blairconrad's Reviews (1.12k)

Interesting popular science book about how Earth-like planets might've developed under different astronomical circumstances. Not too deep, and each article is prefaced by (a pretty superfluous) story set on the planet to be discussed. Fairly fun, with the best bit being the one about Earth being a moon.

Very nice. Spolsky’s introductions were typically Spolskyesque, and I really enjoyed almost every article. The individual authors are gifted writers, and the subject matter was interesting throughout (to me – I’m a software developer, but there were more articles than I expected that would mean something to the non-developer, and even to someone totally unconnected to the production of software).

Cute and quirky, and I enjoyed being in Milo's head for some of the OCD stuff, but ultimately less fun than [b:Something Missing|6280473|Something Missing|Matthew Dicks|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255837684s/6280473.jpg|6464070].
Ultimately, I think I can wrap my head around a "background thief" better than someone who consistently misrepresents who he is to his wife - that's just wrong.

A long history of Yoshirio Tatsumi's life. Aside from a few insights into how early manga collections came to be, I didn't really find that there was much here to keep me interested. The artwork was decent, and from time to time an "event of interest" occurred, but by the end I was reading it just to get it done.

Up and down. Some parts were quite interesting, but I was never able to sufficiently suspend my disbelief to completely buy into the story. I thought the ratdog was fun, and generally enjoyed the Whitey bits, except the one bit towards the end...

A cute, light read. Thrawn is generally interesting, even if he's a little too "early Sherlock Holmes" for me to be completely won over. The Mara thing looks like it could develop into fun, and possibly inject a little bit of emotional depth that the story otherwise lacked.
But that'll have to wait 'till the next book.

More fun than I'd anticipated, especially after having read [b:Doors Open|4617361|Doors Open|Ian Rankin|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/416IyB%2BSk8L._SL75_.jpg|4811891].

I felt comfortable with most of the characters pretty quickly - I think Rankin did an acceptable job of fleshing out Malcolm and his family. The coworkers weren't defined in the same level of detail, but mostly didn't need to be.

The initial setup was very promising, and I was sucked along by both Fox's and Breck's investigations.
I continued to enjoy the story as events unfolded, and it wasn't until the end when we learned who'd really done what to whom and why that my attention waned (things were a little too complicated, and many of the key players were not particularly well defined).

Another small niggle was a change in direction near the end - Malcolm's opinions and actions deviated a little from what I would've expected, considering how the character had been built up.

Still, a very enjoyable read overall. I was very entertained and would not be disappointed if there were more Malcolm Fox novels in the future.

Very good. I was slightly put off by the way we jumped right into large and complicated sentences, but it worked. After the first study, I really got into the flow and enjoyed myself. The cases studies were explained well and many of the examples were very funny, especially the Faulty and Funky Parallels.

In addition to entertaining, the book instructs. It provides useful tips on writing better. Casagrande's central thesis is that writers should (mostly) write to serve the Reader. Each of the sentence tuneups show to meet the Reader's needs over our own.

I have only two complaints. Early on, the phrase "begs the question" is used where "raises the question" is meant. That's one of my pet peeves. More seriously, in the chapter on unclear antecedents, the phrase "call it a variation on AA members' belief that helping others helps them stay sober" contains an unclear antecedent. Who is them, the AA members, or the others that are helped? These complaints are relatively minor, an did not appreciably lessen my enjoyment of the book.

I recommend It Was the Best of Sentences to anyone who writes, or enjoys writing.

I watch the Daily Show semi-regularly, so I thought I was used to hearing the Republicans being slammed, but whoa baby. I’ve come out of reading The Truth with a greater disdain for the current U.S. administration than before. I realize that Franken’s probably taking some liberties, but if even half of what he says is true (and it feels right), these are some nasty nasty people. In addition, even if the book were all lies, it’d be worth reading just for the funny. He really knows how to hit my buttons – I enjoyed the way the book was written even more than the content. A sample:

In books like this one, too often cases are made on the basis of anecdotes and generalities. For example, in Bernard Goldberg’s biased Bias, the author relies on a story about a colleague calling Gary Baure “a little nut from the Christian group” as proof of a media-wide anti-Christian, anti-short people, anti-nut conspiracy. See? I started this paragraph with a generality and tried to prove it with an anecdote. That kind of sloppiness doesn’t cut it here.

Self-reference and a warning against attempting to prove things via anecdote. That either does it for you, or it doesn’t. It does it for me.