Reviews and Comments

colin

muffinista@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 6 months ago

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Henning Mankell: Faceless Killers (Paperback, 2009, Vintage) 2 stars

One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a …

Didn't love it!

2 stars

This is the first book of a series, so maybe they get better, but it wasn't great. The writing is very lazy. There's single sentences that cover things I wanted to know more about, and entire paragraphs where a word or two would've sufficed. There's a lot of casual racism and sexism throughout, which the reader is supposed to understand as problematic, but Wallander often seems to thinks to himself "Huh, that person is racist and/or sexist, but I'd rather not call them out right now." Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is Wallander's own problems with women and minorities, which as a character he seems to recognize and want to address, but the structure around it isn't good enough to make that meaningful or interesting.

Ilan Pappé: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006, Oneworld Publications) 4 stars

Since the Holocaust, it has been almost impossible to hide large-scale crimes against humanity. In …

Solid history

4 stars

This book does an excellent job of showing that 1948 and everything since then has amounted to ethnic cleansing by any definition of the term. That said, my copy has a lot of typos and the author seems to have a great love of using scare quotes which I did not find even remotely helpful.

David Gerard, Karen Boyd, Ben Gutzler, Christian Wagner: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain (Paperback, 2017, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform) 3 stars

“Ross Ulbricht had been doing all his Silk Road work from his main daily laptop. …

Good Criticism of Blockchain

3 stars

This was a decent, quick read, and a pretty good criticism of blockchain, but probably could've used another round of editing or two. I was excited to read some criticism of the music industry and blockchain, but unfortunately that was one of the lighter sections of the book.

Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education (Hardcover, 2020, Del Rey) 4 stars

A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure …

It was ok I guess?

3 stars

I've read Uprooted and Spinning Silver and liked those a lot, but this book really clanged for me. I almost gave up on it a few times, but persisted through to the end and found it to be mostly okay. It's a pretty interesting concept for a book (I didn't realize until I was finished that the Scholomance is from folklore) and I could imagine the next book being ok, but I can also imagine that I might not bother reading it.

Stephen King, Peter Straub: The Talisman (Hardcover, 1984, Viking) 2 stars

Jack Sawyer, twelve years old, is about to begin a most fantastic journey—an exalting, terrifying …

disappointing

2 stars

Over the last couple of years I've been reading King novels that I originally read when I was a kid. I had really fond memories of The Talisman but it did not hold up. It's long, and while there are parts that are great, it's a relic of the 80s and the age really shows.