Sylvia Chi

My chief beef with this book is that I thought it was going to be a thriller and it wasn't, really. As a novel about family life, it was quite good, especially regarding sibling relationships.

Useful stuff in here, I think especially if you're new to managing (like me). It could have been written and edited better, though. I think the biggest takeaway is to see Brené Brown's website for really actionable resources.

I would not recommend that anyone hire Dave Eggers as a futurist, or even a present-ist.

The key to good speculative fiction is sustaining an understanding of how humans behave - otherwise it is too far removed from the human experience that it is boring. Dave Eggers fails to do so; in particular, he seems not to know how real life people use the Internet or relate to each other in general. Or if he does, he asks far too much of us in terms of suspending our disbelief. In the first 20 pages, he asks us to believe that society has done away with online trolls and anonymity. Over the course of the next 400, we are to believe that no one (except for two characters, maybe) has ever studied or achieved any level of understanding of sociology, law, political science, or history. Somewhere along the way, the Constitution and rule of law have mysteriously poofed out of existence. It's just too absurd to take seriously. To be fair: it takes until about page 400 for Godwin's law to manifest itself.

Also, I am highly skeptical of his representations about marine ecology but I am less qualified to rant about that.

I can't even get into the gender dynamics.

Not to mention that the speculative technology is not even novel! It's like, 2005 telegraphed and wants its cutting edge technology back, Mr. Eggers.

I wouldn't be so outraged about this book except that I suspect that the people who are currently, in real life, throwing bricks and vomiting on the tech worker commuter buses in the Bay Area seem to have read this book as if it were unadorned fact.

And it is not even well-written. An example I could not resist taking note of: “There were old printers, fax machines, telex devices, letterpresses. The décor, of course, was for show. All the retro machines were nonfunctional.” Wait, Dave, I still don't get it. Can you hit me over the head about it one more time?

It's weird, because I remember his first two books as being really well-written. So, in sum, I like his older stuff better.

What's great about this book is how good Tolstoy is at creating and describing characters. The various plots of all the characters are interesting and move quickly. The story of Napoleon's warring across the continent is quite interesting too. I don't like all the ranting about historians and self-congratulating about how Tolstoy himself knows how to analyze history; in particular, I did not care for Part II of the Epilogue, which should have been entirely excised so I could have gotten on with my life.

This translation seems really good to me, although I haven't read any other translations. It's written in a very lively and modern style, more so than I remember the translation of Anna Karenina that I read being. There are several typos throughout, though.

This is a gorgeously written book – in some ways, more of an extended exercise of wordplay than a novel. The other two things I liked most about this book were: (1) reflecting on how poorly suited it is for a film adaptation; and (2) the new words I learned (crozzled, salitter, discalced). It perhaps could only be improved by the addition of zombie killing, but then that would probably be a pretty different book.