Colin Gooding

@DownGoesBrown is one of my favorite Twitter follows, he's clever and quick to react to breaking stories in the NHL. So I bought this in part just as a way to support someone who's given me tons of free entertainment.

The book was good, but it didn't live up to what I expected from him. There are some neat stories here and a few good jokes, but nothing overly memorable.

Great modern epic

I love how this reads like an epic poem, and yet still feels modern. The writing is beautifully I descriptive and gives great characterization to each god and hero as soon as you meet them.

I've read or am at least familiar with a lot of the mythological stories referenced here, but seeing them from this perspective as Circe weaves in and out of the events was really fun.

I knew a little bit about this story before beginning this book, but the absurdity of what these people got away with for so long is fascinating. CEO Elizabeth Holmes and COO Sunny Balwani are cartoonishly evil, constantly intimidating and manipulating people internally while outwardly projecting a completely different persona to stakeholders and the public.

I actually thought it felt a bit too editorialized in their portrayals. There's a little bit here and there about how charming and intelligent seeming Holmes is, but none of it was as specific as the bad things she does, so it was hard for me to understand how she got away with some things without filling in a lot of blanks. Balwani meanwhile seems to have no redeeming qualities besides the fact that Holmes likes him. He comes across as a pure thug.

The accounts of all the goings on in Theranos are crazy though and described in great detail, clearly a lot of research was done and many people consulted. I listened to this via audiobook from the library and the ~12 hours blew by, I listened at any chance I had. I'll be checking out the HBO documentary and maybe the podcast soon as well.

An engaging read about a KGB agent who fed secrets to the British for over a decade. I like how a lot of this is both thrilling and rather mundane compared to a Hollywood “spy” story and the details of things like how the British were able to use the information he gave them without giving him away and things like how little miscommunications or inconveniences can derail a plan are really interesting.

I believe this author has written a few other real-life spy books so I'll probably check another one out in the near future.

I'm not sure what to make of this. I generally don't have a problem with broad tropes and cliches when a story has some fun with it, but there was very little levity in this book and it felt like it was trying to make profound statements that just came across as very dull.

Kya is a dirty swamp dweller who is actually alluringly beautiful. She's uneducated and illiterate, but actually a brilliant scientist and author. She even manages to find herself in essentially a classic racial prejudice story, but she doesn't even need a white saviour because she herself is white (what?).

The character Tate leaves part way through this book seemingly only to cause tension for the plot. The central murder is too unexplained by the last five minutes of the book for the reader to not expect something to happen, (and really only Kya or maybe Tate could have done it?) so it takes the punch out of something which maybe could have been a nice little reveal.

There's a serene quality to much of the writing that I enjoyed and a few plot and thematic sort of callbacks (though the effect was often lessened by an exact explanation as to its meaning the moment after). I thought the interweaving of the timelines mostly worked as well.

I found myself just not really drawn into this one too much. I'm not sure if it's the fact that it was an audiobook or not, as I've had various degrees of success with them, but my mind wandered while listening.

It has some well written scenes and interesting themes, but just didn't hold my attention unfortunately.

A fun little memoir filled with lots of great little behind-the-scenes anecdotes and also inside opinions on stories I had already heard. It was well placed and never dwelled on any one subject for too long, so I found it really easy to read through quickly.

Reiss packs a bunch of little joke asides in constantly and for the most part they are pretty funny, but one problem I had (which I'm sure Reiss would find hilarious) is that sometimes I couldn't tell if something actually happened or was just a joke. There are so many strange things that have happened on The Simpsons (such as Michael Jackson appearing as a guest star, yet bringing a voice impersonator to do his singing parts) and Reiss also throws in statements that are clearly not true for laughs (stating that a Feng Shui expert ensures the animation is in harmony before the show is aired), that when he makes an aside about something strange that I hadn't heard of before I have no idea if its true.

Anyways, I'm going to go watch some classic Simpsons episodes now.

This was a really fun little adaptation of one of my favorite podcasts ever.

Early on, it wasn't working as well because I'm not sure that it can really capture the off-the-cuff goofs that work so well in the podcast (though it does a decent job at still keeping the tone in the spirit of that), but near the end as it got more info the meat of what would become the overall story of the podcast I really liked it. I'm looking forward to reading the next one.

Also, Barry Bluejeans is maybe my favorite character name ever.

This book is exactly what you would expect it to be for a book of it's kind, and I'm afraid that this kind of book just isn't really for me.

There are things that it does that are interesting in theory, but I didn't actually enjoy that much in practice. For instance, every single character in this book is a shitty person. Not most characters, every. single. character. Maybe it looks like one character is on a redemption arc? No, they just re-enforced earlier held beliefs now. Maybe this other character will stick to their convictions about not being selfish like the other people of their caste? No, they will be just as terrible when pressed. Again, it was kind of interesting to have the book not fall into established heroic tropes, but at the same time I just kind of found it to be not fun and I didn't really care for any of the characters.

I didn't hate the book. The writing itself is pretty good and often feels cinematic, particularly in a chaotic scene in the middle that feels like a camera sweeping along to follow a new character every few minutes. Early on I struggled to keep the characters straight, especially when I started via audiobook, but when I switched to reading the ebook I was able to slow down a bit and sort things out better.

I could see this series going to interesting places as it continues, but I don't think I will be reading more to find out.

I really enjoyed this, especially listening to the audiobook expertly narrated by Stephen Fry himself, but at the end of the day it's a relatively straightforward (and a tad too twee for my tastes) telling of a lot of well known myths. There isn't any analysis or unpacking of these stories until the short afterward in which Fry explicitly states that he just wanted to let the stories speak for themselves.

And this is all well and good, they are great stories and if you haven't heard them before you should definitely listen to this! I knew most of them quite well, I think about once every year or so since I was a kid I dive back into Greek myths, but there were a handful of them that I was less familiar with.

I see Fry also has sequels to this book about Heroes, Troy, and an upcoming one about the Odyssey, all of which I am looking forward to listening to at some point!

I feel like a had a pretty broad, but shallow understanding of Leonardo da Vinci's work before reading this (I used to play an old CD-ROM game on our Power Mac all the time when I was a kid that was all about his inventions and ideas). It was nice to have it filled out a little more.

I especially liked how this book highlighted his curiosity as a scientific mind and how it went into how he was received but others people at the time and how he interacted with them.

This scratches my sci-fi itches both in fully exploring a “What If” premise with further and further “What If” questions, and uses the premise to examine different elements of our humanity.

I thought some of the characters behave a bit inconsistently just for the melodrama of it, and it's a bit sex obsessed at times, but overall the world and characters are very engaging and kept me guessing.

I really enjoyed this. It's like a bit more of a jovial Remains of the Day, in a way? I'm a sucker for tales of duty and social obligation like this, and the sophisticated dry wit is also right in my wheelhouse.

The narration in the audiobook by Nicholas Guy Smith is perfect. He speaks in an pleasing upper class British accent throughout (he doesn't really attempt Russian as I think it would come off strange), but also does some subtle and not so subtle changes when other characters speak. It definitely set the tone for the entire story.

I'm a sucker for reading something before watching a movie or television adaptation, so when I heard good things about this year's Pachinko series on Apple TV+ I decided I had to read this.

This is a multi-generational drama set in a culture and period that I did not have a lot of familiarity with. I actually somehow had no idea that Japan had annexed Korea for the better part of the first half of the 20th century, so seeing a representation of racism and oppression in that setting was something new to me and drove me to a bit of further reading on the history.

Between the writing and the narration of the audiobook I listened to, the whole book had a stoic matter-of-fact quality to it that worked a lot of the time in a somber “life trudges forward” sort of way, but at other times made the story feel a bit long and drawn out. Time passes effortlessly and characters age drastically from one moment to the next, which in some cases made them feel like someone I knew intimately and in some cases I felt as if I never had a chance to understand them. It was a bit frustrating at times though it did also add a lifelike quality to the whole thing.

I'm really interested to see what the show is like now, because it does not feel like a straightforward thing to adapt and I'm curious to see what angle they come at it, and I think I'm glad I read this first to be able to analyze the show in that way. We'll see!

I really like this series, these characters, and Sanderson's writing, but this one felt especially long to me. There are certain points where everything is happening at a mile a minute and I couldn't put the book down, but other times dragged quite a bit for me.

There are some things that happen, especially in the climax and denouement, that seem very cliche and yet still mostly work with the way that Sanderson is able to build momentum into a frantic blur of scenes. There's a fight near the end that feels like something straight out of a final boss encounter in a video game.

Sanderson has built a great world in this series and tends to dole out interesting new ideas at rapid pace, but it seemed like in the last act so many new ideas came out of seemingly nowhere (though I do admit I may have just flat out missed some foreshadowing) that it lost some of the impact for me as it felt as though literally anything could have happened.

I still enjoyed this book quite a bit and couldn't stop reading for the last quarter of it or so, and I'll eagerly await the next one.

I'm not sure why I didn't like this more. I liked the tone of the book, the author is quippy and flippant while still reporting on whatever the subject at hand is. And I thought the idea of the subject matter was interesting. I think the actual content that was focused on just didn't hold my attention. My digital loan from the library for this audiobook lapsed twice because I didn't finish it when I had taken it out, I just wasn't super compelled to listen to it for the most part.

I don't think this was a bad book, just not really for me.

I feel like I've read a lot of books so far this year that I don't really have any strong thoughts on. This is another one of those. It's well written, but I don't think I was thoroughly engaged while reading through it.

I've had it on my to-read list for awhile and just picked it up because it's been turned into a TV show now and I heard something intriguing about the premise that I didn't realise before that sounded really neat, but ultimately I just thought this was okay. Oh well.

I don't think I have actually ever re-read any of these books. I got the first three in a box set for Christmas in 1999 and then bought every other book on release.

I thought this would be a good first chapter book to read with my daughter, and after a few false starts over the last year or two, this time she really got into it and paid attention as I read. Her review: “That was a good book”.

This first book was always my favorite of the series. I just like the way the world and characters are introduced and I remember being blown away by the reveal at the end. There isn't a ton of side plots or anything, it's a relatively lean and quick story.

Looking forward to reading through the whole series again with my daughter. It's a shame that JK Rowling is a bit of a terrible person though, oh well.

Final note: The fact that the students care about the House Cup so much when the points are complete bullshit ala Whose Line Is It Anyway is absolutely insane.

I already knew a lot of the main talking points here from co-workers and I like to think that I'm both empathetic and honest in my conversations with others already, but the book has a lot of little tips on how to be more constructive with feedback without being mean and highlights a lot of a good examples of how to use Radical Candor in different situations.

Kim Scott has had an interesting career, working for several different high profile companies, so it's interesting to hear her perspective on how some of them operate drastically differently while still being successful.

I got the audiobook from the library after a few month waiting period and learned that you can't renew a book on Libby when it has that long of a wait list, so I ended up listening to the last half of it on ~1.5x speed, which I never do. It's read by the author herself though, and she can be a little slow and monotonous, so I didn't feel too bad about it.

This is going to be more a review of the audiobook than anything else.

This thing was all over the place for me. There are scenes/ideas/characters in here that I loved, but other parts that felt a bit aimless.

The huge cast of recognizable actors is great and helps to keep the multitude of characters distinct, but I still often had a hard time focusing on what was going on. Many chapters consist of quotes from historical accounts (real and fictitious) complete with citations, that are handled fairly well here, but still feel jarring in audio as something that I would naturally skim over when reading.

This might actually be something I try reading again later because I think it will be an entirely different experience.

I kinda just started reading this as a sort of “classic” that I should read, but I really ended up enjoying it. I know this is more or less just a collection of connected short stories, but I really liked having a novel that spandex across centuries and didn't have a real main character (though Seldon is a presence throughout). Some of it is a little clumsy or on the nose, but I like the idea of psychohistory and the way the foundation operates. Fun read.