Sylvia Chi

I feel like someone (European) has overestimated their abilities to reason and understand the world.

And what would Empire have to say about your use of Wade-Giles romanization?

George Saunders can do no wrong.

Found it fairly difficult to understand Miriam, or to really empathize with Paul's relationship with his mother, but still a good read. I'd like to see a modern day screen adaptation starring the guy who plays Adam in Girls.

If you haven't studied [much] linguistics, this will be a great book for you. It's playfully written and covers really interesting material, with a healthy dose of scientific intellectual history. If you took Semantics with Pulju at Dartmouth, you will learn nothing new and just be frustrated by that fact.

P.S. It's a little annoyingly Eurocentric.

This book is sort of Pynchon-esque. A lot of it feels like it's describing some interesting art projects.

It's also really confusing how LeBov's name is so similar to Labov, the sociolinguist.

It's amazing, but a real bummer through much of it.

Best short story collection I've read in a long time.

A little over-simplistic and narrowly focused for me, with far too much personal editorializing about the author's goats, etc., but still provides some interesting observations on outdoor medical marijuana growing in Mendocino. Might be more persuasive for folks who are more ambivalent/less informed about medical marijuana, cannabis legalization, and ending the drug war.

There were many parts of this book that I found problematic (the absurdly flat, semi-misogynistically-written female characters; the incoherent critique of television) but could have chalked up to interesting ambiguities until I read the Afterword and Coda by the author, who turns out to have written this polemic/parable as an ill-considered response to criticism (you know, censorship by women's-libbers and homosexuals) and new media.

Otherwise, Bradbury is clearly a virtuosic writer in a showoffy way, but the story pacing and structure is pretty strained. Although Captain Beatty is a pretty terrifically villainous bad guy.

Everyone interested in social justice should read this.

Pretty uneven; some stories are pretty great, others are pretty bad. Generally pretty imaginative too, and all but one story (the last and eponymous) were compelling enough that I wanted to see how they ended. The one that sticks with me the most is the first, a Hugo-award-winner called “The Erdmann Nexus”.

Multiple people recommended this book to me because they know I like books and dogs. This book is narrated by a dog, so it already starts off strong.

However, I found the dog, Enzo, to be pretty unbelievable in his lack of dogginess, and he also wasn't very sympathetic in his self-loathing – it's revealed pretty much off the bat that this dog wants to be a human in his next life, and he often laments the un-humanness of the body he's trapped in. He seems to spend his whole life with the background expectation that he should NOT be a dog, but a human, and looking down on typical dog behaviors, and I think that's too bad because I like those things.

Enzo also spends a lot of time dispensing platitudes and pearls of wisdom about racing - car-racing, not running in the rain, like you might think a dog would love. His great passion, for unpersuasively presented reasons, is being a spectator to others racing cars.

Also, sometimes I wondered if the author even ever had a dog. I just have never personally known a dog to like bananas or watching TV all day. And the author implies that neutered dogs can't get erections, which isn't true. There are some calculated acts of revenge that Enzo takes that are pretty feline.

Overall, the pacing and structure feel slightly amateurish, and the events are quite predictable. There are some nice and surprising turns of phrase in here, though, and overall it's a pretty nice story. They could probably make a good movie out of this and make tons of money.

I just wanted to read the sections on fat loss/the “slow carb diet” and the PAGG stack. Those were pretty informative and at generally the right level of detail that I require. The book is a good starting place for learning some of this stuff; if you try starting to learn about it by straight Googling, you're likely to get pretty overwhelmed pretty quickly.

That said, at least some (if not all/most) of the key material in the book is also on Ferriss' blog. For example, re: the basics of the slow carb diet: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs-of-fat-in-30-days-without-doing-any-exercise/

However, the whole tone of this book is written as if you're an idiot, by a person who is not a very good writer. You really get the sense that Ferriss had to meet some kind of page/words quota and so he tried to meet it by including long excerpts from emails/writings by other people. It's a really palpably lazily put together book.

I was also interested in the exercise section, but as a kettlebell/weight-lifting n00b, I found it pretty confusing. (Although I didn't check the online references for further clarification.)

I skimmed the section on sex and it looked pretty worthless to me, plus obnoxiously heteronormative, but might be helpful to some.

I was pretty disappointed in this collection, because I really liked his novel. Several of the stories are basically gimmicks, and not well executed. The author seems to be reasonably imaginative when it comes to what-if scenarios, but quite unimaginative when it comes to characters.

The short answer is: carbs. Chances are, you can learn what you want to know by just reading the highest-rated Amazon.com reviews. Most of this book is just setting up straw men about an oversimplified calories-in-calories-out model and then destroying them. It also spends way too much time making the argument for eating meat, and is a little ridiculously skeptical about the health (as opposed to fat-losing) benefits of exercise. OTOH, it's a pretty engaging thing to listen to on a 10-hour road trip.

Finally, a satisfying ending!
As to movie adaptation speculation: there's no way they can do this story justice and get a PG-13 rating.

Pacing is ridiculous, especially the ending. Could make a great movie but I don't trust Gary Ross et al to do it competently.

I am a sucker for novels narrated by history grad student dropouts.

At least as good as the movie.

You should just watch the movie.

Full of lulz until they left Bath, then it's all downhill to perfect felicity.

I can't give less than four stars to a book about a woman obsessing over her puppy.

Clearly, Chad Harbach was never a swimmer.

Now I can practice self-diagnosis on a neurological level!

I read this because it's always referred to in like, everything else I read. The ideas in this book are super interesting, and were certainly pioneering when Snow Crash first came out. However, the narrative voice was so obnoxious. It's like it was written by a 14-year-old boy who wants to be congratulated for his paltry attempts at thinking about the human condition. I mean, the two main characters are (1) the [male] [biracial Japanese/African-American] greatest sword-fighter in the universe/hacker and (2) a hot 15-year-old skateboarding girl.

There is terrible exposition – it's like Stephenson wants us to be impressed by how much data he has dredged up in text form. Basically, I think the person who wrote that Internet hit “If all stories were written like science fiction” had this book in mind.

I also found Stephenson's speculative futurecasting pretty distracting, especially when it was crazy wrong. Like, we have the Metaverse but we still use pay phones?

Anyways, I read this thinking it'd be much better as a shorter, more tightly-edited action movie with great special effects, so I guess it makes sense that, as is explained in the acknowledgements, it was originally conceived to be a graphic novel. It was also interesting that Stephenson cited as a chief influence on his conception of the Metaverse the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which he describes as a book explaining “the philosophy behind Macintosh.”

I'm glad that the author reads the audio version in his lilting British accent.