Reviews and Comments

Kai is a demon, which means he inhabits the bodies of humans after their death, and has various other powers. He and friends spend the book looking for another friend, which sounds pretty simple, but the world in which this happens has a complex backdrop of peoples, organizations and politics that is gradually revealed during a past and present timeline.

I'd recommend dedicating serious sequential reading blocks vs. the way I did it, which was in shorter snatches, occasionally with a few days in between. It made it hard to keep some minor characters straight and to understand some of the political situations. Do I not know what is going on because it hasn't been revealed yet, or because I forgot? Hard to tell sometimes.

Ove is a 59-year-old widower who is ready to end life so he can just be with his wife again, but keeps getting interrupted in his attempts by mostly incompetent people who need his help.

I think the author and I got off on the wrong foot because he made his grumpy old man protagonist just a couple of years older than I am (and I'm not old dammit!). So time felt all off for me through the book. When Ove is dating his wife, it sounds like they're in the 1950s, but his current neighbor is an IT consultant.

For me, there were just a lot of unlikeable characters -- but maybe that's just the grumpy old man's view of the world (mine or Ove's, take your pick).

Received as gift from Gerrit

This book has been on my shelf for years. I think the author is coming out with a new version soon so I thought I'd finally read the original. The thesis is that epidemics (mostly social ones) are triggered by small groups of people or small changes in approach. There were definitely interesting parts and examples, but some things have been supposedly debunked. I've come across the "broken windows" idea in other contexts and so looked briefly into detractors of that. They give unsatisfactory comments like, "We don't know why crime rates went down, but it sure wasn't because of what Gladwell said!" The book seems like it would appeal more to sales and marketing types who can fantasize about finding the tiny tipping point that will make their products suddenly successful.

Recommended by Vincent Smith

The case studies of patients who had strange neurological conditions was fascinating -- people who couldn't sense their bodies, people who couldn't form new memories, a pair of twins who could perceive numbers of things without counting them and several others. The author's philosophizing was less interesting.

Yumi and Painter, "practical" artists in two different cultures become somehow bound to each other such that they experience each other's worlds.

This story took me a little while to get into, and required a fair amount of "let me explain what is going on..." from the narrator to understand some Cosmere concepts that in other books/series are meted out more slowly.

Still, I enjoyed the characters and their self-exploration as well as the imaginative world.

The author, Charlie Bird, had been Cosmo, the Cougar mascot at Brigham Young University while he was a student there, and had some of his dance videos with the Cougarettes go viral.

He is also gay and struggled to reconcile that at a religious school and as a member of a conservative faith that didn't have a very good track record of accepting that. Things were very difficult at times.

Ultimately he came to feel that his religion and orientation didn't have to be in conflict, that being faithful and gay is being true to his entire self. Also, while he had tremendous anxiety coming out to his friends and family (usually one-at-a-time), it was a positive and affirming experience when he did. Charlie was lucky to have people who loved him and supported him, even when it took some learning on their part to understand Charlie's experiences.