Eva
Set towards the end of the 21st century, the US is a place in tumult, battled by regular nature disasters and a civil war of south vs north over the use of clean energy vs fossil fuels. We follow the story of Sarat, a girl that's recruited and trained for the cause of the south, fueled by her anger over the death of family members and a childhood in a refugee camp.
My interest in this waxed and waned, which I probably have to blame on the disruptive mix of personal storytelling from several perspectives and the drier historical reports in between.
2.5
A sad and yet very sweet story about a mother daughter duo with Hungarian roots who live a happy life in Germany despite just about scraping by. Until a surprise visit and an unlucky accident cause everything to tumble down. What's next? Of course to go find that father you mother never told you about.
I enjoyed my time with Billie, who with her naivete and resilience make for a good heroine. She's also quite the grifter, and the author's choice of sometimes simply not revealing how Billie manages to escape tricky situations was a cop-out so blunt that it was quite funny.
Over a stretch of a few days several characters' fates entangle in the luxurious Grand Hotel in Weimar time Berlin. Those who live in glamour and riches tangle with those scheming or dreaming of a future without worries. There's a drollness and melancholy in the characters, and their adventures are just perfect for being in a black and white movie starring Greta Garbo.
Rounded up, to support the rediscovery of female writers of the past. Thankfully Vicki Baum was already quite successful in her day.
It's the end of the season at a lakeside hotel in Switzerland. The few leftover mostly female guests lounge on the terrace, take strolls in the autumn weather, get clothes made from seamstresses, have lunch, take tea, dress up for dinner, and then turn in early. Everyone behaves as if this is a novel set in the early 20th century. And yet, occasional remarks - like having television in their rooms - make you realize it really is set closer to the novel's publication date (1984). There's a hazy out-of-time feeling to it all. The women are mysterious, wretched and dramatic, living different fates of being-pushed-aside-by-men. The protagonist is at a crossroad in her own life, questioning if she should marry.
Elegant and wry writing, which I very much enjoyed.
Deep dive into Chinese history, with a heavy focus on the the tumultous 20th century. It's fascinating to learn how this nation, that was so traditional and mostly inward looking, got unfairly raided and humiliated by the West during the Opium Wars. Understandably that this left deep grudges that grew into competitive spirits, that valued surface images over one's country's underlying health. Communism, revolutions, famines, massacres, corruptions ... ensue.
That was a long and informative listen. It ends around 2009, with an even somewhat positive hopeful outlook on China's future on the world stage. Obviously the last decade of developments countered that somewhat considering China's aggressive economical politics and their genocidal crackdown on ethnic minorities.
This was a great binge-read for a weekend. It's the captivating adventurous story of a headstrong and wide-travelled young woman. There's secrecy, an eccentric father, a violent ex-fiance, a mystery, an escape, a new life, a reinvention, a new freedom, a love story, all set in the early days of the 19th century in America. The side characters were well sketched and intriguing, I especially enjoyed cold Henning and his soft spot for Dulcy.
L'ecouter en francais m'a donne le meme plaisir que ma premiere lecture du roman. Quelle histoire propulsive et inspirante. J'apprecie vraiment l'engagement de Tevis a decrire les parties d'eches coup par coup. Premiere livre audio en francais que j'ai eu envie de lire en vitesse!
L'histoire d'une famille perse, l'histoire de l'Iran, les troubles, les persecutions, l'histoire de la rebellion, de la fuite, de l'immigration et de la reconstruction de sa famille et de sa culture dans un nouvel endroit.
C'etait genial, vaste, mystique et moderne. Le debit etait bon, meme s'il y avait beaucoup de sauts dans le temps.
A fun regency romance featuring bickering cousins, that falls apart for me, when the 20 year old heroine turns too superior and adventurous in her masterminding of everyone's romantic and business affairs. Sophy is a wanna-be Emma that lacks Austen's sharp side commentary that would take her down a notch. Also, the ending seems very rushed.
2.5 rounded up because the first half was fun.
How to MacGyver your way to survival on Mars in case you end up stranded there. Highly entertaining, surprisingly many laugh-out-loud moments (if someone ever get's stranded on Mars, he better have that sense of humor) and lots of science and geekiness. Plus, it already has all the cheesy Hollywood-blockbuster moments pre-written. The whole world bonding together over one lost soul (hell, even China pitches in), the words echo the tear-jerker movie montages that will follow. I didn't even mind that that much, as it was a fun and exciting read, and tear-jerker moments are definitely better in book form, while they deserve more eye-rolling on the big screen.
Fascinating and very elegantly executed literary scifi with a touch of Cultural Revolution, lots of science, a long-standing math problem and first alien communication. The Trisolarian game world with dehydration and rehydration reminded me of the abstract mind twisting of [b:The Inverted World 142181 The Inverted World Christopher Priest https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1245646253l/142181.SY75.jpg 2226603]. The idea that alien civilisations would mess with our scientific research in order to stop our progress, feels entirely possible
This feels too short to be called a novella, it's almost a short story I'd say. Memories of a former classmate who disappeared during Pinochet's reign of terror are invading the dreams of a group of Chileans. Interesting, but a bit too dreamy and too short for my taste.
The love adventures of 4 young upper-class Saudi women in a very strict and traditional culture that favors men in every aspect. The four girls still honor their religion, they are not rebels, they feel like good representations on the scale of traditional to more open-minded. The story follows their various flirtations and relationships over the course of a few years.
Any book that gets banned in its home country, it's worth a look. Even if the writing isn't especially good, the plot is engaging, and the novel is very insightful into a world and culture so far from mine. It was definitely interesting to learn about all customs that feel so antiquated in how they separate the genders and suppress the women, while also embracing the allure of Western movies, shopping addictions and Burger King whopper meals. Women are meant to marry young, the more naive and less educated they are the better their chances. Young guys “number” girls by basically stalking them and forcing their phone numbers on them. And should you fall in love, love is no guarantee that tradition won't break.
Kasparov's match with Deep Blue is heavily cited when it comes to texts dealing with technology and the future. What Clive Thompson added here are 2 follow-up events that i wasn't aware of (even though i adore chess) and that perfectly fit the theme of the book:
Advanced chess tournaments: instead of “Man versus Machine” this form of chess - introduced by Kasparov - shows Man and Machine collaborations. Chess players make use of what computers are good add - big data statistical analysis - and form decisions based on that outsourced technological help and their own more intuitive reasoning.
Kasparov versus the World: Here Kasparov plays against a 50.000 people strong public group, that with the help of technological tools collaborated online and discussed and voted on how to move against the chess pro.
Thompson highlights many success stories from the recent years, small and big, that demonstrate the positive side of the rise of technology. How memory outsourced to computers gives us more time/space to focus on more important things, how ambient awareness of your social circle's day-to-day details creates surprising opportunities, how sousveillance gives power to the masses and helps stage revolution and how using video games in class can transform the laziest students into information-seeking problem-solvers.
First it pulled me in with the story of four friends and young love, then it increasingly annoyed me with everyone's reluctance to help our protagonist recover her memories. But in the end I had to admit that the twist worked really well. Especially in how it made you recall small details from earlier and made you go “aaah of course”.
Newton made our natural world absolute and mathematical. He's the point at which Physics and Philosophy split paths. Suddenly the world was deterministic, they could predict solar eclipses and the path of comets. Gods, myths and the unknown had to retreat.
A fascinating biography of the man who triggered that monumental change. Who had to grapple new concepts and assign words to novel phenomena (gravity!). A scholar who equally dabbled in natural sciences yet also was obsessed with alchemy and religion. A shut-in who discovered optics and the laws of motion, yet kept that knowledge to himself, refusing to publish because he liked nothing less than dispute with scientists of opposing believes. And yet he quarreled a lot, with Robert Hooke, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Newton came out on top, and even ended his life quite wealthy, minting coins for the King, and presiding over the The Royal Society.
Hard to imagine that any future scientific discovery would ever have such a monumental effect over our world views again. And if yes, it'll be scary.
Civilization is a cruel game and some civilizations have evolved past it.
I wanted some things to be more meta, but, maybe they were and I just missed it during the occasional audiobook-attention-drops.
Frenkel believes in the unawakened power of pure maths, being part of Penrose's triangle made up of the physical world, the mental world and the Platonic world of math. They are separate but intertwined, and while we appreciate the significance of the physical and mental world, we are still ignorant of the power of mathematics. He envisions that once we “awake to this hidden reality” our society will experience a shift on the order of the Industrial Revolution.
His book is his way of pulling us over onto his side, by telling his personal story (struggling Russia's discriminating education system) and by explaining his research area. While I had to give up on truly understanding the math sections about halfway into the book (Riemann surfaces, sheafs, Galois groups ..) following his life story was very engaging and it was interesting to learn about how collaborative and dependant the whole network of mathematicians actually is.
Passion is contagious, and I love reading about other people's passions, especially if in pursuit of science, in pursuit of truth. And math has a unifying power, it being the universal language, that never gets lost in translation.
Sweet Days of Discipline is a poetic, detached and gloomy portrait of what it means to grow up in boarding schools in the middle of the last century. The complications of adolescence, friendships and infatuations, remote parents, in the rigid structure of education and discipline. Detachments are formed and ripped apart, what stays is a cold and melancholy feeling. The further it went along the more the prose just fluttered apart. I wanted more narrative structure.
We like future predictions to be presented to us as absolutes: this stock will rise, it will rain, this team will win. Our brains have a hard time making sense of uncertainty and margins of error. We like our realities to be oversimplified, have clear incentives for taking actions. Plus, we don't like to get wet when we leave our umbrellas at home despite being told there's a minimal chance of rain (this goes so far that the weather channels deliberately tweak what their models predicted, to avoid angry rained-on viewers, see Wet Bias).
This book is from 2012, post Moneyball and post 2008 financial crisis. Predictions and the rise of big data was on everyone's mind. Who predicted the housing bubble and who made money of it? Silver goes through different domains where predictions and probabilistic thinking play a major role: the weather, baseball, poker, chess, the stock market, the climate. He starts on how we fail at predicting the occurrence of earthquakes, despite knowing the likely frequency of their occurrences. And he ends on the statistics of terrorist attacks, whose ratio of frequency and impact (their ‘power laws') are not unlike earthquakes.
In hindsight, after the occurrence of an event, it's always easy to look back and see the signal that hinted at it. Yet, while we're in it, it's incredibly hard to distinguish which part of the data is a signal (clear indicator) and which is noise (irrelevant fluctuations, irrelevant other signals). Which part of a baseball player's results are skill and which are luck? Statistical analysis and the accumulation of large amounts of data have helped with isolating signals in some domains, but not all. We're also living in a world that's increasing its volume of information exponentially, tied together in complex systems, making it increasingly important to develop probabilistic thinking. Bayesian logic is the use of knowledge of prior events to predict future events, while continuously updating your hypothesis about the future, when new data comes in. (So far, every morning the sun has risen from the east, therefore I assume it will rise from the east tomorrow morning as well).
Great book, still highly relevant of course. The climate chapter felt a bit messy, and there potentially was a bit too much content from the author's old poker-days, but else this was a highly informative and interesting read. Good to get comfortable with the ‘known unknowns' before having to deal with ‘unknown unknowns'.
A good reminder that progress in equality isn't just a natural evolution, and will never be initiatited by those that are in power. Every step in the right direction is the cause of a brave fight led by those discriminated against. And mostly they can't even reap the benefits of their win, but have to pass it on to those that come after them.
Half a century ago, and we're still not there.
It's a good story, even if the book sometimes reads too much like a historical document trying to list everyone and everyone's credentials.
Oh the rage of a heartbroken and too proud half-god. This was very wonderful, and then quite a welcome tearjerker at the end. It's hard to read or judge the book without comparing it to Miller's newest return to Greek mythology - [b:Circe 35959740 Circe Madeline Miller https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1508879575s/35959740.jpg 53043399]. I found Circe more playful in its writing as the character offered more grey morality, while Patroclus' and Achilles' story mostly was pretty straight forward and (oh so) sweet. But The Song of Achilles has a stronger focused plot arc and the book really excels in its last chapters, when depicting Achilles' fury and torment, and then closing with Thetis' and Patrocluses' fantastic final encounter.
I love [b:Ein ganzes Leben 22550484 Ein ganzes Leben Robert Seethaler https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1406198884l/22550484.SY75.jpg 42007512] a lot, so while Der Trafikant was a good well-told story, it didn't live up to my high expectations. Or maybe there's something about the Austrian tongue, that felt too “schrullig”, occasionally too in love with its carefully constructed phrases.