Andrey Goder

Very good collection of puzzles. While not strictly required, familiarity with some undergrad-level math would be helpful (combinatorics, probability, calculus). In particular, has probably the best collection of interesting ‘hat' puzzles. My only criticism is some of the solutions seem a bit sparse and require to guess a bit as to how they make sense (perhaps this was done to avoid excessive calculation).

This book promotes methods of nonverbal communication known as “Rapid Prompt Method” or “Spelling to Communicate”. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's official position is that “use of the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) is not recommended because of prompt dependency and the lack of scientific validity”. There just isn't any evidence that it's actually the individuals and not the facilitators doing the communicating (see: ideomotor effect). Now there are certainly some people that have trouble with speech and can communicate in other ways, but the case of Eugene in the book going from essentially zero communication to complex sentences and writing poetry is too fantastical to believe. I kept expecting the book to have some twist that actually no, it wasn't him, but sadly that wasn't the conclusion. There are some obvious red flags with these methods, e.g. why does it require a human to hold the letterboard vs. just having it stationary? Why does it only work with certain facilitators? Indeed these are even present in the book itself, yet they seem to be ignored by the author/narrator by the end.

The initial part of the book I thought was pretty good, comparable to Miracle Creek. The mystery of the father's disappearance and the finding of different hints was intriguing. But this all fell apart by the end and turned into some kind of advertisement for these unsupported “communication” methods. The ending was very unsatisfying as a result.

See this article for more info on this:
https://www.asha.org/slp/asha-warns-against-rapid-prompting-method-or-spelling-to-communicate/

I expected a more balanced take, but about half this book is repeated tirades that amount to “cars = bad”, “transit = good”. I think the argument could have been made in a more balanced way (focusing on externalities of cars and parking) rather than just essentially claiming they are the root of all problems in cities.

Divided into three parts, each focusing on one character from the main family. The first two were fantastic, but the third a fair amount weaker, and the ending I felt wasn't great (we don't get much resolution between Nick and Matthew). It was also a bit weird how cold and distant a lot of the characters were towards their family, seemingly only for plot purposes. But overall I still really enjoyed it.

I agree with the author's thesis that a connection into more hands-on work is missing in the modern economy, and that this lack is a cause of a lot of unhappiness or disinterest with work. We see an increasing trend in a pushback against unsatisfying job in books like “Bullshit Jobs” and communities like r/antiwork. The increasing complexity of the technology-based economy leads more and more people to be disconnected from the consequences of their work. If you can't feel like what you do matters it's easy to be dissatisfied. Manual work is sort of an ultimate cure–you can directly feel what it is you did.

The author dislikes that these jobs are considered ‘low status' even though they can often be more fulfilling (and sometimes, like certain trades, very lucrative as well). Yet to some degree the emphasis on specifically manual work is overstated and seems based on the author's specific experience in some very low-value intellectual jobs. In particular, many non-manual jobs can also provide this type of fulfillment, for instance many service jobs involve directly helping people and seeing them improved. But I do think the general idea is right, that without having the feeling that what you do matters a job is going to leave you empty inside. This can be ok, and you can make up for it with other aspects of your life (hobbies, relationships), but for those of us that want to feel satisfied with our 40+ hours/week, it's something to consider when choosing what you work on.

However, I can't give it too many stars because of some things I found annoying and distracting:
1. The author is very focus on his own experience with work, in particular mainly that of repairing motorcycles (a large % of the book discusses this). I kind of think motorcycles are generally very negative for the world, emitting far more pollution and being much less safe. Thus I find it hypocritical the author is so condescending towards certain jobs, while himself participating in an industry with huge negative externalities.
2. Related to #1, the focus on very specific hands-on work diminishes the impact of other types of work, and this is sometimes tinged with sexism. While the author does admit that because his experience is primarily with male coworkers that the book focuses on that, it seems he regards traditionally female ‘work' like cooking or child care to be unimportant (at least it's not mentioned at all) and longs for the old workplace norms where offensive jokes and sexual harassment was par for the course. Additionally, much manual work is objectively very bad, and the author kind of ignores this fact. There's a reason no one wants to work in a coal mine or a sweat shop, after all.[1]
3. Some of the digressions are a bit weird. For example, the author seems to dislike stereos, because in an earlier age more people had to learn to play musical instruments (and created a more communal experience), whereas now everyone just has perfectly-recorded music available instantly. I can see a bit of argument to this, but realistically while this idyllic scenario probably happened occasionally, it was quite rare. More realistic is that in the past people simply didn't listen to music very often at all. This is pretty evident just by considering how sparse the musical landscape was before the wide availability of radio (and especially after recorded music became available). It's hard to take someone seriously that thinks that this hasn't been an unmitigated boon for human happiness and creativity.

[1] This reminds me a bit of Anders Ericsson's book Peak, in which he claims you can basically master anything with ‘deliberate practice', but all his examples are from very narrow and specific fields with well-established training regimens and easy objective evaluation. Any claim of the form “Always X” is almost certainly wrong (yes, I see the irony).

I loved Soule's prior books The Oracle Year and Anyone but this one was kind of a mess. The first part creates a very intriguing setup of a mysterious technology that the main character has to find the origins of, and a strange “plague” spreading all over the world called The Grey (reminiscent of books like Blindness). But then we get an abrupt shift to an overly-long flashback in the whole middle section of the book that reads like a completely different novel. It lost all the pacing from the first part and left me fairly bored, not knowing why I care about any of the newly introduced characters. Finally the third part connected the two stories, but introduces so much new stuff so far into the book that it doesn't get to be explored satisfactorily and ends up with the book ending fairly suddenly.

I wish the book had just kept going with the story from the first part the whole way, and been less all over the place. We didn't get to explore any of the characters very much as a result, and didn't really learn much about the Grey at all. Thus it's unclear what the “point” of it all is. I think the novel would have been significantly improved if it were less packed with stuff and took the time to explore some of it in more depth.

It also suffers from plot holes common to books that just introduce “magic technology” that isn't fully thought through. For example, the ship has amazing technology like some kind of Star Trek energy shield, and yet they don't detect a loaded gun + satellite phone on their security scan (something that even the TSA can probably manage). Additionally it's impossible for a satphone to work inside a ship–it needs an external antenna to work if you are inside of a structure. And it also seems unlikely you could properly aim missiles at a moving ship from a one time coordinate given no additional visual targeting.

The first half of the book was kind of boring and sets up a wholly different story than the part that comes after. I enjoyed the second half more, which had more fantasy elements and was less filled with tropes. It also has the best character in the boost (the demon husband) who I was sad didn't get as many scenes as I would have liked.

The ending doesn't make sense to me. He spends 1/3 of the book in a moral quandary about using the wish, then he randomly uses it for a stupid reason on a donkey? Is he really going to risk his immortal soul for a dumb donkey? It's totally inconsistent with his entire character.

Also the time travel aspect seems like it would create too much inconsistency in the world if wishes actually have that ability.

I expected character-driven literary fiction (like her other books), but instead got a run-of-the-mill YA dystopia with a bland society and plot. The first part, from the point of view of Bird, was at least somewhat interesting because there was a bit of mystery of what happened to his mother. Once we find out that actually nothing really exciting happened, and have to listen to her life story it somehow gets even worse. I don't see much reason to prefer this over any other YA dystopia novel. It makes me sad since I absolutely loved Little Fires Everywhere.

Very well-done thriller. Flows really well so I even read it in one sitting. There is a twist at the end that has some pretty obvious clues planted along the way. I figured it out fairly early on and it was fun looking for the clues the rest of the time (if anything I think it could have been a bit more subtle). I really liked the epistolary format, and it adds a lot to the book since you are able to judge the relative reliability of different sources based on where they come from.

Well-written and easy-to-read story involving time travel and some light philosophy on the simulation hypothesis, but the plot seemed to have a lot of holes. For example (spoilers):
1. Why would the Time Institute send people to be in jail back in time if they are worried about them messing with the timeline? Even in jail, you can easily have influence on the world, and these people have no incentive not to interfere at that point.
2. How would the Time Institute even know it had been tampered with? To take an extreme example, if someone goes back in time and destroys the creator of the time machine itself, then no one in the future would be left to do anything about it. (A better handling of a similar setup is in Asimov's The End of Eternity).
3. It doesn't really make sense to me that a simulation would have trouble simulation the same person in two places. Presumably a simulation is done at the level of individual molecules/atoms, and not each human separately, but even if it is, there's no issue in computers with copying some particular program and running it simultaneously. For a better treatment of this idea, see Permutation City by Greg Egan.
4. Not exactly a plot hole, but the motivation for the main character to break the rule and save someone's life was not very clear. He just does it basically immediately, 5 min after swearing he won't. It would have made more sense for this to be better developed. Similarly, why did the main character go through with learning violin and fulfilling his fate? Based on his previous actions it seems like he might have wanted to resist it just to see what happens.

Overall, the book was easy and pleasant to read because of Mandel's fantastic writing style, but it didn't do well as a sci-fi novel, compared to others that tackle similar issues. I can see how it would be more appealing to a read that didn't have as much experience with science fiction.

This is listed as an adult book but reads much more like a YA. It's very plot/dialog heavy and doesn't have especially complex characters (though there is some amount of character development, primarily for the protagonist). The primary antagonist is very much a “kitchen sink” villain (they do everything bad you can think of, and more besides), which adds to the YA feel. It does have some exciting plot twists and is a pretty easy read in general, although it probably could have been trimmed a bit. Overall it was a fun read but it's not really something that I'm going to remember by next year.

There is some very minimal romance in the book. It kind of feels like it was forced in to check a box since it's otherwise irrelevant to the plot and takes up all of two pages. Probably would have been better to just leave it out at that point.

Comments on the ending:
The ending was portrayed as fairly positive/upbeat, like yay we saved the entirety of the station. But wait, the 14 billion humans of Earth are still dead in this timeline. Isn't that, like, pretty sad still? Are we really supposed to believe that the omnipotent "Wisdom" couldn't think of a single way to avoid that? It seems like only two things were even tried. That aspect wouldn't bother me as much if the ending was given as more of a negative one, but it's very chipper and lighthearted.

I was a bit disappointed the author spent so much time on other people rather than von Neumann. A large part of the book is background on the science/current events of the time and discusses various other persons, whereas I wanted more of a biography focusing on von Neumann himself. There's not much discussion about his personal life or what he was really like, merely a summary of his work.

I expected to read a biography of Keynes and a discussion of economics. Part of this book was that, but over half of it is a political tirade against free markets that uses every rhetorical fallacy there is. The biographical sections are sparse and don't really give an idea of what Keynes was like, for example the author skipped entirely his early life, and Keynes seems to exist purely to the extent that he perpetuates ideas the author agrees with. The last third of the big is completely divorced from reality and reads like an extremely left-wing blog tirade (even Clinton & Obama are considered way too “free market”) and it feels as if it were written in 2010, considering that it ends with the financial crisis and doesn't actually discuss the aftermath and rebuilding.

Definitely stay away from this if you are interested in unbiased looks at history.