Colin Gooding

I think I'm ready to give up on narrative non-fiction.

I've read a few acclaimed books with this structure, such as The Lost City Of Z (also by Grann) and The Devil In The White City, and they just haven't been for me. I find the subject matter really interesting, but the storytelling just puts me off.

There's something about the suspension of disbelief when true-life scenes are described in detail combined with the book usually covering so many things that happened in real life that may or may not be interesting. With movies about real life events I immediately accept that it is fictionalized to some degree and is edited down so that each moment is crucial to the story.

Anyways, there's definitely an interesting and harrowing bit of history at the core here and I'm curious to see what Scorcese does with this for his film.

I first read this book over a decade ago and I remember really loving it. When it was picked for my book club, I was worried that it had only appealed to my younger immature self and that I would be turned off by it now.

Turns out upon a re-read, that was not the case. Maybe I just haven't matured as much as I thought since then, but I really loved this once again.

The way Hornby writes these suspended adolescent characters (which I believe he basically has in all his novels) just works for me so well. The POV character Rob is really just a loser; he is lazy and stubborn, and his actions (or inaction) often cause hardships for those that are important in his life (including himself).

But he is keenly aware of this. He has a pretty decent moral compass, he just chooses not to follow it (at least most of the time). He's a Peter Pan, he peaked in his personal happiness in early college and doesn't want to move beyond that point in his life. He thinks that latching on to things like judging others music collections or sleeping with different women will give his life more meaning, but deep down he knows that he needs more and is afraid of that change.

This is an extremely male adolescent book and definitely won't appeal to everyone, but I just find it to be very honest and I emphasize with the character even though he sucks and I would dislike him in real life. There is core emotional truth here for me and just a perspective on male responsibility and growth that I really value.

Looking forward to discussing this one!

I really loved Ready Player One. I know it gets a lot of criticism for just being a string of references, but I thought it nailed exactly what it was going for, it was fun, indulgent nostalgia wish fulfillment. I had varying levels of familiarity with the different references, but even the ones I had no attachment too were engaging because of the enthusiasm put into it.

When this sequel came out, I heard a lot of similar criticisms of the poor reference-heavy writing that I dismissed and queued this up to read soon. But then I saw people who liked the first book being pretty critical of this one as well so I decided to push it off... but then recently the audiobook became available through the library's Skip The Line program despite being reserved for several months, and I was between audiobooks, so I jumped on it.

** Spoilers **

Ready Player Two is not very fun. The main character isn't fun to be with, he's kind of a shitty person at a shitty place in his life and not happy about it. In the first book, he gleefully undertakes his quest and is a super fan of everything he experiences, in this one he barely knows anything about what he's doing and is just forced to do it quickly by the bad guy. I'm even more familiar with the references in this book than the last and yet they were far less fun.

The way this book tries to both bring up social and moral issues of the technology it uses, while also refusing to have any consequences of it for the characters is absolutely insane to me. The entire plot is about how a rogue AI based off of a real person neatly kills billions of people, but the conclusion at the end is that it was just a one-off occurrence and actually AI memory people are actually super neat? The main character spies on people without their knowledge, copies people's entire consciousnesses into these AI things without their knowledge, and at worst he gets a scolding from his girlfriend about that, who eventually comes around to it anyway because she has her grandma back digitally now. But at least the main character learned enough to not use this technology anymore, even though he continues to profit off billions of people still using it and also maintains direct communication with the AI created by it.

I don't think it's all bad, there's still some enjoyable moments that reminded me of what it felt to read the first book. I was probably wavering between a two and a three star rating while reading most of it. The ending definitely cemented it on the lower end that I was leaning to anyways.

I still think the first book probably holds up, as I outlined some of the differences above, but reading this makes me worried that I would have a lot of problems with it if I were to read it again today. Maybe I'll give it a shot sometime.

I'm pretty sure my workplace practices some form of at least 90% of the ideas and advice in this book, so this is a bit hard to review given that I didn't really learn much from it, but it has a clear influence on my daily life.

It was still an easy listen and hearing it straight from the horses mouth with some clear examples from Google was interesting.

This is the third Ishiguro novel I've read, the other two being The Remains Of The Day and Never Let Me Go, and I am struck by how different their subjects are.

I did enjoy this book as well, though I thought it was a little drawn out and the cryptic qualities of some of the characters' intentions and the reveal of the world didn't always work.

I did love the prose when it was very specific such as in some of the dueling scenes. Ishiguro is great at dealing with the dignity of his characters and those scenes really brought that to light here.

Just like the more recent Ted Chiang short story collection I read recently, Exhalation, this is a mix of beautifully told stories with scientific/philosophical leanings (Tower of Babylon, Story of Your Life, Hell is the Absence of God) and some other stories that feel like term papers with a bit of a narrative wrapping (Understand, Division by Zero, Seventy-Two Letters).

I think it's totally worth reading for the former stories, and the latter aren't bad either, just can become tedious or hard to follow at times.

I was excited to read this after always hearing good things and seeing recommendations for it everywhere, but I didn't really like it at all...

It should have been called The White City (Featuring a Devil) because like 90% of this book is just about the logistics of setting up the World's Fair in Chicago and how the buildings were built. I found most of it pretty tedious, though there are a few interesting segments, such as the one about the first Ferris Wheel, and the actual writing is quite good.

The “devil” sections were pretty interesting, but besides the last hour or so of the book (which I actually really enjoyed) they seemed few and far between. I found myself losing the plot on these parts thigh, partially because of the infrequency and partially because of waning interest in the Fair story that it was interspersed in.

I listened to this on Audible (via their “Send this Book” feature, thanks Katie!) and Scott Brick is an excellent narrator. I've listened to him do Moneyball and In Cold Blood as well, and he just had a great voice for this.

I ended up not connecting with this book as much as I expected to. I'm not sure if I just wasn't in the mood for it, but I found the multi-generational slice-of-life storytelling to be a bit of a drag and I was never too endeared with any of the characters. I found myself searching for themes to connect disparate parts of the story together and often came up empty.

However, Eugenides is a gifted wordsmith (and Kristoffer Tabori does great work bringing the words to life in the audiobook) and so I still enjoyed much of my time reading this.

I'm of two minds about this book. On one hand, I think it has a lot of neat ideas and character moments. It is well written in a lot of ways and certainly has many gripping scenes that I read intently and I was quickly done a chapter and onto the next without realizing it.

But at the same time, this is the most fedora-tipping, gentleman wish-fulfillment thing I have ever read that's not an internet meme. I think the most perfect example of what I'm talking about is a scene in which the main character's rival/bully is flirting with a girl who is clearly unwelcoming to his advances. He's reading her a poem that he wrote, and our hero steps in and says:

“I'm not sure I can trust the literacy of someone who tries to rhyme ‘north' with ‘worth.' No wonder you have to hold women down to get them to listen to it.”

“My lady scriv” I said to her with a bow....

I enjoyed this quite a bit, but oftentimes I find myself struggling to place everything together and follow along, though there are certainly moments where specific things fall into place. I'm not sure if that's all by design, or if listening to it as an audiobook caused me to miss things, or if I just don't think good.

It's been awhile since I've read Foundation by Isaac Asimov, but the scale and subject of this story very much reminded me of it. I didn't really connect strongly to any characters, but there are so many fascination ideas and really cool showy moments that had me captivated.

I'm not too much of a series reader, so I'm not going to get to the sequels right away, but I'll definitely queue them up to see where things go from here.

I had no idea this was about a pandemic when I started this, which was interesting to read now. The way it tells the story of the pandemic and aftermath only through the perspective of a handful of characters, including jumping around in various points in time via very subtle links from one section to the next, was really unique and kept me wondering what the next subject would be.

I've read and enjoyed a fair bit of post-apocalyptic fiction (The Road is one of my favorite books) and most of them are written in a very desperate, bleak way. There are certainly moments of that here, but the writing actually feels very tender and contemplative. Often these stories are about the protagonists holding on to the bare shreds of humanity that they have left, this book felt more about how humanity changes when all the comforts and systems that have always been there to rely on disappear and a new world must be forged. It struck me as fairly hopeful and was a bit of a breath of fresh air.

If I had to nitpick, I would say there are only two things I didn't love. One was a major villain that was a little over the top compared to the rest of the story and goes a bit against what I was talking about in the previous paragraph. The other is that all the POV characters have interesting diverse backgrounds, but their core personalities are all very similar sort of “everyman” types where they are good people trying to do the right thing even though they have flaws and regrets. I think the characters still work, but I felt the voices really weren't that distinct when the POV switched.

DISCLAIMER: I listened to this on the Libby app through the Library, which listed this as an unabridged audiobook, however it was actually a three hour BBC radio adaptation miniseries. I'm still going to count this as read, haha.

This was well produced with several different voice actors, including Brian Cox in the lead role, giving great performances. It was a neat way to experience the story.

I thought it was a bit slow to start and I'm not sure I was following all the setup as well as I should have been, but once the story goes into full intrigue mode it had me hooked. Each new piece of information revealed keeps you changing your mind as to how things will resolve. The book also raises some broader political and moral questions, asking how far is too far for the greater good.

I'll probably try to read some more le Carré in the future, maybe even another BBC production!

I haven't been as engaged with a thriller book like this in a long while. I was listening to this via audiobook as I drove for half a day to go on vacation, and then when I arrived I kept sneaking in time to listen to more because I wanted to see what would happen next. The format of bouncing between the husband's perspective and missing wife's journals probably isn't really a new idea, but works well here to build tension and keep the reader guessing. These characters are really interestingly drawn as well, early on I thought some of the writing was a bit pretentious or eye-rolly, but quickly realized that was intentional characterization.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but unfortunately I kind of suspected some plot points just based on little comments or whatever that I have read about the movie unintentionally, I wish I had zero knowledge going into this, but it was still fun to second guess myself a bit and try to figure out how things would get to where I thought they were going.

I'm not sure if it was just through the writing or the voice of the narrator (Cassandra Campbell) of the audiobook I was listening to, but one of my favourite things about this book was the way it establishes a sort of dreary tone that hangs over the whole thing. The suspenseful moments work well and you can feel the discomfort and fear of the characters.

There are some weird story beats and expository details that took me a bit out of the book as I wondered if they really made any logical sense, but the story kind of innately has a built-in way to dismiss people acting in such ways. And there are some moments and decisions that really do land well.

Definitely enjoyed it overall, curious to see how Netflix managed to adapt it.

There are certainly a lot of interesting ideas in this book, however it's of a style that I very much do not connect with. Oftentimes it just feels like textbook excerpts on culture and politics, and I felt myself losing focus and struggling to follow the actual plot or main characters.

Just not for me unfortunately!

While much of this book is extremely on-the-nose (the aquarium scene near the very end comes to mind) I still really enjoyed it.

I found it interesting that even though The Circle is certainly a Brave New World style dystopian entity that often oversteps its idealism into obviously creepy and invasive areas, the arguments they make for their actions are pretty darn compelling. I found myself wanting to hear more of what the “Wise Men” had to say about the world. Maybe I just like the way Eggers writes. Even the early parts of the book that are just setting up the world I found very interesting just because of the way he describes it.

Though yes, there are lots of problems. Mae feels like a plot device masquerading as a character. She does whatever is needed to serve the direction the story/The Circle is going in, with no real consistency to her. I found most of other characters to be pretty well fleshed out though (okay maybe not Kalden).

I still found this an enjoyable page-turner and I'm glad I read it.

This was a wonderfully written book and it was interesting to see a sombre look at WWII that didn't even really touch on the Holocaust at all.

There were points midway through the book that dragged a bit though, and I thought events ultimately wandered a bit too far into “look what war does to us” territory, but I still thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

I find rating a book like this difficult because a lot of the opinions expressed in it around how to foster an effective working environment are already practiced at my work place, so I find myself without a lot of new ideas coming out of it. I'm not sure if these things were as widely adopted six years ago when they were written, but they certainly are now.

The book is well written and charming though, and provides some neat insights to the process at Pixar over the years (though again there are a few stories I had already known, perhaps just from other sources referencing this book).

I read Way of Kings a little while back, and while I enjoyed it, it didn't really completely capture me and I put off reading this one. I'm glad I came back to it though, because I really got into this book.

I think it can be a little cheesey at times, but I love the idealistic characters and the way they learn about their powers over time. I will definitely get to Oathbringer sooner.