Andrzej

I have grown a certain sentiment towards Haruki Murakami's works. In a weird way they are so different but also so close. Culturally and emotionally. I really enjoyed it as it always brings me to this different world where the extraordinary and ‘magical' things actually do happen, even though everything around is very down to earth, pragmatic and ‘normal'. I guess this is what draws me to Murakami's works. It even plants in me some desire to write by myself :) Sometime in the future

Poor writing and a naïve plot. The book plays on nostalgia and emotions way too much. Moreover the amount of descriptions on games/movies/pop-culture from '80s breaks the flow for me. I don't consider it entirely bad though. I liked the setting (even poorly executed, with horrible black and white characters) and the idea about the hunt was pretty cool. Such a shame it wasn't better written. I can totally understand someone will like it, similarly as just another comic book movie adaptations, etc.

I will be coming back to this book many times in the future. And one day I'll try to review it as well

Great little story. It was rather simple and funny but boy was it entertaining and wittily written. I do not know the original version of the book but this one got it really well. Entertaining protagonist, many twists which were there not just to create a sense of unexpectedness, but rather giving a depth to the story. Solid writing, fun to read and taking a couple concepts, quite important nowadays, on the workbench.

Fantastic description of African continent, it's people and tragic XX century history. The best one I've read so far and the most intimate as well. As I have lived in Africa for almost half a year before, this book has awaken a lot of memories and sentiments. And phrases so many of my own observations and thoughts. Great literature!

Great and one hell of a philosophical take on human behaviour and state. The book's context revolves around the Nazi Germany and the holocaust, but it's a sort of a pretext to talk about much more universal values I believe.
I think the best description of this book will be just a couple of quotes from it:

“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. ‘You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”

—–
“You hate America, don't you?'

That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. ‘It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”

—–
“I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

—–

“I froze. It was not guilt that froze me. I had taught myself never to feel guilt. It was not a ghastly sense of loss that froze me. I had taught myself to covet nothing. It was not a loathing of death that froze me. I had taught myself to think of death as a friend. It was not heartbroken rage against injustice that froze me. I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair. It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love. It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him. What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction.”

Well written, but I did not really care about the characters. Nothing made me sympathize with them or care about what they do. For me there was no reason behind their actions besides wanting power. And that mixed with the amnesia was a bit bizarre.

A great dive into the history of European and USA colonialism and the evolution of racial superiority ideas.

Great sci-fi. World building, conflicts and characters were fantastic (besides the name of the main character). My main concern is mostly about the silver rain. I think I didn't grasp what really was it and the culminating scene with it was somehow weird and uninspiring, although there were a lot of struggles to get there.

A great introduction to functional programming aspects of Javascript. The rest of the content was solid.

Wow! Just wow! This was written in 1966? I actually find it funny that it is all classified as sci-fi, even though the setting suggests so, and there are some futurolgistic things as well. This really is an exploration of humankind, society, transhumanism, totalitarisms, libertarianism, and so many more -isms that it really is mind-boggling how was it possible to fit all of that in such a small book. It's easily the best thing I read this year, although maybe the competition wasn't too strong so far. This book really proves to me that Lem was a genius.

I am seriously not able to rate this book. A book full of paradoxes in how I receive it. Tiring but oneiric, smart but full of rigid views, etc., etc. I love it and hate it and I am sure will reread it in the future (or better read it whole as I didn't manage to finish it this time) when I will be either retired or living with inner peace.

3.5 stars. A really fun and easy read. Engaging and witty. Would make for a fun comedy movie.

Pretty good on the topic. It was very interesting for me to learn about the history of dietetics and how the concept of ‘why we get fat' evolved. The second part of the book reiterated on things about the influence of insulin and your sensitivity to it as the main factor of fat accumulation in the body. Can't judge this, as I am not a scientist, but the research seems sound ;) For those who did not hear about how insulin shapes us, this is definitely a valuable read.

This will be a pretty hard review for me. Snow crash was the first book by Stephenson which I read and I approached it as other, typical sci-fi (I read mostly hard sci-fi...). That probably was my first mistake. This book is not at all as what I was used to as it is more of a sci-fi exploitation... The amount of ridiculous and over the top things here amount as high as the Babel tower brought all the time in the plot. The main character is called Hiro (pronounced like or closely to hero) Protagonist (sic!) who is half afro-american, half asian (deep breath) haker genius, greatest sword fighter in the world, one of the main creators of the metaverse (kinda matrix) working for pizza delivery, CIA and haker-triad Hong Kong. His sidekick is overly sexualised (seriously, this was sometimes way too much) 15 year old courier working for Pizza delivery which happens to be also sicilian mafia and a sovereign state. Their main antagonist (weirdly not called Npc Antagonist) is a native russian east coast ruthless killer and kayak surfer (lol) creating nano blades from glass and connected to a hydrogen bomb (which he has stolen from a soviet nuclear submarine he single-handedly took control over) in case something happens to him... And that is not even a half of what is there!
However under this Kung-fury-like plot (that movie is great btw! ;) ) there is a lot of really interesting ideas and a mix of academic theories from language theory, psychology, philosophy and more. I truly loved how the author has shown human languages as being parallel to computer programming languages. The type of implications it has, how viruses may spread, etc. is quite amazing. Also the historical background, even though quite fantastic, is compelling and creates a believable (to an extent!) context.
Even though I tend to enjoy the exploitation genre (mostly in cinema), here I felt like there was way too much of everything piled up. The ending was like a car crash at a high velocity abruptly leaving the story as if the author was becoming tired with his own book. Also most of what happens throughout the plot doesn't have any great meaning and is there mostly too show how bad-ass is, albeit one-dimensional, is our hero protagonist or his antagonist. What also left me uneasy was author's oversexualised picture of young girls, where our 15 year-old courier is pictured as a sexual object in almost every interaction with males.
Bottom line, it's a book full of great ideas, pretty good form, but buried under way too much nonsense and sexism.

Wittily written, a real page-turner with an interesting plot and memorable characters. The way all the stories converge and intertwine is done very well as well. My biggest issue however, is how the story ends. If the previous part is believable (sometimes hardly, but still) and even shows some plausible mechanisms of mass-media and politics, the ending is going way off into political fantasy realm.

I have recently read Stephenson's previous book - Snow crash, and boy did it age badly. This is not the case with Diamond Age however. This novel dives into a kind of post-cyberpunk world where nanotechnology is omnipresent and in fact defines how people live in almost every aspect. From goods distribution to law enforcement, from judicial system to transportation and political organisation.
The first part of the story is an extensive info dump building the setting. To be honest it was probably my least favourite part as it was pretty dry and not engaging. Afterwards the story starts following the primer and its 3 main users. Although theoretically the book is about that primer and the great majority of the plot is connected to it, I saw it is a mere excuse to venture into topics like self-determination, state as a convoluted oppressive system, etc. All of it is mixed with quite a lot of techno-babble and actually pretty well done. I enjoyed how the author envisions social and political repercussions of technology. And these topics I see as definitely the strongest points of the book. The plot itself isn't bad, but nothing extraordinary either. Especially the way we approach the end is disappointing. After reading this one I am excited to grab another of Stephenson's books and dive into the world of his crazy ideas.

Fantastic subject for a detective thriller. At moments maybe a little bit stalling, but good read nevertheless. I wander if the science there is legit. Hard to say, but for someone untrained in chemistry seemed good. All in whole an enjoyable read. 3.5/5

This could have been such a good book. Interesting historical period, good premise, etc. I am still questioning myself why it did not appeal to me... I really really wanted to like it! However, it was such a pain to read it. Especially the first and the third part where the characters were mostly thinking about theories. Any suspense was killed by boredom. All the amazing ideas, a trademark of Stephenson, were lost in between the lines of endless gobbledygook. I did not finish reading it, stopping around 200 pages from the end. I can now dedicate it to a more enjoyable book.

3.5 My first ‘spy novel' I enjoyed. Good plot, characters who didn't seem too artificial. Nothing amazing, but much more engaging than anything on spies I have read before. This indeed is quite weird, as I enjoy spy movies and did like detective books as a teenager. This one though is the first after a couple of tries (with classics like john le Carré) which made me pretty pessimistic about them. This one though, maybe due to world building or character construction more similar to scifi or suspense, made me quite engaged in the storyline and fairly attached to the characters. I also had it as an audiobook and a couple of longer road trips.

4.5 stars. My favourite, so far, book by Stephenson. Finally he managed to cut those annoying (for me) omnipresent pop-references and women are not as oversexualised as it was in his previous books. The plot is great and really engaging. Putting it in two historical periods was a great decision. As the story unveils we get more and more characters and threads, however everything at some point starts to connect and converge to the same point to culminate with a satisfactory ending. I also really enjoyed the cryptology theme. Even though some parts were somehow incorrect, as a whole it credible and to be honest quite amazing how Stephenson could in 1999 create, albeit only on paper, the idea of cryptocurrencies (disclaimer - I haven't heard about any earlier reference to it, at least not in cultural works).
The size of this book is scary. Almost 1200 pages with typical to the author tendency to extensive descriptions of the world, ideas, characters and so on. Even though he goes to extreme with those descriptions, he also manages to keep them engaging and the story doesn't feel boring at any point. I definitely see it as an achievement. It might have been a bit shorter, but I suppose we would lose a bit of Stephenson's style in a backlash.
Every book by Stephenson I read is full of wild and imaginative ideas. This one however feels to me as the first one where he managed to create a compelling story as well. And even though cryptology stands in the middle of the book it doesn't take over the story telling and character building. I will definitely reach for his other works now.

I enjoyed this one more than the second book in the series. Maybe the plot is simpler, but I didn't feel it being as idiotic and naive. Pretty solid scifi for a book about big guys in huge armors.

Another in the guilt pleasure saga of wh40k novels ;) And yet another story of dudes in huge armors who are not the brightest ever, but think they are. This one was much better than the previous two books in horus heresy cycle. New protagonist, a different, more personal scale. I enjoyed it. I liked how from time to time the author tries to be self-aware. There was this dialogue of Garro with his ship captain where the captain just says that space marines are like teenagers ;) That was a pretty sweet touch. I already got used to the fact that everything here is super serious and everyone is a strategic mastermind, even though it seems like they are just simple dudes with their simplistic approach to life.
Again 4/5 in the guilty pleasure rating

Brilliant take on classical storytelling in a sci-fi sauce. The book consists of several gripping stories fantastically told and weaved with one another and the main plot. Im already buying the next book in the series?

Amazing book. And really gripping. There were parts where I was literally sitting on the edge of a chair! And in the same time it's a very existential book about life, people and what defines us as people. How some decisions (or a lack of them) can impact our whole life. A clear 5/5!