I kept thinking while listening to this audiobook: “This is what Orson Scott Card would write if he decided to tackle economics instead of world politics”. It’s a lot of talking, a lot of smart people arguing, and way more interesting that you’d expect. Lionel Shriver (who is apparently a woman?) also wrote We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is next on my TBR. “Of course for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary – just as notional, just as easy come and […]
“I was a smart-ass, born and raised. This had been my curse and would continue to be so.”
I have my Goodreads goal set at 260 for the year, and it says that I’m currently 4 books ahead of my goal. Unfortunately, I’m 7 books behind in my reviews. So please excuse me if the next few are short and sweet! I would also like to apologize to David Sedaris, since it took me until he mentioned his Greek grandmother in chapter 2 to realize that this wasn’t an Augusten Burroughs book. I mean, it says David Sedaris on the cover. But I guess that […]
Get off my lawn, you little punk
This may be because I’m an old lady of almost 31, but I really don’t like these YA novels where the kids spend the whole time huffing paint and vandalizing shit. A lot of bad stuff happens to the protagonist of Punkzilla, but after each event I kind felt like…well, he deserved it! Presented as a series of unmailed letters, Punkzilla is the story of teenage runaway Jamie, who’s trying his best to make it from Portland, Oregon to Memphis in time to see his older brother […]
Much more enjoyable than expected
I really didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did. It seemed like another spy/assassin thriller, and after finishing Scratch One, I had low hopes. Instead, I found The Accident Man a fast-paced thriller with quite a few unexpected twists. Samuel Carver escaped a crappy childhood by becoming a British SBS Marine. After he ended his tours, he somehow stumbled into becoming an “accident man” — arranging for the deaths of certain people on the behalf of a shady organization. In August 1997, he gets an order […]
“To quote one Valley sage, if your idea is any good, it won’t get stolen, you’ll have to jam it down people’s throats instead.”
Chaos Monkeys brought to mind a couple of other books I’ve read recently, as it deals both with Silicon Valley (like Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons) and the broader state of Wall Street and the stock market (The Big Short by Michael Lewis). Those two other books, however, both benefited from writers capable of making such dry material seem interesting and relevant. While Antonio Garcia Martinez spices up Chaos Monkeys with stories about his own personal life, they tended to revolve around the woman […]
“The real-world value of knowledge in the mobile-device age.”
Caitlin_D reviewed this a couple weeks ago, and I thought it sounded interesting so I borrowed her copy. It definitely was — contains a lot of fascinating (and sometimes scary) facts about how our society is changing when it comes to learning and retaining information. Poundstone spills out a lot of information here, but most of it’s pretty entertaining. He talks about polls he’s conducted or cited for the book — what people know, and in staggering numbers, what people don’t. I had fun reading through the […]
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