Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

I got into a bit of a theme:


First two were best, grunge one easily best overall. The last one is questionably about Glam or Metal.

The rest since I last posted:


Realingers is the only one that was clearly above average.

[benji]

This guy gets it. And the way he presents his interviews with Trump are perfect. It's hilarious that so many others in the media continue to think this guy is smart and a schemer and a master manipulator who has an interest about or grasp on anything.

If I have to take issue with something, it's that Trump's not the showman in the first season either, he's much more doubtful and awkward like Martha Stewart is in hers. The book touches on the latter but buys into Trump's version that he was his character completely in the first season. I think the problem is that you have to go back to the first season to see it. I started with the second season and watched the first season later on so it was more obvious to me.

I also think it's interesting they didn't discuss the UK version which has run longer in the original style than Trump's ever did. Alan Sugar hasn't been quiet about criticizing Trump or his version either. The UK version is also notably far closer to what Burnett's original vision was before Trump took it over other than not changing the head of the show each season. Also unlike Trump's version you can tell that Sugar actually has run businesses before and rather than reveling in irrelevant personal drama dominating everything he's contemptuous of it. Indeed, one of the difficulties in the UK version is that you can't really question Sugar's decision-making except for the finales because unlike Trump he almost entirely weights his decisions on the business aspect, this changes in the finales where he focuses on their characters.

Lastly, I have to question the book's assertion that Trump allowed the producers to determine who he fired because that literally doesn't make sense. I don't mean that it must be "more real" than shown but that the decisions are far too erratic and nonsensical to not come from Trump far too often. Sure, the producers in the celebrity version obviously wanted the biggest names to last longer, but Trump hardly had to be edited or ordered much to make his favorites not obvious, he telegraphed nearly every season from the earliest episodes. Too often they failed to even edit the episodes in a way that could justify Trump's decision. I liked that the book treated how Trump didn't pay attention to the tasks as some kind of big reveal when that was completely obvious from the second season and only became more obvious as the show continued. I think the mentioning that he was briefed and given a packet of information by producers before the boardrooms actually overestimates how much he listened to those briefings and read the packets. At times I questioned whether he even remembered what the tasks were as he showed little to no interest in them or the outcomes other than as ways to make people argue and fight. The viceroys were more than adept at supplying this information for him in the boardrooms themselves. I think the author misses the evidence in front of him, and the suggestion from his own thesis, that Trump never cared about any of it but the part where he was the "star" and center of attention in the boardrooms. To him, the rest of the show existed solely as justification for him to do the boardrooms in each episode and if the rest could have been eliminated he would have pushed for it.

[DavidCroquet]

I finally read The Satanic Verses.

I was sort of...solidarity reading it (on a very long delay) because of his most recent assassination attempt, and otherwise didn't know shit about Salman Rushdie. But that MF can write, wowee! Excellent book.

[Potato]

2024 stats.

Fell well short of my usual goal of 20 books.

However, I did read some pretty damn good books last year. Gideon the Ninth was a highlight and I finally finished up The Expanse. 

I'll be looking to read a little more nonfiction this year and more standalone books rather than long series.

[Potato]

Currently reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Holy shit, it's a great premise ruined by being an ode to fucking wokeness. 

Now I don't use that term very much because it's dumb, but there's no other way to describe a book which goes out of its way to say something completely stupid every 5 pages or so. It's basically American white guilt vomited on to the page and completely interrupts the story. It's so fucking overt, like, woman you're an author, surely you don't need to be so unsubtle? 

I'm a third is the way through and have considered abandoning it multiple times.

Finally finished hate reading this book. Somehow it got worse. 

The lead character is a Mary Sue of the worst type. Almost every make character, except the husband of the heroic maths genius/gun pilot/sex goddess, is a complete sexist racist arsehole. 

All the Black characters are holy and perfect and beyond reproach. 

The lead character's only flaw is that she's super highly anxious to the point of vomiting in high-stress situations and this affected her so much she attempted suicide in her younger years. She hides this from everyone and takes medication that calms her down. This does not prevent her from becoming an astronaut and even when this is revealed, she still manages to be the first woman to go into space. This is because she heroically saves the day during a mission by being the most genius mathematician in the whole of the world.

Oh, did I mention that this super genius is also the first person to recognise the potential climate effects of a meteor strike on earth and she manages to convince the US president that a space program is necessary as the earth will eventually become uninhabitable? Yes, she's just that smart. 

Just an awful book all round.

[Besticus Maximus]

read Red Rabbit as discussed here not long ago.

It was alright and I liked it but also completely edgeless and 2 dimensional. 6.5/10. But I did like it.

[clockwork5]

read Red Rabbit as discussed here not long ago.

It was alright and I liked it but also completely edgeless and 2 dimensional. 6.5/10. But I did like it.

Yeah I gave it 3 stars. I thought some scenes were well done but overall I’d def agree on the 2 dimensional critique. The group just kind of passes through from one place to the next, things happen to them and then they get to where they are going and the expected happens at the end. I liked it but rarely felt any impact from the story or characters. 

I’ve got a handful of chapters left in the latest Stormlight book and I have some thoughts. Gotta finish it before I can really judge it as a whole because I really think Sanderson shines on his endings and though all of the greater Cosmere stuff and the dense magic/history/gods/heralds/radiants/spren stuff isn’t my favorite part of these books, he always plays off of what the reader has learned in a fun way at the end and kind of retroactively makes all that stuff more enjoyable. So yeah, almost done with this beast. The slow parts didn’t bore me as much they did in the last book and though the pacing is also better, I don’t think it is going to reach the highs of the first two books for me. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Going to finish it this weekend.

[Besticus Maximus]

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver 6/10

The missus' mother made a big deal of me reading this and got me it for xmas, super scary apparently. Well it wasn't, but it was well written and interesting enough for the most part but the ground has been covered better by better writers. It has overtones of Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick in particular but it's short and there's like 5 characters in the book and one of those is a dog.

[Potato]

Just finished a little short stories collection from Kindle Unlimited called The Far Reaches collection. 

https://www.amazon.com/The-Far-Reaches/dp/B0C4TJRRRV

Some interesting thought experiments from a number of good sci-fi authors.

Recommended.

[Potato]

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. 



A great little mystery book with such ethereal prose that is typical of Clarke. Highly recommended if you liked Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

[benji]

As always I'll write more extended comments if anyone wants them otherwise I'll spare everyone. Drunk was best of this batch, Black Vinyl the worst:

[Besticus Maximus]

Father of Lies by Brian Evenson.

Well that was certainly something, probably the most jarred I've been by something I've read since Tender is the flesh.

He seems very interesting. One of the BYU factory writers, except they kicked him out because his whole thing is writing horror from the perspective of...mormons.

[benji]

This was pretty hott:


Some of the Goodreads reviews are like "I don't know what the big deal is it sounds like every business." Like, buddy, what kind of weirdo cults have you been working for?

Also a number of reviews accusing it of being a malicious hit piece out to smear a great American patriot whose self-help system really works.

[benji]

Coincidentally, the two that posted as bigger images are easily the two best of these. 

Takeover's jacket, intro and ending all invoke the then upcoming 2024 election and Trump, even as the rest of the book makes quite clear that Weimar Germany was nothing like current America. My actual complaint, rather than amusement like that, is that the author never asks or attempts to explain why Hindenburg ultimately caved after spending so much time on how far he was the only one in the conservative camp who refused to deal with Hitler. We don't even get the common "they thought they could control him" explanation. I think this is a disservice because Hitler's appointment ultimately was not the "takeover" it was when the entire system acquiesced to the Enabling Act. The book stops at Hitler being sworn in as Chancellor. This matters because the Enabling Act is when everyone else deliberately gave up their checks on the Chancellor. The book touches on Hindenburg's desire to retire and how he hated politics, but it doesn't follow this through to why he ultimately gave in to Hitler and was willing to sign the Enabling Act: he had done his time trying to hold together the Republic, he was too old and if everybody else was getting insane he wasn't going to stop them anymore. This seems pretty relevant if your goal, as stated as the purpose of the book, is to learn from the past so we can prevent a future Hitler. Don't base the entire survival of your system around a guy 20 years past life expectancy! (An error many societies have made throughout history.)

[Potato]

Finished a nice little sci-fi book by Paul Dixon called Carpathians. 



It's an interesting hardish sci-fi first contact story which I am assuming is the first in a planned series.

Great writing, excellent use of his scientific knowledge and education and none of the science feels forced or out of place. It's set in a corpo-dystopia with FTL travel and interstellar colonisation. 

Dr. Paul A. Dixon holds a Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. In addition to his writing career, he works professionally in Climate Technology at Singularity Energy, a Boston-based startup focused on decarbonizing the power grid.

[chronovore]

Jason Pargin's "I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom." 
Pargin previously wrote John Dies at the End, and a cyberpunk-esque series starting with "Fancy Suits and Futuristic Violence." He has an original voice, so I like his work in general, and this most recent work focuses on social connections and the dangerous ways information spreads in the current climate. I wasn't sure I liked it until the 40% mark, but it's been a race now that I'm nearly done with it and don't want it to end.

[benji]

Nate's is the clear worst of these by far. It starts with some interesting stuff about gambling but quickly turns into like 300 pages of rambling about how smart Nate and people he knows are. Best part is when Peter Thiel tells him his model for the entire book is stupid.

[Besticus Maximus]

Finished the devils by joe abercrombie, which you will never stop hearing about sometime soon when james cameron makes his movie. Its ok I suppose.

Slewfoot by Brom. Rules so far.

[Alpacx]

Nate's is the clear worst of these by far. It starts with some interesting stuff about gambling but quickly turns into like 300 pages of rambling about how smart Nate and people he knows are. Best part is when Peter Thiel tells him his model for the entire book is stupid.

How was Revolutionary Spring? Ive liked some of Clark's other books.

[benji]

It's good but it is a little chronologically disjointed. And will randomly jump all over the map, with you expected to remember the entire cast of characters from places like Hungary where everybody has similar Magyar names. So like you'll read a bunch of stuff from months of France and then bam it's two seasons prior and you're trying to remember who all these dopes from Romania are and what their positions are supposed to be. It also does that thing where like you know all the towns in Sicily right? Of course you do, no need to give any kind of location for them.