This was a lot. So many ideas that just keep coming. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and really quite silly throughout. I thought it was great.
A lot more hopeful than Politics on the edge!
This is a very depressing read. Stewart clearly has a deep love of the UK and it’s institutions, but describes his experiences of how its politics have been completely hollowed out. All the incentives are wrong, power is not truly in the hands of either the people that claim to have it or should have it. People are only interested in their position, and no one seems interested in the actual improvement of people’s lives. It ends with the rise of Boris Johnson and populism arriving in the UK.
If half of this book is true Billie Holiday had an extraordinary life. I’m guessing William Dufty is the author, but her voice shines through this.
I’m pretty tired of hangovers and ending up drinking more than the couple of drinks I meant to when heading out. This is a pretty convincing argument that you’re not really getting anything out of alcohol.
I stopped on chapter 10 of 15. It feels like a blog post or two stretched to a book, repetitive and unfocused.
Always a risk to go back to heroic fantasy novels I read when I was a teenager. It’s not exactly subtle, but I very much enjoyed it. It moves at a fast pace, has a large cast of quite interesting characters and has something more to say than “the heroic goodies beat the baddies”.
A dystopia where 100 boys are in a competition to walk as far as possible. If you drop below 4mph for 30 seconds you get a warning, after three warnings you get shot.
I got this from the library. It’s absolutely heartbreaking, that poor girl.
A book where each chapter is a brief summary of a uk prime minister. They’re chronologically ordered from Walpole to Johnson, and each is written by a different author.
A lovely book, easy to read and clear. There are some typos in the code examples but that was literally always the case back then. It was a part of how you learnt I think, forced you into figuring it out.
Pretty short but clear book on Erlang. The first half consists of things I’m familiar with already (immutability, pattern matching, recursion, higher order functions). It was the last half that I was more interested in, process oriented programming and OTP. I’ll have to read a more in depth book to understand it thoroughly, but it’s a very interesting approach.
40 women who are locked in a cage that is patrolled by men with whips escape when the men run out after hearing a siren.
A history book that follows a bead that was found in a Viking grave in Repton across to asia where it was likely made. The book details bioarcheology involving comparing the makeup of teeth and bones to show whether people in gravesites are migrants where they likely came from. I’d never heard of that before, and found it all very interesting.
A short story from 1909.