Matthew Carlson
He's got some good advice but seems to talk about himself a little too much. He is never shown in any sort of negative or bad light and seems to mention his accomplishments almost every chapter.
However, I enjoyed the actual advice and quotes. You could sum this up in about 10 pages.
Read time: 3:30
Very different from the movie but quite enjoyable. Good little easy fluffy read that has some suspense. Climax fell a little flat, but not terribly so. I'm quite glad I read the book before the movie.
It feels unfinished. It was setting up something grand it just feels like the author ran out of time or steam.
Reading time: 65 minutes
It's a gorgeous book that wants you to think it has more depth than it actually does. I would categorize it as thought provoking. It's tough because it presents this ideal that everyone just innately knows what their dream is. Personally, I've met very few people who knew what their dream was. The majority of those people do achieve their dream and find that it wasn't what the expected.
Dennis. What the heck? You can't just stop there. Imagine an avengers movie where they have the bad guy on the ropes, look at the camera and said “huh, hope this works out” then fades to black, roll credits.
Overall decent book that continues an interesting storyline. This book feels chaotic and seems to careen around quite a bit and feels like it's a bunch of unrelated disasters. But that's survival I guess?
Solid book. It answered quite a few questions while subtly preparing the next six books in the series. I appreciated the depth of characters and less of “we don't know what to do”. Took me two days to finish, which I guess is expected given how long it is. Belive it or not, I wish it was longer. Which is about the highest praise I can give a book.
So I have mixed feelings about this particular book. The writing and prose? Beautiful. The characters are fully and feel alive. The mechanism of time travel (not a spoiler since it is fairly obvious that this book is about time travel) is quite brilliant and unique. However, the plot is straightforward if bland. What is the point that the author is making? That the modern world is horrible? That seems to be the conclusion. Every book I read tells me a story. Gives me something to walk away with. I'm not sure what this book really leaves you with other than a kind of “huh, neat.”
Great book with lots to like. Political intrigue, former glory, hidden arcane knowledge, female empowerment in a patriarchal society, fighting, romance.
However, it falls a little flat in some areas. The characters lack some depth and feel sort of one dimensional. The ending sentence is beautiful though.
It has some mistborny elements and I feel like they share too many similarities. So for those two reasons, minus a star.
Who is this book for? It assumes a deep technical understanding and explains really basic things at random times. Like we've already talked about monoliths why is there a several page description of what they are six chapters in.
I feel like this book gave me perspective. It was a enjoyable book with an interesting premise. Is it deep and insightful? No. But it is structured well and good enough that you can find deep and insightful things yourself.
One of the strangest books I've read. I've never done drugs before but I imagine this is what drugs is. I will say, out of the books I've read so far this year (which is quite a few), this is one of the ones that I keep pondering in passing moments. Despite the baffling nature of the book, the ending is quite good. It fits the book and provides something for the reader to take away from. What does it mean to be temporary? Is there anything that isn't temporary. I hope that this review, unlike myself, achieves permanence.
There's quite a few plot holes and it spends a lot of time stuck in certain plot points that really don't matter. But there's some beautiful depth of character in several scenes. I love a story that can take an interesting and unique notion and carry it to far reaching impacts on a story.
This book caused me to reevaluate my life, to ponder where my life would be and what makes a good one. I'm a little confused why the author decided that the best life possible was hiking and looking at pretty things.
It started great and slowly got worse. It was well written and had some great talking points. It seemed fairly unbiased until the end. I would have loved another perspective besides a Judeo/Christian one. There's a lot of religions out there. Skip the last chapter. Even a Christian myself with a strong personal belief, it seemed rather confusing tacked on to the end. His point was that the answer to these false religions was by adhering to “The One True Religion” which seems a counter point to many of the talking points in his book. The point was to get you to consider the why and the how of your worship and what of. I'm disappointed that thought was dropped and a regular sermon was preached.
I loved the book, the series is amazing. But the ending! Ah the ending was a travesty. I needed ten chapters more or ten chapters less.
This one is definitely worth getting the audiobook. I usually don't like audiobooks since they're so slow compared to reading. But the way he read it made it funnier and more enjoyable
So this book is much like the game in the plot. Meaningless, grasping at symbols and mythology to continually throw at the reader. Much like a horoscope, it throws it all out there hoping that whoever is reading will be able to derive some meaning from the drivel.
This book has one redeeming grace. The characters are deep and the relationships between them are nuanced. While they seem to flip between saints and villains often, often with no reason why. Most of what the characters do doesn't make sense, but at least they feel and you can feel what they feel. By chapter two you already care about the main character and his dead mom.
At the end of the day, this is a high school drama with broken and interesting characters. Random things happen and the book just kinda shrugs and says “it's random ai magic lol.”
As a computer engineer, who designs the systems in phones, the internet, wifi networks, laptops, etc this book angers me. It just kind of throws out technical babble that would have taken about an hour of talking to someone like myself to fix. Like the author just Googled some code tutorial and copy and pasted it. I get that putting in real code wouldn't be interesting to read and many of the “hacks” in this book aren't physically possible. But like for example, the car hacking. It briefly mentions the can bus, which is a real thing inside most cars for the US market. Then it mentions the data that is sent to the car. The hack is real, there are jeeps where you can hack the can bus through the navigation system but they certainly weren't made in 2010, the year of the car being hacked. Regardless, the data shows an eid, which should be an oid. The value of the eid was way too high (oids are like commands and they're numbered. They usually go up to a few thousand not several hundred thousand like it does in the book).
You could honestly take out the confusing “game” and replace it with an app that has similar privacy implications and misuse. The relationships between the characters is interesting and complex enough to drive the story. Jane austen did just fine with books solely about the interlacing of characters and the events that unfolded.
Like black mirror mixed with brave new world. It tries to be fun and sometimes it succeeds but mostly just makes you feel sad.
It accurately captures the feeling of where things are headed. As an engineer who works on these sorts of things, I can tell you we aren't headed there any time soon. But it certainly does feel like we most days.
I really enjoy this series. You can tell it is written by an engineer, but as an engineer myself, I don't mind. The ideas are fantastic and it has quite a clever premise. Because most of the main characters are the same person, the author needs to just maintain one consistent voice throughout the book with a few differences. It's brilliant actually. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for something to tickle their imagination.
By far the weakest in the series. The novel has such great tension that builds with incredible timing. Then it just sort of ends like the author ran out of time. It should have been longer or shorter. It seemed like some characters reached the end of their arc and they knew it but the author could quite bring themselves to do it
She's good at quipy one liner sound bites and there's some decent advice here and there. But lots of repeating herself and presenting what other people have said as her own ideas
This isn't a history book, it's a story. There's clear heroes and villains. Despite it hinting that people are complex, no one is ever shown as something other than entirely bad or entirely good.
It reads like a self help book for businesses. Too much repetition, too much self aggrandizement, and generic hand wavy way of describing how to actually implement it. They present data with very little description of where it came from and they just expect you to believe them
Does it follow a similar format to the first one? Yes. Did I enjoy it more than the first one? Yes.
The combat is quite well written and while there were some slower beats, overall the book was fantastic. Will definitely be reading the third
So many things. Flimsy characters. Huge plot holes. The authors idea of futurist technology is laughable. It was written in 2014 and the author presented the future as voice activated with automatic doors like an episode of star trek. The Amazon echo came out in 2014.