Rated The Sparrow 8/10
wild-ass book - a unique take on the first contact story. Bleak and weirdly compelling
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Rated The Daughter of Time 8/10
A curious, talky little mystery in which a convalescing policeman considers the very very cold case of Richard III and his purported murder of his nephews.
Rated The Donut Legion: A Novel 8/10
A very silly, enjoyable beach read. Breezy and clever with a little sex and violence, some twists and turns, and a lot of down-homey similes.
Rated Sejong Korean Student Book 1B - English Edition 10/10
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Rated The Devourers 8/10
Wild and rich and unsettling. A young professor in Kolkata meets a mysterious stranger who claims to be half-werewolf and gives him two old documents to transcribe, revealing a secret world of demonic shape-shifters. It's not super long but the writing is so dense and lyrical that I found myself taking a lot of time with it. Absorbing.
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Edited 44d ago
Rated Passing 8/10
A soapy, fast-reading novel about two childhood friends, one living as a Black woman in a Black community, the other living as white. It's about people and not ideas, but never loses sight of the essential absurdity of a system that assigns status and merit based on ancestry. Predates - both in writing and in setting - [b:The Vanishing Half|51791252|The Vanishing Half|Brit Bennett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1577090827l/51791252._SX50_SY75_.jpg|73423787], but shares its themes and concerns.
Finished reading Bushcraft 101: A Field Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival
Rated Walking on the Ceiling 8/10
I like the way this starts out like it’s going to be one thing and then expands out. The narrator’s relationship with an older writer is the structuring device but it’s really about her relationship to her family, Turkey, and her Turkish identity. A little meandery, but a quick and enjoyable read.
Rated The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win 8/10
Really well done. Over the course of researching and writing this book, the writer became a genuinely successful professional poker player, and there's lots about poker in here, but she also achieves her goal of extracting from poker valuable lessons about psychology and decisionmaking. It's well-written and engaging, though with some repetitiveness. When Konnikova gets an insight she really works it over - I definitely found myself highlighting some points only to see them rephrased a few pages later. Highly recommend; admittedly, you may need to already be open to the idea that poker is interesting and that its principles are transferrable. I was already there on both points. <br/><br/>I much preferred this book to the similar [b:Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts|35957157|Thinking in Bets Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts|Annie Duke|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513351600l/35957157._SY75_.jpg|57513167], which felt much less like memoir or analysis and much more like a business self-help book.
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Rated The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History 10/10
Rated The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House 10/10
Wants to read Snow Crash
Rated The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes 10/10
An exemplary biography of a figure that I, like many, have *heard about* more than I've really *known about*. Carter makes an excellent case for the importance of Keynes through the 20th century and in our own time - it's insightful and grapples with Keynes' contradictions and misfires as much as it does the gravitational impact of his work on the world. A lot of this stuff is abstruse and opaque and Carter is a really good popularizer/explainer, putting into sharper definition a lot of ideas and concepts I'd struggled with. In particular, I think the last couple of chapters are really useful as they define the economic policies of the Clinton and Obama administrations as clearly - and harshly - as I've read in any text. Highly recommend!
Rated The Rose That Grew From Concrete 10/10
Rated Anyaföld íze a számban 10/10
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