76th book of 2019 Didn’t like the protagonist, didn’t enjoy the setting, just felt like i was on a plane going nowhere as Senlin went from one cringe worthy decision to the next. would rather watch snowpiercer again.
73rd book of 2019. If you liked ‘Fire and Blood’ by George RR Martin, this might be the book for you. A bit heavy on the 10,000 ft. view narrative of palace politics and succession, but just enough that some of the dry readings are that much punchier. “The emperor was much more interested in pursuing his prurient interests” I appreciated the broad sweep, the occasional commentary, and the willingness to cover every notable emperor across thousands of years. ...
75th book of 2019
74th book of 2019. Not disappointing. Picking up a beloved childhood series as an adult can be a gamble. It’s like rewatching films in high definition, and flaws that were buffed out in the haze of memory become glaringly apparent, while sometimes the author, out of ideas, ends up recycling the b-side plots into endless books of dwindling quality. Exhibit A: the Ender’s Game series. It was a compelling first book, and even first series, but once Card started to get into geopolitics, a lot of questionable racism came out, discrediting the entire series in my mind. ...
72nd book of 2019. Breezy read, the author put a lot of effort into making it fun, and those efforts paid off. Essentially a romp through 19th century science and all the advances that we have made in the modern age, along with the quirky scientists that brought us those advances. I would like to think that I knew most of the content in here anyways, but there were just enough tidbits scattered about to keep me engaged. ...
70th book of 2019 - Big History Done Right. Tap tap…. tap tap tap. You hear that sound? That’s me furiously typing downstairs, trying to absorb the implications of this book and fit them into my worldview. This book is a PM’s dream. Take every civilization, over all of history, and boil them all down to one metric: energy consumption. This allows comparisons between the grain required to raise the pyramids to the fuel required to put me on the plane I’m sitting in right now. I understand why Bill Gates loves Smil, and somewhat tangentially feel like I understand Gates a little more by triangulating his preferences. ...
68th book of 2019 When I’m bored and on a plane, sometimes I write book reviews (i.e. right now). Other times I watch marvel movies. This book fits squarely with the Marvel movies. Welcome to the helicarriers… I mean Rife’s Raft… I mean Endura: the floating city of cliche scythe plots and Chekov’s guns locations. Despite the fact that GRR Martin can’t seem to put out more than one book a decade, plots like this remind me why a decade is worth the wait. ...
67th book of 2019. Scythe – an interesting, somewhat meditative YA scifi novel on death. The premise was fun, and I appreciate how the author went to pains to tell a utopian story. In some ways it’s a trick on us, being able to find enough misery in such a utopia to fill the pages of a novel. But I digress. The characters were ok but nothing special. The plot moved along though I felt like the author tipped off upcoming twists a bit too clearly, such that none of them ended up a surprise. Maybe that means I’ve just been reading too much Scifi. ...
Great ideas, but I left the book less convinced of the theses than after reading the blurb. Ideas: Nations succeed or fail because of ’extractive’ political and economic institutions. After the industrial revolution, a random walk of events led some countries to enter virtuous cycles, and others to enter vicious cycles, often through the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. Institutions are the primary, if not sole cause of national success. The author provides evidence for this thesis by telling vignettes about he history of various countries and why it matters. While this was interesting history in its own right (and I’ve never read about the glorious revolution), anytime the authors touched on subjects familiar to me, I felt their descriptions lacking, and using the conclusions to paint the narrative and thus support their conclusions. In this way, it felt like reading the Old Testament to prove the existence of God. Lots of stories with God’s obvious involvement, but nothing to convince the skeptic. ...
66th book of 2019 I get it, inventing an imagined reality is hard. But sometimes the results are just less than the sum of their parts, and despite a lot of work, something has gone terribly wrong. Exhibit A: Special effects in the Scorpion King Exhibit B: Iron and Magic The premise, magic and technology wax and wane throughout time, and a weird kindof-America-but-with-wizards exists where centurions roam the land and an immortal wizard is doing some sort of bad deeds off-screen. The relationship starts off snarky, and never gets out of snark-gear. I’m still not sure why our characters hate one another beyond the needs of the plot. ...