aolfreetrial finished reading Girls Like Girls by Hayley Kiyoko
Girls Like Girls by Hayley Kiyoko
Trailblazing pop star, actor, and director, Hayley Kiyoko debuts her first novel, a coming-of-age romance based on her breakthrough hit …
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Trailblazing pop star, actor, and director, Hayley Kiyoko debuts her first novel, a coming-of-age romance based on her breakthrough hit …
An Armenian-American woman rediscovers her roots and embraces who she really is in this vibrant and heartfelt queer rom-com by …
The Island of the Colorblind is a 1997 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks about achromatopsia on the Micronesian atoll of …
From Stonewall and Lambda Award–winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity …
Over the course of nine novels, Tom Clancy's genius for big, compelling plots and his natural narrative gift (The New …
Content warning High-level plot spoilers
...or maybe it was never great to begin with. I'm trying to identify when Tom Clancy jumped the shark, and it's clear that Rainbow Six is post-shark-jump Clancy - too many pages of "look at how good and handsome the good guys with good guns are" and copious amounts of references to previous Clancy books sprinkled in there for flavor. Perhaps The Hunt for Red October was lightning in a bottle - whatever the magic was has since been lost.
This is a pre-9/11 book about terrorism fighters who, as the book reminds you over and over again, are fantastically talented and athletic and smart and love kids and have loyal wives and fly around the world making bad guys' heads explode. And the bad guys are the evil commies and socialists and especially the environmentalists who manufacture an epidemic and produce a fake vaccine to kill off humani... yuck, this book really hasn't aged well has it?
Maybe reading this book in 1998 merely signaled poor taste. Now, reading it makes you feel like a QAnon believer. Clancy could have left this book up to his ghostwriters and it wouldn't have come up any worse.
The C++11 standard allows programmers to express ideas more clearly, simply, and directly, and to write faster, more efficient code. …
A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the world as an apprentice to …
I have to say, this was a fun read. And like the author's book Snow Crash from 3 years prior, it features a young girl protagonist, nation-state world-building, a sometimes awkward treatment of Asia, and sections of excessive violence.
In some ways, the book aged a lot better than Snow Crash. The world has made VR a thing which means a lot of the computer-related predictions from Snow Crash feel laughable, but we're nowhere near the level of nanotechnology in A Diamond Age. Snow Crash is a book of the 90s. The Diamond Age feels good even today.
Where this book let me down, however, was in how the plot was woven together. There are a lot of interesting characters that never get the attention they should. I don't demand that all plot threads get tied up in a nice neat bow (I think Anathem even went a bit too …
I have to say, this was a fun read. And like the author's book Snow Crash from 3 years prior, it features a young girl protagonist, nation-state world-building, a sometimes awkward treatment of Asia, and sections of excessive violence.
In some ways, the book aged a lot better than Snow Crash. The world has made VR a thing which means a lot of the computer-related predictions from Snow Crash feel laughable, but we're nowhere near the level of nanotechnology in A Diamond Age. Snow Crash is a book of the 90s. The Diamond Age feels good even today.
Where this book let me down, however, was in how the plot was woven together. There are a lot of interesting characters that never get the attention they should. I don't demand that all plot threads get tied up in a nice neat bow (I think Anathem even went a bit too far in wrapping up the story) but what about Hackworth? Did the author just give up on trying to decide his fate? Did anything come of Miranda joining the Drummers? Who is the mysterious boss of Dr. X? Is CryptNet important or not? Did I accidentally only read half the book?
The author makes so much of these characters only for them to be inconsequential, as if he meant to write a book twice the size but had to abruptly end it mid-way (or wanted to leave room for a sequel). And even the parts that are fleshed out don't seem to fit together very well, and I'm sure you could come up with a long list of plot holes if you tried.
Nonetheless, the main character's story and the imaginative nanotech-based world make this a fun if imperfect book. Don't let me scare you away - you may like this one better than Snow Crash.
I first tried reading Anathem back when it was relatively new, but couldn't get past the first 100 pages or so. Now, having the benefit of a decade more worldly knowledge (such as the history of the Catholic church, Western philosophy, etc.), I've finally finished it and I can say that it was an incredible read.
Is it an collection of philosophy dialogue? Is it an action-adventure novel? Is it actually just Snow Crash presented differently?
Yeah, kind of, but it's also a book that gets exponentially more exciting as it goes on and also says some pretty profound things. (The profound things are, unfortunately, fiction, but it would be a high bar for an action-adventure novel to also truly advance philosophy.)
So if you're considering reading this, just know that you shouldn't worry too much about the made-up words - you'll understand them in due time - and that …
I first tried reading Anathem back when it was relatively new, but couldn't get past the first 100 pages or so. Now, having the benefit of a decade more worldly knowledge (such as the history of the Catholic church, Western philosophy, etc.), I've finally finished it and I can say that it was an incredible read.
Is it an collection of philosophy dialogue? Is it an action-adventure novel? Is it actually just Snow Crash presented differently?
Yeah, kind of, but it's also a book that gets exponentially more exciting as it goes on and also says some pretty profound things. (The profound things are, unfortunately, fiction, but it would be a high bar for an action-adventure novel to also truly advance philosophy.)
So if you're considering reading this, just know that you shouldn't worry too much about the made-up words - you'll understand them in due time - and that the crazy stuff starts happening 1/3 of the way through and even crazier stuff 3/4 of the way through.
In writing an action-adventure novel based on philosophy and physics though, I think the author has run into a bit of a conundrum: it's too rigorous for readers wanting a fun read yet not rigorous enough to hold together well when the crazy stuff starts happening. That is, he takes a long time to set up a theoretical foundation for what happens, but as he stretches the theory to advance the story, he stretches a little too far and leaves a lot of holes.