A generation ago, the city of Voortyashtan was the stronghold of the god of war …
City of Blades
4 stars
Back to the rich world of The Divine Cities trilogy, this book follows Turyin Mulaghesh instead of Shara Komayd (the protagonist of the first book). Mulaghesh is called out of retirement to look into the disappearance of a Saypuri agent in the deceased war goddess' city.
The story is soberingly tragic despite some victories.
Ethan Mollick, professeur à Wharton et auteur de la populaire newsletter One Useful Thing Substack, …
Co-Intelligence
3 stars
A generally optimistic take on what could be: Generative AI won't destroy education, it will be how everyone will have their own personal tutor. Smart executives won't lay off all of their human workers seeking cost savings but will use the productivity gains of AI to allow their workforce to do so much more than they could have previously.
Mollick covers some history of AI, current capabilities and limitations, and guidelines for working with it. But even a future rushing at us so quickly is difficult to predict, as the author acknowledges.
Dalinar Kholin challenged the evil god Odium to a contest of champions with the future …
Favorite moments
4 stars
Content warning
Things that happen... not so much plot
These were some things that I particularly enjoyed.
Adolin and Shallan marveling at the wonders of a thing called a "shower". I've often thought that a hot shower is one of the great pleasures in life. (p.144)
Kaladin and Sylphrenia doing a combination dance/kata together. (p.496)
Kaladin's realization that Szeth wasn't like him, but rather like Kaladin's younger brother Tien. (p.653)
A scene of peace, flute music & stew. (pp.847-849)
Szeth described as a "master of wind and Truth" as a nod to the title. (p.920)
"What are you?... Are you his god?" "No, I'm his therapist." (p.1256)
In the near future, where America has become a police state, one hundred boys are …
A boy goes for a walk
3 stars
Content warning
Maybe spoilers?
100 boys walk until only one is left standing.
Early in my reading of this book I imagined Stephen King taking a bet that he couldn't write a whole book where nothing happens except for someone going on a walk. I also thought I'd be disappointed if there wasn't some kind of a plot twist or at least that things get better spelled out about the setting that makes the walk what it is. But the plot, like the walkers, just keeps going down the line.
Doing a little research, this is apparently the first novel Stephen King wrote (and it was published under a pseudonym), so there probably weren't any literary challenge bets going on.
Despite the simplicity of the plot there are a ton of unanswered questions that leave the reader to speculate.
Did I like it? It was brutal and gory at times, so not "enjoyable" but it made me think.
Kai-Enna is the Witch King, though he hasn’t always been, and he hasn’t even always …
Complex
3 stars
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.
A grumpy yet loveable man finds his solitary world turned on its head when a …
A Man Called Ove
2 stars
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).
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses …
Mixed
3 stars
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.
Content warning
Spoilers (but it is history, so...)
This quote from the book expresses the situation the Osage people found themselves in in the early 20th century:
At one congressional hearing, another Osage chief named Bacon Rind testified that the whites had "bunched us down here in the backwoods, the roughest part of the United States, thinking 'we will drive these Indians down to where there is a big pile of rocks and put them there in that corner.'" Now that the pile of rocks had turned out to be worth millions of dollars, he said, "everybody wants to get in here and get some of this money." (pp. 87-88)
Oil was found under tribal lands, and every member of the tribe received a share of the earnings when drilling rights were auctioned off, quickly making them rich, and ripe for exploitation. There were lots of ways this was done, but a common one was through marriage to an Osage and inheriting shares at the death of their spouse.
Local government and law enforcement were on the take too, so it was hard to find justice when Osage were quietly and not so quietly murdered. It took outsiders from the nascent FBI to unravel some of the plots, but even when that was done and people ended up in jail, many perpetrators were never prosecuted.
In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” …
Taking our brain for granted
3 stars
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.
Years ago he had comrades in arms and a cause to believe in, but now …
Something strange about this planet
3 stars
A Bridge 4 soldier from the Stormlight Archive is skipping across the Cosmere and ends up on a planet whose sun destroys (nearly) all life it touches. The planet's inhabitants live in cities that are made up of a bunch of conjoined hovercraft that keep the people moving perpetually within the safety of night.
The soldier joins up with a small group of revolutionaries as they seek out a refuge that would allow them to stop constantly moving while resisting an evil dictator who wants to unify/enslave all the planets inhabitants.
As a story the book was fine, but I had a hard time accepting the setting. I wouldn't expect life to have been viable on a planet where the sunlight destroys what it touches, yet somehow there are indigenous animals that live there (mentioned only briefly). The humans living there aren't native, but assuming some of the people that …
A Bridge 4 soldier from the Stormlight Archive is skipping across the Cosmere and ends up on a planet whose sun destroys (nearly) all life it touches. The planet's inhabitants live in cities that are made up of a bunch of conjoined hovercraft that keep the people moving perpetually within the safety of night.
The soldier joins up with a small group of revolutionaries as they seek out a refuge that would allow them to stop constantly moving while resisting an evil dictator who wants to unify/enslave all the planets inhabitants.
As a story the book was fine, but I had a hard time accepting the setting. I wouldn't expect life to have been viable on a planet where the sunlight destroys what it touches, yet somehow there are indigenous animals that live there (mentioned only briefly). The humans living there aren't native, but assuming some of the people that decided to go there survived the discovery of the sun's destructive power, its unclear why they didn't immediately pack up for somewhere better.
Also, a major plot point was the need to get the rebel city to fly over some mountains to avoid having to fight the dictator's forces, and through a major engineering effort, that is accomplished. A secondary project was to build weapons for the city so that they could fight the dictator. It seems like if they had made the weapons the primary project, they could have skipped the "fly over the mountains" project entirely.
Given the number of pre-release readers Brandon Sanderson has for his books, I have to think that it all made sense to lots of people, but I guess I missed that understanding beyond "magic". Or maybe Brandon just liked the setting and didn't want to get bogged down in justifying it, thereby ruining the story.
Recollections of the conquest of New Spain describes the various expeditions, marches, embassies, important leaders, …
Learning of the conquest
4 stars
Content warning
Spoilers (but it is history, so...)
I've only had a vague sense of what the Spanish incursion into the Americas was like, from school or whatever other sources I've happened upon. Something about them forcing Christianity and generally massacring the peaceful indigenous people with guns. I got a different sense of things reading Bernal Díaz' account. These are some of the things that stood out to me:
Hernan Cortes' campaign was only undertaken with the thinnest of government authorization, with several parties actively trying to stop him -- not because they thought it was morally wrong but because they wanted the spoils for themselves.
There were a lot of people in Central America, with a large civilization.
Díaz and his fellow soldiers seemed fairly devout in their faith, often ascribing their survival in battles or other good fortunes to the grace of God.
Despite that, they seemed pretty OK with accepting Aztec women as gifts of diplomacy or trophies of war. Was chastity not an important virtue?
Although they taught Christianity, one of their primary goals was steer the Aztecs away from their religion based on human sacrifice and cannibalism.
Cortes was deft at diplomacy, gaining allies among various groups of Aztecs and generally tried to avoid fighting (until he got himself in such a precarious situation that taking Montezuma hostage was maybe the only way of surviving).
Yes, there were muskets, but crossbows were also heavily used in battle by the Spanish.
The story is well told, including a "darkest hour" in the siege against the lake city of Mexico, when the Spanish have lost a battle wherein Cortes was nearly killed, many Spaniards were captured and sacrificed to idols, and their native allies abandon them.
