128 pages of scribbled notes. Very compact and informal introduction to electronics. No unnecessary stories told. Instead, there is room for 100 simple circuits to try out. And that's what I still have to do in order to really "complete" this book.
I need to catch up on my reading goals, so decided to pick up a John Green book. And it turned out to be a quick read, just as I'd hoped for. The characters and setting were pretty much what I anticipated, and yet the book was able to surprise me in places. Also, the whole two-author collaboration really worked with this story.
"You call juggling a sport, and people laugh. You call juggling an art, and people laugh. You show them there's a Juggle magazine, and people laugh a lot. You punch them in the face, and they stop laughing."
A short pamphlet by Jason Garfield, advocate of juggling as a sport and opposer of juggling as a hippie activity. Quite entertaining if you don't take him literally.
I had high expectations for this book but was heavily let down. What wants to be a modern 1984 / Brave New World mashup is just a description of a world like ours, where social media continues to dominate everyone's live.
So there I was waiting for the big thing to happen, the "visionary story telling" that was promised by this book. And then: Nothing. A mere continuation of what all of us can imagine social media to be misused for.
Yes, scary if you think of it. But surprising, new, revolutionary? No way.
Maybe I am too used to this world we live in already and just didn't get the greatness of this book. But any comparison of this book with 1984 or Brave New World falls utterly short of the actual vision and storytelling that Orwell and Huxley showed in their works.
John Green is a good writer, there's no doubt about that. Yet with the fourth book I'm reading of his, the clever and witty writing can't brush over that one annoying fact: He writes the same story over and over again.
The same characters, the same questions of love and understanding what's going on in other people, the same trouble of coming of age.
Yes, it's genre fiction and maybe I'm overreacting, but I'm fed up with John Green novels. For now.
Recommended by my girlfriend, this book by Douglas Adams has been sitting on the reading stack for a while. Partly because I had other things to read in the meantime, partly because I felt like I needed a break from Adams' writing for a while. I don't know if it was the last bit that made the difference, but I really liked this book. Adams and Carwardine are travelling around the world on a mission to shed some light on endangered species (and the pure fact of how shitty we've been treating our world). I had a slight idea of what to expect from a talk by Adams I had watched a while ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc) and was not disappointed. As the book has been written in the late 80s, I'm curious to find out what has happened to the species in the past 20 odd years. Too bad Adams himself is now part of the rare kind of people that no longer enlighten us with their wisdom, humour and wit. :(
Finally managed to enjoy this classic. Huxley draws an interesting picture of our society's future. Enslaved by our own desire for eternal happiness and the society's need for stability and productivity. That does sound quite convincing. Between that world and the one described by Orwell, it makes you wonder if we're already somewhere in between those two.
I'm curious to watch the film so I picked up the book when I saw it at some airport.
I'm still torn between "just a thriller" and "wow this is excellent". Turns out it got addictive pretty quickly and I liked the twists it took every now and again. Still, it just followed that pattern you kind of expected in the beginning.
Personally, seeing the couple's relationship develop was touching and actually pretty depressing at a time. Will our own relations eventually develop like that? Let's hope this is all just fiction and we can be better people and better couples.
This is clearly a good book. Still, it wasn't for me personally.
The premise of the book is the huge amount of early-earth-creationists. The actual numbers of people believing in a world younger than 10,000 years baffles me (about 45% in the US, less in Europe, more in Islamic countries). In my surrounding though, I haven't met a single person who wouldn't believe in a million year history of evolution.
Dawkins really wants to drive the point home that evolution is a fact, so the books tends to get very repetitive in places. For some facts he gives three and more examples, stretching over several pages, where a simple "this is how it is, and here is a 2 sentence example" would have sufficed.
From the explictit overstating of examples and repetition of already mentioned facts I would have thought this to be targeted at ... less educated people? At the same time, Dawkins uses quite educated language. His sentences have this intellectual ring to them. It's as if you are hearing his British voice in your head.
The actual facts and pieces of evidence he presents are very interesting. Still, I am sure the same could have been done in a third of the book's volume.
This is a book offering ammunition to people who are surrounded by history deniers. Sadly - well, fortunately - that's not the case for me. So it was a quite a drag to read. Hopefully his other books are different, as I intend to read some more.