A collection of short stories by Saki. I didn't understand a couple of them - the ones that seemed to be mostly about the Balkan Wars? But obviously I enjoyed the mockery of Edwardian high society.

Part of the "What Katy Did" series, but one I don't think I've read before! The first third of the book is still mostly about Katy and her wedding, but the rest focuses on Clover and Phil staying out west while Phil recovers from an illness (and meeting her future husband). It's a pretty cute book, but not as interesting as the earlier ones in the series.

I wondered if it was just that I first read this at the right age, but as it turns out I just really like this book. (I'd forgotten the part where they electrocute babies to condition them into hating books, though :/)

A young adult book about a teenage girl growing up in Nazi Germany. I enjoyed this a lot, but I can't think of anything else to say about it except that the handwritten pages were quite difficult to read on the Kindle.

Stewart Lee is a stand-up comedian that I was a big fan of when I was about... fourteen? But after that he wasn't really on tv at all until last year, and except for his involvement in Jerry Springer: The Opera I'd pretty much lost track of him. I heard this book recommended on Jackie Kashian's podcast The Dork Forest, and I'm glad to have read it. This book is partly a biography focusing on his career and on how he came to write some of his live shows, and partly heavily-annotated transcripts of the shows themselves, and I found it both interesting and hilarious. It also has several appendices about things which don't really fit the theme, one of which is about how he thinks Johnny Vegas is great (I disagree, but it was an interesting read).

As a result of reading this I've added both seasons of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle to my DVD rental list! I look forward to them.

From the second Humble eBook Bundle.

Okay so. Before I started reading this book, which is a collection of Wil Wheaton's blog posts and some extra autobiographical commentary, my opinion of him was on the positive side of indifferent: I watch his show Table Top and he's alright in that and I liked him in Eureka, but since his characters in that show, Leverage, The Guild and The Big Bang Theory all seem to have the same personality I didn't believe him to be a particularly good actor. So I didn't understand why my boyfriend and large portions of the internet love him so much, since it's apparently not because of Star Trek.

After reading this book, my opinion of him is that he is an entitled, misogynist snob and that no matter how many times he tells me he's totally over the fact that quitting Star Trek to make films, no really he is, his constant bitterness every time he talks about anything to do with the show doesn't inspire me to believe him.

For the entitled snobbishness, please see this Goodreads review, which I agree with except that I also disliked the first half of the book, particularly the part where he made his aunt's funeral all about him.

Misogyny-wise, I particularly disliked the part where he compares not enjoying appearing at conventions to being a domestic abuse victim. Also, near the beginning of the book with an anecdote about the time a Hooters waitress asked him if he "used to be an actor", and he was offended but then told himself that her opinion didn't show more matter because she was only a Hooters waitress and also a bimbo with over-processed hair and "ample cleavage seductively long[ing] to bust out from beneath her thin cotton T-shirt" (ugh are you serious). In the epilogue, he returns to Hooters, and this time a waitress with a different name and hair colour but otherwise identically described does know who he is and also sits on his lap. How marvellous for him.

In conclusion, I now dislike Wil Wheaton much more than I did before reading this and I wish I had not read this book, because it annoyed me so much it gave me a headache. But at least it was short. show less

A YA book set at a prestigious private mixed-gender boarding school in the US. It was fun and I enjoyed how angry Frankie was, but it did seem a bit unrealistic and elitist in ways I can't quite put my finger on.

I loved it! To begin with I felt like I wanted it to just be an Ankh-Morpork book rather than a Dickensian London book, probably because of its kind of old-school Discworld-esque writing style, but once all the various historical figures started appearing my mind was changed. Still, the mood of the book is very Ankh-Morpork-like, which I enjoyed a lot. Recommended!

As usual, I love space archaeology. But the character of Pascale was so nothing that her existence got on my nerves, and the timelines at the start of the book were a bit too confusing for me.

Exploits: not very coherent but fine.
Lintons: I'm sure I must have read this one before because I remember the midnight feast, but I don't remember any of the rest.

I think this is actually my new favourite Stephenson book! This is set in a world where, because of some kind of Terrible Events which occurred in the distant past, all mathematicians live in strange monastery-like cloisters ("concents") cut off from the general population and study theoretical maths and astronomoy, but are banned from studying things with real-world applications. It starts off feeling like a future or fantasy-world dystopia, describing the different rituals of the concent and the daily lives of the people who live there, but then due to outside events the main character ends up involved in something that affects the entire world, at which point the tone shifts to being more scifi. Every chapter begins with an excerpt from the dictionary of the mathematician's language, defining and giving historical context to some important referents. It took me quite a while to finish this, as the characters often engage in long mathematical or philosophical debates which are, however, quite plot-important, and so I had to make sure I wasn't skimming them. But I wouldn't call it a heavy read.

On the more racist end of the Chalet school scale. At least there was a lot going on apart from that too?

I thought the teachers were being a bit OTT when they told Thekla she was a "murderess" but then Joyce's mother almost did die after all! How dramatic!

In some ways I found this a really interesting read -- some MMO hackers steal data from some Russian mobsters, and in trying to get it back the Russians and their hostages somehow end up getting involved in some kind of terrorist plot. Most of the details about the MMO's backstory and business were really interesting, and the action sequences (mainly gunfights) were pretty good. However, a lot of things about this book were quite annoying, particularly with regard to the female characters.
Although it would have been easy to write such a book without having any female characters at all, and this one has three quite major ones, which I suppose is good? But two of them don't actually get to do very much except be dragged about as hostages, and the third (Olivia), whose amazing skills and ability as an MI6 agent are often listed in the narration, still spends more time being rescued by dudes and being told off for sleeping with too many different guys than actually using those skills. I was also irritated by the way they were all paired off at the end.
Some of the technological stuff also didn't make much sense to me. Especially the whole APPIS thing about using the MMO to improve airport security and business meetings - that made no sense to me from either a technological or business standpoint, and was also totally irrelevant to the plot, so why was it even in there?
Trigger warnings for an attempted rape scene and eyeball damage.

I disliked the prologue, but it grew on me after that. Well structured. I´ll have to read the sequel soon.

Psychics and people with elemental superpowers fight against discrimination and terrorists in Tel Aviv, plus a gay romance. A few too many sex scenes for my taste, but I suppose not an unrealistic quantity given all the peril of imminent death.

A fast-paced, easy read but still with some depth to it. There was one OTT detail (burgers made from human faeces, really?) towards the end that I thought was unnecessarily gross just for shock value, but otherwise I think this was well done.
Content warning for sexual harassment (although I didn't find it gratuitous).

An interesting topic, but the writing style was very dry, there are a lot of proofing errors and the figures are not arranged very conveniently, which often made it hard for me to follow.

Very interesting! It's been a while since I've had to look up so many words in an English book, too.

Too gruesome for me to give it five stars, but excellent.
I'm glad I had recently been reading about the Nanking Massacre (in A Public Betrayed), as it helped me pick up on more of the real-world parallels.

Reread (2006). I feel like I understood it better this time... well, all I remembered was the cat flute thing and that, as usual, Murakami's sex scenes are the weirdest.

one of my favourites of Murakami.

A fun (but violent) YA fantasy quest story with an interesting magic system. I got some Last Airbender vibes, although with a higher level of gore. I personally could have done without the romance, and I'm not sure how I feel about the cliffhanger, but I'm still interested to read the sequel(s).

DNF.

Five chapters in and there's not a single likeable character and nothing interesting is happening. Although this is supposedly the first book in a series, there are so many references to previous events from earlier books by the author (I assume; I'd never heard of them before picking this up) that I thought I'd mistakenly picked up book 2.

Interesting until the last 20 pages or so. I didn't care for the ending.

"This thing is bad." I agree. "Therefore you should delete your accounts." but... Why? How would that help with this problem specifically?
Some of the arguments were so US centric that I don't really know what the author meant, and some were about advertising or other stuff that also exists outside of social media so I don't see how deleting would change them. There are also some irrelevant rants about... Hypothetical evil podcasts made by AIs? Or something?

For me, the benefits of social media still outweigh the disadvantages. He says "email your friends instead", but I primarily use twitter to chat in groups and meet new people who share fandoms with me, so that wouldn't work as an alternative. He quit social media because he kept fighting with people and obsessing about his follower count and "status", but I don't do either of those things. I also don't get my news or political info from social media, but from actual news sites, despite his mourning for journalism (and the translation industry... Hi, we're alive and well, actually).

Anyway, in summary, I was not convinced and I will not be deleting my accounts.

I picked this up because I was interested in the setting, and I suppose the characters and plot are entertaining enough, but unfortunately this is just not very well written. The ending was very unsatisfying (what is the point of the epilogue?) and there are a lot of misplaced commas, weird line breaks and abrupt mid-scene POV changes. I was also not a fan of the incest plotlines.

I got a lot of book recs out of this, which is what I wanted, but it's definitely a bunch of blog posts and not a book. I skimmed a lot of it, especially the endless litany of Locus award nominees.

Great, but it stressed me out! The romance was surprisingly non-annoying.

Some interesting ideas but a bit unfocused.

Mostly excellent. I could have done without the "what if feminism but spiders" stuff, which I found too heavy-handed.