In 2014 Yuval Noah Harari became world wide famous for the English publication of his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. A lot of my friends recommended it, I couldn't turn around without hearing about it, but before I could read it, I watched some videos and TED talks from the guy so I was hearing the slightly whiny voice and I was imagining the face and mannerism of Harari while I was reading the book. And the truth is the book feels just like an extended version of one of his lectures. I found the book interesting, with some insights that were quite nice, but I think it started a lot better than it ended.

It goes through the history of our species, starting with the origins, going through the changes that shaped our society and identity. It goes on to explain, for example, how almost everything our society is based on is a myth that we collectively cling to and give power to. And he is not talking about religious myths only, but also notions like country, nation, race, money, law, human rights, justice, individuality, good, bad, etc. Like a house of cards, once we started to be able to think abstractly and communicate ideas, we've created a world that is based on assumptions on top of assumptions that we just choose to believe. I thought that was the most interesting point in the book and the one that made me think most. If our entire life as a species and as individuals is axiomatic, then how different could lives be if only based on other axioms?

Another great insight was that liberalism and individuality, coupled with the capitalist growth model that is based on a scientific and technological trust in a better future, are very recent inventions. Most of human history, even up to the nineteenth century, people were content with the status quo, were nostalgic about some bygone era that was "golden" and better than today, and people were stuck into their lives with no hope or even thought of changing them. The explosion of new discoveries and conquests comes from a new found hope in a better future, one based on technological progress and scientific discovery. Other ways of living weren't worse, they just were obliterated by people who chose to accept that they don't know everything and started looking for resources to plunder and answers to their questions. In contrast, whole societies and empires based on the holiness of stations manned by people who assumed knew everything stagnated for centuries.

Yet another point that I found interesting was about the state and commercial institutions eroding and replacing the traditional. Before the legal, moral, support, educational and emotional systems were part of the family or the extended community. Now they are outsourced to law, financial institutions, psychologists, schools, which thrive on the concept that we are individuals and need no one.

Harari makes the point that we are the product of evolution, not different from any other animal, but once we went over a threshold, we created new arenas in which to evolve. Something I didn't particularly agree with is his view that hunter gatherers were living a better, more content life, than farmers. Rather than working all day for a very limited diet, they were free to roam and enjoy the seasonal food that was literally hanging around. Further on we went through the Industrial Revolution and people were even more restricted by the rules of technology and industry. A big portion of the book is dedicated to this kind of thoughts about how our success bound us to a way of life we now cannot escape. The author even uses the word "trap".

In the end, Sapiens tries to analyse our state: is it better now than before? It goes through chapters that talk about happiness: what is it? do we have it? does it matter? Harari is probably agnostic, but he does favor Buddhist ideas of meditation and escaping misery by removing craving, and that is pretty obvious by the end of the book.The last chapter contains a short and kind of reused discussion about the future of us as gods that remake the very fabric of our bodies, minds and reality and, of course, the singularity. But while at the beginning each historical step of Homo Sapiens was analysed with scientific attention, with insights that were clearly coming from a lot of thought on the subject, by the end the rhetoric devolved into just expressing opinions.

So, I did like the book. It felt a bit too verbose, because Harari's style is to explain something, then give an example to make it clearer. If you understand what he explained, the example feels superfluous most of the time. I also didn't like that the book started great, with careful analysis and beautiful insights, and ended with obvious personal opinions superficially backed by facts. I could have accepted either one, but having both just highlights the contrast between them.

As a final thought, Harari mentioned Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) as one of the greatest inspirations for the book by showing that it was possible to "ask very big questions and answer them scientifically". I tried reading that and it was way too thorough and heavy. So having something like Sapiens is like light reading for people who are interesting in science but not very bright :)

The idea is nice: multiple versions of the same city of London, somehow named the same, even when the countries and the languages and the magic is different from world to world. Then there is the magician who can go between worlds and the charismatic female thief who accidentally steals from him exactly in the moment of a great change in the structure of power between these worlds.

While I liked the idea and even enjoyed the characters, I felt like Victoria Schwab was more in love with the story than with the characters. Barely sketched, they do things because they do things, not because of an inner drive that makes a lot of sense for them. Even the villains are standard psychopaths doing bad things because they like doing bad things. Plus they kind of suck. I liked A Darker Shade of Magic, I think I may read the rest of the series, but I barely managed to feel anything for the characters. Whenever something needed to happen, some prop or person appeared right then and there. Everybody had stunted emotions that only seemed to push people to action when the plot required it, rather than as a natural consequence of feeling something and plot holes were a plenty.

The bottom line is that I can't recommend this book to anyone, even if I enjoyed reading it.

Imagine Me Gone is one of those books that I thought I should read because it received prizes for great writing. Maybe I'm too stupid to understand why something that doesn't say anything in the first 5% of it is a good book. The subject is great, too: a family of five people that each describe their lives while battling crippling depression.

I think Adam Haslett found a good way to convey depression: talk endlessly about random pointless things, describe the weather, the way light bounces off of things no one cares about, don't actually express anything or mention anything interesting and occasionally say something really heavy or personally relevant with the same boring and bored rhythm and style. It makes sense, it's the way people feel when in the thralls of this terrible affliction: nothing matters, nothing stands out, it's all grey and pointless. However, a good book means more than just making the reader feel suicidal, it has to have some story to care about, some characters that stand out, anything than just forcing the reader to fight throwing away the book in boredom.

That is why I couldn't even begin to finish the book. I wasn't interested in the depressed description of someone I couldn't care less about, talking about how she handles the depression of others. I can only assume that the high marks for the book are coming either from writing that went completely over my head or from people who were affected by mental illness in the family and read about themselves and got the book. My family is not without its share of psychological problems, but I've had just about enough of it as it is.

I've read some books in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation series and I more or less liked them. So when I've heard of a new book from the same author I've decided to try it. The result is mixed. For most of Revenger I disliked the characters and the story, but the ideas in it made me want to see what was going to happen next.

What you need to understand is that this is a straight pirate story, only set in the future and in space. It starts with two girls that decide to leave their world and join a spaceship crew in order to make some money. Only they get jumped by pirates, so one of the girls must fight the system and her own nature to become hard enough to find the pirates and save her sister.

The problem is that the characters are hard to empathize with, are pretty inconsistent and always stretch belief in this world in which space crews are uneducated louts speaking in jargon and going from world to world in search for ancient technology they cannot understand that was left by long gone alien races. The only part of the book that made me want to read the next one was the very end, the rest was people acting weird, not thinking too much and speaking a lot.

Bottom line: I can't recommend the book. I might read the next one, after all the books in Revelation Space had wildly varying degrees of quality. The ideas are nice, the implementation is what hurts the book.

I liked Dreadnought, the first book in the Nemesis series. It was fresh, with a sympathetic character that went through some major changes in life. The team was interesting, the villain, too. A bit too female centered, a bit naive, but hey: it's about a teenage transgender superhero. What could I have expected? It says something about the book that I read the next one in the series.

Unfortunately, I almost disliked Sovereign. The discussions about weird sexuality (without actual sex scenes) and the characters that are connected to transgender issues increased, the character development stalled, some people simply disappeared (Danny's parents say two phrases in total in one appearance), the villain's motivation is stupid, the heroics are random and the drama and tension that should have kept a reader to the edge of the seat, curious to see what will happen next, are almost non existent. When people die, the heroes kind of shrug it off: "oh, we killed some people. Sucks!" Not an actual quote, but it felt like this. And the only reason why they find out about the villainous plan is because the head vil is literally inviting Danielle to his mansion to explain said plan. Some things happen just because the story couldn't go on without them, and it's painfully obvious. I understand April Daniels may have identified too much with her characters and is not eager to torture them, but the book felt like a kiddie show in written form.

I finished the book, but I won't be interested in the future of the series. And it's too bad. I felt that this concept was going places.

Ruthana Emrys wrote the short story The Litany of Earth as a reinterpretation of Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth, where the people of Innsmouth were actually the victims of persecution from the government. Extending the story to the first book in a trilogy, Winter Tide acts as a sequel to the Lovecraft short, telling the story of some of the few people of the water working with the US government to investigate the misuse of their magical rituals.

If in Shadow over Innsmouth, the horrible fish people were being righteously rounded up by the authorities and interned into camps, their town and traditions forcibly destroyed, in this book they are the victims of persecution, a subspecies of humans that just wants to be left alone. Their magical rituals are more about communion than power, but some of them can be terribly misused, like the body swap technique. This gives the author opportunity to add to the story the Yith, ancient race of mind travelers who have the only concern to archive the experiences of sapient beings before they go extinct - with the added horror that they face any extinction event themselves by mass swapping into another civilization, leaving those poor souls displaced in unfamiliar bodies and facing certain doom - depicted by Lovecraft in The Shadow Out of Time, as well as hint of a body swap misused as means of trying to achieve immortality, as told by Lovecraft in The Thing on the Doorstep. So when one of the last females of the water people is asked to help by an FBI agent, she decides to put aside her distrust and horror and help the ones who murdered her people in the purpose of at least preserving her race's reputation and preventing the use of their magical arts in the terrible world wars the air people were waging.

You have to admit when you think Lovecraft, you don't often imagine a gay female author writing about the importance of diversity, community and love, yet this is what Winter Tide is. And it has a quintessentially female style of writing, where the lead character helps the people she should normally hate in order to bring peace, she solves problems by bringing people together and treating them with familial love and encouraging their differences rather than using violence. Her purposes are selfless and she wields power not as a sword, but as shelter.

While the style felt a little too formal and the pace was rather slow at the beginning, I found myself wanting more by the end of the book. It felt like a strange melange of Lovecraftian lore, notoriously difficult to bring to a modern form - yet Emrys did it effortlessly - and a style of writing that brought it back to a more ancient feel, thus relating modern themes in a work that still tastes like Lovecraft. The second book in the series, Deep Roots, just came out and I intend to read it as well.

I am sure I only heard of this book because of the agenda of some of the sites I visit, but I do not regret reading it. Dreadnought is about a teenage boy obsessed with comic book heros who secretly wants to be a girl. When he gets his wish (plus some awesome superpowers) he has to deal with the lack of understanding from parents and people he thought of as friends. At first I thought "Oh, no, I fell for it again. It's going to suck! It's going to be Sense8 on paper. I am going to read the entire book about how bad cis-people are". I am glad that it wasn't so, so before you automatically dismiss the book, think again.

While the main character is transgender, this only adds some complexity to it, without polluting the main thread of the story, which is a typical teenage superhero saves the world kind of thing. The way the world is described reminds me a bit of Wild Cards and maybe also some of those Union Dues books about powered people who get screwed over by politics and unions that were so popular on Escape Pod: metahumans are common, some of more power than others, heroes have leagues and are commonly recruited (and financed) based on their abilities, bad ones always try to take over the world while a majority of them are doing whatever they can with what nature gave them. The issues the main character has revolve mostly on how her bully of a father is messing her life after the transformation. Her parents want "their son back" and try to "fix" what happened to her. Meanwhile she is hunting for the biggest supervillain there is, trying to deal with her asshole family, handling the pressure from superhero adults who try to tell her what to do before explaining anything and ... do homework for school.

This is not a masterpiece, mind you. I enjoyed the book, which is rather short and pretty naive, because I actually thought the story was interesting, however it is mostly typical YA crap with a fresh perspective. A second book in the series from April Daniels is already out, Sovereign, and I intend to read it as well. I hope it's at least as good as Dreadnought. I was kind of hoping that it would be a different hero in each book, but it's the same in each. If you like that kind of diversity between viewpoints, I really recommend you read the Wild Cards series. It's huge, though.

Just after finishing some mediocre books from Brandon Sanderson I started with Oathbringer, as if to remind me why I like this author so much. As Lift would say, the book is awesome! It's not without its flaws, but it is a mammoth in size, great in quality, epic in scope.

The third book in The Stormlight Archive, ambitiously planned as a ten book series, Oathbringer focuses more on Dalinar Kholin rather than Kaladin, who one might think was the main character of the series. Yet it also expands the characters already introduced and brings even more. There are histories that explain what is going on: the Voidbringers are back, another Desolation has begun, Parshendi will become agents of chaotic destruction under the control of mighty Odium, their god, who wants nothing more than to bring the end of the world, and the only hope comes from Heralds, Knights Radiant and people united against their common foe. But is that what happens? Who are the Voidbringers, really? Why are parshmen awakening, but instead of agents of destruction most behave like normal people who have just woken up from stupor? Are the Radiants united under the same purpose? Are they even the good guys? Where are the Heralds and who among them are still sane? Who's god is Odium and what does he really want? And when spren become corrupted by one god or another, what happens when you bond one? All these questions make for not only a good exciting read, but an intelligent one, as well. I felt the adventurous reader, the engineer and scholar in me all enjoy the book.

As for the bad part, the book is, as were the others in the series, quite large. Maintaining pace, or indeed even pretending there is one for the entire book, is impossible. Some parts are bound to bore, while others to annoy when perspective inevitably switches away from them. Sanderson paints each character as the hero of their own story, creating understanding and compassion for almost all and bringing them up and down as the story progresses, and while this is a worthy goal and a mark of a good writer, it takes a toll on the reader who would rather just root for the good guys. Probably worse of all, the next book in the series is optimistically planned for 2020, which means another two years of yearning for the mere continuation of the story. It is a book that feels more wide than it is long and waiting for fifteen years for the series to end so one can read it all it is not manageable either. So yeah, my biggest complaint with Oathbringer is that it is too good.

I loved the Reckoners series and Elantris. Funny enough the Mistborn series that Sanderson is known for threw me away and some of the recent attempts like Legion felt just bad. Yet The Stormlight Archive is a series I can get behind and invest in its characters and enjoy. Oathbringer is just a part of it, but a good part. Bring on the fourth shard of the story, Brandon! I need to unite them all!

Brandon Sanderson wrote two short books about the Legion character, which is different from the Legion character from the Marvel comics and TV series. It is basically about a guy who hallucinates other people around him, specialists that help him solve "cases". People are not sure in what box to put him. Is he schizophrenic, is he multiple personality disorder, something else? It doesn't really matter, since he is functional and (with the help of his imagined personalities) brilliant.

Yet, while the character can be compelling, the stories are rather boring. The joking punny positivism of Sanderson's characters is barely there, while the setup is that of classic detective stories. There is no fantasy like in Cosmere, nor are there interesting ideas that blow your mind. Just short average books about a quirky detective. It can't get less original than that, I believe.

Bottom line: without some serious redesign of the concept, I doubt Legion is a character that warrants further exploration.

The Grisha trilogy (or The Shadow and Bone series) is, as the name implies, a series of three books that comprise the entirety of a story about a young orphan girl and her childhood friend growing up to find they have powers and need to battle evil that only they can vanquish. Yes, it's typical young adult stuff.

The refreshing bit about this series is the Slavic flavor that permeates the story. The names are Slavic, the legends and history are similar to the ones around Russia, and if you read not the books, but the short stories, you get that nice hopeful dread that one can find in old Russian legends: things can be nice, but most of the time you can only hope for instructional and survivable.

That leaves me at an impasse. I liked the books, but compared to the expectations created by the short stories they are pretty crap. I mean, you get that Twilighty romantic triangle thing (it's more of a square, really), and so much potential from characters that are tortured by a rough childhood is just wasted on pointless romance dancing around. The first book is clearly the best, but then Leigh Bardugo falters and writes the rest of the story more and more traditional... not to the Russian folklore, but to Hollywood bullshit. The evil guy gets more and more evil, for no actual reason, the characters get more and more righteous, for no reason other than being juxtaposed against the evil guy, secondary characters get killed off randomly, with no gain from the effort made in defining them, while primary characters get more and more entangled, again, for no good reason. The worst offence, in my view, is that the author bothered to create this Slavic world of impoverished peasants fighting neverending wars with neighboring countries, only to basically end it all with a happy ending. In order to bring the story to a popular finale, she massacred an entire universe, not unlike the villain of the series.

Bottom line: an interesting and easy to read young adult story that unfortunately ends much worse than it had begun. Instead of continuing to explore the truly adult themes of loss, betrayal, learning from mistakes, surviving trauma, etc, it caves in to the easy romantic and tired idea of light versus dark, losing all other color in the process.

Ed Yong's style is a little bit over narrated, like those TV documentaries that start with some guy walking down the street while they present who he is and what he does. That's the only real issue I had with this book, other than a few groan inducing puns. Besides that, the book is not only extremely interesting, but also contains a multitude (OK, I like puns) of well crafted insights into the biological world all around us.

I Contain Multitudes explains how animal and plant life has evolved from a previous state in which microbes were everywhere and everything. Every adaptation since then has taken them into account and forced them to adapt in turn. Microbes, as explained by the book, are not a bunch of criminals hell bent on causing disease, but a complex ecosystem that overshadows the macrobiome, with complex adaptations in a matter of days.

A lot of eye opening ideas in the book. That disease is more often caused by an imbalance in a community of different microbes, not by one opportunistic infection. The old paradigm of "kill'em all" is no longer valid, as it just clears way for other microbes to take over the vacated real estate. The way selected cultures of microbes can function as a living drug for all kinds of afflictions, from bowel problems to mental issues, from tree diseases to those transmissible by insect bites, is shockingly powerful. But there is more, the most pervasive being that we cohabitate a world of bacteria and viruses that are as part of our identity and function as any other organ. Indiscriminately killing everything microscopic is then akin to cutting off your limb, just because you feel like it.

It is a book I can't recommend enough. Anyone even remotely interested in medicine should consider it as a must read. Anyone interested in their own health should read it. In fact, I can't imagine a single person that shouldn't read it. Check out the book's page on Ed Yong's web site for more information, videos and articles.

Female Orgasms is not so much as a book, as a really tiny set of chapters that are barely connected to each other. Emily Nagoski is frustrated by the way male standards are used to judge all sexuality and makes a point in this booklet that it is unhelpful, at best. However, while some of the ideas in the book are interesting, to me it seemed as a list of ideas and ramblings gathered together in order to form a volume, with most of the things either really basic or without any narrative or connection to others. 100 ebook pages and 26 chapters, that's saying something.

The book is oriented towards women, with men as a secondary audience. It is not a self-help book for men to become gods in bed, it is a self-help book for women on how to become more aware of their sexuality and enjoy themselves better. Some of the ideas I found interesting are mostly related to expectations. If we know 95% of women masturbate with clitoral stimulation, why do we even consider the necessity for women to orgasm from vaginal intercourse? It's nice when it happens, but as opposed to men, women don't orgasm predictably nor is the orgasm the end purpose of sexual encounter. Another interesting fact is that women are mostly responsive to erotic stimulation, as opposed to men who just wake up one moment wanting to have sex. It's a statistical fact, but still, one to take into consideration. One idea that the author wanted to make clear is that there is only one orgasm: the explosive release of sexual tension. How that tension is generated doesn’t matter (to the orgasm).

An important concept that Nagoski is making efforts to popularize is the one of arousal nonconcordance. In other words, while for men there is a strong correlation between physical sexual arousal and the desire or openness for sex, for women it's not quite so. Experiments of people watching porn while devices compare their sexual arousal and also take their reported input of how aroused they feel show consistently this is true. I do feel, though, that the author pushes a little too far, attempting to completely decouple the declarative and physical arousal. Considering some men use opposing ideas as justification for non consensual sex ("your body wants it, so you must want it" kind of logic) that is understandable, but less scientific than I would have liked.

This book is part of a series about sexuality, written by different authors, called Good in Bed Guide. I found it basic, but probably helpful for a lot of people. I wish it would have been better written and edited, though. Also, try reading this on the subway with a straight face.

What the hell?! After starting with so much potential, the story started fizzling, but there still was a lot of room for greatness. Instead, Bakker seems to have contracted Martinitis for his last book in the series, having important characters die off randomly, insignificant ones suddenly pop up, and filling space with feudal descriptions of the battles fought by completely irrelevant characters. Oh, and talking about erect penises. And then the end comes, everything seems to come to some sort of confluence, only it actually doesn't. It all goes completely to the left. Things get confused, the story goes nowhere, and the reader goes to WTF land for the entire day.

What is the purpose of having the reader getting invested in characters, only to kill them off, then return them later on (oh, they didn't die!), only to have them do nothing or die (again!)? What is the point of reading the names of every leader of men and no-men while they battle gloriously, complete with a short description of these characters right before they die in said battle? Was this book written with dice?

The Unholy Consult is a complete disappointment of a series finale. It ends practically nothing! Consider that it all started with Drusas Achamian, as a learned, in love, slightly damaged magus who liked to consider the world with wisdom. At the end, he is a bumbling old buffoon who can't string a thought in his head. Esmenet, the ex-prostitute, chosen by Achamian for her beauty and by the Emperor for her intellect and strength for bearing his children, first rises to the challenge of being a queen, then is just hauled away like a child and just does random things. Mimara gives birth to twins. But one is dead. There is no significance to this at all, it's just a random event. The four horns... they appear and disappear in the plot, like they have some great significance, but they don't. Why write about one character almost a quarter of a book only to kill him randomly in the next? Why be so verbose for 95% of a book only to break out into incoherent scenes and inconsistent actions in the last tiny chapter?! And it goes on and on like that. There is no moral to the story, no resolution to the fact that we followed the action of a psychopath for twenty years of book time waiting for this precise ending, only to be robbed of any meaningful closure.

Bottom line: I guess the author has a "great vision" in mind. If Prince of Nothing was followed by The Aspect Emperor, then a new series of books follows which is, in fact, another volume of the story. Only I lost all interest. What is the point in following characters if the author is going to butcher them (and I don't mean kill them off) later on to the point of irrelevancy? What is the point of following a story, if it leads to nothing?

I have read all the Prince of Nothing books and the first two of The Aspect Emperor, in truth a single large story rather than two separate series. I am amazed of how many details and human truth could R. Scott Bakker stuff in the books and I wrote in the review of The White Luck Warrior that I was in withdrawal after I realized the next book was not published. Therefore my strategy was to wait until this and the fourth and last book in the series were published. Which is both a blessing and a curse. I had to remember what the hell happened "before", though the book has an intro in which is tells the story up to that point which I found very useful. I was also detached from the story and characters.

With that being said, the book felt even more like filler material. It mostly covers a rather boring part of the Ordeal, Esmenet and the story of a now more interesting Sorweel. Yet throughout the book I felt like the author was struggling to push meaning into less and less interesting concepts by his overuse of italics and very detailed introspection. That is both the general flavor that makes the series so good and the bit that sometimes made me want to fast forward. Kellhus is almost absent, like in the previous book, which is strange for a series called after him, but there is also less action. Or at least less from characters that I enjoy reading about (there is a nuclear explosion in there and large army conflicts, but again they felt like filling space). I was disappointed with the short and empty solution to Ishual, considering the largest part from the previous book was about getting there and towards the end there is an interaction between a Dûnyain and Qirri that left me in a "WTF?!" kind of state. On the bright side, a character that I enjoyed a lot reappeared as an agent of the Consult. That was fun!

So I am overly glad that I waited for both books from the series to get published so I can now get at the meat of the story (praise the meat!). I may have given you the impression that I didn't like the book, but I was merely comparing it with the rest. It is still a damn good book, however I am the type of guy to focus on the negative, so that is that. If I were meeting my past self, the advice I would give would be to read The Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor back to back. Oh well, that ship has sailed.

The Shattered Realms series is starting to gather momentum with Stormcaster. While Flamecaster was set mostly in the Arden empire and Shadowcaster in the Fells, Stormcaster goes everywhere, connects the characters developed in the first books and finally reveals the main villain. Unfortunately, that is all it does. Stuff happens, things are set up, people meet, then the book ends. We just have to wait for the fourth and maybe last book in the series to see how things end.

As I was complaining for the first two books, Cinda William Chima is really nice to her characters. The most that can happen to a hero in this series is that they lose a loved one. Even the scenes describing said loss are weak, almost neutral, like someone who would lose a lover or a parent and their reaction would be "Damn! That sucks!". She is definitely not George R. R. Martin and when reading these books remember that they are probably aimed at fresh teens. Heroes are all very young and yet competent and in control of their life. What child wouldn't love to read that?

Stormcaster brings us in contact with the remote empire from the East and its empress, along with a bunch of new characters. However we will have to wait until Deathcaster, probably the last book in the series, set to be published in April 2019, to see how the story ends.