book

Wants to read Understanding Deep Learning

Wants to read The Guns of August

Added The Creator

Finished reading Rivals

Added Game Changer to Read Books

Added All Fours to Read Books

Wants to read Black Hole Heart and Other Stories

Rated Too like the lightning 9/10

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...

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

Wants to read River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

Reading Warhammer 40.000: Eisenhorn 3: Hereticus

Finished reading The Long Game

Finished reading Happy Place

Added The Long Game to Read Books

Finished reading The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World

Wants to read The Enchanted Greenhouse

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 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 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/

Rated A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction 6/10

Much to my surprise, I didn’t enjoy this collection as much as most of Pratchett’s other works. Most likely, his short stories are just not my thing. In fact, the longer the story, the more I enjoyed it.

The Sea and Little Fishes was the clear standout for me, but I also liked The Hades Business. Stephen Briggs’s narration is excellent, as usual, and Michael Fenton Stevens handles the non-Discworld pieces well.

Full review: https://puf.io/books/a-blink-of-the-s...

Rated The Martian Chronicles 8/10

Bradbury shows little interest in scientific plausibility here, using Mars instead as an imaginative setting for poetic, humorous, and emotionally charged storytelling. Some elements, including the treatment of the native Martians and certain racial and gender stereotypes, have aged poorly, but the collection still held up well for me.

(also: that cover here is gorgeous!)

Full review: https://puf.io/books/the-martian-chro...

Finished reading The Rise of Christian Kingship in the Early Medieval West

Rated The Regicide Report 8/10

It is impressive how Stross pulled so many characters from the other books into this story. Each of them has fairly little to do, but it was still nice to have them back for the grand finale. Not a bad end to the series at all.