I have to admit that my expectations for this book were so high that it was probably doomed to not satisfy me. I was expecting something deeply Asian, with fantastic elements and fresh ideas and characters. What I got is something that is almost accidentally fantastical and has few cultural elements to make it fresh. Yet it does have interesting characters and, if it weren't for the plot, which meanders whichever way the author needs to further her agenda, it would have been a good book.

Joan He is American of Chinese descent (hence the name of the book?) and the culture described in Descendant of the Crane is based on an American's understanding of Chinese culture. That makes it both relatable and less Asian than I would have liked. What do I know, though? My feeling was that the author was exploring her own understanding of her origins instead of sharing something solid with the reader. There were some very intriguing ideas in the book, but they rode the story and the characters too strongly, making them inconsistent and irrational. This is an almost maybe book for me.

Bottom line: even without getting a lot of satisfaction out of it, I feel two stars out of five is too little, yet I am certain three is too much.

It was one of the few Brandon Sanderson books that I hadn't read and it is, at least at this moment, a standalone book. I know that title says that The Rithmatist is part of a series, but what successful book isn't? In truth, Sanderson started this book while working (and failing) on another and it took years to rethink and rewrite it into a finished story. It's best you take it as one of those wonderful accidents that successfully reach the reader despite the publishing industry.

Back to the book, it's almost classic Sanderson: the main character is young, passionate and intelligent, yet lacking power. Everybody else has it, though, and he is fascinated by it, while learning at a prestigious school that also teaches the techniques of power. In this gearpunk like novel, the power is magical and involves drawing lines with chalk and imbuing them with personal will. The lines then become defenses, attacks, weapons and even magical minions. When the school is attacked and his friends are in danger, it is up to him to solve the mystery.

It's obvious that the story has issues, and that is probably why Sanderson worked so much at it to make it publishable, but one can get past it quickly. The characters are not as funny or punny as his others or even very complex, being satisfied to have one or two goals in life and go for them (kind of like magical chalk drawings themselves, hmmm). The plot, involving the awesome power of carrying a piece of chalk with you and going through amazing duels that resemble tower defense games, it also not the most captivating. Yet the story kind of works.

Bottom line: a pleasant Brandon Sanderson classic, without being exceptional in any way.

I thought long and hard how to start this review and I think the best place is the ending. In July 2015 the Internet and even the classic media exploded with the news of the American space probe named New Horizons reaching the last unexplored classical planet of the solar system: Pluto. Long thought to be a frozen piece of rock floating too far from the Sun to be of any interest, it has been ignored by NASA and every other space agency out there, only to be revealed to be one of the most intriguing and beautiful gem of our system. New Horizons had been launched in 2006 and it took one more year to get all the Pluto data back to Earth. As far as the general population was concerned and even most of the people passionate about space, this was an axis in time with three major events: launch, flyby and end of data download. As far as the media was concerned, it was a great discovery because it produced memeable pictures (the Pluto heart is one, for example).

Chasing New Horizons starts in 1989, when Alan Stern deciding he would work for a NASA mission to Pluto, it takes us through the Herculean job of creating interest, gathering people, drafting a project, finding support and funding, fighting competing teams, bureaucracy and political apathy and even bad will, the ups and downs, the almost-theres, the Sisyphean and thankless work to get something up the Hill only to see it fall because of a change in administration, or a cut in the budget, or some hidden agenda and even people petty enough to demote Pluto's status as a planet as a personal grudge against the person who discovered it.

I liked how the book was written, even if at start I had to move over the usual platitudes meant to garner interest for space from the average reader and had to cope with the American units of measurement: feet, miles, Fahrenheit and, of course, the bus-size. However, no matter the small faults in the writing, the subject is so important than I can't rate the book lower than maximum. This is a must read, even if it skirts the technical aspects and mostly discusses the 25 year work from a managerial standpoint.

It's hard to describe how awesome these people are. Can you imagine working for a quarter century for something that can fail abruptly and with no positive outcome at literally any moment? I thought I had it bad when a project I was working on for six months was cancelled - imagine having to go through something like this several times, at the exact moment when you thought it will all sail smoothly from then on, when you had the funding, the assurances and even the construction of the probe nearly finished. Four days before one critical moment, the flyby, when New Horizons was supposed to do almost all of its work, the on board computer rebooted and lost all previously uploaded programming. In those four days, people had to scramble to recreate the entire software package they had worked for incrementally for the last 9 years and upload it to a machine that was 9 light hours away from Earth. One of the most critical moments of the mission (after 16 years of ground work to make it happen) was the launch, for example. The mission planners had no control over the mechanism of the launch vehicle. It could have blown on the pad or in the air.

There would be no redos. First, no way the project would have been approved again after a failure so senseless. Second, Pluto would have moved in a region of its 248 year long orbit where its atmosphere would freeze, making any other future probe return much less interesting data than at that exact moment. If it failed, it would have been the first and probably last APL planetary exploration mission, after they fought tooth and nail to be the ones doing it, rather than the usual and entrenched JPL. People had lived their entire lives working on this thing and it could have failed in so many different ways.

Bottom line: you have to be insane to do what Stern did. A wonderful flavor of insanity that is both admirable and terrifying. The system behind NASA should value and support these people even if, especially if, they are insanely driven enough that they don't actually need it. I would say that New Horizons succeeded despite the American space industry and political system, not because of them. It really shouldn't be that hard. This is a book for all space fans, but also people who had difficulties in their projects. While it might help with specific insights, this book will make almost any hardship you ever endured seem insignificant.

The Blood Mirror felt like the weakest book in the series, but really, if I think about it, it's the pattern that unfolded through the entire Lightbringer saga that feels wrong. The first book was amazing, with interesting characters, great world building, an intriguing story, but then came the second book - and I didn't see it then - which upended much of the concepts in the first and added many more. It was not a continuation, per se, but a reframing of the story with other parameters. Instead of closing story arcs, Brent Weeks was transforming them, kept them open and added many more. The third book made this pattern obvious and in this book it became annoying.

Forget that everybody is the relative of everybody or in the extreme the member of an organization that we didn't know existed or cared about in previous books. Forget that after we follow a character as something, we have to follow them as something completely different in the next book, because of reasons that we didn't know (or cared) about. Forget even that threatening someone's loved ones seems to control everything with maximum efficiency in this universe, while actually harming them is a forgivable offense. Nothing. Ever. Ends. It just piles on. And since there is limited space in the book, important things - like the war or what the people are actually doing when the entire establishment blows in their faces and destroys their lives - get sidelined or completely eliminated in favor of whatever insecurity Kip feels while discussing hot sex with his friends or amazingly beautiful (and totally inconsistent) wife. And of course, the book ends in another cliffhanger.

In chess, when you are overwhelmed by the complexity of the position, you simplify it. You exchange pieces until the board is clearer. In Lightbringer, enemies just enjoy threatening each other and never following up while they work together for some completely pointless goal. Just like in TV soap operas, they all hate and love each other at the same time while things that could never have been predicted by the reader happen as chaotically as possible around them.

So, the fifth book will be published this year and I will read it, but my rating on the entire series just plunged dramatically. I don't expect things to really come to any conclusion, I don't expect characters to evolve in any meaningful way anymore or the lore behind it all to ever be explained. We started with seven colors and a god, now we have 11 colors and about 200 gods, for example. The chances that all of this mess will become clear in the future are remote.

The Broken Eye continues right after the shocking finale of The Blinding Knife! And that pretty much sucks, because the ending was the type of cliffhanger that just felt added on in order to make people quickly buy the next volume. Unfortunately, this book is no different. After a zillion story arcs that meet improbably and a lot of agitation one way or the other, Brent Weeks ends Broken Eye with an even shockier (is that a word?) ending.

And I will bite, I will read the fourth book in the series, The Blood Mirror, but only because I find the characters intriguing. Yet I definitely lost that feeling of respect for the story, the careful attention to detail that I enjoyed so much in the first volume. Weeks is a good writer, maybe even a great one, but instead of the series getting better, it just gets bloated until it needs over the top twists and abrupt cliffhangers. One of the most pervasive feelings when reading this volume was frustration that the stories of characters that I wanted to follow were interrupted by all of the others and how each and every one of even the secondary heroes needed their own grand achievement until it got claustrophobic. OK, you're the good guy, but when you see someone hurting everyone you know, you just kill them. You don't one up them, you don't talk to them, you don't strategize or play games. OK, you're a powerful psycho, but it doesn't mean everything needs to be a power show. I mean, does Andross Guile even go to the bathroom or just wills his bowels into submission? OK, you are young and inexperienced so you don't know what to do when you love someone, but doing the exact opposite? And how come in this universe there are at most two degrees of separation? More like one and a half. And how come everyone knows what they need to do when they need it, regardless if they ever learned it before?

I am already hooked into the story and Brent Weeks creates a complex and compelling one, however the experience of reading the books is only diminishing with stupid techniques like cliffhangers and hidden information and mindless expansions into new territories that absolutely did not need to be there. Too bad that now everything will need to at least maintain this insane level of tension and complexity, for fear of turning boring.

Bottom line: not bad, certainly not boring, but pointlessly exhausting.

This is more a backup for the extensions that I have installed on the two main IDEs I'm using for my job: Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Code

In order to list the extensions installed, use the command code --list-extensions. For me, this results in this output:

code --install-extension aeschli.vscode-css-formatter
code --install-extension Angular.ng-template
code --install-extension christian-kohler.npm-intellisense
code --install-extension cmstead.jsrefactor
code --install-extension cssho.vscode-svgviewer
code --install-extension danwahlin.angular2-snippets
code --install-extension dbaeumer.jshint
code --install-extension dbaeumer.vscode-eslint
code --install-extension donjayamanne.jquerysnippets
code --install-extension donjayamanne.jupyter
code --install-extension DotJoshJohnson.xml
code --install-extension ecmel.vscode-html-css
code --install-extension eg2.vscode-npm-script
code --install-extension esbenp.prettier-vscode
code --install-extension fabianlauer.vs-code-xml-format
code --install-extension fknop.vscode-npm
code --install-extension HookyQR.beautify
code --install-extension humao.rest-client
code --install-extension joelday.docthis
code --install-extension k--kato.docomment
code --install-extension michelemelluso.code-beautifier
code --install-extension minhthai.vscode-todo-parser
code --install-extension mohsen1.prettify-json
code --install-extension mrmlnc.vscode-scss
code --install-extension ms-mssql.mssql
code --install-extension ms-vscode.csharp
code --install-extension ms-vscode.typescript-javascript-grammar
code --install-extension ms-vscode.vscode-typescript-tslint-plugin
code --install-extension msjsdiag.debugger-for-chrome
code --install-extension naumovs.color-highlight
code --install-extension pmneo.tsimporter
code --install-extension rbbit.typescript-hero
code --install-extension robinbentley.sass-indenrted
code --install-extension wayou.vscode-todo-highlight

In order to install them, use code --install-extension [extension name] for each line.

Visual Studio

For Visual Studio, funny enough, in order to export and import your extensions you need to use an extension: Extension Manager 2017, which on my system exports a file in .vsext format:

{
  "id": "5f191824-b8a6-47c0-9f96-f607dfd3c09b",
  "name": "My Visual Studio extensions",
  "description": "A collection of my Visual Studio extensions",
  "version": "1.0",
  "extensions": [
    {
      "name": ".NET Portability Analyzer",
      "vsixId": "55d15546-28ca-40dc-af23-dfa503e9c5fe"
    },
    {
      "name": "Advanced Installer for Visual Studio 2017",
      "vsixId": "Caphyon.AdvancedInstaller.23debb5a-cff4-4b91-88bf-6280f72a7ebb"
    },
    {
      "name": "Azure Data Lake and Stream Analytics Tools",
      "vsixId": "1e906ff5-9da8-4091-a299-5c253c55fdc9"
    },
    {
      "name": "Azure Functions and Web Jobs Tools",
      "vsixId": "Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.AzureFunctions"
    },
    {
      "name": "BuildVision",
      "vsixId": "837c3c3b-8382-4839-9c9a-807b758a929f"
    },
    {
      "name": "Clean Code .NET",
      "vsixId": "CleanCode.NET.9ecfa9bb-0775-48d0-9898-4dbbbd529fe3"
    },
    {
      "name": "Cloud Explorer for VS 2017",
      "vsixId": "Microsoft.VisualStudio.CloudExplorer"
    },
    {
      "name": "Code Cracker for C#",
      "vsixId": "CodeCracker.Vsix..5b99e64c-1418-4a06-990c-fd4cf01f4f63"
    },
    {
      "name": "Code Graph",
      "vsixId": "CodeAtlasVSIX.Company.df5456fb-08ea-4256-b5ff-ecdb3a512ad3"
    },
    {
      "name": "CodeMaid",
      "vsixId": "4c82e17d-927e-42d2-8460-b473ac7df316"
    },
    {
      "name": "CommentCop",
      "vsixId": "CommentCop..0521EE68-1A5D-4C78-9970-B6A46B03FA6D"
    },
    {
      "name": "EntityFramework Reverse POCO Generator",
      "vsixId": "EntityFramework_Reverse_POCO_Generator..d542a934-8bd6-4136-b490-5f0049d62033"
    },
    {
      "name": "Extension Manager 2017",
      "vsixId": "e83d71b8-8bfc-4e06-b145-b0388910c016"
    },
    {
      "name": "Fix Mixed Tabs",
      "vsixId": "FixMixedTabs.9f1d3050-b986-4b10-ae36-97c6efc5e968"
    },
    {
      "name": "Fix Namespace",
      "vsixId": "f073da8c-bb52-41f8-b95a-a6346b1a0b52"
    },
    {
      "name": "MetricsAnalyzer",
      "vsixId": "MetricsAnalyzer..8026235d-7afc-401b-8f45-ba8624a07ef5"
    },
    {
      "name": "Microsoft Code Analysis 2017",
      "vsixId": "4db2d63d-3320-4fbd-bf80-07f8d1500bd3"
    },
    {
      "name": "Moq.Analyzers",
      "vsixId": "Moq.Analyzers..c3c7e3f8-2407-428d-beef-c4557253517b"
    },
    {
      "name": "Object Exporter",
      "vsixId": "07fb5b16-f4be-4488-9a19-b4f36d2c05a6"
    },
    {
      "name": "Output enhancer",
      "vsixId": "VSOutputEnhancer.Nikolay Balakin.a06be4c3-f97e-425c-8a0d-bdef08ac2abb"
    },
    {
      "name": "Power Commands for Visual Studio",
      "vsixId": "PowerCommands.3ecdd89b-f985-483d-8c94-be37de4dc083"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ref12",
      "vsixId": "SLaks-Ref12-086C4CE4-7061-4B1F-BC77-B64E4ED71B8E"
    },
    {
      "name": "Reference Conflicts Analyser",
      "vsixId": "ff477521-e67b-4ca3-931f-3edf36125d28"
    },
    {
      "name": "Regular Expression Tester Extension",
      "vsixId": "a65d58d2-ead8-4eea-a47d-fa60865a6043"
    },
    {
      "name": "ResolveUR - Resolve Unused References",
      "vsixId": "637ba02c-3388-4e54-9051-3eea7c51b054"
    },
    {
      "name": "Roslyn Security Guard",
      "vsixId": "RoslynSecurityGuard..45fa56c2-16f1-4395-8c10-a5a460084018"
    },
    {
      "name": "Roslynator 2017",
      "vsixId": "9289a8ab-1bb6-496b-9992-9f7ea27f66a8"
    },
    {
      "name": "Security Code Scan (for VS2017 and newer)",
      "vsixId": "955196A7-ACBF-4F6B-820B-51B8507CE853"
    },
    {
      "name": "Solution Error Visualizer",
      "vsixId": "SolutionErrorVisualizer.a392f96b-6b33-4b53-b4bb-3376a05f986c"
    },
    {
      "name": "SonarLint for Visual Studio 2017",
      "vsixId": "SonarLint.36871a7b-4853-481f-bb52-1835a874e81b"
    },
    {
      "name": "SQL Search",
      "vsixId": "Redgate.SQLSearch.VSExtension.9BD7AEDA-C291-4702-8191-4189B099F3A9"
    },
    {
      "name": "Target Framework Migrator",
      "vsixId": "TargetFrameworkMigrator..4f7666b9-e62c-46a1-af25-21ab8742ef00"
    },
    {
      "name": "Trailing Whitespace Visualizer",
      "vsixId": "4c1a78e6-e7b8-4aa9-8812-4836e051ff6d"
    },
    {
      "name": "Unit Test Boilerplate Generator",
      "vsixId": "UnitTestBoilerplate.RandomEngy.ca0bb824-eb5a-41a8-ab39-3b81f03ba3fe"
    },
    {
      "name": "Visual Studio IntelliCode",
      "vsixId": "IntelliCode.VSIX.598224b2-b987-401b-8509-f568d0c0b946"
    },
    {
      "name": "Visual Studio Spell Checker (VS2017 and Later)",
      "vsixId": "43EA967E-0DE2-4136-8E52-C6DCFB5C2748"
    },
    {
      "name": "Wix Toolset Visual Studio 2017 Extension",
      "vsixId": "WixToolset.VisualStudioExtension.Dev15"
    }
  ]
}

The Blinding Knife continues the story of Kip the bastard, Gavin/Dazen Guile the genius god-like Prism and just about every other person alive a mere mortal. It is just as entertaining as the first book, although more focused on action than lore. A lot of new concepts are explored here, like colors that are not on the spectrum but can be drafted, other gods, other chromatic skills, but, as fantasy focused on little boys taught us, always unexplained, mysterious, too young to understand, people dying before they can finish their sentence, etc. I hate that cliché and I really hope people would stop using it so much. I am talking to you, Brent Weeks!

Anyway, I can't say anything more about the story or the style or the author than I did when I read the first book in the Lightbringer series. It's a continuous story, split in book sized volumes. I will start reading the next book in the saga momentarily. I recommend the writing style and I like the attention to detail and the lore, although after a while the boy genius recipe feels more and more like a Japanese manga and less than a real story.

It seems there is a dedicated fan base for the Riyria series that so enjoy the setup that they ignore the quality (or lack thereof) of the writing. The writing style is amateurish at best, the characters are not fleshed out, yet the little building they get is contradicted with impunity whenever the plot requires it, the point of the story of the book has not been revealed after more than half of it, while the plot doesn't make any sense most of the time.

I am sorry, Michael J. Sullivan, but I could only read 60% of The Crown Tower before deciding I will not continue and I will not try any of the other books in the series. For the readers, imagine a story about implausibly competent youngsters that are forced to work together by a kindly old professor for no good reason other than they have to work together. Imagine a prostitute who decides to fight the world and open her own brothel, right across the street from her former pimp and king of the street, but the only concerns she has is how to bribe city officials to give her a business permit. After half of the book in which the characters have barely begun to do any of the activities listed above, nothing really happened, while hints have been placed to imply this is a world where magic exists, goblins, elves, dwarves, gods, yet none of them made an appearance.

I don't understand how stuff like that gets any awards. Is it just because they sell? Toilet paper sells and doesn't win anything! Just... ugh!

You remember when you had to write a paper for college and you had the thing that you wanted to say, but then your coordinator told you to make it a chapter, and then add others that are related for context? This book kind of feels like that. In English it is called The Fear Factor, but the Romanian edition calls it "Altruist or being good without reward" (my direct translation, as Good for Nothing didn't feel right, even if it is the title of the book in the UK), showing that even editors didn't really agree with the author on the right way to label it.

Overall, what Abigal Marsh tries to say is simple: our capacity to do good to others without expecting a reward stems from an ancient mammalian mechanism designed to bond mothers to children and it is triggered by our ability to empathize with the fear other feel, while regulated by a network of brain centers, mainly our amygdala and hippocampus using the oxytocin hormone. This takes the book through eight chapters, each kind of separate and which I liked in different measures. The ones describing carefully crafted experiments and their outcomes I liked best, the ones that felt like fillers or the ones affirming that correlation doesn't imply causation then proceeding in describing a lot of correlation less so.

Marsh goes out of her way to portray a positive image of humanity, where most people are generous, empathetic and altruistic. She describes people who aren't capable of it - psychopaths and their amygdala dysfunction, people on the other side of the curve - superaltruists who don't care to whom they do good, they just do it, goes to very interesting experiments and comes with theories about how and why altruism, fear and empathy work. Her conclusion is that our focus on negative things makes us falsely believe things are getting worse, people less trustworthy, when the actual opposite if overwhelmingly true.

Bottom line: I liked the book, but some of the chapters felt forced. I didn't really need the exposition of her beach trip to save the turtles or how much she feared and then appreciated the help of a random guy who looked like a hood thug. Most of the information interesting to me was concentrated in the first chapters, while the last, explaining what to do to become more altruistic and how that improves our well being and filled with international statistical charts on altruism I could have done without entirely. It's not that it wasn't correct or well written, it just felt like an add on that had little to do with the book or, worse, was there just to fill up space.

If you search on TED Talks, you will see the author have a talk there titled Abigail Marsh: Why some people are more altruistic than others.

If there is something that went wrong with this book, then it has to be the cover on Goodreads: a hipster young man with dark hair, a goatee and a pointlessly fancy dagger, which has almost no connection to the story. Instead, try the one on Amazon, which at least doesn't offend. And that concludes what went wrong with The Black Prism! I actually liked it a lot.

The story feels like so many other young adult fantasy novels, with the young child with important ancestry that had a bad childhood and is suddenly thrown in a world of magic, war and intrigue, but the characters are fresh, their motivations carefully crafted with respectful attention to detail. The world building follow suit, with a novel magic system, a deep history and not all yet revealed. The writing is good, too. After reading this first book in the Lightbringer saga, I immediately felt the need to read the next one in the series. But there is a dark side to all this, too, as The Black Prism isn't a stand alone book. If you like it, you will have to read it all.

Bottom line: I really liked the love Brent Weeks weaved in his book. This is not one of those "give me your money now" kind of work, it's something that has value and beauty. It's not the greatest book ever written, but what book is? For the fantasy genre, it was pretty entertaining (and big!).

When I was a child I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I was going through the pages of the Zoological Atlas again and again, looking at the big lizard like monsters and memorizing all of their names. If I would have had access to a book like Steve Brusatte's, I would have probably become a paleontologist! By that I mean that the book is good... for an eight year old or for somebody who is already giddy with the prospect of reading about their favorite subject. Now, decades later, I really made an effort to enjoy The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, but it had no wow factor anymore. The plethora of names that I haven't known about when I was smaller than a toddler did not bring me joy. Hearing about feathered dinosaurs and what is the most likely reason feathers evolved at all or how they dinosaurs turned into their modern day form - the birds, even the tales about the dwarf dinosaurs found in my own homeland merely made the book bearable. Having a long chapter focused on Tyrannosaurs and having my book reader stop after each T. in T. Rex didn't help either.

My verdict, therefore, is that it is a good history book. It is well written and the passion of the author is palpable and admirable. Yet, unless you either know nothing about dinosaurs or you already love them, you won't read anything really amazing or new. It is, quite literally, a history of how dinosaurs rose and fell and it feels like reading a history book. Somehow, I was expecting more, something that explored in depth a lost world, but in fact it only made clear how little we know and how tiny chances are that this will ever change. Instead of the feel of a lush green world where danger loomed and beauty abounded, I got a dry dusty look at people digging in rocks for small hints of that world. It was like looking at shadows and trying to figure out what made them.

Have you ever found a book so bland that you just refused to continue reading it? To me it happens rarely, but it did with Malice, by John Gwynne. And I do feel a sense of loss, since the reviews I've seen are all so overwhelmingly positive. Maybe if I would have just read a few more formulaic chapters I would have gotten to the part when something, anything, happens.

But no, I do have a lot of books to read and I am not going to waste my time reading about another child who wants to be a hero, but he's weak and bullied, another large blacksmith who was once a soldier, another pair of good and evil gods and their minions, noble savages, strong princesses, evil viziers and so on and so on. After several chapters all I got was a bunch of people in different contexts, each with their own names, friends, family, dreams, history and narration. Whenever I thought something would happen, another character with a silly name came along to perform whatever ritual is assigned to its cardboard role. Confusing and boring as hell.

Bottom line, I couldn't even begin to finish it. I probably read about 10-15% and gave up.

Much like City of Stairs, Foundryside is a steampunk story set in a world where power resides in the hands of a few "houses" who use a magical programming language to alter reality. The lead character is also a girl, the plot also revolves around someone who wants to abuse ancient magic to rule the world and the state of knowledge is yet again recovering from a major catastrophe that veiled the past. Yet with all this, I liked the book less.

Just as the story moved from a more mystical setting to a more rational, scientific one, so did Robert Jackson Bennett's writing turned more formulaic. It's like he took something he had success with and applied the same exact formula, with some improvements related to what people want to read. As a result, the characters are less mysterious and more cardboard, the hints peppered around the story for the reader to glimpse where it is going are way too revealing (something that bothered me a little in City of Stairs, too, but here it was just too obvious). But what bothered me most was that the characterization: some were way too modern, way too educated or philosophical, considering their background, and the divide between good and evil was so obvious, back to the annoying cliché where the good characters are principled and loyal and intelligent and their opponents are insane, frustrated and ugly.

Bottom like, I liked the book, but I feel like Foundryside is a step back for Bennett. It was harder to empathize with the heroes and almost impossible to do so with the antagonists. The story felt recycled from a basic idea scrived with the same recipe as City of Stairs, but more lazily.

What makes a good story? It has to be the telling or writing style, of course, but then there are other factors: believable and sympathetic characters, an interesting idea, a tight plot, good world building, entertaining scenes. I am happy to report that City of Stairs aced everything! I haven't heard of Robert Jackson Bennett before, but I am sure to remember his name now. The first book in a trilogy, City of Stairs wasn't just blessingly self contained, but also made me happy to have following books to continue the story.

The main character is a woman who does everything from conviction, care for others and most of all her own intelligence and effort, not because of her gender. The story is a detective story, set in a fictional preindustrial almost steampunk world where gods recently existed until people killed them. It is a book of mystery, intrigue, politics, detective like investigations, spirituality and magic, but held tight around a solid core of whodunit and great character and world building. It reminded me of the wonder I felt when starting reading Brandon Sanderson's books.

Bottom line: not the greatest work of literary fiction that ever existed, but I couldn't find any fault with it. Per my definition, it was a perfect book.

At first I thought this will rehash the same information I've got from books I've read recently: how microorganisms are everywhere and how they live in symbiosis and cooperation with themselves, plants and animals, how the imbalance in the ecosystem is what we normally get to call disease, maybe some epidemics stories and so on. Instead I've got an ode to E. Coli and how studying it for decades has revealed to us in details the way life works. It's Carl Zimmer's multifaceted portrait of a single species of bacteria (although that's a lot of bacteria, if you get to read the book).

Well written even if more technical than the average popular science book, Microcosm explains how heredity works, DNA, RNA, proteins, amino acids, bacteria, biofilms, archaea, eukaryotes, viruses, plasmids, mutations, evolution, resistance and so on until it gets to creationists, genetic engineering and exobiology, all while following our scientific history built on the study of this one bacteria, the workhorse of microbiology. In fact, it is so focused on E. Coli, that it snubs most other bacteria, it talks little of epidemics or the microbe ecosystem and instead focuses on how things work. It's like an engineer's view on how life works, or a user's manual for Escherichia coli.

I liked the book and I will probably read more from the same author. I mean, if he writes a book per microbe species I could read his books until one of us dies :) I highly recommend it not only for its subject, but also for how it makes clear the inner workings of life and evolution. I would have loved to read this book when I was 12.