Ninett

Good novel. My boyfriend bought it for me because he thought it was a nonfiction book about chemistry (I feel there's irony there, with the subject matter of the book being what it is), and it turned out to be a novel instead. Not a genre I'd choose for myself to read, with it straddling the line between romance, tragedy and drama, none being genres I generally read. 
I liked Elizabeth because I identify with her in many ways. The cooking show theme of the book is an interesting invention from the author, but I found it to be quite left-field. I suspect this was the central idea around which the book was built. 

This book was actually fantastic as an introduction. That said, the problem I have with books written about scientific topics but not written by scientists is that they often don't delve deep enough for my liking. I realise this may be a tall order given that this is a whistle-stop tour of the human body and not a thesis, but I nevertheless did feel like I was reading a collection of semi-popular facts at times. There were a few chapters from which I made no notes (with my note-taking policy being only write down things you didn't know previously). 
The tone and language were excellent, however, and I did still manage to take away some newfound knowledge.
P.S: What about the lymphatic system?!

I love a good dark and whimsical piece of writing. Even if it's technically probably for kids. This was a rare instance in which I was genuinely sad the book ended because the characters grew on me so much: I felt the gut wrenching sadness of being left behind with the Owenses when Bod and Silas left at the end. I resented that the crew was scattered in the wind with no promise to ever again reunite. And the death of miss Lupescu- absolutely tragic.
All in all engrossing and I guess even though the Jacks' motivation felt like an afterthought it still held my interest all the way through. 

So in depth. I would never have thought that salt was such an important catalyst for trade and the movement of people. I did find it hard going to read in some sections, because the writing can be very bland. The author takes no pains to make a series of facts into an engaging narrative.

Still, I liked learning about how closely intertwined human societies have always been with an innocuous mineral.

I just didn't get it. I thought it was unbearable in its dull, neverending descriptions of the most boring elements of peoples' lives. Maybe I should try again. I have a beautiful vintage copy.

Immune was a big job for me to read, for two reasons.

Firstly, I take notes on all popsci nonfiction I read, noting down things I didn't know before, and I knew nothing about immunology, so I took many notes. This is a good thing, because I learned a lot from the book!

The second reason is a bad one, unfortunately: I hated the authorial tone in this. The vibe is that of a teacher who tries very hard to be down with the kids and makes liberal use of slang that's just a touch out of date. I really did not jive with this, it took away from the topic and made me mistrust the authority of the writer on the subject. It was certainly done to be more accessible, but it comes across as cheesy and condescending.

The illustrations were of a very high quality, and they added so much to the narrative, always presented at exactly the right time, spread evenly throughout. This brings the rating up to three stars.

Overall quite good, easy to understand and well written, especially like the summary table. My main trouble is that I read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and found this to be 80% a repeat of that book. I can't really rate it down for that (but I kind of did anyway), but it also didn't really bring much news to the table. Sound, actionable advice, and I did manage to get something out of it ultimately, but I just found the book by Duhigg (which is mentioned in atomic habits as an inspiration) more well written if a bit less directly actionable. 

The author is very playful with the information she withholds from both her characters and from her readers, which creates a fun dynamic between reader and character. I loved that the story was light and full of absurdity.

I found it especially silly that the book is essentially about a time-travelling cat causing chaos, yet it is named with a reference to Cyril instead, who doesn't drive any of the plot, making the title extremely apt. I hated Tossie, even her name is distasteful to me, and her mother was an even more detestable figure. I did manage to guess Tossie's ending about 2/3 of the way through after more than one mention of the Butler Did It trope.

Overall I found this to be clever, well written, and lighthearted. My only qualm was that maybe the pacing was a bit too slow for the content.

This was good! Not really my usual genre, I read it because GPT recommended it as part of a Halloween reading list. I wasn't really sold on it until about at least a quarter of the way through, and I didn't like the main character - I thought she had a childish, spiteful streak that I didn't succeed in warming up to. The premise is great, and I was really into the gothic manor-on-a-hill vibe. I recently read Entangled Life, so the fungus aspect of it was also right up my (current) alley. Dark and at times disgusting, the evils were well fleshed out, I could practically smell the decay at times.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book at first. I struggled to read the first chapter and had to have a few goes at it before I got into it. The language is very poetic, sentences long and twisty-turny. The storyline is a little bit like the Odyssey in that it follows a series of travels of the main character to various places - while he searches for someone else. The ending for me was a little bit disappointing because Remfrey didn't go out in a spectacular way, the Lucidor died with a whimper and didn't even get to kill Remfrey, the big bad guy that started the invasion wasn't vanquished (or we didn't see or know it if it was), and even the shatterling storyline went out with a dim blinker rather than a bang. Regardless, I enjoyed the ride itself and the unique and unusual world so much that the shortcomings of the plot haven't deterred me from giving it 4.5 stars. 

Beware spoilers!

01/12/2024:

I've averaged the scores of my two readings of this book. When I read it in my teens I rated it 5 stars. I now rate it 4.

I still love this book: the myth-founding potency of the Dracula character portrayed in this book remains plain to see just by observing the impact on modern pop culture. Stoker dragged the Vampyre from the depths of folklore into common culture.

But as an adult I've seen some parts differently, too. The story is laced with a kind of benevolent sexism throughout, which is characteristic for its time, yet I find impossible to ignore. I feel the Dracula character did not make full use of all his powers and went out in a whimper rather than a bang. Stoker could have killed off his antagonist in a more befitting way. Also not sure why he kept Jonathan in the castle.

I read this on my nintendo ds originally back in the day, and I have my suspicions that I had read a strongly abridged version, since I didn't recall most of this story.

The cover lured me into reading a book that belongs to two genres I'd normally never read: a short story collection, and a crime one at that... 
But I'm glad it did. I have been meaning to open up my reading a bit recently. I liked the classic twists in each little story and the image of an era that it left imprinted on my brain (both this era of crime fiction writing and the era the stories were set in in general). The writing was excellent - flowing well and reflecting astute observations about what we're like as humans. 

This book came to me at the exact right time in my life for me to be able to appreciate it the most. I hadn't read much about Bayes previously, but my work has started to veer towards a direction in which I felt knowing more probability and stats would be useful. I have a background in engineering, so now that I am equipped with an intuitive understanding of what Bayes' theorem says, and what sorts of problems it can be applied to, I'm well placed to read further into the nitty-gritty of what I've read in order to apply this to my work.

I loved that this book wasn't written exclusively about the mathematics itself, but featured biographical elements of Bayes' life, places the story in a well fleshed-out historical setting, and shares anecdotes about the applications and development of the theorem.

Probably the most notes I've taken on a book in a long time.

Not a bad book! Great as an intro or reference for runners, especially in the latter half, in which the author gets into the technicalities of gait, cadence, and form.

My major gripe is that there are lots of theories on form that are put forth strongly, but with really only anecdotal evidence to back them up. In contrast, Lieberman's book about exercise (absolutely amazing book) backs every claim up with scientific publications, and the reader can draw their own conclusions.

I realise that not all sports writers can have a PhD in evolutionary physiology, but I do expect some level of rigor in the scientific aspects of the writing, otherwise I am likely to dismiss it as opinion (which I think it is in this case).

Still a good intro and still has some interesting thoughts and observations, and with it being a quick read, I do recommend it to beginner runners even if only for the inspiration and basic technical knowledge.

I had a lot of gripes with the first half of the book. It read like a play. There was not much narration and the plot was advanced solely via dialogue. The characters are not fleshed out, they are just plot devices, and their copious dialogue is empty too. This section of the book is the reason I can't conscionably give it more than 3 stars overall. 
But after the first plodding, disjoined half was over, the story really came into its own and I'm glad I persevered. The plot become interesting and twisty-turny. It even managed to go out with a bang. 

I will also say the book needs an editor. Grammar errors,  discontinuities of character and plot holes abound. Fair warning if you can't get past that kind of thing. 

When I chose this book, I had in mind a story about a plague and people surviving in it. I would say that this is a book about a character philosophising about human nature, which happens to eb set during a time of plague. The main element is the philosophy and the by-the-way element is the plague. I'm not usually a fan of a book in which the central theme is flowery language around abstract social commentary-type concepts. I can see how others will like this book, but it just was not what I expected and it took me a long time to slowly chug through it. I kept forgetting who each character was and didn't really care enough about the story to even google it. 

I found this book immensely boring, overambitious and contrived. It took considerable willpower to get to the 25% mark in it, and when even then it did not begin fulfilling on its page-turner promise I finally gave up on it. I felt that the author came up with an interesting idea about a physically impossible house and a separate idea about wacky formatting, and then just jammed the two ideas together, with a sprinkle of dry technical datasheet style documentation about both interspersed throughout. Yes, I understand that the formatting is meant to give us the same experience as the inhabitants of the house had, but it was so gimmicky and made it all a colossal hassle. He didn't even attempt to write well, thinking that the formatting will more than make up for it. 

This is a natural history of Europe as a continent and as an ecosystem. The chapters are short and crammed, but worth reading for the clever language and because this is a topic that is sorely neglected amongst hundreds of history books about the time of the dinosaurs and thousands about human history. The in-between time is often cast aside. 
I think that perhaps the chapters could have been fewer and more detailed rather than so many brief cursory treatments of varied aspects of the topic. 

The second installment of the Cradle series picks up exactly where the previous left off - almost as seamless as if they weren't separate books. This series is lamentably a bit predictable, but the light reading entertainment it provides nonetheless is sometimes exactly what's needed. Eithan in particular is an interesting character, and I'm pleased we're following him into the next book.

This is a genre I tend to avoid because real life-adjacent stories are not usually engaging enough for me, but the hype around this novel a few years ago was intense, and I was landed with a copy through no fault of my own. I am currently making my way through a long progression fantasy series, and needed a breather, so I decided to just read this as a break. 
Right off the bat: I really did enjoy this, despite my preconceptions of the genre. I was pretty much hooked from the start, and finished in two days. The characters are well written, with complex emotional worlds, and histories in which they can be interpreted as both good and bad people. They are in the grey-zone in between, and that is refreshing. 
I had a look online to see how much $10,000 USD in 1982 would be worth now in 2024, and the sum is about $32,500 USD (??25,600 GBP). I personally would not volunteer to carry a child for someone and birth it for even ten times that amount, and that's because I don't think permanent changes to my body are something I could put a price on like that. I am not sure if this is meant to show Mia's sheer desperation or whether the author thinks that is a reasonable, believable amount for a surrogate pregnancy.
note: I did just Google it, and the prices do appear to start at $35,000 for surrogacy in the USA, and about ??10,000 in the UK. I find this unbelievably cheap.

My mom was reading this on holiday, so I decided to get a copy myself and read along at the same time. I wonder what the intention of the publisher was for this book. The author is so self absorbed, so grandiose, so insufferably self-congratulatory that I am forced to think that the publication of this work is a joke played on the author by the publisher. The inner voice of this woman is vapid. She has no redeeming qualities. Her emotional life is sterile and pitiful.

It isn't a novel for entertainment purposes. This is the voice of a woman without knowledge of how her life may present to others - she has no ability to understand that this would come across as repulsive to non-psychopaths, and writes in a gloating tone of her inability to connect with anything. I suppose if I knew I was missing an essential piece in me, I'd try to make it look like a win, too.

Either way, I hated this woman. I felt some kind of primal, instinctual revulsion to this memoir. My mom said that all voices are worthy and we can't judge people for what they can't help, but I wouldn't want to be within a km radius of this lady either way. The idea that this novel serves as a window into the life of someone devoid of humanity, and this being an important window to peer in through, even for just a bit, is what kept me from giving it a 1 star rating.

I really loved this book when I first read it a long, long time ago. It was fresh, funny and unexpected. The absurdity really did it for me then. This re-read has been fun, but this time I've had to knock a star off (oroginally 1.5 stars, but then I didn't have the heart to go through with such a big downgrade), mostly because I realised there is no plot to speak of, things just happen randomly and for no particular reason. The story never evolves and the characters aren't fleshed out. This is more annoying now as am adult than it was when the world was a crazier place (in my teens).

This book caught me off guard a little bit. I expected mindless fun, action: a filler. But instead, it was a very human story which happens to be set in a science fictional universe. While the plot does lean heavily into time travel, which is the obsession of the main character's father, the centrepiece is not the time travel itself but the emotional journey of a man raised by a parent who sacrificed everything to his work. Also currently reading GEB and found the self referential nature of several elements of the book interesting. All in all a weird but welcome detour into unhappy man themed sci fi. 

My first Vaclav Smil book, which I enjoyed in small doses with plenty of time in between. 
I appreciate that the chapters were divided into topics, because it can be a labour in itself to read 71 short essays on disparate themes due to the mental switching involved, and the subdivisions lightened this mental load. As an engineer, numbers and figures do not really phase me, and in fact I found myself wishing for a bit more of an elaboration on the stats, though I understand that this was written for everyone to enjoy and not just numbers people.
I did end up skipping some sections, which were to do with my area of expertise: electrical and electronics engineering (the electric motor, moore's law, integrated circuits, comms, etc), but the rest were a great refresher for things I knew but never thought about, or as an intro to topics I am quite hazy on.

I like Simon as a guest on podcasts. He has a lot of good things to say and the empathy and kindness with which he approaches disparate topics while still remaining informative and sharp is enviable. 

BUT I did not like this book. I feel bad because it is an older piece of his and he has probably come a long way since this was published, but this book was repetitive to the extreme. The only point it made was the titular point: start with why. You could have stopped there instead of hashing out myriad ways in which this same concept can be described from a different perspective. The central idea is solid and a good one, but a book based on it was not merited in my opinion. I didn't learn much after the first chapter.

There are lots of sort-of outdated scenarios in the book as well, as much of the content is centred around 1990s-2000s era tech companies.

Lastly: There is some pseudoscience in there as well. I really do not think for a second that Simon knows much about neuroscience and I hope no one else thinks he does either. Get your neurosci bits from people who are qualified to dispense them :)