book

Reading The Lost and the Damned

Added Hyperscale: the ambition and excess of big tech's data empires to Want to Read

Finished reading The Honor of the Queen

Rated Too like the lightning 9/10

Added Seven surrenders to Currently Reading

Rated Lords and Ladies 8/10

I loved this one. It combines hilarious comedy with deeper ideas about beauty, goodness, respect, and worth, all through interesting characters. Granny Weatherwax is at her kind-but-not-nice best, while Magrat gets a particularly strong arc.

By now I've also really gotten used to Indira Varma's narration, and especially enjoy the way she voices the three witches.

Full review: https://puf.io/books/lords-and-ladies...

Reading Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos

Added The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook to Read Books

Added ADHD is awesome: a guide to (mostly) thriving with ADHD to Currently Reading

Wants to read Etna

Wants to read River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

Finished reading Malleus

Added The Creator

Finished reading The Long Game

Finished reading Happy Place

Added The Long Game to Read Books

Wants to read The Enchanted Greenhouse

Rated The Spellshop 9/10

Rated Slaughterhouse-Five 8/10

I first heard of Slaughterhouse-Five back in Dutch high school where it was on the allowed-reading list for English class, and it took me four decades to finally get to it. 😅

I found it an interesting read. The absurd mixture of styles made Vonnegut's lived experience and the absurdities of war easier to take in.

Full review: https://puf.io/books/slaughterhouse-f...
All my reviews: https://puf.io/books/

Rated Columbus Day 6/10

Columbus Day mixes space opera pulp of the purest kind with splashes of Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque absurdism, and that’s not a bad thing.

The story is very readable, the plot moves fast, and the interaction between the characters is funny and functional. I enjoyed this book for what it is, but wonder how its lightweight nature and (so far) lack of character development hold up across the series.

Rated 3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years 6/10

I’m a sucker for science fiction short stories that change one or two aspects of reality and explore the consequences.

Scalzi does that well in this story, and the writing works for me. I especially liked how the different travelers allow the story to explore several scenarios.

The ending was less satisfying than I’d hoped for, though, so this lands at 3 stars for me.

Full review: https://puf.io/books/3-days,-9-months...

Rated Crisis Engineering: Time-Tested Tools for Turning Chaos into Clarity 8/10

A relatively easy read, especially given its potentially complex subject matter. The authors do a good job making crisis engineering practical and understandable, with a strong emphasis on sensemaking and getting everyone to see the same picture of what’s happening.

I found the more theoretical middle part the driest, probably because I haven’t been dealing with any such crisis recently. It was also fun to recognize many of the practices from working with SREs and on difficult projects during my time at Google.

Rated Witches Abroad 6/10

I’m reading Discworld starting from the highest rated subseries and working backwards, and Witches Abroad was an interesting point in Pratchett’s evolution.

The deeper moral ideas are very much there in this book, especially around good intentions, expected roles, free will, and self-restraint. His treatment of them still feels a bit more obvious and less nuanced than in many of the later Discworld books I’ve read, but it’s already a long way from the earliest works in the series.

Pratchett wrote 41 Discworld novels in 32 years, and I find it fascinating, if not always satisfying, to backtrack through his evolving style and craftsmanship.

Full review: https://puf.io/books/witches-abroad--...

Rated The Subtle Knife 6/10

I enjoyed The Subtle Knife, but like The Golden Compass, it didn’t fully live up to my expectations.

The world-building didn’t interest me as much this time, but the plot moves along nicely and has some unexpected twists. It also ends on another big, but darker, cliffhanger.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the story wraps up in The Amber Spyglass.

My full review: https://puf.io/books/the-subtle-knife...

Rated The Moustache 4/10

An interesting concept, and in places the story is a real page-turner. But in other places I found the writing boring and repetitive. This could still have been a 3-star read for me, except for the last two pages, where the book suddenly takes a turn that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Full review: https://puf.io/books/the-moustache---...
All my reviews: https://puf.io/books/