Dave

This needed editing or something. It went on a long time

Perhaps I should tone down my rating a little, but this book was the first one to offer the premise that saving more than you needed to live a fulfilled life is wasteful. I found the concept to this profound and have tried to understand how I can transform stored savings for retirement (someday fun) into some happy event or memory for me when I'm old.

I felt that there wasn't a ton of practical advice on how you can shift your mindset, the author just advocated to do the action no matter how mentally challenging that could be. But overall the concept I found so interesting and well articulated that I had to give it 5 stars.

I've read several books criticizing the excesses of the left but this one is the first that comes from a liberal position. Usually the author can not disguise their open “conservative” views even though they announce themselves as a centrist. These authors openly call themselves liberals and give detailed reasons of how we have found ourselves dealing with so much identity politics and why it hurts discourse. I listened to this in audiobook form, and I'm looking for the physical book so I can check some of the references and continue to read more about the thinking presented here.

In some places it dragged a bit with historical background and setup, but for the most part I was very engaged with this thoughtful argument. And I feel like the lengthy setup actually does pay off in the end as it ties together.

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.

It was fine, especially when read to me. However there are several books in this time period that have people lying and acting like guilty people to protect someone else's honor in ways that are hard for me to deeply comprehend. It makes all the nonsense people go through to ferret out the truth just fall flat for me.

This one had a massive side story that I thought was quite fun, or I would have marked it down even more.

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

When someone writes a book about the hyper competent person and everyone wants to bang him, it grosses me out like when people involved you in their public lewdness kink without your permission. This is some real auto-fellating nonsense. Also, it must have been pretty racist back in the day.

I save 1s for books so boring I can't finish them. This wasn't boring, I'll give it that.

It felt super misogynistic and very classist. I think it's a product of the time, he doesn't come across as mean about it more like Very matter of fact. It made it hard to get at the heart of what he was trying to do (I think) which is get you to try and imagine what a fourth dimension would be like through analogy. By telling you a story of a two dimensional creature having to get a grip on a three dimensional reality, he's really trying to get you to understand how it is to conceive a fourth dimension. Which is kind of cool. But slogging through the classist mysoginy seems like too much to get through.

Well, at least they aren't breaking the law in this one. Still the naiveté on display here is staggering. I'm checking out the books written by this disgruntled teacher to see what they have to say. But this entitled piece of garbage masquerading as a story is just kinda gross. I'm not going to read any more of these, they are just making me progressively more disgusted.

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.

This was entertaining a bit, and I can appreciate the thoughts being advanced on how people getting tagged as elitist can maybe try and reconcile with the populist people. Now I've got to go find a book that's about not coming across as smug.

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

I checked out a few of these tuttle twins books, and this was the first one I read. It refers to several other adventures when talking about why government sucks in a way that didn't explain much about why it sucked.

It then suggested that we should be able to shop around for government function, which is all well and good except how do cops or courts work then? These ideas are put out there with no real explanation about what happens when you need to enforce agreements or do something about actual criminals. And I kind of feel like if you're rich enough to live the life depicted in these books, you kind of implicitly can shop around for the government you want. It's called living in a different country.

I didn't find the stories about the psychology of robots as interesting as I think other people do I think it was made up problems that are given weird solutions.

But it was entertaining enough to read.

This book seems to be mostly a tirade against far-left pushing on boundaries around norms particularly in the space of racial justice. In short, it is a guy complaining about people complaining. This is as compelling a read as that might suggest.

It asserted so, so many things about the goals of the thinkers in this space. It never addressed the concept that I was taught as a kid that makes sense as I move through life. In order for something to be unjustly racist, there has to be a power imbalance. I'm sorry if a bunch of people protesting racist institutions or demanding that the college education they pay for teaches them things in a more diverse way but they have no power. The fact that they are out yelling about change tells you they are at a disadvantage. Don't punch down, try and understand where people are coming from and see if you can find common ground.

I give this 2 stars not 1 because while the whining of some dude about how it sucks people won't just take oppression anymore like the good old days is pretty much bullshit, the critique that we should watch out that the pendulum doesn't swing to far the other way is fair.

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.

This one is pretty wild in a few different ways. It seems like misogyny is in full stride here. The villain is.over the top. This is like the fourth book I've read where Bond is catching someone cheating at a gentlemen's card game. I figure the author got cheated by somebody once in his life and has never given up that memory.

I give this three stars instead of two only because it is so over the top outlandish you kind of have to read it to believe it.

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.

There wasn't anything particularly original presented in the story, so I can't give it full marks. It was a pretty standard revenge story in a way. However, the way the story was told was tight and you can blow through it in a single sitting. There is a fair amount of story packed into that little space.

I felt like the book title and opening promise a more generalized view of democracies throughout history and how they in general go but it became fairly US-centric shortly in and uses the world examples only as a cautionary tale for Americans. Other than that minor disappointment, I thought it was a good analysis of how US democracy has managed to succeed so far, how it has handled authoritarian advances in the past and how it is not well-equipped to handle it in the near future.

I didn't really take this as a Trump sucks book, but I am biased. I found it a study of Trump's election and why he succeeded why others have failed in the same kind of attempt.

This is a deeply upsetting memoir of growing up in the home of a fundamentalist prepper. The numerous tales of abuse and injury inflicted on children made me physically ill.

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

Heinlein gets quite preachy often, and this one is no exception. I get bored with the benevolent rich guy that seems to know everything and has the moral philosophy that gets libertarians happy in the pants area. It is beyond reasonable for me to believe that a human left with aliens for 20 years could develop the crazy powers described in the book. It was difficult to suspend disbelief and get on with the story. There was pretty sexist and misogynist talk throughout and overall it was just hard to slog through.

It also ends halfway through but then keeps on going for no good reason at all.

Things I've learned about what Heinlein thinks about himself:

- I love cats
- all women want me
- I'm the coolest MF on the planet

I felt it was a bit long, but I believe it was to back the arguments (of which there are many) with facts and anecdotal evidence as much as possible. I think when I finished the book there was about 20% left of footnotes and citing.

The basic idea here is that there are lots of jobs that are bullshit, and the book takes you through:
a) What the strict definition of a bullshit job is
b) Giving an estimate of what jobs fit this description and refute counter-arguments to the idea that capitalism can produce pointless jobs.
c) categories of BS jobs and some nominal explanation for their existence
d) the effects that these jobs have on the humans that occupy them
e) what might be done about it

I don't want to spoil much of anything, so I'll just say I found the arguments about the existence and categorization of BS jobs much more persuasive than the possible outlined solution. He does give a caveat of how he doesn't want to offer a solution, because that would be the focus of the book so I can't tell if it's self-fulfilling prophecy or it's just hard to propose solutions to big problems.

I found the concept frankly fascinating and I really loved the thinking being laid out on how this could come to be and what it's effect on people is. The humanity in capitalism, how we ignore it or mold it to suit the raw purposes of capitalism is something I haven't seen spelled out quite like this before.