I read books sometimes. In my 30s.
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“The first year is when some of us lose our lives. The second year is when the rest of us …
Revenge and Resurrection in a Frozen Wasteland!Drizzt and Catti-brie have been away from Mithral Hall …
I started burning out on this series midway through this book. It's not bad on its own (actually better than many of the previous Drizzt books), but after a while it just gets predictable and rote.
Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from New …
Enjoyable. Predictable. Straight. YA fiction for adults. There are bisexuals, for a handful of sentences, possibly even lesbians. The last chapter made me really not like the love interest (it was from his POV). I'll read the sequels.
This book was entertaining like a ghost hunting show is entertaining, which would have gotten it four stars but the ending kinda sucked. Not that it was an awful ending, just, it didn't do it for me. They explained the Monster and it just kinda killed the vibe.
The story of temporal engineers who meta-regulate the history of humanity through the centuries, eliminating …
I, Robot is a fun set of thought experiments about the Laws of Robotics, and I read it most recently for nostalgia. The characters are a bit flat, but the book is short so I don't mind. Asimov writes off Communism and Capitalism by acting like Machine Learning will make those contradictions irrelevant, despite seeming to understand that automation is a workers' rights issue, and that bothers me. Maybe it's just his characters talking and he expects the reader to read between the lines.
Ultimately, Asimov seems to be stuck in the idealist trap of believing that AI is unbiased and, with the proper constraints, better than humans at even ethical problems. That is an annoying ideology that runs rampant despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. (Telling your AI not to hallucinate is silly and ineffective, but is just the kind of thing that would end up in one …
I, Robot is a fun set of thought experiments about the Laws of Robotics, and I read it most recently for nostalgia. The characters are a bit flat, but the book is short so I don't mind. Asimov writes off Communism and Capitalism by acting like Machine Learning will make those contradictions irrelevant, despite seeming to understand that automation is a workers' rights issue, and that bothers me. Maybe it's just his characters talking and he expects the reader to read between the lines.
Ultimately, Asimov seems to be stuck in the idealist trap of believing that AI is unbiased and, with the proper constraints, better than humans at even ethical problems. That is an annoying ideology that runs rampant despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. (Telling your AI not to hallucinate is silly and ineffective, but is just the kind of thing that would end up in one of Asimov's stories.)
Worth reading, fun to read, but only 4 stars.
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
1828. Robin Swift, …
Do you hate capitalism? Do you hate colonialism? Have you ever read Fanon? Do you tear out your hair whenever the White Moderate makes excuses for empire? Do you believe that revolution must be made, and that we can find solidarity in places we never expected?
This book was both painful and cathartic to read. The characters are messy, idealism abounds, but I feel like the author and I are on very similar wavelengths.
This book made me laugh and cry.
One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife …
At first the book felt like a fun predictable romp, and it was, but there was plenty of originality.
I loved this book for about 3/4 of it, it's wild as hell and the metaphors don't stop coming, painting a vivid and horrifying picture of a libertarian utopia. Then they start dropping slurs. You aren't supposed to like the people doing it, and it's only done a few times, but it was entirely unnecessary. But what really got me was a sex scene between a 15 year old (repeatedly mentioned) and a man in his 30s or 40s. There's also homophobia that is pretty egregious. Also, two hours of exposition between the beginning of the climax and the end of the book. I'm not a slow reader. Chapters of exposition. The pacing went from fast to none.
I'd give this book 5 stars if it left out the slurs, homophobia, statutory rape and sexualization of minors, and massive blocks of exposition waxing poetic about what is basically a dressed …
I loved this book for about 3/4 of it, it's wild as hell and the metaphors don't stop coming, painting a vivid and horrifying picture of a libertarian utopia. Then they start dropping slurs. You aren't supposed to like the people doing it, and it's only done a few times, but it was entirely unnecessary. But what really got me was a sex scene between a 15 year old (repeatedly mentioned) and a man in his 30s or 40s. There's also homophobia that is pretty egregious. Also, two hours of exposition between the beginning of the climax and the end of the book. I'm not a slow reader. Chapters of exposition. The pacing went from fast to none.
I'd give this book 5 stars if it left out the slurs, homophobia, statutory rape and sexualization of minors, and massive blocks of exposition waxing poetic about what is basically a dressed up synthesis of Dawkins' meme theory and Chomsky's linguistic theories. As is, the last 3 or 4 hours of the book were a slog.
Interesting enough to read (and short enough to bear) but pretty anticlimactic. I was hoping for an epic struggle of wills, but no, just suicide after suicide until the last. (That's not a spoiler, unless you consider "there's a lot of suicide" to be a spoiler.)
"A strange plague called the 'Gets is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes …
The real monster is adding pedophilia to an otherwise fine book for no apparent reason but shock value. This book went from 4 stars to 3, then to 2 with that. This book also suffers from "explaining the Monster", which really destroys the actual horror element.
Also, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between CO and CO2, full and new moons, or centipedes and millipedes. It seems petty to dock a star for that, but it's jarring to have things that should be well known (a new moon is dark, you can't look up and see the light of the new moon) screwed up, and it made the other discrepancies more irritating.
There was foreshadowing that kinda sorta panned out subtly, which was nice, but ultimately I didn't like this book much after the first 3/4s.
The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the …
It could be that you aren't supposed to like the captain, but the prolific use of a certain e-slur coupled with anti-indigenous racism is too much. I hope he gets murdered by the monster, but I'll never know.
A mission to Mars.
A freak accident.
One man's struggle to survive.
Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one …
When an injury throws a young, battle-hungry orc off her chosen path, she may find that what we need isn't …
The epic tale of everyone's favorite dark elf, Drizzt Do'Urden, reaches new heights!Drizzt Do'Urden struggles with his own inner voices, …
Join Drizzt Do'Urden, the world's most famous drow elf, on his adventures in the Forgotten …
The plot was decent, but Calimshan is a mess of racist tropes.