Dave

I came looking for stories about people who have retired or not and reasons why they have (or not) and whether they regretted these choices (or not). Kind of some data blended with anecdotes to make it memorable and help me with my decisions about retiring (or not).

This is really the story of a about to hit 70s guy who is a reporter so he knows tons of famous and connected people. He'll tell you a little bit about their reaction to his thinking of retiring and why it's not selfish or horrible for boomers to just work high paid gigs until they drop dead. Also, he has a lot to tell you about his daughter who is going to college.

I tapped out after 2/3rds of the book. Maybe a tiger shows up and it gets interesting but I'll never know.

This is the memoirs of a intersex person telling you how they've struggled with this identity. I'm glad she can talk about it and I appreciate learning about more messy biology. I really respect and appreciate Wendy Davis. But I don't think the memoirs were that interesting so I only give it a meh-good rating.

It's long but I never really felt like it was just rambling on. These were crazy times that I didn't realize just how crazy it was. I knew the hippies were a thing, but I'll have to go back and re-read fear and loathing on the campaign trail ‘72. Last time I read it I remember thinking that Hunter was really such an unreliable narrator that I couldn't make head or tails of what was going on. This straight account of the wildness of the time made me realize maybe he wasn't so crazy. I mean he was, but maybe so were the things he were seeing.

Anyways, I find a bunch of parallels between Nixon and Trump and I am seriously disturbed.

This book lays out the theory that anglo-american history has moved in cycles since the 1500s, following roughly 84-100 year (a long human lifetime) periods. They also propose that the 4 generations involved follow rough cycles as well (Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist) that are reactionary to what's come before, not engrained in the people or through some kind of mystic reason. He lays out a lot of anecdotal evidence to support the theory. Like most theories that look at historical data for a pattern, I think there's a bit of squinting to fit the archetypes proposed and the seasons of the cycle that are laid out in the theory. I also question what we can do about this, even if it's right. There is mention at the end that if we know winter is coming we can act like it but I'm not sure that is meaningful if you say that you have no idea the shape of the coming crisis will take.

Anyways, the author hedges to have the crisis ending sometime in the next decade. Good luck everyone.

A romantic story set during World War 2. It reminds the reader that Hungary was into Nazis and working jewish people to death, just more lightly. I enjoyed the vivid descriptions of pre-war Paris, Budapest and Europe from a regular person's point of view. I got very tired of the longing glances, secrets between lovers, repeated questions and answers and ruminations. This book could have been like half the size. I don't like the benevolent generals saving Andros on multiple occasions, it reeks of aristocratic ass kissing. It's not historic, so it's the author's choice and that really took me out of the story and see it for just that, a very sentimental story with eastern front trappings.

This is a matrix-like story well before it's time. But it's pretty dated and hard to parse it as such.

Even as short as it was, I had trouble slogging through it. Lot's of dramatic statements that were dreams recalled or crazy threats not realized. I am coming it seriously late into the series but I feel like Patterson (or his ghost writers) have the same pattern where they like to contrast a happy home life interrupted by the awful murderous people that are being handled.

These were ok, I'd rate them like goodish Twilight Zone episodes. Stephen King had a story similar in feel to “The Man Who Traveled in Elephants”, both are alright but a little warm and fuzzy for my tastes. I think after reading quite a few of Heinlein's stories I prefer Dick's stories quite a lot more. These aren't bad, and thankfully don't showcase a scrappy hardworking and utterly brilliant man who is just killer with the ladies and likes cats.

This needed an editor. It was super long to describe the arc from brave posturing to caving in. If I hear the word haircut again to describe reducing loans owed I might scream.

This felt like a collection of blog posts in some way, not as coherent throughout as I would have liked. It's also a bit light on practices you can engage in to transform yourself. It does have some interesting philosophical ideas about the roles of masculinity and femininity in life which I enjoyed thinking about. A couple of things that really stuck out and I will have to think about them over time:

- Women will challenge you, cause chaos and disrupt because it is their nature. They are testing their partner to determine if they are not fit for the world. If a feminine partner can disrupt the masculine partners tranquility, the world will easily do the same and they are not fit.

- Part of the challenging will come in the form of complaints. While these complaints are signals that the f partner detects a weakness and is testing that weakness, the actual content of the complaint is meaningless. That is, if a f partner complains that you always leave your clothes laying around the room, actually examining the facts to determine if this is true is pointless. Only the signal that they detect weakness and are probing it is meaningful.

There were some other things too, I find the book overall a light on spiritual enlightenment but I do think that there are differences between masculine and feminine people in how they see the world and relate to others that does need to be examined and talked about. So I liked it for that.

This was good for me, I like short stories and it's nice to get a mix of some people you might not have read before. None of these were bangers, but they were decent yarns.

I thought this was going to be a book that kind of let you see some life skills you should learn as you meander through life but this was a kids book in a way, with some all I needed to know I learned in kindergarten type thoughts in there. I liked it, loved the art, and I enjoyed that these were things that people really shared when interviewed.

Octopussy - I kind of liked this story, it's about an agent going bad and how it hits them after they go bad. Also seems to use the term pussy to mean a pet or something endearing, which when listening to it as an audiobook makes it a little awkward. Doesn't feature much of Bond, which might be why I like it ok.

Property of a lady - This is the usual Bond starter stuff where he gets called in to some swanky scene to spot the bad actor. The glamour is described in detail and Bond of course is debonair. Kind of a let down.

meh on the others too. not worth the characters to type it out.

I've seen most of the Bond movies over the years, so I decided to take a look through the books that created such a phenomenon. I don't really care much for the movies, but I will admit that the more recent movie with Daniel Craig I found pretty good so, how's the book?

Things are described in detail, always. You get a vivid picture of what the scene looks, smells and tastes like. It is a story of cavalier hard men engaging in dangerous games with one another. I can see how this story (and more in the series if it continues in the same vein) would be greatly appealing to teenage and young men that are looking for something to emulate. Bond has skills, panache, and knowledge of how to act in both dangerous and classy situations. At middle age, this story doesn't hit the same so whatever.

It has some stuff that would be considered fairly racist these days and how Bond views women and how the female character acts in this seems wildly misogynist, and I don't consider a playboy secret agent bedding women left and right as particularly bad. They are portrayed as vapid objects of entertainment or horrible distractions to the dangerous game that is being played.

I give this a few stars because it really was gritty spy business and I thought the story was well done. I dock stars for treatment of women in ways that I think are kinda shitty, even for the time.

This book doesn't go deep into how crypto works, but rather it tells you enough to have some idea of what's happening on a technical level. What the book really looks at carefully is the hubris of it all, the various characters and chaos that surrounded the crypto boom of the last few years. It is an engaging story, and it doesn't have a super satisfying ending (not the author's fault).

This is a close examination of how to reason and loggical fallacies people can engage in. I wish there was a workbook to kind of review the critical points, this was a fair.amount to digest.

Read Dec 2023. Sometimes belabored the point, but overall decently interesting.

This is horseshit ranting.I wish it wasn't so tinfoil hat crazy, I'd like to get some insight into conservative thought that isn't just pissing in pants fearful about showing empathy.

This holds up pretty well from my teenage reading years. Story of a world-weary hedonist biting off more than he realized with exploring extra-dimensional pleasures. Barker has vivid descriptive powers here and really paints a picture of this world.

Funny enough, I think the first movie did a really good job translating this into a film. Beat for beat I think it was there.

This came across as mostly nazi apologism and some wankery about how.its ok to troll and say outlandish shit to get a reaction but we'll take everyone else's words and twist them until we're all shitty.

It reminds me a lot about how Abby Hoffman used to sound and write except Hoffman didnt cozy up to Nazis

I think that this analysis is very accurate but the suggestions made to improve things I think are impractical on a political level.

A little light bed time reading to influence the dreams. I dock it one star since while I think most of the things presented here are true, I think there is a broad spectrum of people that are participating in the groups described from trolls that just do random things for the lulz up to paranoid and radicalized individuals that are out to overthrow the government. While the book shows that the people in the former can be pushed into the latter, it does far more broad brush painting of the group instead of examining how this radicalization happens and maybe how we can interact with the people before they get too radicalized.

Anyways, it was good to get an intelligence officers perspective on the threat of home grown terrorist groups. It was interesting, but I can't say I know how to integrate it into my ethos.

There was a bunch of really feel good mysticism in here, but the point I seem to have gotten was something similar to the secret. Want something super hard and you will get it. If you didn't get it, you must not have wished hard enough.

I give it some love because there were bits of personal philosophy I can get down with. But chatting with the universe is really hard reading.

Poetical telling of how it is to be part of a culture while adopting a new one. And also the new one maybe doesn't care for your culture. And also there's Djinn.

I liked it.

This came across as a boomer complaining with data about why things aren't as cool as they were when he was a kid. Towards the end of the book, he gets to the main point “Once people are successful and comfortable, they are less driven to achieve”

I have seen this replay throughout history and the idea that you need to push yourself to stay hungry isn't a particularly new insight. Unless you want a ton of factual analysis about why it's a good idea as a nation to stay hungry, you don't need to read this book.