Ninett

I had a lot of gripes with the first half of the book. It read like a play. There was not much narration and the plot was advanced solely via dialogue. The characters are not fleshed out, they are just plot devices, and their copious dialogue is empty too. This section of the book is the reason I can't conscionably give it more than 3 stars overall. 
But after the first plodding, disjoined half was over, the story really came into its own and I'm glad I persevered. The plot become interesting and twisty-turny. It even managed to go out with a bang. 

I will also say the book needs an editor. Grammar errors,  discontinuities of character and plot holes abound. Fair warning if you can't get past that kind of thing. 

When I chose this book, I had in mind a story about a plague and people surviving in it. I would say that this is a book about a character philosophising about human nature, which happens to eb set during a time of plague. The main element is the philosophy and the by-the-way element is the plague. I'm not usually a fan of a book in which the central theme is flowery language around abstract social commentary-type concepts. I can see how others will like this book, but it just was not what I expected and it took me a long time to slowly chug through it. I kept forgetting who each character was and didn't really care enough about the story to even google it. 

I found this book immensely boring, overambitious and contrived. It took considerable willpower to get to the 25% mark in it, and when even then it did not begin fulfilling on its page-turner promise I finally gave up on it. I felt that the author came up with an interesting idea about a physically impossible house and a separate idea about wacky formatting, and then just jammed the two ideas together, with a sprinkle of dry technical datasheet style documentation about both interspersed throughout. Yes, I understand that the formatting is meant to give us the same experience as the inhabitants of the house had, but it was so gimmicky and made it all a colossal hassle. He didn't even attempt to write well, thinking that the formatting will more than make up for it. 

This is a natural history of Europe as a continent and as an ecosystem. The chapters are short and crammed, but worth reading for the clever language and because this is a topic that is sorely neglected amongst hundreds of history books about the time of the dinosaurs and thousands about human history. The in-between time is often cast aside. 
I think that perhaps the chapters could have been fewer and more detailed rather than so many brief cursory treatments of varied aspects of the topic. 

The second installment of the Cradle series picks up exactly where the previous left off - almost as seamless as if they weren't separate books. This series is lamentably a bit predictable, but the light reading entertainment it provides nonetheless is sometimes exactly what's needed. Eithan in particular is an interesting character, and I'm pleased we're following him into the next book.

This is a genre I tend to avoid because real life-adjacent stories are not usually engaging enough for me, but the hype around this novel a few years ago was intense, and I was landed with a copy through no fault of my own. I am currently making my way through a long progression fantasy series, and needed a breather, so I decided to just read this as a break. 
Right off the bat: I really did enjoy this, despite my preconceptions of the genre. I was pretty much hooked from the start, and finished in two days. The characters are well written, with complex emotional worlds, and histories in which they can be interpreted as both good and bad people. They are in the grey-zone in between, and that is refreshing. 
I had a look online to see how much $10,000 USD in 1982 would be worth now in 2024, and the sum is about $32,500 USD (??25,600 GBP). I personally would not volunteer to carry a child for someone and birth it for even ten times that amount, and that's because I don't think permanent changes to my body are something I could put a price on like that. I am not sure if this is meant to show Mia's sheer desperation or whether the author thinks that is a reasonable, believable amount for a surrogate pregnancy.
note: I did just Google it, and the prices do appear to start at $35,000 for surrogacy in the USA, and about ??10,000 in the UK. I find this unbelievably cheap.

This book caught me off guard a little bit. I expected mindless fun, action: a filler. But instead, it was a very human story which happens to be set in a science fictional universe. While the plot does lean heavily into time travel, which is the obsession of the main character's father, the centrepiece is not the time travel itself but the emotional journey of a man raised by a parent who sacrificed everything to his work. Also currently reading GEB and found the self referential nature of several elements of the book interesting. All in all a weird but welcome detour into unhappy man themed sci fi. 

My first Vaclav Smil book, which I enjoyed in small doses with plenty of time in between. 
I appreciate that the chapters were divided into topics, because it can be a labour in itself to read 71 short essays on disparate themes due to the mental switching involved, and the subdivisions lightened this mental load. As an engineer, numbers and figures do not really phase me, and in fact I found myself wishing for a bit more of an elaboration on the stats, though I understand that this was written for everyone to enjoy and not just numbers people.
I did end up skipping some sections, which were to do with my area of expertise: electrical and electronics engineering (the electric motor, moore's law, integrated circuits, comms, etc), but the rest were a great refresher for things I knew but never thought about, or as an intro to topics I am quite hazy on.

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 :)

Great review of the current state of the neuroscience and psychology around learning. Dehaene initially spends a considerable amount of time making comparisons of the brain to modern AI, which might put some readers off. There are lots of valuable insights in the book about the impacts of various factors on learning and retention - some I already knew from previous reading and a long academic journey, but some novel. 

Sleep is my religion (I guess it's Dr. Walker's, too). I was an excellent sleeper before I read this book. Now, I lay awake thinking about needing to sleep, and I wake up in the night regularly when before I never once did. Have I gone against the popular adage of “don't fix what ain't broken”? Will this phase pass? Do I need to purchase an air conditioning unit?? 
Very good book, on the whole. I spend lots of time in academic circles myself, so the clear use of language and the scientific detail was very much appreciated - though I can see why it might be dense for a newcomer to scientific language. I found every morsel of information delicious. 

As much as I understand it's the product of its time, I simple cannot read so much sexism and not be put off. The story is interesting, but every character is odious and there's not that much comeuppance. I would have loved it if Dorian were slewn by the brother of Sibyl, but I know this would have deprived us of the dramatic self-kill at the end and thus could not be the ending.

If the reader is able to defeat the seamingly insurmountable disconnectedness of the first 50 pages where the mains are children, the characters' internal ruminations and conciousnesses do become intersting and worthwhile. Woolf peers into the human soul and pulls out what is not often said, and shows us the motivations behind each character's actions. Sometimes it is hard for us to be as honest with ourselves about our reasons for doing things as Woolf is with her protagonists' reasons.

The two stars I knocked off were because of the protracted, often repetitive sentences, and for the part in the beginning where we are thrust into the random, scattered thoughts of children (that nearly put me off the whole book altogether).

Good book. Every aspect of it was thoroughly revolting. I did find that the descriptions of the deaths of everyone Grenouille left behind gave him a kind of mystical aura through no action of his own. He's almost like an unwitting ominous talisman. It's a good thing books cannot physically convey smells, some of the things described were truely disgusting.

I read this book as part of a halloween readathon challenge on bookly. In keeping with classic gothic style, it's set in a manor house and the weather is awful the entire time. I felt Paver really did her best here to personally antagonise me with the absolutely despicable man she wrote to be Maud's father, and I am sure that getting lobotomised is comeuppance enough for this man, but I do wish something happened to him to make him regret his actions more desperately...  
I liked how Ivy was written in as a multifaceted person who had motivations in line with her very unfortunate circumstances, not just as a bitch whole and pure. 
Poor Maman, poor Clem, poor Jubal, poor Chatterpie

I feel that we are finally getting a taste for what the broader world that this story is set in entails. The epilogue in particular is great because I thought it was an omission all along to exclude Lindon's family entirely, and I do love Orthos. I wish there was more overarching story rather than what I call ‘secluded plot bubbles (1. Jai long challenge, 2. Ghostwater, 3. Uncrownded king tournament, etc ) ‘, which are set up to promote advancement rather than to serve a greater plan. 

I didn't realise this was a children's book, so this review comes from a place of ignorance. As someone who can no longer even rightly be described as a young adult, I found out hard to connect with characters written for high school students, and the holes in the plot didn't help. A great idea for a story executed to the level of expectation of a teenager and marketed as such. My fault for not being about to read the signs, really. 

A great introduction to the world of emotions. I am someone who leans far and heavily into a pure rational interpretation of the world, often neglecting or discounting my own and by extension the emotions of others. It's incredibly hard for me to understand why people do certain things, as well as why I feel the way that I do. This book is seeing the world through a different lens, finding out that there is a different, equally important perspective that I've been dismissing. It doesn't help too much in the way of actionable points, but definitely can serve as a lucid and compelling eye-opener for the completely uninitiated. 

I wish I had read this as a child! It really threw me for a loop. I truely hated the main character, the further down the path of brattiness be went, the more I despised him. But the story brought a series of enlightenments to the reader and to the boy, which shed light onto his actions and kind of vindicated him.
I enjoyed the pace and the sheer creativity that went into building this story, which gave an unusual sort of met-experience involving the reader herself as well as the characters. As a child I would have doubtless rated this five stars, and as a somewhat jaded adult I can still award four.

A bit more muddled after the big event at the beginning goes down. I'm not sure how structured the plot will be, or whether to expect a series of events that are indeed unfortunate but not particularly influential to one another? I can see where Lindon is headed, though, and I am certain he will reach that goal given his history. Furthermore, I am glad that some of the Suriel elements have taken more of a front stage position this time.

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.