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Apple in China – Patrick McGee
Apple in China paints a picture of a company that took Steve Jobs personality to heart. From Tony Blevin’s making deals that put workers in dire situations at Foxconn so that the company could hit the prices Apple forced on them, to Tim Cook going back on his 2017 statement about staying silent in the…
Style: Non-fiction -
Of Boys and Men – Richard V Reeves
The main idea that Richard V Reeves is trying to get across is that men are in crisis now, and that acknowledging the crisis that men are having doesn’t negate any compassion and equality we still need to seek for women. It is possible to hold the idea in your head that both men and…
Style: Non-fiction -
Meditations for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman
This is an in progress read for book club. Scroll to the bottom to see the related posts. Oliver Burkeman asks us to spend one day on each chapter, ideally, and evaluate how hard we are on ourselves. Instead of falling into the prouductivity porn culture surrounding us, where we rush through everything so we…
Style: Non-fiction -
The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley
This book started off slow and while it sped up a bit, it was never a breakneck paced science fiction thriller. It’s firmly a character driven story that has some science fiction as a background to how the characters come to interact. The final few chapters do suddenly increase in pace as a bunch of…
Style: Fiction -
Farsighted – Steven Johnson
This was read for book club in July. Join to get all the discussion on the book. While Johnson has some good ideas we can put into practice, he takes far too long telling us stories to get them across. This is a “glossy” book, much like Malcolm Gladwell writes, which gives us a high…
Style: Non-fiction -
A Witch’s Sin – Daniel B Greene
Welcome to a world of technology embedded in your body, where ads can blare at you at any time and an open window means you’ve granted permission for a drone to broadcast further ads into your personal living space. In this world we meet Taya, and learn that there are honest to goodness vampires. Taya…
Style: Fiction -
Temeraire – Naomi Novik
While this book was recommended to me (from a source I can’t remember) as an excellent fantasy novel that added dragons to the war between Britain and France during Napoleon’s time, I can’t continue that recommendation. The book is decently written if you want multiple pages on the etiquite difference between the Navy and the…
Genre: FantasyStyle: Fiction -
The Other Valley – Scott Alexander Howard
The story starts off slow and a bit sad as we follow 16-year-old Odile who is a lonely girl after her only friend moved to a different part of town. Her life starts to look up as she is befriended by Alain and Edme, but she also learns a secret by accident, one of them…
Genre: Time travelStyle: Fiction -
Limit of Vision – Linda Nagata
This book explores the evolution of human-kind as the combine with LOV’s, artificial brains designed by humans, in what at times appears to be a race to “beat” AI and at times feels like a slapped together concept that never really lands. For me the book felt rushed most of the time, like there was…
Genre: Science FictionStyle: Fiction -
The Burnout Society – Byung-Chul Han
While there are many great ideas to pique your interest, I couldn’t help but think that I needed to read all the other philosophy the author cites to fully make sense of his arguments. This is clearly a philosophy book focused on burnout and work, and it’s written as such with long complex arguments I…
Style: Non-fiction