Sandy

Just read the commentaries after each chapter – they're much better at describing the concepts than the actual chapters are. As a young, upwardly mobile software developer with more money than I know what to do with, but little love for investing, I found nothing relevant to my interests after chapter 10.

Instead of being about the computational philosophy of science, this book describes a data definition language and corresponding computer program for problem solving, but, as far as I can tell, neither are useful for anything. /Extremely/ contrived examples are used to showcase the power of the system, but the correlations drawn are completely arbitrary and would be indistinguishable from noise in a real application.

I read this because I had approached Thagard in an attempt to do research with him; he told me he wouldn't talk to me before I read his book. After reading his book, I decided I no longer wanted to do research with him.

I only made it about 10% through the book before realizing this was not the book I wanted to be reading. It's a collection of habits about individual people with no analysis behind why they do what they do. That being said, this is probably for the best, since I wouldn't trust the author to make such an analysis.

A fun book and good introduction to mnemonic techniques, but I found it to be more of an exercise in storytelling rather than a how-to of remembering everything.

Dreadfully uninspired, chalked full of overt symbolism with inexplicable coincidences at every turn. As a work of fiction, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is an example only of how to not weave stories or create strong characters.

Don't waste your time. This book is overly reliant on anecdotes and poor examples. For a better, more concise and more scientific approach to the same topic, look at Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, along with lots of other interesting and useful facts about the brain.

Funny, but not very useful for procrastinators or otherwise.

This book is showing its age – although the algorithms are solid, I find it unlikely that the author would make it through a modern technical interview. Software engineering has evidently come a long way in 15 years.

This is an excellent book. The twins make for significantly more interesting characters than Meg and CW, who always felt like Mary Sues, and as such, were hard to care about. The ideas and storytelling here are fantastic, though L'Engle's writing falls ferociously flat whenever the twins talk to each other. She uses it to present exposition to the reader, but it comes off forced and unnatural; they're identical twins for fuck's sake, these are guys who share a lot of knowledge. Writing them as fish out of water works in the context of the story, but not in the context of their relationship. Anyway, great book, go read it.

I read this as a kid and absolutely loved it. Rereading it as an adult, well, it's still a fun read. But it feels a lot like Narnia meets 1984. Narnia in the fact that the main characters are all pretty useless and don't really advance the plot or solve any of their own problems. 1984 for reasons that will become pretty obvious reading this as an adult. The plot is fun yet surprisingly dark for a children's book, and there are some neat ideas. But also every NON-EVIL creature in the universe is a practicing Christian.

Like so many children's books, the characters are the weakest part. The main character Meg is pretty crap and it's mentioned several times that her FLAWS are her STRENGTH. And boy is she strong. She spends like 25% of the book complaining about blaming everyone for things they couldn't have prevented and yada yada yada I guess it's a plot point, but she's not sympathetic in the least.

As a kid, I thought the boy-wonder prodigy character Charles Wallace was precocious and annoying, but he's definitely the best part of the first half of the book. He's smart and knows it and is oddly wise, and then all of this gets thrown in his face when he underestimates the enemy. It's a pretty good arc.

In the end, LOVE SAVES THE DAY. What an overused trope. Meg loves her brother SO HARD that the evil brain creature just can't understand it, and then an alien teleports her to safety, and everyone rejoices and even the dog comes in for a hug!!!!! Wow!!!!! So sweet!!!!!!!!!

Ugh. You can tell JKR was ready to be done with Harry Potter. This book is a rush job full of plot holes, extraordinary coincidences and meaningless beats. There are lots of interesting ideas here that get no time to breathe because there are FOUR HORCRUXES that need to be found and destroyed as well as a sword as well as THREE DEATHLY HALLOWS which don't make a damn lick of sense. Also make sure you break into Gringotts and have a giant battle at Hogwarts!

Like there is genuinely cool stuff here but the whole thing is go go go, so much so that I think JKR also forgot to think about it. Somehow the super wand belongs to Harry, because... he... disarmed Draco while Draco had a different wand??? And then he uses the super wand to repair his old wand and says “this thing is TOO DANGEROUS” even though it does literally nothing in the book except repair his old wand.

And then there's this super perfect invisibility cloak that nobody can see through, except Dumbledore does in book 1, and then Mad eye does in book 4, and the dementors can get past it and for fucks sake did JKR think about this whatsoever?

Eh. 2/5.

I gave up after a few chapters of being bored by blue-collar fishermen robots talking about inane shit. Nothing about it felt like they were robots, other than the prose reminded me of it by talking about the gears.

This is without a doubt the worst biography I've ever read. It calls itself “the story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip,” but it's not really. It's goes on and on interminably with anecdotes only tangentially related to the band:

“Gord Downie died from cancer, here's sixteen pages about other, completely unrelated, musicians who also died from cancer.”

“Here's an entire chapter about the internal politics of the record labels, and how they affected other bands' records, but not how it affected the Hip's.”

“That one time I went to a Tragically Hip show.”

“Is the Tragically Hip really a /Canadian/ band? Or just a band from Canada?”

And lots of other banal shit like that. Skip The Never-Ending Present, it's clearly a cash-grab on the sensationalism after Downie's death.

It's a great book with the least likable protagonist of all time. Pretty sure Rowling was having teenage son issues when she was writing this one.

Yada yada yada some guys who don't understand market economics blathering on in run-on sentences that cover entire pages.

I've been on a HP reread lately, and this one has been my favorite of the bunch. I read it when it first came out, overnight, in one go, and couldn't for the life of me remember anything about it. Partly that's because not much happens, but it's an extremely interesting character study of Voldemort, Dumbledore and Snape, who've otherwise been quite 2D throughout the series. There are a few plotholes around the D-man destroying a horcrux before he knew Voldemort had made them, but you know, whatever. It's a book for kids.

A few weeks ago, a girlfriend of mine came down with THE SICKNESS. She was stuck in bed for like ten days straight, and it was up to me to entertain her. Remembering that my mom read this book to me when I was bedridden as a child, I thought it might make for a good read.

Island of the Blue Dolphins is very clearly a children's bedtime book. It reads a lot like a sitcom, each chapter something new and unrelated happens. And then the chapter ends, and something else happens. There's an earthquake. But everything is fine. She makes friends with an otter. She makes friends with a girl, who immediately leaves. That kind of thing.

So yeah, I get it. At ten minutes a chapter, IofBD is fun, yet episodic, enough to put someone to bed. I remembered loving it as a child, but it hasn't stood the test of time.

Slightly interesting, but mostly just modern geopolitics, and not in fact “everything about the world.” I didn't care enough to finish it, and can't remember anything about it a month later.

Likely the best book I have ever read.

It was fine, I guess.

It's mostly a rehash of his blog on the same topic, but the information is good, the topic is interesting, and as far as I can tell, nobody's ever managed to do gui-based property testing before. It's worth the read!

This, up there with “The Truth,” “Night Watch,” and “Guards! Guards!” is the best Discworld book. It's oddly inspiring, that all people really want is a show, and are willing to look the other way on most everything if you give it to them.

I'm probably a bit biased.

I picked this up as part of a returning-to-YA-classics because I was looking for something lighter to read while falling asleep. Geomancer is unfortunately less good than I remember it being. The characters are almost unanimously unlikable, have no arcs, and don't actually learn anything in the hundred thousand pages that this book feels like. Irvine's plot points out lots of odd things — most notably a character's father being in bed with another man, at which our narrator is “disgusted!” — and then doesn't do anything with them. The 75% of the book is long and slow, and spends a lot of time with our main character dealing with an addiction, that she never solves, and is repeatedly used against her, by the same people, to accomplish the same goal. And then the last quarter goes SUPER FAST where everyone manages to cross the whole damn continent on foot in a few pages and then open up a damn hole in the universe and get her sister killed and then be betrayed and sell out humanity. All in like 100 pages. My guess is that this guy didn't have an editor.

All in all it's an OK read. The story is pretty interesting, but would be much better if it were 1/5th of the length.