Sandy
Great, but long as fuck and dries up in the middle. It's just 100 years of history with no commentary — this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Weird to see parallels in modern life to things that happened in 1920. This book is definitely worth a read, but maybe not as your primary book.
I've been thoroughly disappointed with most of the Discworld books I've read since reacquainting with the series as an adult, but Making Money is a welcome reprise. Moist is a fun protagonist, and there are enough side-stories going to keep everything interesting. Crucially, this book doesn't fall prey to the common Pratchett plot point problem, where he spectacularly fails at foreshadowing but never resolving it. This book isn't 5 stars due to the central plot being a small portion of the actual story.
It's a fun book that overstays its welcome. While reading Feynman's outgoing correspondence is a great way to get a feeling for the man behind the anecdotes, half of the book is other people's letters to Feynman! I tried to read this book exclusively, all in one go, but that was JUST TOO MUCH FEYNMAN. Instead, it works much better as a bathroom reader, or something that you can pick up and put down for a few pages at a time.
I came away from this book thinking I really need to up my letter writing skills.
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.
An extremely interesting book that isn't written very well. Made worse by the fact that the Kindle edition is terribly put together. There are lots of diagrams with tiny text that Kindle completely shits the bed on, as well as page-inserts which are referenced in the text, but show up 100+ pages later.
But despite these issues, and that Carroll doesn't seem to know who his target audience is, there is a LOT to chew through here. EFMB answers questions you didn't know you had, like “why do all vertebrates have only four limbs” and “how come dolphins are mammals but also live in the ocean?” This book has profoundly changed the way I look at living creatures, and the discussion of the evolution of mammalian wings is itself worth the price of admission.
My dad recommended this to me, and it's delightful. There are parallel stories about a penal colony one billion years in the past, and — more contemporarily — the set of events that led the main character to end up there. It's an extremely interesting character study in homeostasis and the stories we humans tell ourselves in order to survive.
EDIT 2021-12-22:
Well, I finally got around to finishing this book, and it's actually fantastic if you can slog through it. This is the first book I've seen in a long time that has any coherent view of what the future should be, that isn't just that our phones will get faster and our cameras will have more megapixels. It's inspiring as hell, though not without flaws.
ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Started off great, but it meanders aggressively and was unable to maintain the author's or my attention. His claim is that the technology exists for flying cars today, but the political wherewithal for them hasn't kept up. Regulations and environmentalism have gotten in the way. This corresponds well to my priors, but he downplays environmentalism more than I think is deserved; when I dug into his citations they were of poor quality, which unfortunately makes me shift away from the bit of his premise that I agree with. 2/5 due to abandonment.
I'd rate this 2.5 stars if I could, but I can't. I read this after /loving/ Egan's book Permutation City, but found this collection of short stories wanting. It feels a lot like the feeder ideas that went into Permutation City, but explored less well here than there. Most of the stories washed over me without leaving a trace; but The Darkness and the time travel one were absolute masterpieces and have both stuck with me (except, evidently, the title.)
The overarching theme of the stories (like Permutation City) is “what does it mean to be me?” Axiomatic explores this question under the lens of twins, parallel universes, time travel, P-zombies, designer embryonics, brain transplants, body transplants, and the merging of two minds. A few of them are interesting, but it gets repetitive, and there are many more misses than hits here.
If you're looking for some dark ass, heavy, depressing short stories with a hard SF twist, this might be the book for you. There are a few gems to be found here, but I'd strongly suggest reading other books in between these stories.
This book is oddly popular in my non-theatrical circles, so I figured I'd give it a go. The first half is a man talking about the improv games he teaches and what they can teach about about interpersonal relationships. A lot of his message is that beginning improvisers need to be protected from themselves; that they need to be given permission to fail in order to take chances and become better. I find myself thinking about this a lot now that he's mentioned it.
The other big takeaway was in status games, and we as humans are incapable of doing things that are status-neutral. Everything we say and every action we take confers status, and by being cognizant of this we can use it to our advantage. Status isn't something we have; it's something we carve out when we need it. Most people have a preferred status that they play at, and it takes practice to get people to be able to play different statuses.
And then the last half is about letting gods into your soul or something. It mentions “possession cults” a little too often for comfort.
There are only like three ideas in this book: 1) English is a weird Germanic language because of Celtic influence, 2) Sapir-Whorf is wrong, 3) English might have Phoenician influence. I had read this in another review, but thought that meant “these are the three /big/ ideas.” No. These are the /only/ ideas in the book. Could have been a blog post. In fact, was a blog post: a fantastic blog post by McWhorter, making the same points, and directed me towards this book to learn more. It's a good funnel on his part, but feels like a scam on mine.
Anyway. McWhorter doesn't seem to know his audience. He argues for about half the book that English has Celtic influence, clearly to defend himself against other professional linguists. So is it written for them? Absolutely not; it calls fricatives “hissy sounds” and goes on a great deal about “what constitutes evidence.” By all appearances, this is a book written for the layperson, except that the layperson is more than happy to take McWhorter on faith that English does in fact have Celtic influence.
Am I happy I read it? Absolutely not. Should you? No. But you should read his blog post instead. https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages
Solaris (2002) is one of my all-time favorite films, and so I was excited to dive into this book more than half my life later, hoping to understand once and for all what the hell was going on. Lem is on record saying the 2002 film adaptation is terrible and completely misses the point of the book, but I'm going to back Soderbergh on this one. The book is reminiscent of Murakami in that lots of weird things happen and then nothing is explained and the whole book might as well have not happened. The film understands character arcs and human interest, set among a fantastical environment required for exploring its themes. The setting is a vessel for the story.
But the book, it's clear that the the book is a vessel for the setting. Lem has nothing to /say/ here. He manages to describe a completely alien encounter, but... why? What's it all for? We never learn who the main character is, or why he's come to this strange station. The book doesn't deign to tell us why he is so quick to believe his suddenly re-appearant dead girlfriend /is actually who she says she is./ What the fuck? After like two hours of unease, he settles into the idea, cuddling her at night and talking about bringing her back to Earth. And this guy is supposed to be some sort of world-class scientist? OK sure.
If you're looking for a book with great ideas /that completely fails to execute on them,/ and instead are OK with 150 pages of boring technobabble and a make-believe history of science, then this might just be the book for you.
This is undoubtedly one of the best books I have ever read. One of the knockdown Christian arguments for the existence of god is that of the first mover; as it goes “effect requires cause / since the universe is in motion, it must have had a cause / therefore god.” Of course, this argument merely passes the buck — if the universe can't be started in motion, why can god? What was his mover? Permutation City is what happens when you bite the bullet and take that question seriously.
This book follows a computer-simulated psychonaut in his quest to understand the nature of consciousness and reality. Egan really takes his time exploring the consequences of being able to make simulated copies of humans — for example, what happens if you run their subjective experience backwards? Or if you remove a haunting memory? Are two indistinguishable copies the same person? Amazingly, every result here is both coherent and interesting, and I found myself pausing every few pages to think deeply about the consequences of some aspect of Permutation City's reality. Egan is a mathematician, and it shows.
Go read this book. If you appreciate hard science fiction and remarkably good world-building, you will love it.