Emma Goto

I really enjoy T Kingfisher books, but I think it's more for the romance more than anything else so this was pretty light on it and hence the 4 stars. Still a cosy fantasy read.

Shizuka Satomi has sacrificed the souls of six violinists to the devil, and has now found her seventh soul in runaway teen and violin prodigy Katrina. When she visits a local donut shop, owner Lan Tran catches her eye. What she doesn't realise is that the donut shop hides a spaceship, and the Tran family are actually aliens from another planet.

In amongst the quirky plot, the book touches on a lot of serious topics. The main one being the transphobia that Katrina experiences throughout the book. Her parents are unsupportive and abusive, she has to do sex work to make a living, and there's mentions of sexual assault. When she performs as a violinist on stage, she's misgendered and made fun of for wearing a dress. Most of the characters are Asian, so we also see some casual racism directed their way, as well as some bigotry towards two other LGBT characters. There's also the side plot of a violin-maker with super low self-esteem, because her father told her that the secrets of violin-making can only be passed down to his sons.

Unfortunately it didn't quite come together for me. The book tries to straddle too many things. I'll admit I went into expecting a comfy sci-fi read (the book is described as “Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet”) so I finished it feeling really confused and disappointed.

The book is about an affair, so the main character is a trash human being but at the same time it's beautifully written so I couldn't help but like it anyway.

The beginning and middle felt quite dry and impersonal, like I wasn't really connecting with the characters and they were just going through with the motions of the plot - and it was like, well what's the point? It got better towards the end so it redeemed itself a little.

This one was hampered a bit by being the middle book in the trilogy. It ends on a huge cliffhanger, and I spent most of the book looking forward to reading about what happens after they graduate, which won't come until book 3.

Huge alien beings known as Architects have the power to wipe out planets, and no one knows why they do it. Enter the crew of the Vulture God, a salvage ship that discovers evidence of the Architects returning after 50 years of peace in the galaxy.

I loved Tchaikovsky's Children of Time so I was really excited to read this one. However I found the first third to first half to be very dense on information and quite hard to keep up with. Luckily if you stick through with it, it does get better.

The author is really good at writing about people and their relationships with others in a believable way. The ending was also very cathartic.


The part where it fell down a bit was that the entire book is leading up to a house party and wildfire in Malibu and foreshadowing something "bad" happening but it turned out to be a fairly positive ending.

Having also read Michelle Obama's recent memoir, I'm going to have to say I enjoyed her's more. She spoke from the heart and was a bit more personal. Barack's was a bit more of a play-by-play of his interactions with leaders across the world, and the work that goes into his policies (war in the middle east, affordable care act). Of course that was still interesting to hear about, though!

The general premise of this book is that two “best friends” are secretly in love with each other for 10+ years. Maybe that's romantic for some people but I found the way it was written was just frustrating, like surely after a couple of years you'd get your shit together!!

I'll give it a 3.5 rounded up to a 4/5 since I didn't find it too be too bad for a romance novel, otherwise.

A book about a team reintroducing wolves back into Scotland to help restore the ecosystem. It's fiction, but does take real-life inspiration from how wolves were successfully reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. The story comes with a side of romance and murder mystery which is not quite as compelling as the wolves, though.

Not a big fan of the ending - it felt absurd that the sister was responsible for killing a grown man, nearly killing another, and killing a dog (the biggest crime of all, tbh) and then she gets away with it, no psychiatric treatment necessary, and conveniently goes off to die in the forest on her own.

A wholesome romance about a girl meeting a sort-of-ghost girl that has been stuck on a New York subway train for 30 years. I liked the fantasy element, it made it more interesting to read than a regular romance book.

I had assumed this book was about what it's like to be an Asian American so I didn't think I would relate too much, but the author is actually half white/half Korean, and as a fellow half-Asian I feel so seen

Less of a productivity/self-help book and more of an author's musings on how there is no such thing as peak productivity, and as much as you want to try for it and reach that feeling of fulfilment, you're just gonna try for the rest of your life and never really reach there (lol).

I found this didn't grip me as much as Bad Blood did (the book about Theranos, another dodgy startup with a charismatic founder). Probably because the stakes were lower and they actually did have a real product (albeit one that's not really profitable).

At the end, Neumann walks away with hundreds of millions of dollars and WeWork still exists as a company so it doesn't quite have that satisfying feeling of justice either!

Nonetheless it was still an entertaining read.

I enjoyed Weir's first book about a science dude on Mars, but decided to give his second one a miss after hearing lackluster reviews about his attempt at a female protagonist.

For his third book, he's gone back to his tried-and-true approach of having a science dude talk about a lot of science shit and although my eyes glaze over as all the science shit happens, it was a fun and heartwarming read.

Heartwarming isn't the first word that comes to mind when the plot centres around him waking up alone on a spaceship but it really does turn out that way, somehow.

I don't want to spoil it any more than that, so give it a read if you like sci-fi (I would love if they could turn this one into a movie too).

Nadia Eghbal's recent book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, covers what the open source experience is like for maintainers today.

It ends with the following sentence:

“We don’t have all the answers yet, but I’m hoping this book helps point us towards the right questions.”

This felt like a very apt conclusion, for I did walk away from this book feeling a lot more sympathy for those who do work in open source, but also without any real answers or solutions for what we can do about open source.

This post is a summary of some of the things I learned from Nadia’s book. At around 250 pages it’s not too long of a read so I would definitely recommend buying the book for yourself if you have any interest in this topic.The open source community has grown friendlier, and more inclusive

Eghbal points out that open source has come a long way in becoming a more open and inclusive community. Repositories now have codes of conduct, and there is a culture of being generally welcoming and friendly towards first-time contributors. This contrasts with the earlier “benevolent dictators” of open source like Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux) who in 2018 apologised for his many years of "unprofessional and uncalled for" behaviour.

I’ll admit gave me a chuckle when I turned the page to see Torvalds giving the finger, juxtaposed with Sindre Sorhus surrounded by Huskies.

Github is also credited for reducing the barrier to participating in open source. Since we have standardised on Github as the place most open source repositories live, this means users are more likely to be familiar with the interface (and to already have an account). This makes it a lot easier for users to open issues when they encounter bugs or have questions, as well as to raise pull requests to fix these bugs or add new features.

Popularity can lead to maintainer fatigue

The generally welcoming nature of open source combined with the ease by which users can create PRs or issues can result in a lot of work for maintainers (especially those who maintain a repository by themselves). They may feel pressured to respond to every issue and pull request received, and to spend time helping contributors to get their pull request to a state where it can be merged.

Of course, not all contributors are a burden. It may be that by taking the time to help a first-time contributor merge a pull request, they could go on to contribute more useful pull requests in the future. But if more than 50% of contributors are one-off contributors to a project, that can be a lot of time invested by maintainers that they're not going to see a return on.

This pressure can cause some maintainers to want to quit. However even quitting can be hard! Deleting a popular repository could “break the internet” as was the case with left-pad. And finding someone to take over your repository might mean needing to put your faith in a relative stranger, who could end up adding malicious code to steal your Bitcoins.

Should open source be a one-way mirror?

One of the potential suggestions Eghbal poses to this problem is to make open source a "one-way mirror". In practice, this would mean that users would be able to see the code, as well as any discussions that maintainers are having, but would no longer be able to open pull requests or issues asking for help.

Maintainers would be able to opt-in certain contributors who they know would bring value, or they could allow people who are sponsoring their project access as well.

This would drastically reduce the amount of time maintainers have to spend responding to users’ requests, and allow them to do more high-value work.

With the inclusive and welcoming nature of open source, there could be some anger directed towards maintainers who take this approach. I think it would be too drastic of a change to be widely adopted any time soon, but I think there's a lot of inspiration we can take from this idea. Maybe there's some sort of middle ground?

Looking for solutions

Eghbal has pointed out some of the problems plaguing open source today, but given this is a very hard problem to solve, understandably there are no perfect solutions yet.

To some extent, we can mitigate some of the busywork maintainers have to do by using bots and other automation (like running tests when contributors open PRs). Maintainers can also uphold a certain set of standards that a pull request must meet before it becomes reviewed, and provide clear documentation to help first-time contributors meet these standards.

Maintainers could also employ curators who could maintain a similar role to what moderators do on Twitch - weed out any low-value issues or pull requests, and surface to the maintainers only the issues and pull requests that are worth the attention.

As Github is the platform of choice for open source, maintainers are also reliant on Github to provide the features they need to work effectively. For example, users can now vote on issues by using the “thumbs up” emoji, but for a long time this feature was not available, and so maintainers had to deal with receiving notifications from users leaving “+1” comments.

## Conclusion

As someone who has dabbled a little bit in the open source community, Working in Public has provided me with a lot of food for thought, and definitely makes me more sympathetic towards maintainers!

The book feels especially relevant this month with Hacktoberfest, which has unfortunately caused a lot of difficulty for maintainers of open source projects.

I'm interested to see what direction the open source community takes into the future. I think the idea of curating issues/PRs on repositories (similar to Twitch moderation) could also be a great way for people to start contributing to an open source repository if they don't feel comfortable enough with the codebase, but want to help out.

Maybe there's some way we can crowdsource this and create some sort of platform so that maintainers can ask for help curating, and volunteers can step in. Could be interesting!

Similar to “Never Let Me Go”, Ishiguro likes to do this sort of vaguely dystopian sci-fi where he doesn't quite flesh out all the details.. I need answers, damnit!!

Why is Karla decommissioned but left “alive”? Wouldn't it be kinder to turn her off? And the sun is probably just a regular old sun, that Klara is mistakenly expecting to be a God that can save Josie - but then it does? Is that just a coincidence?

Cute fantasy story about a princess who has to break a curse to save her brothers who have been turned into cranes.

Nothing groundbreaking, but it is a YA so I won't go too hard on it. The book cover is gorgeous too.

On Writing Well's key message is to be economical in your writing. Find the most efficient way to express your ideas. Skip the fancy prose, because your readers will see through its pretentiousness, and instead focus on expressing your ideas clearly.

As a writer you might worry that by doing this, you will lose any chance standing out and having your own unique writing style. But like carpentry, you have to start from the foundations. And over time, your style will grow.

The book reiterates some of the advice laid out in the Elements of Style:
* Use active verbs
* Cut out most adverbs (e.g. “blared loudly” and “blared” mean the same thing)
* Skip little qualifiers like “a little” or “sort of” as it reduces your authoritativeness

Some more general writing tips include:
* Practice writing every day
* Read your writing out loud to make sure it flows well
* Write for yourself

> “If you write for yourself, you'll reach the people want to write for.”

There are chapters on writing about different genres of non-fiction writing. On travel writing: skip the cliches. Everyone already knows the Grand Canyon is majestic. What's more interesting to your readers is your own experiences. The book covers other topics like business, sports and memoirs. For me, these were the most boring since I had no interest in these genres.

Something I have a bad habit of doing is using exclamation points, and Zinsser discourages use of this as well. Your readers are smart enough to pick up on when something is exciting or unusual, without you having to point it out to them with a “!”.

The only dated part of this book is the use of “he” as a default when talking about hypothetical situations. As part of the 30th Anniversary Edition, the author says he has replaced 300+ usages of “he”, since many women brought it up to him after they had read the book. However he didn't replace them all, and disappointingly he says:

> “But let's face it: the English language is stuck with the generic masculine. To turn every ‘he' into a ‘he or she' . . . would clog the language.”

Otherwise, this book is still quite relevant today, and I would definitely recommend it for serious writers. For a hobby writer like me, I would have preferred it to be a little bit shorter.

Sci-fi with a side of romance. Jainan's husband Taam dies in an accident, and so he is quickly married off to Taam's cousin Kiem to maintain the treaty between their two planets. Turns out it's not an accident and a murder-mystery ensues.

There's a bunch of space politics, although Jainan and Kiem are both super bad at politics and just go around revealing all their findings to anyone important (including the Emperor) which kind of seems like political suicide and/or very dangerous.

Regardless it's refreshing to be able to read a romance novel that's not completely trashy, especially in sci-fi (is it just me or is romance is more common in fantasy?) so this was a pleasant read.

The Four Winds follows a broken family as they migrate from drought-ridden Texas to the green “promised land” of California during the Great Depression.

The main character, Elsa, is a downtrodden woman, which is at least a step up from the previous Kristen Hannah book I read (“The Great Alone”) where the main character was downtrodden and abused. I'm not the biggest fan of her weak characters but maybe it's more realistic that way, I dunno.

I'll give it a 4.5 stars. An interesting retelling of Achilles' story, focusing on his relationship with Patroclus. The Iliad itself doesn't outright mention any sort of romance between the two of them but interestingly, other ancient Greeks did interpret it as a romance. It's only more recently that people were keen to interpret their relationship as a friendship instead.

I enjoyed how flawed Achilles' character became as his pride got the better of him.The ending didn't really make me as sad as I thought it would, since in the end the two were reunited in the afterlife. Another fun fact I learnt was that Achilles and Patroclus were really buried in the same tomb, and that Alexander the Great and his male "companion" (friendship or romantic, who knows) paid it a visit.

I always go into romance novels with low expectations, so this one turned out to be a pleasant read. It helped that the two main characters both had family issues they were dealing with so it wasn't just a romance novel. The way these issues were resolved didn't feel that satisfying, though. There's also a side plot where they start researching a cult for a book, which felt kind of random, and didn't really go anywhere but could have been cool if it was a bigger part of the plot.

This works really well as an audiobook. McConaughey will shout, use Australian accents (actually quite well - I'm impressed) and at times it felt almost poetic.

At 6 hours in length, I think this would be way too short (and all over the place) to read as a conventional novel and I would probably dock it a star or two if I did.

I struggled with whether to give this one a 3 stars or a 4 stars. It's not bad - but it felt very long, and my small brain got lost in the plot in amongst all the different characters introduced.