This one is a very middle-of-the-pack Shakespeare work. There are plenty of dramatic scenes and arresting turns of phrase, but there's really no character central enough to be considered a protagonist, no one to whom the audience ever really feels a sense of attachment. It's as though you can feel the Bard treading ever so gingerly through the messy tale of Queen Elizabeth's parentage, lest he should run afoul of his sovereign's good graces. Indeed, the play's end leans heavily into Elizabethan propaganda.
Not that I blame Shakespeare for that. His shrewdness was certainly a part of his success. But it does mean that this particular play is more interesting as a historical artifact than as a work of drama.
This short book is a great little manifesto detailing the values and methods of a master designer. The central lessons are Vignelli's emphasis on deliberate decision making, care with details, and value for simplicity.
I hadn’t read this since I was maybe twelve years old, and I was really surprised at how much the details and even the specific words resurfaced in my memory as I read. A classic for a reason, I enjoyed this every bit as much as when I was young.
Continuing my journey through Asimov’s Foundation series, this one continues adding complexity and questions onto the original premise. And it’s just so readable, with a plot that twists and turns.
This one was rather disappointing, and I confess that I didn’t make it quite all the way to the end. Too episodic. Too cartoony. Not enough depth.
I don’t know if I wasn’t in the mood or if maybe this kind of comedy plays better on stage than on the page, but this quintessential Shakespearian farce of lookalikes and mistaken identities just didn’t land for me.
Sometimes you read a book that restates a lot of what you already believe and know, but it’s still worthwhile because you needed to have it brought to the forefront of your thoughts afresh.
A minor Shakespeare work for a reason. This one is thought to likely be a collaboration and it shows in its lack of Shakespearean depth of character and interiority. Still, interesting for a completionist like myself.
A Hugo Award winner for a reason, Joe Haldeman’s military sci-fi epic takes one character skipping across the surface of time through a thousand year interstellar war. It’s grim, it’s episodic, and it’s brilliant. The book portrays the futility of war with a sharpness that is just as relevant now as it was in the Viet Nam era during which it was written.
I love Shakespeare’s great villains and Richard III is one of the greatest of them all. Unapologetically evil, it’s a joy to watch him scheme, lie, and murder his way to the top (though his subsequent downfall feels a bit rushed and perfunctory, as if the bard knew he had gotten past the juicy bits and was eager to wrap it up). On this read I really noticed how much House of Cards and even A Song of Ice and Fire draw elements from it.
The second book in Asimov’s famed Foundation series. It’s clear that he’d grown quite a bit as a writer by this one, with a plot more intricate, subtle, and less predictable. A classic for a reason. (In case you’re wondering, I have no interest in Apple’s new TV series based on the books. It’s not the kind of thing that can be done properly on screen.)
My book club chose this one to read and I was relatively interested to see how Dostoyevsky’s work stands up to my high school memories of Crime and Punishment and fragments of The Grand Inquisitor section of this book. The answer is not so good. The book is rambling in the extreme and most of the plot involves around a quasi-incestuous, middle school style game of he-said-she-said romance melodrama. It does explore philosophical themes, but the central question of whether a person can be moral without faith seems to me (as a humanist atheist) to be pretty well answered and not particularly germane to contemporary readers.
Continuing my Shakespeare reading project, this particular play has always been a personal favorite. The titular characters are so fully realized, mercurial and tragic, that I really love them for all their flaws. Reading it this time, I kept picturing it filmed as a space opera with larger than life production design!
A brilliant imagination, full of big ideas!
I think this book would have been mind blowing if I had read it when it was new. But so many of its ideas are now mainstream in the design and development world that it feels very old hat. Something of a victim of its own success as far as the reading experience goes.
This is an interesting one. The first half is almost all drama and the second half mostly comedy, with a big time jump in the middle. I prefer the former, a portrait of someone mad with jealousy destroying himself and all he holds dear.
