Sonic the Hedgehog Encyclospeedia
Okay I am not even giving this a rating this is just something I checked out from the library because I thought it was funny that they had it.
The Dawn of Everything ★★★☆☆
Interesting book laying out a viewpoint on history and politics that humans, for most of history, have been much more deliberate political actors and had much more direct agency in how society was organised than we generally think or are taught and that ways societies were organised have been much more varied than they currently are or how we generally think of them as being in the past. It does get very bogged down in complaining about things that apparently “all historians” say or think in a way that reminds me of Tumblr’s bad habits when talking about history to be honest, though it thankfully stops doing it as much as the book goes on (and as it references the work of historians who clearly are not saying the things that they say all historians are doing).
3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development ch8 Rotation in Three Dimensions ★★★☆☆
I learnt about quaternions.
Ring ★★★☆☆
Rereading the Ring series for @thetheringpod. I think this book has a lot of problems, not the least of being that the main characters are absolute scum lmao, but it has some weird, neat, ideas that I enjoy and I think they come together in a really satisfying way.
Spiral ★★☆☆☆
A sequel that feels mostly better written that then just turns into a traincrash at the end. There’s some ideas I like in here but Suzuki fails to grasp the actual interesting parts of what he’s come up with and instead uses them in service of doing a Big Twist ending that makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. I do love Sadako in this book, though.
Loop ★★☆☆☆
Actually quite an interesting book for much of it. The first half feels like a big change of pace for the series with the main character dealing with everything around him being consumed by cancer. Goes completely off the rails in the second half with a series of Big Twists and retcons that make even less sense than Spiral and retcon its retcons.
Birthday ★☆☆☆☆
An epilogue to the Ring trilogy that tries to flesh out both the past and the ending and fails to do both in any way that’s interesting. It is actually quite funny how boring the depiction of the humanity-ending threat in this is. It also is a book that is meant to focus on the female characters of the series where the longest section in it is still from the point of view of a man talking about Sadako than from her own perspective and the final story and framing device is from the point of view of a woman but entirely about watching a man do things.
The Good Doctor ★★☆☆☆
This novel asks: What if the Thirteenth Doctor’s era was compotently written? It nails it perfectly. It really feels true to the characters and general leanings of the era, especially in how the Doctor tells a species that has been systematically enslaved that using violence to free themselves is just as bad as them having been enslaved.
Displeasure Island ★★★☆☆
I think this is not really as good as Grave Expectations but it was fun and gets bonus points for being set nearby.
The Poppy War Trilogy ★★☆☆☆
I can’t say I didn’t enjoy reading these but as it goes on it does just kind of feel like Rin is just constantly oscillating between thinking she has it all figured out to thinking she was being the dumbest idiot ever for every believing in something to the point of self-parody and I dunno a bittersweet ending trying to break cycles of violence was more or less where I was expecting it to go but like when the country is being handed over to the, explicitly within the narrative, racist, extractive, cultural chauvinist colonisers it’s really more of just a bitterbitter ending.
Anarchism: From Theory to Practise ★☆☆☆☆
Wow this book sure did make a lot of anarchism just seem like a lot of theorists completely disconnected from reality saying absurd bullshit before it got to like some actual people doing shit in Spain and the Russian revolution at the end and just made me wish I was reading books that actually had some depth on those people instead.
