Reviews and Comments

I enjoyed reading this book, full of interesting information. I fear that many of the book's intended/actual readers will probably know most of the content, but still it's always good to get a recap. The author takes pains to be pretty politically neutral throughout the book, and because of this doesn't stray too far into economics, when that is not really the book's bailiwick.

I'm not 100% convinced by the book's structure, nor, given that structure, the ordering of the chapters, but that's probably a very personal complaint that wouldn't be shared by many/most others.

This is quite easy reading, each topic is not delved into particularly deeply, it's pretty shallow. The sort of person who would read this, could probably have written 90% of each chapter without doing any research, so you're not going to learn much new, but it's still quite pleasant to read.

Except for the attempted humour, I haven't heard their podcast, so it's possibly a case that their brand of humour doesn't translate well to the written word. Still it grates on you pretty quickly. I feel like a decent editor should have been taking most of the attempted jokes out. If you can get past the attempted humour (which is easy to sample because it's mostly in either speech bubbles or footnotes) this is a pleasant read, but also pretty skippable.

This is a pleasant dive through what science has to say about many of life's more philosophical questions. It's very pleasant to read, but most of the questions are approached in a pretty broad manner, meaning that each question has mostly only the surface scratched. In that sense the book is rather shallow. That's not necessarily a bad thing, each question in the book could be the topic of an entire book in itself, and I'd probably rather read these intros rather than a set of nice books, or even, say, the most appealing three.

It does mean though, that you're not going to learn much new here, unless, well unless you're the sort of person who wouldn't read this book anyway.

A very readable book. I enjoyed it more or less from cover-to-cover. I like that the stories are mostly pretty independent of each other but interlaced just a little a bit. I also like that we get to see the interlaced parts from two or multiple points of view, from that aspect it's a little like Bret Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction. You hear one protagonists feeling of a relationship/interaction and then later hear the other side's perception of it, this is most obvious in the after party between a former pupil and teacher. Overall, well worth reading.

I expected to be glued to this, but didn't really find that to be the case. The best parts are really just the stories of the cons, of which there simply aren't enough. There is quite a lot of description as to what has gone wrong in each case, some psychological biases, and human frailties which allow for these cons to be successful, but ultimately I found myself a bit lost during the book.

I pretty much loved this from start to finish. I am a slow reader, but found myself frequently picking this book up whenever I had a spare ten minutes.

He also uses a trick, that John Irving uses, which really hooks me. At the end of several chapters, he gives a spoiler about the current topic, but then the next chapter is on a different topic. The spoiler just teases you enough to want to keep reading now to get closer to when the teaser is fully expunged.

His voice and style is the same as with pretty much all Bill Bryson books, if you love Bill Bryson, there is no good reason not to read this one. That said, if you aren't a fan this will likely be a long slog. If you've never read any Bill Bryson, perhaps start with a shorter one as a taster.

This was very readable, very easy and pleasant, almost cozy to read. It's a little tougher to say that I'll remember it, or see exactly what the point was. I understand that this was a serialised novel, and I could imagine reading it one chapter a day (for some 200 days) and that would be quite nice.

But reading it as a book novel, I struggle to see what the point is? It's almost like a soap opera in written form. That said I did like the character development, it just didn't seem to go anywhere with those developed characters.

A very good overview of the topic of the Soviet Union side of world war two, and the many contradictions therein. It's a little difficult to say more, and I don't know how well it can be judged for factual correctness as I'm not a historian. But nonetheless this was a useful book, and I, at least, enjoyed reading it.

A very readable journey into a possible future. A very interesting narrator, an artificially intelligent humanoid with good observational abilities but limited reasoning, which ultimately allows her to draw some curious and false conclusions.

Minor things about the proposed future slightly irk, for example we seem to have autonomous artificial friends, but driving is still something done by humans. Walking around is likely more difficult to automate than driving around, though companionship does not appear to be as difficult as we might have thought/hoped. That said, the future inhabitants all have something called an 'oblong', which seems to be roughly a futuristic smart phone. Do we then really need the artificial friends to be humanoid in look? Why can the artificial friend not simply be interfaced with through the oblong? Lastly, it seems that the artificial friends can perform chores if asked, why then does the main family still have a housekeeper? Why does not everyone have a robotic maid?

Still these are just nitpicks about the possible future, the main throw of the work, and the pleasure of reading it, is not significantly affected. At times, the book may seem to belabor about the point a bit. Perhaps some scenes could have been cut, or perhaps I am just missing their significance.

This was a pretty enjoyable read. I'm generally a bit of a sucker for war related stories. This is basically the author's imagination of how Josef Mengele's time in South America went. It's pretty readable, but there isn't much there to takeaway. He was mostly in hiding, leading a pretty simple life. But that much we probably already guessed. I guess I was hoping for something a bit more surprising.

This was pleasant enough to read, but I was really hoping for more depth. There are 52 rules, each of which are just 2 small pages, about 3 paragraphs worth. My problem here is that for me, I knew pretty much everything in the book, with a few small (but interesting) exceptions. I suspect that's probably true of most people who would decide to read this book.

I read this after reading an article that gushed about this book and in particular the differences between the book and the Disney film. I was a little underwhelmed, this it is different from the Disney film, some of the animals are killed by other animals not just the hunter, and the hunter does rescue a fawn. So the characters and the story are more nuanced than the film, and in that sense the book is for a more mature audience than the film. 

That said, for the most part, I was kind of just a bit bored. Not very bored. I guess, there isn't much of an actual story here. Bambi's life, just isn't particularly compelling, it's that of an ordinary male deer. Probably not a bad book for an adolescent to read, i.e. not a children's book, but a teenager may take more from this than an adult, though getting a male teenager to read this is probably not easy.