Colin Gooding

I, like I assume most people, know this story very well even though I have never actually read it. I'm honestly most familiar with it through Mickey's Christmas Carol and The Muppet Christmas Carol, which are both great! In fact, seeing The Muppet Christmas Carol with live music from the local symphony orchestra is what inspired me to finally read it.

And I loved it! I've always loved the structure of this story, it just feels like one of the classic basic archetypes of a story that hits on something interesting with every beat and doesn't have any fat on it. The quick character arc and morals expounded by his change are also very satisfying.

This Dickens guy has a pretty good way with words too, I'd say. I love a lot of the lines that are often quoted verbatim in adaptations (“A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”, “If they would rather die, they'd better do it, and decrease the surplus population”, “Come in! and know me better, man!”, etc). Each character, time period, and location is imbued with so much life and texture, and they all become very clear in my mind while reading it.

I actually listened to this via an audiobook that was narrated by Hugh Grant and made available for free through Audible, though it annoyingly had ads littered throughout as I don't have a subscription to Audible right now. It is a pretty short read as well, so I think I might try to revisit this one more often in the coming years, both in written form and audiobook, and of course as performed by Muppets.

I really loved World War Z when I read it years ago because the journalist account of a fictional global crisis was such a neat idea and really well executed.

This follow up book is much smaller scale about one incident to one small group of people, but still tries to tell the story in a similar way with having a few different experts and related characters interviewed as well as the majority of the story being told in journal entries of a single character who was present for the events. It mostly just feels like a standard first person narrative though with this journal conceit clumsily fit over top of it.

The story itself is fine, some of it is thrilling and there are ideas here and there that piqued my interest, but it honestly took way longer than I expected to get rolling (the first third to half of the book is just setting up the community location and it's cast of characters) and it wasn't particularly interesting or unique.

Giving this a two because I wouldn't recommend it. Read World War Z instead.

This book was totally fine. I'm a sucker for this kind of premise, but the plotting feels like the very first ideas for story beats that you would obviously come up with given such a premise. It's not bad, it's just not very exciting and a bit too cute/precious.

It was still engaging enough though, the writing mostly flows well and is easy to read, and the audiobook is well narrated by the actress Carey Mulligan. It was a good breezy read between other books, even if it feels a bit like a flash-in-the-pan beach-book-club pick (nothing wrong with that though I guess, I really liked The Help too).

** Mild Spoilers Below **

The decision to jump into a consciousness without any related memories and having to make sense of your new reality on the fly is fun... the first couple times. It feels like a huge portion of the book is just the main character trying to reasonably pass as her new self and it just isn't that interesting a lot of the time and is just a predictable way to hit us with a shocking revelation. However I did like how it was used in the conversation with Molly.

I actually thought the first two thirds of this book were alright, the Hunger Games are fun (even though everything about it is kind of fucked up, it still is just kind of silly fun for some reason) and seeing them from a perspective outside of the arena was a bit novel, but maybe if I had read the original books more recently it would feel a bit redundant again.

And then the last third of the book is just... kind of boring? I didn't really care about Snow as a character at all. Maybe I'm forgetting details from the original trilogy but it seems to barely matter that he is Snow at all. This isn't even really a fall from grace story, he's kind of a shitty person on a shitty path the entire time. He briefly flirts with being not shitty, not even good just not shitty, and then decides to be shitty.

I actually liked a lot of the prose in the book, it's easy to read and it's evocative without being overly descriptive. Just nice light reading. But there are a lot of terrible story beats that repeat over and over, like Snow having a secret or something and being sure he was going to be found out, being confronted by someone, and then oh actually they didn't know and he's actually had this good thing happen! Or vice versa where he was sure he got away with something, but oh no, he's caught! The inner monologue he'd have leading up to these events so clearly laid out that it would twist the other way every time. Ugh.

I generally like reading Star Wars books every now and then because the world is so iconic and vast that there's room to explore a lot of different facets of it without having to spend a ton of time on setting up the world. I was excited to try out a story set in an earlier era of Star Wars that was free of the weight of the Empire and all the characters from the movies.

This book was... fine? I mostly just found it a bit bland I think. There are a ton of characters and things going on, so I never really got attached to anything or anyone. A lot of it feels like suuuper stock-standard action too, early on several chapters end with a character being cut off mid-line by an explosion. There's some good stuff in here too though, I liked following a character that was uncertain of himself learning to become a Jedi and the hero that people expect him to be (which is also pretty standard, but works here mostly).

I would probably give this a completely neutral 2.5/5, but since I don't think I would actually recommend it to people I'll round it down to a 2. There are much better Star Wars books out there.

This is a well organized exploration of its topic, but even as someone who has only read a little bit about the history of racism and oppression in America, this book was still full of stories I have already heard (the schoolteacher's experiment of segregating her class by eye colour, Albert Einstein's allyship with the black community, etc).

Still though, this is obviously an important issue and the main thesis of the book is interesting: Racism is a byproduct of the caste system, not the other way around. The upper caste stays ahead of others by discrediting them, and discrediting people individually is difficult, so the easiest thing to do is to discredit an entire group based on a visible difference.

I already knew a fair bit about Weinstein's story before reading this, but the thing that is emphasized here over and over again is just how many people were willing to actively defend and support the behaviour of this terrible human being (and others like him). Some of these people felt they had no other choice due to the power dynamics at play (including many of the victims), but there were also many others also in positions of power who acted purely to maintain the status quo. Very disheartening.

The author is the main character of the story here, it's told from his perspective and shows the journalistic process behind exposing a story like this, which is very fascinating to me. It isn't as simple as just printing what people tell you. I need to find more books about this type of work, but it reminds me of movies like Spotlight or All The President's Men.

I listened to this via audiobook from the library's Libby app through a neat program that I didn't know existed called “Skip The Line”. This is a popular book with a long waitlist, but it has at least one copy that when available is presented to people in the hold queue to take out immediately as long as they act quickly, and the loan is for a shorter period with no option to renew.

The audiobook itself was narrated by the author himself and for the most part well done and engaging... however he does voices/accents any time someone else is speaking and it is incredibly weird and cringey, I don't understand why he felt the need to do that.

I had fun with this, it was full of character and even had a good handful of scenes written in such a way that they played out really well cinematically in my mind's eye. I find myself without too much to say about it, I enjoyed it and I might read something else by McBride now, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend running out to eat this.

I read the first book in this series (The Gunslinger) over a decade ago now. I didn't really care for it, but there were things about it that I did like, and the fans of this series are very vocal in their praise of it, and there is a possible new tv show in the works for it. So I thought I'd try to continue on.

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. At times it is thrilling, but at other times I find it to be either a slog or just straight up off-putting. The story of "edgy" King that I don't love tends to rear his head a fair bit.

I was leaning towards a 2/5 on this, but the last section of the book is a string of tense action scenes that had me captivated.

I'm not super eager to contine the series, but I probably will get around to it in under a decade this time.

Anecdotally, this seems to be a lot of people's favorite of the first three books, if not of the entire series. Rereading them now it's definitely my least favorite of the three so far (though still great).

It feels like there's only a little bit of information dolled out throughout the first three quarters of the book, so then when the climax happens there are pages and pages of exposition just for it to make sense. It's wild!

It's still fun though and some great characters are introduced. Dot's response when I asked for her review: “Good job for making this book”.

This is a really fun and interesting read, though I'm not sure I agree with many of the conclusions drawn from the data they have. It is well presented though and raises a lot of interesting questions. It is good as a thought experiment.

I've really liked this series, but this one clicked more than the others for me. It presents some perspectives that we haven't really seen up until now and there are some fun and interesting character interactions that really drew me in, like Navani and Raboniel. There are still a lot of archetypical hero moments and repeated story beats, but they are well done and fun to read.

I still think these books are way too long for my taste, but this one felt like much less of a slog compared to parts of the last book, Oathbringer. I'm not entirely sure why, it felt to me like chapters were pretty short and switched quite often to almost completely different storylines, so I never felt bored in one place for too long.

I find a lot of the god-tier rules and stakes really confusing though, and I'm not sure if that's on me or if it's because I don't know much about the greater Cosmere beyond this series or if it's intentionally opaque. I can understand the effect of certain things on the characters in this story, but a lot of the details and implications of them are muddled to me.

** Minor Spoilers **

The occupation of the tower is really well done and gives a lot of insight into several different types of characters, and allows interactions that we haven't seen before. Not everything is black and white in the conflict. Also, having Kaladin basically Die Hard-ing throughout the tower was fun.

I like almost all of the main POV characters. Adolin trying to prove himself in a world where his main skills have been rendered nearly obsolete. Shallan's personalities could have been very eye-rolling, but it works as a blunt representation of inner conflict. Dalinar is just a well written character who provides a good path into a lot of the macro-story. Navani teaches us a bit more about how the world works and is a more clinical insight into it. Venli lets us explore a lot of unseen history, allowing us to understand and sympathise with the “enemy”.

** Major Spoilers **

I'm kind of surprised that the three main storylines (Shadesmar / Dalinar at War / The Tower) didn't really converge to a finale. I thought that would bother me, but I kind of liked having them all with their own concerns.

The big fight once again being resolved by swearing a new ideal is a little bit much, but it was enjoyable still. The power creep in this series is getting wild though.

I'm really conflicted on how I feel about this book.

There are a lot of great ideas and little touches that I appreciated, but there are just as many lazy attempts at sentimentality that really bugged me.

I liked it overall though, and it is a pretty quick, easy read.

I really loved this author's previous book, Station Eleven, so I had pretty high expectations of this. And it's good, I just didn't love it.

I really enjoy her writing style though, similar to Station Eleven, we study in and out of several different character POVs without any regard for a chronological order. The prose to me is very soothing and understated for some reason, even when bad things are happening. I just like reading it.

However the story and characters here are just fine. There is a decent sense of time and place, but I was never super attached to anyone or waiting to see any particular plot points develop.

Still I did like this and I'll certainly read more by Emily St. John Mandel in the future.

I'm not a huge fan of Seth Rogen, but he can certainly be funny and charming so I thought hearing stories from, especially about the film industry, could be entertaining. And they are, I really liked his behind-the-scenes takes from some movies or about certain celebrities. A lot of them are just very strange interactions that he seems to have been bewildered by. I'm not as big of a fan of drug trip stories though and that's about a third of this book, but you kind of have to expect that from a Seth Rogen.

Overall a pretty fun quick read and it was nice to listen to the audiobook narrated by Rogen himself and featuring a bunch of other actors.

I really enjoyed this. It feels like a very personal take on what it means to be an Asian American, yet it is an extremely stylized telling as it's often written in the form of a screenplay AND in second person, which I'm not sure I've ever seen outside of short stories. And it GOES PLACES the further you get into it (which isn't too long, the audiobook was just over four hours). I still need to process my thoughts and do some reading / podcast listening to understand this better.

This was well written enough and easy to read, but just felt pretty muddled and I never was really invested in anything.

I'm not a diehard XKCD reader or anything, but it's a clever and fun comic strip so I was hoping for the same here. And that's kind of what this is, but it didn't really work for me for some reason. There are some fun bits, but a lot of it is just a bit too drawn out or one note for me.

I might have done myself a disservice listening to this via audiobook though, I believe the printed version includes a lot of comics and other illustrations.

I've been listening to podcasts and other things instead of reading lately, so I thought this audiobook would be a good transition back, it's produced like an episode of Gladwell's podcast.

I like Gladwell's ability to find interesting stories/people and draw broad conclusions from them. He generally stays on a topic just long enough for it to remain interesting before moving on to a tangentially related but fairly different one.

I enjoyed this book, but it didn't interest me as much as some of his other's. Concepts such defaulting to truth or mismatched presentation were well explained, but I didn't think the conclusions that were reached from some of the stories told about them were as thought provoking as I hoped they would be.

The premise of this novella is great: two agents on opposite sides of a war leave notes to one another as they travel through time on their missions.

And some of that is really neat. And some of the purpose is very beautiful. Yet I found it a bit hard to follow and meandering, so it didn't really connect with me. I may have just been in the wrong headspace for it.

It's a fairly short novella, the audiobook I listened to was four hours long, so I think I'm going to take another crack at it sometime in print instead.

I almost didn't want to give this a rating because I don't think I really gave it a good effort. I listened to the audiobook on loan from the library and it just didn't really hold my attention, to be honest.

There's some nice passages in here and I enjoyed the narration by the author, but I could barely even tell you what the plot was if pressed. It was quite short (~6 hours), so I actually might give it another shot sometime and come back and revise this.

Re-Read thoughts:I picked this for book club and decided to re-read it as a refresher, this time via audiobook from the library. It holds up for me! I couldn't put it down again. It's written in a relatively simple way that still manages to just convey who each character is so efficiently and move the pace along briskly. Just a fun read!———Original Review:What a wonderful book.There was something so charming about it to me. The main character isn't exactly a new archetype: the narrator who has had a tough upbringing, yet is naturally witty and intelligent, able to raise herself up, only to come crashing down at times due in part to her inability to fit in. But hey, it's a fun archetype when it's done this well. The character feels fully alive for this entire book and is just fun to spend time with. I actually thought it was really interesting that this was written by a male author and told in a first person viewpoint from a female character, with almost all the important secondary characters female as well. Maybe I don't read enough, but that seems very rare. The character relationships felt authentic to me and were very touching. I loved how the narration effortlessly jumps around in time. The narrator will recall a past event and began discussing it in the past tense, and as the scene develops, it somehow just gradually becomes the present tense, and as a reader you are just living in that moment now, completely invested in these new surroundings and it's happenings. Then suddenly you are snapped back into the real present and the weight of that event washes over you. Just beautifully done. I haven't even talked about the main thrust of this story yet, which I kind of wish I didn't know about before starting it, so I won't even mention it here even though the cover art gives it away. I'm a sucker for this kind of “magical realism” and I loved it here, I was constantly arguing with myself about what it symbolizes and how it would develop in the story. This is one of my favourite books I've read in awhile. It gives me the same feelings in a lot of ways as when I read [b:The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 1618 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Mark Haddon https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1479863624l/1618.SY75.jpg 4259809]. Shout out to my wife for recommending this to me, she had taken the ebook version out from the library on a whim since it was trending and looked interesting, and after she got a few chapters in she found a hard copy at the library so that I could read it as well.

I picked this book up after listening to the New York Times Top 10 Books of 2019 and hearing it was by the author who wrote the story that the film Arrival was based off of.

I absolutely loved the first story, which is kind of a fable set in medieval Baghdad that uses time travel to explore fate. There's another great story later on that deals with memory, language, and writing by contrasting new technology and old customs.

However, about a third of the entire book is taken up by my least favorite story here, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which was just a dull story about the morality of our treatment of AI that never really went anywhere interesting.

Overall though, this is a great little set of philosophical sci fi stories that I'm glad I read. The author even had a short little blurb at the end of each story to explain what motivated him to write each of them, which I found very insightful.

This was really well researched and written, it felt like a huge fact dump without the tedium that usually comes with it.

The points here are unfortunately not too surprising, almost universally products and ideas are designed with the average person in mind, but the average person is actually the average man. In examples cited in this book, the failings repeated the most seemed to be the unaccounted for difference in size of the average male to the average female and the fact that women are far more likely to be the primary caregiver to dependents, though the book also dives into much more specific sex-based differences as well. Often times, it just reads as an inditement of capitalism in general, just point out that it treats women extremely disproportionately worse.

I like to think that I consider this sort of thing in my day-to-day life and work, but this book will certainly make me think harder about it and be more aware.

I listened to this via audiobook narrated by the author herself, which was really well done and felt more personal for it, I think. Highly recommend.

I like to try to read books that have movies or shows coming out soon, so when I saw that Netflix was making this with Amy Adams in the lead role I grabbed the audiobook from the library.

This was okay. It's an unabashedly Hitchcockian and pulpy thriller, and it does a pretty good job of it. There are twists and turns, and thrilling moments, but there wasn't anything overly inventive or memorable about it. Also the ending was stupid.

I think it'll make for a pretty schlocky movie, but there's enough talent involved that I hope it's a fun thriller at least.

A final note about the audiobook: After it was over there was a segment where the narrator did a Q&A with the writer. I wish more audiobooks did stuff like that.