Ambar > Recent Status Updates

I done gone from "great! Another so called brilliant novel that's really just a bunch of half baked satire pretending to be far sharper than it really is" to "goddamn this shit is bangin"

God it’s a slog. I mean, for obvious reasons this is an invaluable perspective into what happened, and there’s a lot of interesting detail, but there’s also repetition, run on sentences, and pedantry. Very poor editing.

May as well have called this one The Giant Book of Cliches ft Fantasy Man who juuuust flawed enough to be as fuckable as possible and one dimensional woman who really just serves as a vessel to see him through.

Also drinking game. Do a shot every time Niffenegger gratuitously namedrops an artist/work of art/music/Book/poem. The entire gang will have their stomachs pumped fun days!

Flames.

Colour me surprised and thoroughly impressed. So far, makes up for the weaknesses of book 1, sets up a more promising and plot arc with more variables, and takes an unexpected hard right turn into horror to boot.

Love the whole spider evolution storyline. But poor editing. There's a lot of repetition going on, he's mentioned Kern's world's relatively high percentage of oxygen like 4 times in the context of a fire. Very putting off that he doesn't trust the reader enough to get it the first time.

Not really what I was looking for. Soft sci fi, but thought provoking stories

Someone needs to pass a law forbidding sci fi writers from romance. These nerds are fucking terrible at it and it makes me think they deserved their wedgies back in school.

Also, weak ass plot, no hard science yet, poor translation and a complete lack of everything that made the 3 body problem so good.

Definite improvement over Dune Messiah. The "abomination" angle referred to in the first part is finally fleshed out, and so far, looks promising.

This is some of the worst shit I've ever read. And what makes it worse still is that I can almost see Frank Herbert writing this thinking of himself as a political philosopher in the mould of Machiavelli.

It's just so fucking bad.

What's so great about slaughterhouse five again?

I'm immediately hooked. This is sad, revolting, very intelligent and very well written.

Mearsheimer > Waltz


The defensive realists got the structure down sure enough. But I agree with Zakaria and others (including Mearsheimer) that they have drawn incorrect conclusions.

States operate in an environment of anarchy. States are security maximizes. But states are never really secure. More power is always better than less, and states reflect this in their behaviour. Simple, accurate, sensible.

Ken Waltz was a smart man. No doubt about that. But for all his brilliant analogies between IR and economic theory, and all his takedowns of classical realists and reductionist theories, what is his real contribution?

Beyond telling us that structure has a massive impact on outcomes, Waltz gives us nothing.

I can’t. I just cannot. Whatever its great literary merit, I cannot stand this stream of garbageness. And whatever payoff I might receive by the end of piecing together the sorry tale of the Caulsons? (I don’t even remember what the family is) just doesn’t seem worth it. Reading should be fun or at least tolerable.

Abandoned

This is vast. Starts at Ertugrul and continues till after the establishment of turkey.
Finkel hasn’t written an overly academic account but it she has also not strayed from the facts. Particularly noteworthy is how the transition to sprawling empire raised the all powerful Ottoman sultan’s prestige ever higher but increasingly made turned him into a bird in a gilded cage

Dad's recommendation. Obviously the kind of book he would recommend outside of sword and sorcery or high fantasy.


A fictional US/USSR war in Iran during the cold war. It's interesting, from an operational perspective, written by a soldier and whatnot. But the author holds views that are too stereotypical American to entirely enjoy

I don't even know why I stopped midway. Brilliant as expected. But it's been 2-3 years and I probably have to start from the beginning

Ernst Junger is the antithesis of Remarque.

Well maybe that's a bit dramatic he doesn't try to hide the hardships of war, but the man is made of something else. The war broke most that fought in it, but this dude appears to have discovered himself

Definitely going to get back into this

Dude has an obsession with fruits. Not enough focus on the man himself, at least so far and I wasn't enamoured by the writing either.

Babur was an impressive enough guy tho, but thanks to his entirely incompetent son, much of the baburnama is lost to time.


Will likely be abandoned but I'll hold out for now

Sorely tempted to abandon. But my boy Mitrokhin risked his life and spent years collecting this archive on soviet documents the least my lazy ass can do is read it.


Will get back to it. Eventually. Maybe.

This is the second of The Watch series that's set outside of Ankh Morpork (jingo being the first).

So far so good, but I can't help but feel like thud and snuff lack the earlier charm of The Watch.

This seems to be very highly rated. For some reason I was put off by it, but it was a gift from Hozie (not that he read it) and seems to be universally appreciated, also important subject matter.

I guess I'll have to come around to it eventually

Oh man. Kinda want to abandon because I've never had the best mind for economics but I guess this is just one of those books that have had to profound an impact to ignore.


I'll get back to it I guess. Eventually. Maybe.

Somebody in HNLU probably has my copy, scribbled with personal notes that may or may not make sense. This is from the extreme pothead days.

Shame, I would have liked to have that copy.

15 percentish? Forgot entirely that I even picked this up at some point. Been two years should dive back in

Some would say the best experience of fiction is to be found when you are unable to put down a book in the dead of the night. Certainly, that is true of the most entertaining of books.


But the pinnacle of fiction, to my mind, is a book that you are forced to put down, and ruminate upon while the world sleeps. I already know I’m going to be thinking about “the memoirs... “ for at least some months to come

Abandoned. Observations that appear (to me) obvious. Personal notes and nothing about his role as emperor. Boring af

Imagine my horror at the realization that all I remember of most Pratchett works is the broad outline of the stories.

For some reason I've not been reading as much as I'd like to, and revisiting Terry has long been on the cards. Guards! Guards! is great, but if teenage memory serves, Men at Arms is where the City Watch really comes into its own.

Slightly more than halfway through. Brings back every emotion "All Quiet..." provoked, and as forcefully. I had forgotten just how powerful a writer Remarque is. I've said it before I'll say it again. All Quiet... Should be required reading in schools everywhere. And so far, so should The Road Back.

I could finish this and take away some sense of what Kundera means but frankly, far too illiterate to do so.

Maybe a couple more years.