says. Anyway, I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to think about food culture, cooking, even American culture as a whole as it relates to big business.

First: it's one half of a book. Apparently book two vindicates a lot of book one, but I'm not sure I want to give Suarez the pleasure of making me read a whole second book after this one.

Spoiler
Second: it takes a really interesting and plausible near-future premise and then, in the final act, switches to absurdist sci-fi. Killer robots, man.

Third: there's a nightclub scene very early on that is awful, unsettling, and unnecessary. It's supposed to, maybe, make the character bad? But then a few scenes later, the narrator clearly wants us rooting for him.


I guess that's it, really. Disappointing after some strong setup.

I really enjoy Horowitz's writing, and the Susan Ryeland series especially with its book-inside-a-book conceit. But I'm growing more uncomfortable with his relationship to homosexuality. He made Hawthorne, his meta detective written as nonfiction with Horowitz as the first-person narrator, a homophobe, and literally in his book said “I would not have chosen to write a character like this” but uh, he did. And with Alan Conway, whose sexuality is prominent through two books, we mostly get ugly caricatures as well. SpoilerThe eventual villain of this book turns out to be a former “rent boy,” who is apparently not actually gay but performed gay sex for money and is just disdainful of basically everyone around him. It looks like Horowitz once played devil's advocate in a TV discussion, against gay marriage, despite purportedly not actually objecting to gay marriage himself. It's not absolutely damning, but also, like, the devil doesn't need an advocate. So it kind of fits this bill, where I don't think he would see himself as homophobic but he's certainly not doing himself or the LGBTQ community any favors.

I feel like I missed an obvious clue (in retrospect) to JKR's transphobia in the early Cormoran Strike books, and I'm worried I'll be doing the same here if I continue reading these. I don't know, though. We'll see I guess.

Honestly from a pure entertainment standpoint, I enjoyed this just fine. It's like average pop music—it hits a lot of familiar notes and wraps up quickly. And that's really a lot of what I look for in a book like this, so I was preparing to give this a three or a four.

But it's apparently some kind of love letter to libertarianism by the end?

This is Lisa Tanchik book one, but it's Nate Fallon's book and despite Lisa having lost a sister to drugs, it spends zero time examining Fallon's bullshit justifications, and ends with a little Rand-ian soliloquy offering one final justification for his actions. It's a bummer because it's a moderately fun cyber-thriller that could have had something interesting to say without much effort.

Fallon didn't have to be a cartoon villain; taking apart the things that at first made the character sympathetic would've been more interesting than simply making him bad, but the book opts for neither.

Obviously, there are moments that the book realizes (and quickly sweeps aside) the real, negative consequences of his actions. And at times I think the author intended to go further there? A few conversations he has weakly imply a deeper criticism. But it never goes anywhere, and on the balance, the book appears to be more reverent than anything.

And also Lisa Tanchik is in this book for some length of time, I guess?

I read this book because Charlie Jane Anders, whose work I've really enjoyed, recommended its sequel. And to be truthful, I still might pick that up at some point. But I'm kind of surprised at the recommendation, in retrospect.

Man, I was really interested in reading this book and I did not enjoy it. It reads like a fever dream, and not in any sort of compelling or intriguing way. The heavy, invented colloquial speech is distracting. The plot is not ... really a plot, it's more of a montage of scenes. I found myself moderately interested in the flashbacks to Roland's childhood, because things actually happened there and there was a bit of an understanding of the world he lived in, and there were real secondary characters. Just about everything in the present was hazy and disjointed, void of character or place, and building up to a climax that really wasn't. This is only my second King book (the first was [b:11/22/63 10644930 11/22/63 Stephen King https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327876792s/10644930.jpg 15553789], which I really enjoyed even if I felt the ending got away from him), but my experience with this one was wildly different from the last. I think this book was written much earlier in his career and was maybe more experimental for him?The good news is that this is one series that I don't find myself compelled to finish. I have too many series to read already.

Just remembered this book. I loved it as a kid. Only 22 reviews?? Crazy.

Not a bad book, but it's got a lot of problems. I'm not an economist (/econometrician) or anything, but I would be reading and see a flaw in the logic that, sure, it was probably fine to overlook, but it would make me wonder more and more what other flaws the book had, that I had missed. I took it all with a grain of salt: many of its analyses declare positively that such-and-such a country is the best, or worst, or biggest overachiever, but the methods getting there take small liberties at every step, which seems like it would produce cascading inaccuracies (remember the movie Multiplicity?).

The reason I kept reading, after a certain point, was that it offered me a lot of interesting historical information - about soccer, and sometimes just about the progress of smaller nations that you don't hear much about in American high school history classes.

So it's absolutely worth reading, but I wouldn't take it too seriously.

Totally serviceable genre book. The resolution was pretty obvious from pretty early on, but I didn't guess everything.

I enjoyed it. As it wrapped up though, there was a bit too much going on. Too many red herrings or dark secrets. Even though that's kind of what these books are about, it was just a little too much. Still fun though.