Joe

The first half of So Much For That was incredibly difficult to get through. It felt like there were too many lectures, and too little characterization. The second half moved at a much better clip, but unfortunately this book felt too much like “American Health Insurance for Dummies.” Jackson, for the first half of the book, seemed to exist solely as a mouthpiece for the author. Shep and Glynis, who were the heart of the story, seemed murky and distant, much like a picture from a pinhole camera. The prose is wonderful in much of the book, but it is too flawed to recommend.

This is more a collection of essays than a cohesive whole. Pena Chodron says that the book came about as a collection of unrelated dharma talks she has given. Still, the central theme of all of them is facing pain rather than hiding from it. Using meditation, finding one's boddhicatta and converting pain to loving-kindness, one can face pain and convert it to compassion. Some chapters are stronger than others, and if you have time to read only one, make it chapter 10. I'd give this 3 and 1/2 stars if I could. It's not a strong enough book to warrant 4 stars.

I really wish I could give this 4 and a half stars.

This was an extremely difficult collection of stories to work through. If you don't value the rewards of working through difficult prose, this book is not for you.

It's a powerful collection, filled with characters that I was often horrified to discover I related to. I was most struck by The Depressed Person, a powerful story that just won't leave my head. The last interview is also powerful, and it has made an indelible mark in my brain.

While I find the idea and the conceit of Reality Hunger interesting, it failed to deliver on its promise. It is far too shallow and spends too much time expounding on the idea that all true art is built upon the work that came before . Anyone who would be a candidate to read this book would know that already. The second half is more compelling, but ultimately, I'm not convinced that Fiction is dead and that we crave reality. The discussions about the areas where fiction and non-fiction collide (collage, the lyrical essay, and memoir) was interesting, and I agree that these are currently the areas where a lot of the innovation is happening. But in the end, I don't think Shields made the case for the end of fiction.

Highly recommended if you have any authority at all to control how work is done at your job.

I'm doing an experiment where I'm trying to understand what people see in Stephen King. So I'm reading the Dark Tower (the series he considers his magnum opus) and connected books. Since The Dark Tower and the Stand contain the same big bad, it seemed like a book I needed to read. The Stand has not convinced me that the man can write. This book was more of a mishmash of lazy cardboard cutout characters interacting than an actual story. The edition I have is the newer version with over an extra 100,000 words, but the book could easily be cut down from 1300+ pages to under 700 without changing anything important. It could probably be cut to 400 pages and become a better book in the process.

This is obviously one of his very early works, so he hadn't honed his craft yet. But I feel like I might have lost a few IQ points just from having read it. Definitely not recommended.

There's some good nuggets of information here. I wouldn't call it a great book. There's enough flexibility in the formulas though to allow creativity. I found some use out of it, and I guess that's what is important.

Cooper writes about the intersection of sex and violence. This novel, mostly told through anonymous message boards provides a slew of unreliable narrators. While Cooper is often labeled as a transgressive writer, I really believe he transcends such labels, and it would be reductionist to say that his novels are transgressive. I find them wrapped in so many layers of honesty that isn't always present in the works of other transgressive writers. Highly recommended unless you have a low tolerance for sadism.

This is a fun collection of stories. The various versions of God are hilarious, and the final story about the Golems convinced me that they're probably too much of a bother. While nothing is sacred in these stories, everything is funny. Highly recommended to people with a sense of humor. Not recommended to those easily offended by “blasphemy”.

While I think John Cassidy's [b:How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities 6691186 How Markets Fail The Logic of Economic Calamities John Cassidy https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1442955895s/6691186.jpg 6886629] is more accessible, this book definitely covers more ground. I think anyone planning on reading this book, though, might do better to start with [b:The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds 30334134 The Undoing Project A Friendship That Changed Our Minds Michael Lewis https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1464874845s/30334134.jpg 50830817] by Michael Lewis, because an understanding of Prospect Theory and Behavioral Economics would go a long way to understanding why the Efficient Market Hypothesis is based on false premises (the biggest false premise being the belief in rational actors). While the Efficient Market Hypothesis is an important and usable model for equities, and this book does make sure to emphasize that, it is a limited model that is not always correct. In fact, when it is wrong, it is very wrong. In the end, attempts to beat the market will always fail. More importantly: efforts to beat the market by creating new derivatives or other financial products will always lead to financial disaster.

This anthology isn't really a cohesive whole, and that's a good thing. The stories contained within are supposedly from a newish genre called slipstream. According to Bruce Sterling, slipstream's unifying force is cognitive dissonance. What this anthology demonstrated is that Slipstream isn't a genre at all, and that's there nothing new about it. It is, in fact, anti-genre, and a demonstration of how some our great young writers don't give a damn about genre boundaries. Much of the fiction here felt influenced by Borges and Kafka, with a hint of Calvino.

I was familiar with many of the stories here, but it was nice to see such a broad variety of stories in one Anthology. There are other names for the type of fiction contained in this book: interstitial arts seems to be the latest term. Don't be fooled: these stories are fiction without genre, and it works best when the authors aren't trying too hard. Highly recommended.

Great introduction on reading literature at the symbolic level.

Rather than teaching you recipes, Ratio teaches you the basis of how food is made. It teaches you the proportions of commonly made items like bread and cookies, and from there you can modify the recipes to produce what you want. Probably the most important cook book on my shelf.

This book makes a nice companion the Strunk & White (AKA The Elements of Style). Where Strunk and White gives you the rules of grammar and usage, Spunk & Bite teaches you how to creatively break the rules. I'd recommend this book to any writer looking to add interest to their locution. As the book says, it is all about “locution, locution, locution”. I found the chapter on writing for Gen-Y a little less than useful, but otherwise, the book was pretty useful.

Shuck is the story of Jaeven, a street hustler, gay porn star, diarist, meth addict, and unpublished writer. The book takes place in the late 1990's in Manhattan. Shuck consists of short segments, narrated by Jaeven. We follow him episode to episode, and it quickly becomes apparent that Jaeven is a man worth following. He's witty, sometimes happy and somewhat miserable. He is often filled with both bravado and fear.

Shuck feels like a true story, and that's because it contains grains of truth from the author's previous existence as a porn star and high-priced escort. Cox has said that Shuck is fiction, but much of it is based on actual events(including an incredible scene where Jaeven shows up for his first porn shoot.)

At the heart of Jaeven's life is an artist named David, who allows Jaeven to stay in his apartment for $300 a month, and the promise of showing off any bruises and scrapes he acquires. David needs those bruises to come up with brand new colors. His most recent artistic endeavor includes turtles and markers. The relationship between David and Jaeven (platonic throughout the book) is confusing. Jaeven isn't quite sure if David is jealous of Jaeven's sex with other men, even though David and Jaeven have never had sex, though they sleep in the same bed.

There are scenes of great humor in the book, along with scenes that will make you cringe. Some sections consist of lists of reasons why New York is not America. Others contain lists of things Jaeven finds while dumpster diving. Mostly, though, the book is a brief excursion into a life most of us will never know. It was an amazing read. Highly recommended.

I'll start by saying that I understand why many contemporary novelists are fans of this novel. The family dynamics in this novel are so life-like, I felt like a fly on the wall who is observing a real dysfunctional family. That being said, the novel suffers from a lack of critical editing. It could easily have been cut to half the length without any loss of resonance or truth. Still, I recommend it to anyone that writes about family dynamics and any fan of novels centering around those dynamics. Just be prepared to work hard to make it through the overly drawn out center of the novel.

For those who have seen the movie based on this book, I still think it is in your best interests to read the book. It's fascinating, to put it mildly. This isn't exactly a story where I can ruin the ending: the big investment banks created derivative products called CDOs based on subprime (meaning unlikely to be paid back) mortgages. The CDOs were insured (mostly by AIG) by Credit Default Swaps, and AIG and others happily allowed people without any investment in CDOs to buy Credit Default Swaps on their own (basically allowing the creation of a derivative of a derivative, the synthetic CDO). The financial rating institutions, like Moody's and Standard and Poor's, rated these CDOs as AAA, which meant that insurance companies and retirement funds could invest in them. (As a note: AAA means as safe as a government bond, and therefore, riskless). This was a catastrophe waiting to happen and it appears that the banks really had no idea what they were doing, despite being warned by at least a few people. While this all sounds very technical, Lewis manages to make it entirely understandable.

This is essentially a story about what happens when we let our financial institutions run amok through deregulation. Deregulation began with Reagan, and then continued onwards through the Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama administrations (I can only imagine it will continue through the Trump administration as well). This book is a perfect story of a perfect storm, and if it is missing anything, it is a call to action. But I think the call to action is implied by the very nature of the events Lewis describes.

While I liked this book, I found it too long. It's not a long book, but it's not edited well. It is clearly a wonderful novella wrapped in an okay novel. I'd have liked to see this cut down more; down to its essential core. In the end though, the true test of a book is whether I would recommend it to others, and I certainly would recommend this book to everyone. It has broad appeal, despite its geeky references and Dominican Spanish. I gave it 4 stars, but that's only because I can't give it 3 1/2.

A WMD, Weapon of Math Destruction, is an algorithm that is a block box (opaque), used at scale, and damages the lives of people, generally poor minorities. Cathy O'Neil goes through a lot of detail describing several of these WMDs and how they are ruining people's lives. Hate Clopening? (working at Closing and then Opening up the next morning). It's likely an algorithm created that schedule. Hate the fact that employers now use opaque personality tests to look for mental illness while you're applying for a job? Another WMD.

This book is important, and I think it should be read by anyone concerned about how Big Data can be used to harm us all. As someone whose future career depends upon algorithmic learning, statistics, and mathematics, I can say this book was eye opening. I'm used to hearing about the power of algorithms and modeling, but really, a model is not the thing that it models (as every mathematician knows).

This book is a lot more accessible than Derman's Models.Behaving.Badly, even if it is in the same vein. It has a much clearer focus, and it very clearly explains the traps mathematical modeling has created. I highly recommend this book to everyone. It doesn't require an understanding of math (there are no models or equations in this book). Just an understanding of how algorithms can contain bias through the use of proxies. Read it and share it.

The Child is about a gay fifteen-year old named Stew. Stew travels to Manhattan in order to meet up with an adult gay couple, David and Joe, that he met online. He has gone to their apartment a few times, and has engaged in sexual activity with them while there. Stew then propositions a police officer in a public restroom, and his world comes crashing down.

The officer convinces Stew to turn in David and Joe through deception. David and Joe are arrested, and because David has a prior conviction, he'll likely get a stiff sentence. The book also follows two attorneys, Hockey and Eva, and Eva's partner, Mary, a playwright who's had little success in NY's theater scene. Hockey is approached by a friend who wants him to represent David. Hockey brings in Eva to assist him.

I'm torn about how I feel about this book. The book is literary LGBT fiction wrapped up in a legal thriller wrapper. The problem is, I don't think it entirely works as either. For starters, most of the dialogue felt inauthentic. It reminded me, in fact, of a pastiche of A.M. Homes and her very weird, but very realistic dialogue. I'm not a fan of legal thrillers, but I've read a few, and this just didn't flow in the same way as legal thrillers I've read. In fact, the tempo felt off. (I can't really explain why. That's just the way I felt).

On the other hand, there was a lot about this book that I liked. The ambiguity of Stew's fate seemed natural, since the fate of any teenager (and gay teenagers in particular) is always ambiguous. I also appreciated that Schulman's treatment of David and Joe's actions was fairly objective. While the characters all seemed to have opinions about it, I didn't get a sense that the author's opinion was presented anywhere in the novel. Were David and Joe pedophiles? Legally, yes. Is growing up different for gay teens and straight teens? Absolutely. Does that make David and Joe's actions appropriate? No. Does it make their actions understandable? Possibly.

For me, though, the book fell apart at its most crucial scene. While I won't give the specifics away, it's fairly obvious that Stew is filled with rage, mostly directed towards his family. When that rage finally erupted, it erased any amount of empathy I had for Stew. I was extremely frustrated by a decision that Mary made late in the book, but I was even more frustrated by Eva's reaction to it. I don't expect tidy endings all wrapped up in a bow. I do expect that decisions characters make have a connection to their thoughts or behaviors earlier in the novel. I also expect characters to demonstrate some emotional depth. Schulman's tone was so objective, that her characters felt flat.

So how do I judge this book. I usually go by three criteria. Did I enjoy reading it, would I read it again, and would I recommend it to specific people. I did enjoy reading it, though I wouldn't read it again. There are too many great books out there to settle down with a mediocre one twice. As to recommending it: I couldn't think of a single friend that I thought would like this book.

This book gave me the impression that while Schulman is an adequate writer, she's neither a good writer nor a great one. But I'll read at least one more of her books to get a better impression of her talent.

This is a book about the eviction crisis in America. It is an incredibly powerful, but ultimately very sad book. It really brought the stories of the tenants and the landlords to life in a very powerful way. The tenants in this book are all victims of our unwillingness to assist the poor with housing, even though housing costs continue to rise. People were living in places without stoves, refrigerators, heat, etc., because they had no choice. In some cases, even homeless shelters provided better services than one's own apartment.

The system, at least in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is rigged against tenants (and Wisconsin is not alone in this). Very few states have strong protections for tenants. Entire neighborhoods are torn apart by evictions. For some of the people in this book, their lot in life appears to be their own fault (addiction, inability to hold a job, etc), but eviction becomes a vicious cycle. You don't go to work because you're moving, and you lose your job. You lose your job, and you can't pay your rent and you get evicted. Landlords evict people for calling the police because of domestic abuse happening in a nearby apartment, because landlords get cited if the police show up too often at their properties. People lose their welfare benefits because they've moved and remembering to call the welfare office was the last thing on their mind. And then they get evicted. Landlords purposely refuse to repair property because it costs money, and if residents complain, the landlord finds a reason to evict them. In other words, no one wins but the landlords.

This book is incredibly depressing, but incredibly important. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in sociology, or just the plight of the poor in the United States.

Great Basic Introduction to Category Theory

This is a great introduction to category theory for non-mathematicians. If you are a mathematician, you'll find an understanding of abstract algebra helpful, but ultimately unnecessary. I'll go grab a more technical introduction with more confidence now.

Well written. Unfortunately the plot starts to unwind at the end. It sinks beneath the technical details of meteorology and the main characters obsession with it.

I generally only read literary fiction, but I make an exception for some fantasy writers. Tim Powers is one of those writers. Declare and Last Call are amongst my favorite novels. This novel, however, fell flat. The lack of a cohesive ending, paired with a less than coherent plot made this a dud for me. I'd have given it two and a half stars if I could, but only because of my love of anything involving the Fisher King (who I wish we'd seen and heard more from).

This is my second read of this book. I want to love it, and for a long way through, I do. Then it all falls apart in the third act. I'll likely read it again in a few years, after the specifics fade from my memories.