john holst

David Wong can definitely write a fun story. It always keeps me going one more chapter one more chapter then it's midnight and I should have been in bed.

This book at times required a weird amount of suspension of disbelief on my part for a large portion of the plot points and the “physics” of how things happened. That being said I really enjoyed this book. The concept and the plot beats were really fun. I love AI concepts in general and this one was really entertaining.
If you can get past the idea of an AI scanning dna with a blue tooth espresso machine and see the good parts - check this out.

I think the most interesting thing about this book was the time period in which it was written. How much emphasis was placed on food shortages and homosexuality. The scifi backdrop of time dilation was very fascinating.

I enjoyed the universe Blum created. There were questions I had about it's inner workings about how deep the coincidences go. About 4/5s the way through I guessed the end but it didn't diminish it. Still satisfying. I did think this was going to be a bit more sci-fi-y than it ended up being.

I loved the three body problem trilogy but ball lightning was no where near those levels. The first 2/3s of the book were alright but after a character comes back and starts telling their 20 page long life story it got very long in the tooth. The bit at the very end got me interested but all in all I can't say this lives up to three body.
Still worth a read but skim the parts you don't like.

This should be classified as a horror book. It was gripping and terrifying but very informative. Micheal Lewis does it again.

The first book took a while to sell me. It's hard to look past the obscure philisophy and history lessons. It's difficult to keep straight all the gender fluidity, which makes it hard to imagine in your head what people look like and what the scene looks like. All that said, once you get into it the story takes off and it is a lot of fun to try and figure out whats going on.

This was an extremely well done book. I admit KSR usually writes books that are a bit to slow, methodical, dense or obtuse for me. It took me a year to slog through Red Mars. So I am weary of most of his books but this one sounded too interesting to pass up and I was not disappointed.

This was a very interesting book on a historical figure in atheism I did not know about before this. The authors writing style with weirdly structured sentences was a bit weird, but I otherwise enjoyed the topic and learning about Robert Ingersoll.

My gf read this book before me and liked it and her tastes are much different than mine so I was excited that this book was so enjoyable. Not that I didn't doubt another Green would be a good author. Man this book was great. I read it in a few days and was excited to see where the story was going and was probably the most satisfied I'd been with a book ending that did not tie up every question at the end.

I would read a sequel to this but I do not think it needs one. Great job Hank.

I read this and homo deus in the wrong order but that did not effect the enjoyment of them. Harari's books are well thought out and very satisfying to read.

I actually enjoyed the history of the post office and in a very real sense how it created America. It got a bit depressing getting to the modern times realizing how much cooler the post office could have been with savings banking and electronic mail delivery and security.

It was a good book and I highly recommend it.

I enjoy the back and forth between the two character points of view in this series. I am not sure how much actually happened until the end of this book but I enjoyed the journey none the less. I am excited for the final book at the end of this year.

This read took me awhile (lots of breaks to listen to that weeks SGU) but it was well worth it. Having this book on my shelf is reassuring. Knowing I have somewhere to go to check my biases and failings, to know there are others who strive for logic and truth.
I enjoyed the read and the personal stories towards the end. 10/10 get this for people in your life.

I listened to this on audio book, I thought the female voice actor was great but the male voice actor was a bit weird. Also, I felt it would have made more sense for each character to voice their own character even if it was not the chapter from their perspective. As it stands, when it is Adrians chapter he voices Nova's lines in a girly voice. It seems weird when they could have had Nova's voice actor do her own lines in Adrian's chapters.

Either way, I was surprised I had liked this book towards the end. I want to know more about the backstories of the groups. I feel like there is set up for a twist where the bad guys are the good guys and the good guys are the bad guys. “From my point of view the Jedi are evil!”

This book was okay. I thought, before getting it, that it was the first in a series and it is, but first in a series of an even larger series of books by Neal Asher. What that means is that there is a lot of super interesting characters and concepts in this book that I would have liked expanded but were expanded in the first series in this universe.

Towards the end the concepts and names and call backs were coming so fast and furious it was hard to know what was really going on or why it was impactful.

I full accept this was my fault for getting this book first but I definitely thought this was the first book ever in this universe.

This was a very good look into game development. Listening to podcasts and reading articles during the development of all these games gave me some insight into the surface level of what happened but Schreier definitely dives deep and gives context. It is a hard look into a difficult art form and career. Highly recommend to anyone who has a passing interest into video games.

This is was a weird one. I did not like the first third of this book. It is very obtusely written. The things I want to know about the world are drip-fed to you under the guise that you are reading this in the future of this world and the narrator is telling you things you probably already know. Also, I understand that this is the first book in a series (isn't everything these days) but the ending left quite a few plot holes just open-ended. Things are vaguely alluded to and then the narrator tells you to check out part 2 of his story.

For the good, I learned to like the world created. It was interesting structurally and technologically. I just wish the author/narrator explained the pieces in a bit more detail. Most if not all of the characters are eventually reprehensible, save a few. Those few have very little “screen” time. It makes it hard to root for anyone which makes it hard to sit through scenes with terrible people all the time. Leaving only the world to latch on to which I wish had more description.

I don't think 3/5 is bad. I think its just fine.

There is something about John Scalzi's writing and characters. I've read so many of his books now and he writes science fiction in a way that just keeps you hooked. I am a big fan of The Interdependency series so far. This book continues on the store and mythology in a way that I could not put it down.

The idea of flow shoals and memory rooms and the habitats that this space-faring society lives in are really fun to think about, but what makes this story stand out are the characters and the interactions. I don't think I saw the end of this book coming though I knew something was going to happen.

I like where this series is going and can't wait for Scalzi to finish it up or hopefully he will keep it going for a long while like with Old Man's War.

I thought it was a very interesting book. As a man it really makes you see things from a powerless perspective. I think the ending was a little flat but I would definitely read another book in this universe or with this theme.

This was a very informative and helpful book. I think actually it would be helpful to own not just to rent from the library so you could go over the helpful questionnaires and exercises again over the years.

I found this book by looking for a list of books about long-term relationships and making them work. This was a very good read, not so much for relationships exactly but a way to frame your own thinking and life to get the most happiness out of it. She repeats throughout the book that you cannot control other people but you can control yourself. Making yourself happy makes the people around you happy.

Would highly recommend.

My girlfriend and I are getting ready to get married so naturally, I looked up a list of books about marriage to read. This came up as one of them.

It was very insightful. There was a bit of religiousness sprinkled in but I think more so the book had a tone of general spiritualness which I was more open to.

This book definitely gave me a better understanding of how a mindset governed by forgiveness would be beneficial. It also laid out pretty concrete guidelines, practices, and methods to work towards forgiveness in relationships, with other people or with your self.

I would highly recommend this book if you are feeling guilt, shame or conversely if you have been harmed by others. Or if you are like me and just want a better toolset before you embark on a big step, relationship-wise in your life.

This is not my genre, my girlfriend, who never rates books, told me this was 5/5 for her. She has different tastes in books than me. I am more hard sci-fi or science-related non-fiction. She appreciates the fiction that takes place early or pre 1900's and has to do with drugs or has a spiritual bend to it. This book covers all over her pre-requisites.

I will say I appreciated the story. It's about a family dealing with death, drugs, vague spiritual powers that they don't really discuss, prison, being black in the early 1900s (?). I like that they jumped perspective a lot. The son, the mom, the spirits, the grandparents.

That said I tended to skim some parts that got a bit confusing. Multiple characters talk at once, but only one character can hear one of them and also the dialect and accents are hard to read but I believe that is just period appropriate.

I would recommend this book, especially if this is the genre you gravitate towards.

Like most financial books I've read, I wish I had read them earlier in life. This book was really good. It was very “our studies show”, followed by charts and percentages. But the information was interested regardless of the 1996 original publish date.

I think the amounts of millionaires have changed and maybe the businesses they are in but the core concept of the book (Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth vs Under Accumulators of Wealth) still has value.