Sandy
Ehh. The first half was engaging and held my interest, but I found myself not caring by the end. It's a meandering story told by an obviously mad man, which isn't exactly a recipe for meaningful prose. I suspect there are lots of little treasures to be found in the writing qua writing, but on the whole, I found myself bored and being excited for Lolita to be over.
So terrible. One big jerkoff narrative about how giving in to the universe to let things happen will make your life better. Surprise: it won't, and it's an actively harmful belief.
What a weird experience to re-read. I last looked at Xenocide when I was in my early teens, and it's cool to see just how much it shaped the person I am today. There are lots of really good ideas in this book, but it's weighed down by all that /literature/ stuff. Like, having too many characters without anything to do. Ender has six kids and a wife from the last book, but only two children have anything to do here. The others are shoehorned in, and get into some arguments for the sake of Drama, but without any payoff to the actual story.
Ender's wife gets jealous and throws a hissy fit. But it doesn't matter, and it feels like Card remembered she was around and should probably do something. Thankfully she joins a nunnery and we don't hear from her again, which is delightful because she's a tedious, unlikable character.
There's a ton of this. Plikt is set up as this MYSTERY WOMAN who idolizes Ender from afar. But Card forgets about her, and she does nothing. We get a whole chapter introducing Valentine's husband only for him to wordlessly drive the car later while the real protagonists do things. She brings five kids along, but they are never mentioned again.
And the convenience of the thing! The Enderverse is dripping with Star Wars-style creative-bankruptcy. Ender not only happens to be the guy who saves the human race, he turns out to be a brilliant author and orator and diplomat and detective. He writes and pushes through the first inter-species treaty. And he carries around the only existing egg of a extinct alien civilization. And an intergalactic AI lives inside of him.
His sister is the best op-ed writer in the universe. His brother singlehandedly united humanity and governed it until the end of his life. OK fine maybe it's a particularly bright family. Sure.
But then he travels 3000 years into the future and marries a woman whose parents genetically engineered a cure for the virus that allows for all life on the planet. She was probably pretty smart in the last book but I don't remember what she did. But her baby daddy figures out all of the only known-living alien culture. Of their children, in order of descending age:
1. discovers deep biological secrets about the aliens; is later the target of a genuine, physics-defying miracle
2. designs a vaccine to a virus that saves all of humanity in the universe; also gets rid of the false gods
3. (we are told) is a great religious hero, who dies a martyr and is subsequently beatified.
4. has metal eyes and (we are told) is the greatest father imaginable
5. commits TREASON because she is mad at her mom
6. intentionally leads a pogrom to massacre the aliens. also invents faster-than-light travel.
Like what the fuck. The city they live in has over a thousand people, and the only other inhabitants we learn about are the mayor and the bishop. Why does everyone relevant to the plot have to be in the same family?
So there's lots of stuff like that. But there's much more wrong with this book. Card's religious overtones dramatically detract here. One of the book's big themes explores worshiping false gods, and then does a smash cut—without any sense of self-awareness whatsoever—to a Catholic settlement that it plays entirely straight. Like, to the point of absurdity. The aliens don't question the christian god. The fucking sentient trees don't either. There isn't even any lampshading here as to why the christian god is OK, despite the characters knowing about the false gods.
And then there's this excellent cliffhanger ending, where Ender creates new humans out of his mind. Cool principle and a great place to end. But the book goes on for another hundred pages and sorta kinda briefly engages with these extremely flat, and so, so tired, characters. Nah dog; everyone knows you end the book when they show up.
Oh yeah and did I mention the deus ex machina where they can just wish ANYTHING THEY WANT into existence? It saves the day, but is underwhelming because nobody did anything to deserve it. And either it's going to ruin the next book, or require ridiculous lamp-shading to prevent from doing so.
idk man. Xenocide has the seeds of greatness in it, but it's got absolutely nothing on Speaker for the Dead, and doesn't inspire me to want to finish rereading this series.
This is a pretty neat SF world with a rather dull murder mystery plot slapped on top of it. It gave me lots to think about in terms of what the world could look like if we had something to strive for — infinite life, seeing the end of time, having energy capabilities orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more than we have today. The plot itself felt rushed and the mystery's resolution was underwhelming, but it's not really about that. I think. Maybe.
I didn't like it enough to make any real progress. Nothing against it, but the narrative didn't speak to me.
Surprisingly great, even though OOP is silly. My takeaway from this book was that there are good patterns in programming which transcend paradigms, and that these design patterns are means of achieving those goals in an OO setting. If you read between the lines and the designs, the advice here is applicable to functional styles as well; just try not to get too caught up in the factories and visitors.
I've read “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, and “Steve Jobs” — this book is a nice piece of history linking the events of those two things. It's a fun read about a bunch of visionaries and their cool engineering. Though the book hit a little too close to home; the toxic politics inside PARC reminded me of a lot of the otherwise-great jobs I've had! Xerox's bureaucracy's complete incapacity to do anything with their amazing research is a great warning against growing too big.
The PARC guys are inspiring; they aren't allowed to buy a computer so they say “fuck it, we'll just make one.” They don't have the cash to buy fancy speakers, so they reverse engineer someone's set, learn what they need to, and then build their own for 1/10th of the cost. They need to send files back and forth, but they are in two separate offices a few miles apart. So they hook up some lasers on the roof and beam the information to a truck parked half way, which beams it the rest of the way. Pretty good solution compared to waiting for months to run the cables!
Ehh. It's alright. The first few chapters definitely gave me a feeling of having been ghostwritten—they don't come off in Craig's voice whatsoever, and often end in obviously false feel-good sorts of fluff writing. One chapter ends, for example, “[When I was a kid, I used to think my dolls could talk.] I'm not sure either one of us has properly grown up or completely left the attic. Lynn, like me, still believes the toys can talk.” Nope. No you do not. This is awkward pandering, and unfortunately isn't by any stretch the only example.
But if you can ignore that, which I had a problem doing, the rest of the book is fine I guess. It has an interesting arc about Craig's alcoholism which paints it less gloriously than most authors do. But at the end of the day, there are no insights and no takeaways from this book. It's just a bunch of uninteresting stories about a relatively uninteresting man, but told in a funny sort of way.
It really and truly feels like the book version of late-night television, so that's something.
While I didn't like a lot of his business advice, which appears to be “make up a crap product and then seek rent on it for the rest of your life,” the rest of this book is great. It feels like a spiritual relative of Sebastian Marshall's Ikigai — reading this book will have you spending a lot of time pondering “hmm, what kind of life do I really want to live?” The answer for most people I've talked to is “not like this,” but the fear gets in the way.
This is a good book about getting over the fear. It's got helpful little exercises for comfort zone expansion, tactics for dealing with bureaucrats, strategies for building prestige, and lots more. And a lot of prompts for trying to figure out what you'd rather be doing, and for figuring out how to get there from here.
The gist of all of it is that people don't really want to be millionaires, they want to have what they assume is the millionaire lifestyle. So computer how much money per day you'd actually need in order to live how you'd like, and then work towards that number. Waiting to live until you're too old to appreciate it is a crap strategy.
A seagull learns to fly so well that he can teleport through time and space and metaphysics. Inspiring, if weird.
This is a weird book, separated into three parts. The first is on building utopian societies, by rethinking how to thoughtfully organize our macro world into things that work for humans. This section is aspirational without much in the way of how to bring it about—it's fun to think about, but probably not very relevant unless you're directly responsible for building a city.
The second part is what makes for good neighborhoods. Things like how far away parks should be in order to actually use them, what sorts of public squares people will hang out at, and how to bring about a sense of belonging and ownership in your local environment. This stuff reads like a guide to live in the city, much like my takeaways from “The Life and Death of Great American Cities.” While it might not be directly actionable, it's helpful for naming why things do or do not work, and is probably helpful when you're in a position to choose where you want to live.
The third part is on how to put together a building for humans to live in. It discusses things like the optimal size for a patio to encourage conversation, which rooms in your house should be in the sun, intimacy gradients of the rooms in which you will host people, and just generally how to make your place feel homey. This part is extremely actionable, especially if you're currently thinking about these things as I am.
I haven't finished this book, but intend to come back to it. The first two sections, not being particularly actionable, are fine to read front-to-back, but the third is much more random access. I'll certainly pick it back up (as reference material) when I buy a house.
This is an excellent book that suffers from what I call 100-Years-of-Solitude syndrome. It spans three generations of the same characters, and the allegories reiterate themselves from generation to generation. It's a good read, but any one of the generations would have been a fine book on its own, and in aggregate they don't do much more than hammer home the same blunt Biblical allusions. Is it neat that the three generations echo and rhyme? Absolutely! But it's a hard thing to keep up steam for over the long haul.
Anyway, that's the bad. The good is the book itself. There are lots of fascinating characters, each of whom exemplifies some aspect of human psychology. Reading through East of Eden feels a lot like casting acquaintances from your life into book form; there are lots of characters, and with the exception of Aron, each of them rings true. My girlfriend suggests that we can learn more about the human condition from fiction than we can from psychology, and books like these make me thing she might be onto something there.
Is this the best book I've ever read? No, but I'm happy I made it through. It could have used an aggressive editor, but the scale of the world, the characters, and the recurrent themes make it a breath of fresh air compared to most modern literature. I doubt this book will stick with me, but I can see why it's considered a classic.
UPDATED REVIEW, 2023.
This book is fucking mind poison. On my second read through, I couldn't tell if it was good advice presented poorly, or bad advice presented well. Turns out its the latter. Lots of bad advice caged in new-age wisdom, that makes claims without ever being unfalsifiable. Stuff like, “do X and she will love it. And if she doesn't, it's because you didn't do X with enough love.”
Stay clear of this one. It might be OK if you're a single man, but in a happy, loving relationship, it can only bring pain and suffering.
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ORIGINAL REVIEW, 2018. Originally 4 stars.
This is a hard book to review. It's got some fantastic advice in it, and also has a lot of shit. Some of the great stuff is about making moves in the world even if you're not super sure where you're going, being confident in your relationships and striving to be true to your purpose above all else.
And then it gets to the “women” portion. The Way of the Superior Man comes off as a book written by a guy who has never once been in a healthy relationship; it's full of advice like “if you come too quickly, your woman won't respect you and will attempt to undermine you at every turn” and “if she doesn't sound happy about your accomplishments, it's because she's testing you to see if you give a shit what she thinks.” This is some dark red pill shit dressed up in language about love and “her positive feminine energy.” Nah, Deida, just stop dating terrible humans and things will be alright.
Rating this a 4/5 because of it's good advice for taking care of yourself; skim the stuff about women.
A nice book about lots of different people terraforming Mars. There are some good bits (the engineering) and some bad bits (REVOLUTION!!!!) On the whole it's an interesting read, but I don't feel the need to hit more in the series
Abandoned. Kinda interesting but too old to really get. Thompson assumes you know all the relevant politicians on a first name basis.
I didn't much care for this book, but it did make me want to read more Dennett. He comes across as a delightfully clever man who isn't afraid to take his own ideas seriously and go up against the establishment. That's a vibe I could get more into, but this book failed to deliver what I was hoping. I wanted more “here's how I learned how to think” and less “let me tell you about the fun I had in Paris one summer.” Maybe it gets better, but after being bored for a few chapters (with ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE QUOTES SPRINKLED HERE AND THERE) I started jumping to more interesting-seeming chapters.
I never got what I was looking for, but maybe reading his books on philosophy would be more amenable.
The charm of Red Dwarf is the interpersonal relationships, and this book is a series of stupid scenes involving one character at a time. Worse, it's based on some of the worst episodes in the series.
HP sorta creates the problems and isn't instrumental to solving them, which takes away from his eventual victory. Still, it's a charming book.
I'm planning a trip around the world in Erdos' style — showing up, working hard on a project with someone, and then peaceing out. Most books about mathematicians I hate because they spend too much time discussing their personal lives, and not enough talking about their mathematical contributions. Unfortunately, this is the one book contrary to that style. It's a book with a few fun Erdos anecdotes, but mostly a description of somewhat-related mathematics and mathematicians for the layperson. Cantor's diagonalization argument is great and all, but I know it, and it doesn't help answer any questions I have about Erdos' lifestyle.
All of that being said, this is a fun book that's worth reading. It just didn't answer what I was hoping it would.
God damn, what an interesting book. It's essentially a history of science and understanding, starting from astronomy, giving rise to calendars, then to timekeeping devices, to clocks, to high-precision machinery. But that's just one of the 15+ “books” in this book. There's also a book on the rise of intellectual communities, and of academic journals. There's one on the rise of mathematics, and its slow and successful application to the world.
I didn't read the whole book, but it's well-enough organized that I felt like I could safely skip around and read only the pieces that interested me. I skipped a book or two on philosophy and psychology, for example. But I'm certain that those parts are just as well written as the rest of it. Very highly recommended; probably the best thing I'll read all year.
A fun story about the engineering behind a new computer. It's got some good moments, but relies too much on telling us what beards people wear and what they were like as children. Maybe it's mentioned in the prologue, but I didn't realize this book was written by some guy who was just paid to follow the progress of the engineering — it really detracts from the story, since it becomes evident that this book wasn't written due to the historic impact of the thing they were building. No, they just happened to have a journalist around.
All in all, you probably know already whether or not you're going to read this book.
Interesting, but easy to put down. I'm not sure how factual the book is, but it's certainly great imagination fuel; eg, it's fun to think about what life would have been like before clocks.
