So I am reading this book about a Black gay man called Saeed, living in the American South and having a Christian grandmother and a Buddhist single mother and it doesn't bother me. It's personal, it's well written, it's real. It doesn't feel agenda driven, it doesn't make me feel guilty about not being Black or gay myself, it makes me feel close to the character/author. It's honest. We need more of this and less of *that*, you know what I mean and you know who you are.

  In this context, the title How We Fight for Our Lives might be a little misleading. While Saeed Jones does talk about the constant fear of being hurt, from the damning official pronouncements that hint you will die of AIDS if you are gay, to the racist or homophobic murders in the US, he describes his life rather than his worries. He is never truly assaulted or reviled. One understands how strong the concept of family is in his culture when you see how connected and even deferential he is to his mother and grandmother, even if his family is nothing if not uncommon. When he spends time with his grandmother, she takes him to Christian church, where everybody is aghast hearing that Saeed's mother is a Buddhist. When he spends time with his mother he goes to Buddhist temple and chants stuff. The author doesn't present this as an inconsistency, other than in the eyes of his grandma. The moment she realizes he is gay, her reaction is "No, no, no, no!" which is both terrifying and laughably ridiculous, depending on which side of history you feel you are.

  This is a short book. It is not something amazing, but I liked it. I liked how personal it felt, I liked that the author would focus on his thoughts and feelings, his literary heritage, his own person, rather than some mythical racial or gay social identity. I appreciated describing the sex scenes together with the conflicting feelings and thoughts he had about his encounters: part defiance, part shame, part longing, part hope. It must have been hard to describe his love for his mother and yet they kept each other at emotional distance and when she died, it was way too soon and with so many things unsaid.

  "I am a person! I am real!", Saeed Jones shouts with this book, and I feel I heard him.

When do children lose their rubbernecked quality? asks Scott Richard Shaw when talking about little children fascinated by bugs. It's a valid question for him, because Planet of the Bugs feels like a an eight year old in a toy store, switching attention from toy to another without purpose or sense, talking excitedly about each of them randomly and abandoning them in the middle of the story to start telling another.

It's not like the content of the book doesn't have the potential to be interesting, the author went to a lot of places and read a lot of material, as an enthusiast does, but with absolutely no narrative thread and no structure to the chapters, Planet of the Bugs serves neither as an anecdotal journey in the world of insects and spiders and the like, nor as a possible reference piece. I mean, even Shaw's reason to get into arthropods feels like a boring version of the Spiderman origin story. I am paraphrasing here: "One day I stumbled upon a bug and from then on I was hooked. It was a hook beetle, you see!".

Bottom line: I really wanted to like this book, but it was just not well written.

 The Blade Itself is a very nice book. Well written, complex characters, vast world and careful world building. The story, however, is not forthcoming from only this book. Joe Abercrombie has barely managed to present (some of) the characters, build them up and get them together in this first volume of The First Law series.

 What is it about? In a imperialistic feudal world that so far seems split into the North, the Middle and the South, a union of kingdoms has all the power at the center, while her bitter rivals in the south and north are doing everything to gain power. The union is complacent and rife with corruption and bureaucracy, as any rich and safe nation becomes, so much so that is has forgotten even the real events of its formation.

 And yet magic is not dead and the magi return, apparently gathering special people to prepare for a coming event. And then the book ends :) I am curious about the other books in the series so I guess I will be reading them next.

 I recommend this book for readers of good fantasy.

 The Hatching felt like a cross between The Troop and Infected, but not as cool. The premise, the style and the characters felt artificial, like someone writing by numbers. Common phobias as main subject: check. Characters acting all human and relationshippy: check. Women in positions of power and important characters: check. OK, spiders don't work that way, biology doesn't work that way. If large arthropodes would be capable of coordinating in swarms, eating people, invading a human body and hatching in a matter of hours, they would do it already. There are numerous reasons why they don't, so in fact it was a simple choice: write a less alarming story that is even remotely possible or write something quick, algorithmically and that hopefully sells. Ezekiel Boone chose the latter.

It's not that it's a bad book. Far from it: the familiar writing style and pace made it really easy to read and get into the mood of it. Unfortunately the details were all wrong: the biology, the way everything happens at the same time without any reason to, the politically correct setup that was still sexist because from three lead women characters all of them were sleeping with an underling or thinking about it, plus the extra characters including some gay ones that had no role in the story at all. Now, I understand this is a trilogy or something and those characters will probably play a role later on, but as it stands, The Hatching is simply a bland average book that doesn't even provide closure. If you were caught by the story, you will need to wait until the next book in the series comes out. And for what? To hear about even more people who can't kill spiders or study them in any scientific way until providence saves them because they love their children. Oh, loving ones children as a reason to survive: check.

Bottom line: utterly average and strangely not scary for such a horrific subject.

  What is burning so white? Love, of course. Brent Weeks ends his Lightbringer saga with a huge book that completes all started threads, brings closure to the grieving, love to the survivors, second and third chances to just about everyone. I liked it, as I did the entire series, but for me Burning White was the weakest book in the series.

  And it wasn't that there was anything wrong with the writing, there was just too much of everything. A lot of new information came along, as it did in many of the other books, but in this, everything was being upended every other chapter. People have lost their memories, then they remembered, then the memories were actually wrong, but they were right, and everybody was being connected, but they didn't actually exist, but they did and everything has a glorious design, but you never find out what the actual design was and what the hell white and black luxin actually do and why people don't use them on a daily basis, etc. There was so much to do in the book that the last ten chapters (three of them called Epilogue) were ALL epilogues and then a post credits scene and even a post book scene. And we still don't know who Kip's other grandfather is.

  I am the first to complain about straight lines in books, but in Burning White, lines go all over the place, loop back on themselves, different colors, shape of kittens, the whole shebang. So in the end, when everything has to come to a close, it all feels really really unnatural and even random. Why did that guy die? Why did this guy live? Why is anyone doing anything?

  I know I am filling this space for nothing. If you are going to read the book you probably read the others in the series and no one is going to stop you now. I am not even suggesting it; this is a great book. However, with great epic stories comes great responsibility to end them right. I don't know exactly why I feel so unsatisfied with the ending, but maybe because the author build up all of these grand heroes, only to kind of make them fail until someone changed their view of the world and helped them out. It invalidates a lot of the previous books. Also, less cool magical mechanisms in this one and a lot more talking and feeling.

Full title "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund", this is a book that everyone should read. It's not a masterpiece, in fact it feels banal, but it's this banality that makes it so powerful. Hans Rosling is capable of showing with actual proof that your world view is really really wrong. And not only you, but also the politicians that are supposed to fix the world, the specialists that are supposed to find solutions to all of our problems, the reporters who are supposed to report on the news and the large majority of people are just as confused as you are.

And it is proof of the power of the book that someone like me, who knew who Rosling was and watched his very inspiring TED Talks, was still surprised by its content and teachings.

The book claims that the instincts that helped our ancestors survive are clouding our judgement of the much less dangerous, but more abstract modern world we live in. Rosling enumerates ten, with anecdotes that feel like scenes from TV dramas only to make you doubt who is the villain and who are the heroes. It is the main idea of book that only by working with fact based information we can make the best decisions and take the best possible action to move us forward.

This is not a book that will amaze you with its writing style, it will not make you laugh out loud, nor is it intended to make you feel good, although it probably will. It is facts about things that you felt you knew, but in fact were ignorant of. It is for example heartbreaking to read the part about immigrants in Europe dying and being taken advantage of because of really dumb European laws, not because of their destination countries regimes or from poverty. It is uplifting to know how much the world has changed for the better in just a few decades and all over the place. As a Romanian, I've always assumed that the rest of the world was rich and plentiful outside the Iron Curtain and that the recent improvements in life style were caused mostly by the fall of Communism in the area. I had no idea how similar life was for so many around the time I was born and that life has improved dramatically all over, not just here. It is empowering to know that women make more or less children in consistent correlation to their income and not their culture, religion or regime. When people don't need to have children, they don't make them, regardless of what Mao, the Pope or anyone else says.

Bottom line: you have to read this just as much as you have to get a general education. It simply should be taught in schools.

Permanent Record is a very well written book. Ed Snowden has the rare capacity of deep introspection and when he explains what happened and why, he makes connections to his upbringing, events in his life and the world and has a very clear view of his internal processes when making any decision or taking action. He also has a way with words. He's a guy easy to either hate or love, obviously, depending on how prone to envy one is.

There are several important takes from this book.

One is how extraordinary Snowden's position was to make him able to do what he did. Not only is he this brilliant guy who lives in his head and plans everything in advance, not only did he have specialized training on how to do what he did and get away with it, but he was given free access to the underlying technology of the CIA and the NSA. As he himself admits, he was on a list that probably contained under a dozen people, and that only from incompetence and lack of oversight.

Another is that every large organization is the same. Be it the NSA, the state run companies or private corporations in any country, they all impose hiring limits that they break by using contractors that don't affect the count (or their declared principles). It's amazing how similar my own experiences were, but in (supposedly) very different contexts. The contractor system is a global disease that too few benefit from and too many are affected by.

A more salient point is that technology is what happens when there is something we can do. We will ultimately do it, just because we can. As much sympathy I have for Snowden, his actions will probably have short lived consequences. The machine to get all the data from everybody is already there. No one will put that genie back into the bottle. If anything this book helps the very people who the author hopes to thwart by giving them valuable intelligence in the mindset of the whistleblower and on the limitations and vulnerabilities of their technical, administrative and indoctrination systems. As I was saying before, the chances that Snowden happened were astronomically small. Now they are orders of magnitude smaller.

It was devastatingly depressing to read how few places in the world are even marginally free of the American hegemony. Ironically, he had to go to Hong Kong to maximize his chances of remaining free. That says something terrible about the state of the world. I felt like the most hard hitting bits were those that explained what the government would do to discredit him (or anybody in their way), using deeply personal histories, fabricating evidence if none found or amplifying the one that does exist. This makes Snowden even more outstanding, for being a guy with very little dirt in his life to be turned into a weapon.

On a more personal note, it's amazing that reading Permanent Record, I was reminded most of Gary Sinise's autobiography than anything else. Thinking of what Snowden did, a family tradition of serving the country military and strong patriotic spirit is not what would first come to mind, yet that applies to him and he did what he did because he strongly believed in his country and in service to it. Even now, hunted by the US government in the most blunt, unimaginative, bureaucratic and cruel way possible, like big bullies do, Ed Snowden still loves his country and believes in it.

At a glance, Permanent Record is a book on hacking. As a child, Ed starts understanding how the world works and manipulates it to his advantage, only to grow up working in an organization that has hacked the Constitution and society as a whole in order to manipulate it to their advantage. People of our generation grew up with at least the illusion of a fair society, people who would take you at your value and judge you on it, whatever the outcome. The new hacked society cannot see you as you are, to the point that makes you doubt yourself of who you are. There cannot be a fair process of evaluation anymore because everyone comes out distorted.

This is a must read book and I recommend it highly to all adult readers of any level or education. It's easy to read, captivating and relatively small. Fair warning: it's not a happy story.

Welcome to my new blog!

Please let me know what you think.

I've had some issues with Blogger and that pushed me towards the step that I have been too lazy to make for so long a time: my own domain and hosting. So, from today on, my personal blog is at https://siderite.dev. I am working on it, still, so forgive the occasional hiccups.

Let me know if anything is wrong or, even better, that everything is right!

Siderite

I haven't been as frustrated with a book as with Lightless for a long time. Everyone in it is incompetent to the level of cretinism. The only people remotely good at what they do are psychos, all of them.

I understand why books like these need to be written: when you write a character based play-like story you become a better writer, but it doesn't mean what you write is any good. In this case, a character based story has cardboard shapes moving around randomly instead of characters. It failed. The main character is a computer programmer. As one, I felt insulted that C.A. Higgins believes we are that moronic.

As for the plot, that's the most redeeming factor, but it's not great either. In a future where mobile devices don't exist and locks are still based on physical keys and the Solar System is under the iron boot control of ... err... The System, an organization straight out of Blake's 7, with the same cartoonish efficiency, a mysterious ship is boarded by two people who turn out to be criminals the System wants. 90% of the book is people being dumb and talking to each other, all while assuming they are the bread of the universe. The rest is people doing really dumb things.

Conclusion: all the "smart" bits of the book were obvious from the start, making the journey of the buffoons in the story to figure them out really boring. The idea of the Ananke was added only to make this, of course, a trilogy. It reads like a theater play with people being stuck in a room.

If you want a book about women feeling stuff and constantly interrupting each other whenever they are about to communicate anything relevant while acting like space pirates in a desolate corporate universe, but doing nothing particularly consequential, Ascension is the book for you.

It is the distant future: space is called The Big Quiet, the universe has turned into a cosmic version of bankrupt Detroit because of the infusion of magic tech coming from a different universe (well, it's baryonic matter infused with human will, but yeah... magic) and all major characters are women and most of them are lesbian. About what you would expect from Jacqueline "(J)" Koyanagi, who describes herself via marketing as "writes science fiction and fantasy featuring women of color who love other women, disabled characters, neuroatypical characters, and diverse relationship styles.".

The main character is a female engineer (ugh, space surgeon) that falls in love with a peg leg female captain of a starship (that she also falls in love with) while being pursued by the authorities for something they didn't do. The physical attraction between the two girls is so strong that events like death of her family or genocide are just pushed in the background.

I guess we need books like these to realize how someone might act annoyed with books that only contain straight male characters, but other than that this is just low quality space pulp. And this trend is taken to a point so extreme that in the whole book there are only three males: a man who is part wolf, full of muscle, brooding silence and the occasional snarl, a security guard who is incapacitated before acting and the husband in a random family who's first act is to isolate and attack the protagonist before also being quickly disabled. I pity women who see males like this.

Bottom line: I read it all just to see if behind all the agenda bullshit there was anything interesting related to story or characterization or world building. But no.

The autobiography of an artistic daughter of a beer tycoon, Beer Money has almost nothing to do with beer, but everything to do with how we can't really choose your family and how toxic interacting with them can be. I liked the writing and sad as it is, the book was not meant to be dramatic, only truthful.

It was a difficult book to finish, even as it was very personal, as I like biographies to be. Mostly because it is just biographical, with nothing in the lives of the characters that has any meaning. The only lesson one can learn from the book is that once you realize your family is crap, you should stay away, no matter how difficult it would be. A very valuable lesson, I agree, but singular.

Frances Stroh is part of the old German family that introduced fire brewed beer to the US on a large scale. Their Detroit empire imploded from bad management by family members, the collapse of the car industry and so on. And while that was going on, she had to contend with a passive mother, a father with an inflated ego who couldn't care less about the people around him unless in rare moments that seemed like a heavenly gift to respect and love deprived children, siblings who went into drugs and alcohol to avoid the pain and last but not least the lukewarm reaction of the world to her own artistic ambitions.

The author seems to have accepted her fate and the strained love/disappointment relationship with the most important people in her life. I liked it and I thought Frances Stroh has a gift for melancholic writing, but I can't really recommend it to most people.

Just has a revelation. There are studies that show the moment you introduce currency in a social transaction, the dynamics change dramatically, leading to conflict, selfishness and the dissolution of societal and even emotional bonds. For a random reference check this article: Why Good Deeds and Money Don’t Mix.

I've been struggling with this new political correctness movement because 1) I didn't get it 2) almost every one of the people actively acting offended in this context appears to be... not nice and 3) it doesn't seem to be helping any. So, am I the bad guy? I started to ask myself. Am I a racist homophobic sexist misogynistic normie white male working in the tech field or is there something else going on? Judging by how far from normie people who actually know me think I am, I started to think about it more.

And it came to me! Political correctness is a form of currency forcefully introduced into our social transactions. Not only is it causing trouble for people who are assholes, but also for normal people who suddenly feel they have to pay something. And, as currency does, it breaks society, not strengthens it.

That is why so many people caught in this are so violent and partisan about it. That is why when you are nice towards a - I don't even know how to call them these days - not white person it feels good, as it would being nice towards anybody else, but when you are forced to do it, it well... feels forced. It feels like duty, like work, like paying a tax. The concept of balance slowly creeps in and makes one push back. Maybe with a joke, maybe with an angry tweet, maybe with something worse like actually picking on someone for their skin color, sex, age, religion or anything else. And they do it because picking on someone for being... I don't know... Romanian, doesn't feel like restoring anything. And now Romanians are pretty angry, because offending Jewish people or of recent African descent is somehow "wronger", so they get offended and feel left out. It's wrong to pick on anyone either way, deal with it!

In the end, introducing currency just pushes people into two diametrical opposed groups: the payers and the people who are owed. And of course, the people who ride the wave and get their little percentage to convert it to any other currency: money, hate, power, etc. We become slaves to the middlemen even when we interact with other people! Hell, they want to introduce ethics for computers now. Where does it end?!

So, as I am an egalitarian in my misanthropy, I submit that you should get offended by people just like any other person would. Leave currency to bankers. Or pick on them! No one ever got into a twist for calling bankers names.

I started reading The Troop after reading some amazing reviews on how creepy and scary it is, how well it is written and so on. I agree this is a good book, but not without its faults. It felt like a rollercoaster, because at first I thought it's going to be a monster body horror, which I like, then it turned out it could be a contagion story, which I love, maybe even a world wide epidemic, which I always hope for, but yet it wasn't. I thought it resembled a cross between King's Dreamcatcher and Golding's Lord of the Flies.

The best part is Nick Cutter's writing. He is careful with his characters, goes deep into defining their motivations, their inner thoughts. I loved that he would have filtered their previous experiences through a horror lens, so even their histories are aligned to the mood of the book. I know it's a common writer tool and he's a bit obvious about it, but I personally enjoyed it. Then there is the story, which happens on an isolated island and involves children being horribly killed by a relentless organism. I'm a sucker for those. Overall, the book was great. It felt like a Stephen King novel and the author paid homage to the writer in the acknowledgements section.

However, there were some elements that annoyed the hell out of me. One of them was the use of interviews and official reports and news stories about what was going to happen. It spoiled so much of the plot! Then there was the character dynamic. Such wonderfully crafted people seemed to not do anything of what they were supposed to do and the idea is that in terrible circumstances, our mettle is truly tested and the real person surfaces, but in many cases what the characters did made no sense. Even if well written, the basic archetypes were kind of obvious, too. And finally the technical aspects of the plot looked good on paper, but do not stand up to scrutiny.

Some notes: the horror of Lord of the Flies comes from showing how horrible ordinary people, children, can be. They are not psychos, they are people. Cutter overused psychopaths in The Troop. The tension in King's novels is growing and growing and is almost never released until the very end. Cutter spoiled what was going to happen and even if he described horrible things, he kind of did it in a constant way that got tiresome after a while. Worst of all, these flaws in the book made it predictable.

Bottom line: the book proves great writing talent and knowledge of people's character, however the author feels too nice to push the boundaries to do something truly brilliant. Well, he is Canadian...

There are few big questions as big as "Why death?" and "Why getting old?" and "Why sex?. And it's surprising that the answer is probably parasites.

After a lifetime of fighting disease and random damage, it becomes more efficient to give up and just start anew. Death comes just as a natural consequence of a body that has (or should have) achieved replication already and is out of warranty, so to speak.

Sex is similar. Once a parasite finds a way in, it makes a whole lot of other parasites that know that way, too. If an entire population is the same, clones of the same splitting creature, they are all just as vulnerable. Sexual reproduction mixes things up and leads to more variety, jump starts evolution and maximizes the chances that a portion of a population is immune to any one attack.

And I've been thinking today, as a tangent, that another big question might have the same answer: "Why are there sociopaths?". If societal development and cooperation is the solution for gaining supremacy over individualistic populations, why aren't we all social and empathetic and nice? And I am thinking: empathetic people want to help others, especially sick and hurting people. Instead, they get sick themselves and help spread the disease. It helps to have a small, but significant minority, of assholes who only care about themselves. In case of a major outbreak, they stay clear and survive.