Ninett

Beware spoilers!

01/12/2024:

I've averaged the scores of my two readings of this book. When I read it in my teens I rated it 5 stars. I now rate it 4.

I still love this book: the myth-founding potency of the Dracula character portrayed in this book remains plain to see just by observing the impact on modern pop culture. Stoker dragged the Vampyre from the depths of folklore into common culture.

But as an adult I've seen some parts differently, too. The story is laced with a kind of benevolent sexism throughout, which is characteristic for its time, yet I find impossible to ignore. I feel the Dracula character did not make full use of all his powers and went out in a whimper rather than a bang. Stoker could have killed off his antagonist in a more befitting way. Also not sure why he kept Jonathan in the castle.

I read this on my nintendo ds originally back in the day, and I have my suspicions that I had read a strongly abridged version, since I didn't recall most of this story.

A collection of short stories set in the universe of the original trilogy, featuring side characters from the original. It includes an origin story for Goddard. I'd say well worth reading to eke out a few more drops from the world built by Shusterman, and some of the short stories are really great in their own right, though some did fall a bit flat for me. I was comfortably able to read it in two train journeys and return to the library within a few days.

Good, simple fun.

I like Simon as a guest on podcasts. He has a lot of good things to say and the empathy and kindness with which he approaches disparate topics while still remaining informative and sharp is enviable. 

BUT I did not like this book. I feel bad because it is an older piece of his and he has probably come a long way since this was published, but this book was repetitive to the extreme. The only point it made was the titular point: start with why. You could have stopped there instead of hashing out myriad ways in which this same concept can be described from a different perspective. The central idea is solid and a good one, but a book based on it was not merited in my opinion. I didn't learn much after the first chapter.

There are lots of sort-of outdated scenarios in the book as well, as much of the content is centred around 1990s-2000s era tech companies.

Lastly: There is some pseudoscience in there as well. I really do not think for a second that Simon knows much about neuroscience and I hope no one else thinks he does either. Get your neurosci bits from people who are qualified to dispense them :)

The cover has a quote from George R.R. Martin proclaiming this book to be a breath of fresh air, and I am inlcined to agree. The pacing is quite slow, but the focus on creating realistic, engaging characters and building a story that readers are able to invest in won me over by the time I was a quarter of the way through. The writing is beautiful for a fantasy book. It may be because this book was published over 20 years ago, and different styles were en vogue at the time, but I liked that there was only a wisp of a hinted romance, but Hobb doesn't plow indiscriminately on in that direction at the expense of storytelling and worldbuilding as happens in many modern fantasies.

Lastly, the first person perspective doesn't usually work very well for fantasy because you are so limited in scope in what you are able to see from one character's perspective, but here I think it works well because there is such a focus on the characters. Plus, there are some 15 books still including the novellas - more than enough to find out about the world.

I cried at the last paragraph.

This book came to me at the exact right time in my life for me to be able to appreciate it the most. I hadn't read much about Bayes previously, but my work has started to veer towards a direction in which I felt knowing more probability and stats would be useful. I have a background in engineering, so now that I am equipped with an intuitive understanding of what Bayes' theorem says, and what sorts of problems it can be applied to, I'm well placed to read further into the nitty-gritty of what I've read in order to apply this to my work.

I loved that this book wasn't written exclusively about the mathematics itself, but featured biographical elements of Bayes' life, places the story in a well fleshed-out historical setting, and shares anecdotes about the applications and development of the theorem.

Probably the most notes I've taken on a book in a long time.