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The Genius Factory - David Plotz This was really an interesting book. It's the history of the "Centre for Germinal Choice" the Nobel Prize winner sperm bank and the author's encounters with the donors, the children and their families. I really learned a lot from this book, it covers the history of eugenics, artificial insemination and the sperm bank industry along with the stories of some very colourful characters like Graham who funded the project and Shockley, inventor of the transistor. It really was a fun read.
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Sep 10, 2007 08:00
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The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness by Lee Alan Dugatkin If you've read books by Daniel C. Dennett, Dawkins or Steven Pinker then you probably won't find a whole lot of novel stuff in this book. Though it does go into some biographical information of the scientists involved and their observations or experiments, which I found interesting and made it worth reading for me personally. It's quite short and easy to read, and is not very technical at all.
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Sep 12, 2007 02:35
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I just finished the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I found it to be a light read and entertaining enough. I don't really see why it has drawn as much attention as it has, I didn't read anything that I hadn't read multiple times before in books by Dennett, Karen Armstrong, Shelby Spong, Steven Pinker, Dawkins other books, etc. I would much rather read Richard Dawkins books on biology (I loved the Ancestor's Tale) rather than a layman's guide to atheism and more masturbatory discussion of 'memetics'.
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Oct 2, 2007 05:54
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perceptual_set posted:I was thinking about reading that soon, would you recommend it? If you haven't read much on the topic of Atheism it'd be a good starting point as it gives a basic overview of a lot of material. If that's the case then I would recommend it, years ago I read a similar book by Taner Edis and it introduced a lot of concepts to me that I've since read much more deeply into. I would suggest reading The Ancestors Tale and The Selfish Gene before passing judgement on Dawkins as an author though. I just finished the Discovery of the Hobbit. It covers the discovery of the small hominids on the island of Flores in Indonesia. It was easy to read and the subject matter was very interesting. But the book gives a lot of detail on the minutiae of the politics between different archeology societies which isn't particular interesting. It would have been better if more attention was given to the Hominids themselves and some more background on paleoanthropolgy.
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Oct 3, 2007 04:16
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Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart I don't remember buying this book, but somehow it ended up in my pile. I think I saw it on the Pharyngula blog. Anyway, Arnhart argues that while Conservatives are generally opposed to Evolution for reasons of religion and supposed moral consequences, a naturalist view of human nature supports Conservative thinking. Most of his arguments boil down to the point that Leftism relies on human nature being perfectible and this is incompatible with the innate instincts shaped by our evolution. The book is quite brief and was reasonably well written. Some problems I had with it were: 1. Intelligent Design is given too much credit as an "intellectual" movement. I see many other reviewers felt the same. 2. The discussion on the compatibility of Religion and Natural Science is very shallow. Overall the book was decent. I found some bits very interesting such as the discussion of the French Revolution and Napoleon's rise to power and the parallels between Darwin's writings and those of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke.
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Oct 11, 2007 02:38
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We by Vevgeny Zamyatin. I finally got around to reading this after hearing about for years as the 'inspiration' for Nineteen Eighty Four. Overall I'm glad I read it, but I was very much underwhelmed by it. The prose is minimalist and very obtuse, written in the style of a journal. Very little attention is given to describing significant characters and events.
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Oct 27, 2007 07:05
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antiloquax posted:Just finished the wonderful Day of the Locust and am now going to try and finish The Raw Shark Texts. Loofa08 posted:Just finished Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Now I'm reading The Stand, which I'm enjoying quite a bit. I just finished Steroid Nation. It was mediocre and could have been a much better book with the source material it had (The Underground Steroid Handbook, Olympic doping, trafficking, BALCO, supplement industry, etc). It's an attempt to describe the history of steroids in North America by covering the involvement of a number of key personalities. The book is disjointed and devotes too much time to storytelling while neglecting an awful lot of essential information.
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Apr 18, 2008 06:37
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Galileo's Revenge This book is about junk science in the courtroom. It was a very interesting read, covering things like the Audi 5000, Bendectin, traumatic births, etc. A little out dated but entertaining if you're into law, science and odd trivia. I found this book through a reference in Genome, by Matt Ridley which I loved. One Day Me Talk Pretty - David Sedaris I liked this book a whole lot, genuinely funny and an easy read. It is well written compared to a lot of books of this kind, which can often read like a transcript of a standup comedy routine.
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May 26, 2008 02:39
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Jean-Paul Fartre posted:Weby Yevgeny Zamyatin And.......?
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Jun 4, 2008 05:08
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Just finished "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman". I enjoyed it. Like most books of the sort there's a bit of ranting from the author and the quality of the essays is a little inconsistent. Overall it was an fun read.
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Aug 6, 2008 04:58
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I just finished, The Economic Naturalist. Complete shite. The premise is good, using everyday situations to illustrate the fundamentals of economics. The execution is terrible, most of it is pure speculation, almost nothing is quantified and the conclusions are outright silly at times. What you end up with is a paragraph long explanation of some concept like cost/benefit and then a handful of just-so stories with no sources. The section on relationships could be lifted directly from GBS.
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Sep 16, 2008 03:51
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Just finished Alas, Babylon. I really enjoyed it. Survivalist fiction is really corny more often than not, like guys on motorcycles wearing bondage gear or civilisations built around the author's crazy personal fantasies. This was a really balanced and entertaining read.
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Nov 7, 2008 05:17
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A Canticle For Leibowitz This starts out so very promising and is a satisfying read. The first part is exceptional, the remainder of the book is a little disjointed and was not as appealing to me.
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Dec 30, 2009 13:17
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Roark posted:I'm on a post-apocalyptica kick right now, and I just finished Alas, Babylon. It was great, and everything that I had been led to believe. You read "A Canticle for Leibowitz"?
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Jan 15, 2010 06:10
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Finished The Toaster Project. It's about a industrial design student's mission to build an electric toaster from scratch, as in getting the raw materials (iron, mica, etc) himself and then making heating elements, electrics, housing, etc. I saw an article on it and thought it might be interesting. It was a short book, finished it in two sittings. It comes across as a 1 hour Dave Gorman type talk that's been padded out into a very small book. It definitely get's less detailed as the book goes on, the latter few chapters seem very half-arsed compared to the first few. It ends with some very amateur philosophising around in circles about externalities of consumer products. It was pretty underwhelming and inconsistent in writing and aims, which is a shame because the concept is definitely one that could have been used to make a great book.
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Aug 23, 2013 01:18
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War of the Worlds Managed to pick up a lot of older sci-fi books when the Borders near me was closing down. I may have read it as a teenager, I definitely read The Time Machine. Definitely didn't remember Wells being so heavy handed with his commentary.
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Oct 3, 2013 09:49
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Console Wars It's a book about the 16 bit era of video games. I was very interested in the subject matter, it covers a lot of history and politics. The rise of Sega after the dominance of the NES, the antagonism between Sega of Japan and Sega of America (how that gave rise to the 32X and killed partnerships with SGI and Sony), the controversy over violence and game ratings, failed partnerships that lead to the Playstation, Rare and the revival of the SNES late into its life cycle, marketing and change of perception from consoles being toys to multimedia devices, etc. But it's presented like a TV mini-series or show. With descriptions about locations and scenes and all the information presented by fictional recreations of conversations between people. Really detracts from the whole experience and is something that has to be suffered through to get all this great information that come from interviews with the people that were involved. Like there's a chapter about the success of the SNES in 1992 with the release of Legend of Zelda, marketing and exclusive Street Fighter II release. But to get that information you have to read all this fluff about employees not wanting to swim in the pool at a barbecue and 'juicy burgers grilled to perfection'.
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Dec 11, 2014 02:55
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Payndz posted:Is that the one where there's a chapter playing out the innermost thoughts of two people as they met on a beach or somewhere that the author couldn't possibly have gleaned from interviews unless they literally told him "at that moment, I was thinking this"? I read an extract and found the underlying story interesting (I worked in the industry during that period), but god drat it was a chore to pick it out from the horrible fictionalised text. That's the first chapter. It's a great hook for a documentary or non-fiction book, you have a market entirely dominated by Nintendo with absolute control over suppliers, software developers and retailers. The USA outpost of a Japanese company takes a gamble on the man responsible for some of the biggest successes in the toy industry to challenge Nintendo. Told by a fictional third-person recount of a two men talking to each other on a beach, with his preschool aged daughters appearing to give 'wise beyond their years' insight.
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Dec 12, 2014 02:21
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Just finished Attempting Normal by Marc Maron. Starts off promising, there's some insight into his failed marriages, family, addiction, life in stand up comedy, etc. If you're familiar with his podcast and stand up his writing has the same 'voice' and is pretty well done for the most part. But it burns through the interesting topics pretty quickly and the rest of the book is the kind of storytelling his does on stage about small episodes in his life. Some of these are related to episodes from his IFC show and things he's talked about on stage, but they aren't transcripts of his standup like other books by comedians (George Carlin). If you enjoy what he does on stage, storytelling from the point of view of a fussy and neurotic middle aged man, you probably won't regret reading it. If it was more focused on his life, career and addiction and didn't randomly jump around between topics it would have been a much stronger book.
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Dec 19, 2014 01:37
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Hopefully the movie/documentary is successful and they can release a new edition of the book without all the shite. I'd buy it a second time and reread it if it was just non-fiction without the cliche and unrealistic made up dialogue and drama. I.e. it would be good to read about the success of Street Fighter II for the SNES without all this poorly written guff about a barbecue with 'juicy burgers grilled to perfection' and some executive not wanting to swim in the pool.
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Jan 13, 2015 01:35
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I'm a walking stereotype so I just finished Catch-22. I liked it personally. It's absurd and very clever. I can see how the pacing of the story and the constant use of circular arguments between Yossarian and other people gets a bit tiresome for a lot of people.
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May 21, 2015 02:14
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Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer It covers the history of Joseph Smith, the LDS church and polygamist Mormon sects alongside some more recent events like Elizabeth Smart abduction and murders by the Lafferty brothers in the 80s. The subject matter was very interesting to me, I wasn't familiar with any of those subjects and the history of the LDS church and Joseph Smith is crazier than I imagined. It shifts chapter to chapter between the modern events and the historical stuff, each chapter is about 12-20 minutes long.
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Sep 7, 2015 00:45
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. This one took me a while, it's like 900 pages. I liked it a lot though. I bought it thinking it would be mostly about the Manhattan Project with some background information but it goes into serious detail from the early work on the nucleus through to Nagasaki and the backstories of all the people involved. As someone who's read a lot of non-fiction on physics I was constantly finding out about new things like the espionage surrounding nuclear weapons during WWII, the exile of Jewish scientists leading up to the war, physicists who predicted the Cold War and were dismissed by Churchill, etc.
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Jan 4, 2016 05:07
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On The Beach by Shute I'm surprised it's taken me this long to read it. I read a lot of post apocalyptic fiction and live in Australia. The plot is pretty sparse really, there's not a lot that actually happens and the focus is on the different personalities. How they interact, how they come to terms with impending death, etc. It's very moving. I put it in the same category as Alas Babylon, a very grounded and personal post-apocalyptic story.
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Feb 10, 2016 01:03
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The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. I'm surprised this book isn't mentioned a lot more. I can't even remember how I came across it, maybe through recommendations in Goodreads/Amazon from all the post-apocalyptic fiction I read. It was written in the early 1970's and it's quite prophetic in a lot of ways - cities with unsafe drinking water, life expectancy going down, increased corporate influence in government, drug resistant disease, chemical resistant pests, large scale illness outbreaks from food products, etc. It's written in an odd style, jumping between episodes of unrelated characters/events and small transcripts of things like news reports. Can be quite difficult to keep track of the different characters and in the beginning at least it's not clear whether you're reading some isolated little vignette that's there to establish the setting or something that's part of the larger story. The writing could have used a little more restraint in places, the character Austin Train is the perfect humble martyrly genius academic that chooses a life of obscurity and manual labour because no one heeds his warnings. Also he can make people break into tears and do a 180 degree change in their personal worldview just by speaking to them face to face, so basically an environmentalist John Galt. Some of the very bad things that happen to innocent people in the book seem cartoonishly bad at times. The ending is a little underwhelming and abrupt, but overall I enjoyed reading it.
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Mar 1, 2016 00:32
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100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today by Stephen Le A little disappointed with this book. Like a few non-fiction books I've read lately it reads like a TED talked padded out to a short book length. The chapters are little uneven, some providing a good level of detail and references while others go around in circles without saying much. It tries to be a travelogue where traditional ways of eating are experienced and the lessons of anthropology and science come together to provide a blueprint for healthy leaving. It's pretty shallow in all aspects. The central theme of the book is that meat and calories should be restricted when younger to delay puberty and prevent cancer and diabetes type disease that take a long time to develop. But also that meat and calories should be consumed in higher quantities later in life for physical robustness and resistance to disease. The travelogue aspect is pretty clumsily written. Chapters follow this template of 'I went to this far flung place to eat like their ancestors. Here's some dull story about trying to find the right bus to catch or hire a motorcycle and meet my friend I know from university who lives there. Turns out people here don't eat the traditional way anymore. Remainder of chapter is science/history of insects as a protein source'
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Mar 9, 2016 00:43
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Say Jared Diamond three times and all kinds of retards will appear. Then you have 100 pages of people arguing 'North Korea and South Korea' disproves any geographic contribution to technological progress with 'IQ decreases with proximity to the equator' types.
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Apr 4, 2016 17:06
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Wool - Hugh Howey Only the first book so far, but I have the whole omnibus. Was disappointed after reading the first half of the book. Writing is reasonable but not great and it definitely suffers from starting with mostly self-contained stories and characters. It definitely picks up in the last third of the book where there is more continuity with the events and the characters. I finished this book and started immediately reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I don't really have a strong opinion about it yet, but it's was very striking how much better the narration seems compared to Hugh Howey.
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Apr 6, 2016 06:04
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Station Eleven I was a little unsure about this book until about half way through it. Once the connections between the characters and the time periods were clearer I became very engrossed. I think I would have liked it better with some more development of certain characters and periods. But overall I really recommend it. Post apocalyptic fiction which is more lit than sci-fi and not some hamfisted fable for the author's ideology is always welcome.
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Jun 17, 2016 03:26
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Let The Right One In I thought this was very decent. Some oddness that might have been the translation. Just happy to read modern vampire fiction that isn't Anne Rice type of pandering shite.
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Jul 6, 2016 15:30
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Finished the Silo series by Hugh Howey. Writing was competent and starting with the second book continued to improve. The setting and the different story arcs were compelling enough to look past the writing. Not up to the standard of the Oryx and Crake but definitely worth reading.
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Aug 22, 2016 02:52
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The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood This trilogy of books is all I've read from Margaret Atwood. I really like the style of writing - the dialogue, descriptions, characterisation, imagery, etc. I read some different science-fiction from other authors in between Oryx and Crake and this book and the difference in I guess you'd call it the 'competence' of the writing is really noticeable. The other thing is that the book is full of well worn out science-fiction cliches - evil corporations, future weird sex stuff, sadistic bad guys, new futuristic slang words, fantastic animals, running man style criminal death matches, good guy environmentalists, etc - it gets a little close to being pulpy at times but the quality of writing keeps it in check. If you told me about a sci-fi book from 2009 with those themes that was written from the viewpoint of some female protagonists I would be expecting cheescake comic book style jerk off sci-fi with a sexy lizard lady on the cover. Like the shite I spent my childhood reading in 2000AD comics.
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Nov 3, 2016 01:44
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I thought World War Z was a bucket of poo poo. Hamfisted and character voices were written really bad.
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Nov 29, 2016 06:06
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Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood. I didn't find this as compelling as the first couple of books, even though I was eager to see the conclusion of the different story lines. The back stories revealed and the major current plot line were unremarkable compared to those in the earlier books. But the sentimentality in the book was great to read and despite the subject matter the writing keeps the book from getting too pulpy. Apparently the HBO adaption was canned but a mini-series script is written and Aronofsky is free to shop around.
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Dec 15, 2016 01:23
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The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. David Simon and Ed Burns. Came to this book as a huge fan of the Wire and having not seen the mini-series. Probably the best example of literary non-fiction I've read in ages. Very genuine, very intimate and the literary approach suits the stories being told. I've read a few books of late that seemed like forced and half-arsed screenplays when just basic exposition would have suited much better. So it was a joy to read. I'm not American, I have no appreciation of how Americans at large view Simon or Burns's politics and ideas. When discussing sentencing, drug policy, welfare, etc the writing in the book is very confident without coming across to me at least as being ideological or patronising.
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Jan 31, 2017 02:19
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Almost half way through the first book in the Last Policeman series. I like the premise, but I find the writing a little lovely.
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Feb 8, 2017 01:51
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The Last Policeman - Ben Winters Very unremarkable writing. Very formulaic and very confusing at key parts of the story. Interesting enough premise to carry it though, benefits from not being too long. Seems like a big shift in tone for the next novel basic on the epilogue. I'm going to finish the series, just not all at once.
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Feb 17, 2017 00:58
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Finally got around to The Handmaid's Tale. I really like Atwood's prose, especially the voices her characters have. When it comes to speculative fiction critical of religion you don't have to look hard to find lovely writing. Can't say I'm bothered by the ambiguous ending either. I wonder if that's going to be maintained in the Hulu adaption that's coming soon.
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Mar 3, 2017 01:22
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VideoTapir posted:There is no genre more tragic than alternate history. It has such potential, but it's such a corpus of garbage (mostly right-wing, libertarian, and racist; sometimes just ahistorical nonsense that undermines its own premise) that something being advertised as alternate history is enough to make me not bother. I mean we're talking about a not-poo poo:poo poo ratio somewhere around that of furry fiction. Also a magnet for 'steampunk'
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Mar 31, 2017 05:58
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Wizard of Earthsea I do really love the matter-of-fact style of prose, it's much better than I was expecting given that I was approaching this as YA fiction. Still it took me a long time to get invested in the story, I think if I had read this as a kid I would have finished it in two sittings. I read a lot of lovely fantasy then and I'm realising a lot of what I read was heavily influenced by these books. It was compelling enough in the second half that I'll probably continue with the series, just not straight away.
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Apr 17, 2017 14:48
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