Eva
Wow I loved this. It's 1979 and a rag-tag team of engineers is on their way of hacking out a new 32-bit minicomputer (then the size of a couple of fridges) in the basement the Data General in Massachusetts. And a journalist gets to watch. The dust jacket reads, Kidder wrote the book “with a reporter's eye, a novelist' heart, and a technician's understanding” and it's all that and more. It's about wire-wrapped prototype boards and chasing bugs, management styles and team motivation, burning out and finding new drives, vivid portraits of people full of excitement for building something new and innovative.
Rick Deckard is ein Bountyhunter auf der mit giftigen Staub ueberzogenen Erde, auf der Jagd nach Androiden die ihren Besitzern entflohen sind und auf die Erde kommen, in der Hoffnung ein eigenes Leben zu finden. Deckard's besitzt ein elektrisches Schaf, sein Traum ist es jedoch ein echtes Tier zu besitzen. Die Menschen finden Trost mit den Gefuehls-orgeln, die ihre Empfindungen programmieren, und mit der Mitgefuehl-Box des Mercer-Kults, die alle Menschen zugleich eins sein lässt. Auf der Jagd nach den neuen Nexus-6 Androiden, trifft er Rachael Rosen, eine Androidin, die ihre Reize gegenueber Bountyhuntern einsätzt um Mitgefuehl zu bewirken. Deckard, der schon seit längeren die Aufgaben seines Jobs hinterfragt, lässt sich mit ihr ein, nachdem er aber ihre absicht herausfindet, geht er auf einen letzten Androiden-hunt und killt die letzten entflohenen Modelle.
The title word of the book appears once in the (English edition) text. Aliide and her sister and niece are on the way home from a terrible night. Her sister Ingel tells her to ‘purge' her face of the tears and snot that cover it. Before they all would enter into their home, pretending nothing terrible had happened to them.
The female characters in this novel have a lot terrible things happen to them, and out of shame or fear they decide to hide it. They recognize the truth in the eyes of women who've lived through the same.
My second Oksanen, and again it's quite a thriller of a novel, featuring female protagonists living through rough times in Eastern Europe. I learned a lot about Estonia.
Wow, in the end Aliide had quite the body count on her conscience.
A gritty, slightly dystopian Robinson Crusoe story of a man being stranded on a desolate trashy traffic island between highways outside London. He is stuck in limbo, fights hunger, pain, a fevered mind, and starts a 2-3 week adventure with/against the island and it's Mad-Maxian inhabitants. Several times he self-sabotages his own escape, and seemingly alternates between despair and fascination for the effects the island has on him.
Mieville's world building is simply intense! At the heart of the novel is New Crobuzon, a seedy overcrowded steampunk kingdom of a city, teeming with life of all sorts, creatures from various species; bird people, insect people, people recrafted into ‘remades', beings from this plane and those from beyond; criminals, artists, scientists, rebels, politicians.
It's hard at first to dig your way through the onslaught of details about this weird-fantasy victorian horror London, full of vivid, dark and grotesque elaborations, alchemy and madness. But then a villain emerges and a rag-tag-crew sets off to fight it and suddenly the plot just catapults and pulls you along.
The first half of the book is fine enough, somewhat corny and simplistic, but fine, as it tells the story of a white Irish girl growing up among the slaves at a tobacco plantation. But then the second half pushes all the melodrama too much, over-relying on secrets and misunderstandings as plot points. Also, the main character is rather maddening, as she never grows out of her little-girl naivety.
Peter Seibel interviews 15 giants of the world of computer programming. I pretty much didn't know any of the programmers before, and my programming skills are definitely far from any of their standards, but this book was an amazing read.
The interviews create detailed portraits, zooming in on the craft of programming, and feature everyone's thoughts, opinions, life-stories, tips and tricks about how they program, what languages they use, how they debug, and if they start bottom-up and top-down. Seibel asks questions about how they got into programming; if they consider themselves scientists, engineers, artists or craftsman; and how they recognize great programming skills.
We hear hands-on stories about team management of coders, enforcing of strict coding syntax standards, finding the balance between quick-and-dirty and over-optimized code, and a lot of bashing of C and C++ and their use of pointers.
Lessons i will take away from this book:
> Read other people's code, a lot!
> Write readable code, instead of extensive commenting
> Learn more languages
With few exceptions most of the interviewees started learning the craft in the area of punch-cards and teleprinters, and have been influential for the discipline by inventing operating systems, programming languages or writing the bible of programming.
I'd really like to see a version of this book showcasing today's media-art coders. But in general, there really should be a XXXXXX-at-Work for every discipline there is. Hearing personal accounts, behind-the-scene stories about the field you are passionate about ...
Bite-sized advice for the work-life, especially business-owners and managers. From the makers of Basecamp. Quick and easy read, that tells many truths you might already know, but might need to hear over and over again, in order to not forget to execute them.
A writer comes off age in a chaotic and neurotic Italian family. The modern equivalent of Natalia Ginzburg's [b:Family Lexicon 41842200 Family Lexicon Natalia Ginzburg https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1537098137l/41842200.SY75.jpg 206315]? What a fun read, somewhere between biography and autofiction, questioning the truthfulness of our memories and the stories we tell. I chuckled a lot at Raimo's digs at her brother (who's also a writer).
A graphic novel on Bertrand Russell's life and on the battles about the logical foundation of mathematics during the first half of the 20th century. With a dash of the madness of the brilliant. We (and Russell) meet all the important players along the way: Whitehead, Frege, Hilbert, Cantor, Poincaré, Wittgenstein, Gödel... The story of this quest of mathematics and it's importance is cleverly told on multiple levels, as the narrative jumps between Russell's life and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the graphic novel.
Tamment has mild autism, synesthesia and a unique relationship to language. For him words don't just hold meaning, but they also ring and shine and sparkle. He prefers his words to harmonise, visually and sonically, and to build sentences with care. Reading him describe his love of words, made me slow down and notice the beauty of his words. His chapters deal with his personal discovery of language, novel ways of teaching language, the history and current state of Esperanto, identity through language in ex colonies, preserving the Icelandic language, sign language, and the collaborative game of conversing on the phone. I was more enchanted with his personal stories at the beginning, and sped through some of the later chapters, but all in all this is a beautiful compendium on language and word tales.
When your radiologist dad gives you a couple hundred x-rays as treatment for your sinus infection...
I think i was compelled to finish this so that i finally could give a non-4 or non-5 star review on Goodreads. This and the fact that its a light read made me power through this. It's a working mom's perspective on how to become happier, and there is nothing wrong with that, and a lot of the things she talks about are useful and thought-provoking in some way. But what really made me dislike it, is that I simply didn't like her, and she puts a lot of herself into it. Her love for scrap-booking, her constantly nagging at her husband, her dislike of shopping, her seemingly criticizing herself for characteristics that are not criticize-worthy or that she must be secretly proud of. But hey, one secret to happiness is to be less negative! ;)
Entertaining and so elegant in how it examines ingrained traditions, authority and rebellion at a much-lauded Viennese school. A coming of age story about education that reads like a classic, even though it's very much grounded in the here and now.
Whatever revolution Feli is starting in her future, I will take part!
Perfect holiday read. The talented protagonist who had to grow up too fast, a young sister who is her one and all, a mother who is the problem, a mysterious and enigmatic love interest, a future on the horizon but too much responsibility in the present. Wonderfully immersive despite the short length and the sometimes sparse narration. Wahl's technique of interposing what Tilda wants to say with what she ends up saying out loud, was done very effectively. I connected with all the elements and had fun reading this.
A family of geniuses, a grandpa only talking in prose, and that twin situation at the heart of it - too much to take.
Three different forms of consciousness meet on an island ...The fictional sequel to [b:Other Minds 28116739 Other Minds Peter Godfrey-Smith https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1606353700l/28116739.SX50.jpg 48126419] tied up in a tech-futuristic climate fiction. I very much enjoyed this. I wished it could have been a tad nerdier and grittier, gotten us encounters and communication attempts earlier, because those were amazing. All praise the shapesinger!
I made it a third into it, but I think I'm going to stop now. Even though I enjoyed the beginning, it started to drag soon. Plus, the novel suddenly went from 1 narrator to many,many,many narrators which I truly don't like. Not up for listening to another 18 hours of this, sorry.
I really like the Radch world and the questions of agency, justice and gender its human-and-machine hybrid society poses. And yet, this book felt too trapped in a small planet's colonial plot? It dragged in parts and I had a hard time keeping the characters apart.
As it's been a while since I read the first one, I would have appreciated a glossary, to help me get back into the world's unique terminology.
A couple that uses Wald's airplane as a token of their love < a complicated nerdy relationship ;)
This was fun, and uncomfortable, and everything's obviously not fine.
Will abort this mission at about 20% in. Setz takes you on an interesting well-researched journey, but I find his style rather tedious when you don't have a protagonist you can relate to. I might have endured, were it not so long.
Very surprising this apparently was mostly written pre-covid and the onset of the conspiracy theory epidemic!
I read it in one sitting on a long plane ride, and it was the perfect book for that. An easy read, full of charm (loved Buchholz's laconic and witty voice), mysterious, sexy. It almost dove too deep into the magical realism well, and I could have done without the stage play at the end, but I certainly had a good time reading it. Not sure I'd raise it to the cult-level as some want to, but it definitely is unique.
I was a big fan of Sittenfeld's debut ([b:Prep 9844 Prep Curtis Sittenfeld https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386925666l/9844.SY75.jpg 2317177]), apparently didn't think much of her first romance novel as I rated it one star ([b:The Man of My Dreams 72622 The Man of My Dreams Curtis Sittenfeld https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386924531l/72622.SY75.jpg 978325]), and then thought her other one was fun but rather silly ([b:Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice 25852870 Eligible A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice Curtis Sittenfeld https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460477855l/25852870.SY75.jpg 26428236]). But now she totally won me back with this book. I absorbed it within 24hours, and thought it funny, warm and really excellently written. There seem to be so many romance novels out there were character's insecurities are the unrealistic roadblocks thrown into the narrative to elongate the angst. Yet they are constructed so feebly all you do is roll your eyes. Sally and Noah - the protagonists of this novel - also come with insecurities that pose obstacles, but they at all times feel genuine and realistic. So, is it all just in the quality of the writing? The protagonist at one point proclaims she wants to write “non-condescending, ragingly feminist screenplays for romantic comedies”, which she would achieve mainly by the quality of the writing, and the character development. No cutesy female characters with flour on their nose from baking cookies, no messy disaster characters. She wants to write about people who aren't flawless but aren't ridiculous or incompetent at life. Well, mission achieved. And some. I also really enjoyed learning about the day-to-day mechanics of the SNL-like sketch show, even without being a fan of SNL. And I might have cried some tears about Jerry.