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.
This was the Rieu translation, which apparently initiated the Penguin Classics series. It is in prose rather than attempting to translate into poetry. It was very clear and easy to read.
Jarvis Cocker having a clear out of his loft space talking through some of the things he finds. I didn’t know much about him really, but fancied something quite light to read and it was on offer. I’m glad I picked it, I found his perspective on life and music interesting as a fellow awkward nerd that seems to be in a slower gear than the rest of the world a lot of the time.
The first section details the authors time in Auschwitz, which of course was hard going and fascinating.
Very short and very silly. I have a real soft spot for Rincewind, and the early Discworld books.
I found the different perspectives on power interesting.