Lukáš Kucharczyk

A great account of how some of the most popular games (did not) get made.

Incredible story of a family trying to survive during the Great Depression that is strangely relevant even today. Loved the characters (especially Má and Tom) and the colloquial language.

Not an easy read for someone who like me who is probably just a surface reader at best.

Although the surreal feeling of his writing is probably what I like the most about it, sometimes in can lean into incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness style that is almost impossible to follow. This is especially true about the whole first part (called Contemplation, or Betrachtung in German) and the four stories united under the theme of a starving artist: A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler), A Little Woman (Eine kleine Frau), Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk or Josefine (die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse), and First Sorrow (Erstes Leid).

It should come as no surprise, then, that I like Kafka's more narrative-driven works better. In this collection, that would be:

(longer ones)
* In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie)
* The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung)
* The Stoker (Der Heizer)
(shorter ones)
* Before the Law (Vor dem Gesetz, amazing!)
* The Dream (Ein Traum)
* The Bucket Rider (Der Kübelreiter)

Alright for big fans of Warcraft.

The book's potential is incredibly hampered by Blizzard because they don't want fans to feel like books are mandatory to experience the whole story. Literally nothing happens in the book that you won't find out by playing Battle for Azeroth for 2 hours.

A well-written introduction to several scientific theories that you might have heard of but didn't understand before. I liked all of it except Spiritual Universe which I don't necessarily agree with it, though I do think that spirituality is important, just without religion.

A great story that I think would be very satisfying to anyone who likes a good whoddunit murder mystery. It is hard to describe in a spoiler-free way why it is so good, therefore Spoilerhidden from the eyes of those would would like to keep themselves unspoiled, I can say here it is an amazing example of an unreliable narrator. As it is said in the epilogue, we are not as much mislead as facts are elided in a masterful way.

The narrator's account of what has happened to her seems to be woven with great care from many different pieces of our own history. It's appalling how many of the things in the book remind me of the various events that took place in the past decade, especially in the US.

Thinking back on the ending, I especially like it because it avoids being both a clichéd happy-end and its polar opposite. It's both bleak and hopeful, but also quite sudden; a story suddenly cut off. This reinforces its “found diary” quality.

The book was OK. I think some of the previous entries were much better. The ending was also OK. If this doesn't sound like I'm too enthused about it, it's because I really am not. However, I appreciate Erikson managing to finish such a huge undertaking even if the journey was more interesting than its actual end.

Funny in an entirely unintended way. The authoress must have really loved Pride and Prejudice!

My main takeaway from the book (though there is plenty of other good advice, too) is that if you want to be something more than a robotic worker doing boring work, you have to connect with people and do more than what's in your job description: be human. His ultimate thesis that art is something that needs to be given freely and without expectation of recompense is something that is probably not an obvious answer to the problem of being unsatisfied with your job.

Could be I'm just fond of this particular strand of science fiction but the setting and the atmosphere is pitch perfect and doesn't feel like it aged one bit.

An interesting, I'd daresay even good collection of three stories that were published back in 1953, before even the first trip to the Moon, yet they talk about interstellar travel and discovering other planets that is not out of place even now, almost 70 years later.

The stories are laser-focused on the science side of things, the characters are simply mouthpieces for the author to explain how stuff works. As someone who likes this, I didn't much too much, but it's definitely the biggest weakness of this book.

An interesting insight into living with cats and their personalities. The descriptive parts of Particularly Cats dragged quite a bit for me but the rest was good.

The beginning was rough and the whole character of Kamele being one big exposition dump is not good. But the story and the world are intriguing enough to make it worth reading for fans of sci-fi.

An actually good love story with some saucy dialogues.

The narrator of the novel is a journalist writing about the last game of the Japanese master of go for their newspaper audience of laymen who probably like many a reader is not familiar with the game and thus care more about the personalities. Although it is based on real events and people, this final match is also an allegory for the then-popular topic in Japanese literature, the clashing of traditional Japan with modernity, the old and the young. And though not explicitly intended for non-Japanese readers, it also manages to describe the meaning and ties the game has to Japanese culture.

All of this is done with Kawabata's characteristic style where often we see focus shift on describing the natural world around the protagonists that sometimes, if read into deep enough, also serves to describe the feelings and relationships of the characters in a very obscure way.

I started reading this very uninterested because of the seemingly heavy focus on the game I know virtually nothing about, but Kawabata managed to wove an intricate tale (with some help from history) that's more about the underlying culture and people, and I ended up liking it a lot. This has also been an overall experience of mine with all his stories so chances are if you like his style, you'll probably like any of his writings regardless of topic.

This seemed to me like an interesting opinion on the subjectivity of beauty and value of impurity before we got to full-blown “old man yelling at the cloud”-moments with an unhealthy dose of sexism and racism, and some completely confused views on science.

All while reading I tried to refrain from being too judgmental but in the end there were too many things that I can't easily gloss over. Someone called it a tongue-in-cheek work but I honestly couldn't see it as such. Even when Tanizaki was describing the poetic qualities of toilets (confusingly, this I actually felt the most agreeable of his opinions).

Despite knowing the twist, I still enjoyed the book greatly. Excellently written.

Where other people may have found heartbreaking story I found only guy who invaded a land that was manifestly different, on behest of couple of drunkards calling themselves a parliament and for no reason other than boredom no less, found his soon-to-be wife there who he later drove away due to his complete inability to accept anything else but his own little world, and despite her trying to do her best. The rest of the book is then describing his nothing short of insane obsession (no euphemism there, mind) with getting her back with no self-reflection whatsoever... and succeeding.

I realize this is fairy tale-esque fantasy but I just couldn't get over it with this book.

One of the things the author wrote about in this book that I feel to be correct even without having evidence for it myself yet, is that reading too much without thinking can make you dumb. Reading can give you the necessary kick when you need to “think with someone else's head”, as Schopenhauer writes, but you need to make time to think about what you read and adopt it within yourself, otherwise you're just a poorly tossed salad of other people's thoughts.

Even though this play written almost a hundred years ago might become even more relevant in the future when due to scientific advancements we are able to live longer than 100 years on average, the urgent message it carries between the lines is to live your life fully no matter how long or short it is, and I think that's a life motto that will hardly ever become irrelevant.

Did you know that in the bombing of Dresden at the end of the Second World War more people were killed (~130k) than during the bombing of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb (~70k)? I didn't and shame on me for that.

Even though I've known about Pratchett for years, I had never gotten around to reading any of his books until now and it was delightful. The quirky humour and impeccable writing doesn't sacrifice any of the wonder that I came to expect from a good fantasy, on the contrary.

Amazingly written, quite distressing to read.

This book is horrifying and amazing at the same time because unless you're one of the very few people with regular 7—9 hour sleep, you will get to find out exactly how you're literally shortening your lifespan, destroying your immunity, lowering your attention span and forgetting half of the stuff you wanted to learn! On the other hand, it is great motivation to think long and hard about your shitty sleeping habit and finally fix it which is what I did.

There is a lot of worth quoting but I liked this one because it is so unexpected:

“After four hours of sleep for six nights, participants' performance was just as bad as those who had not slept for twenty-four hours straight—that is, a 400% increase in the number of microsleeps.”