Finished Reading

How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur

How to Be Perfect Cover 4 out 5 stars rating

I saw this book at Goodreads’ shortlist for best nonfiction in 2022 and as it was available at my local library I decided to take it to read it, and turned out to be a good choice as I quite enjoyed the book and learned quite a lot with it too!

The gist of the book is to introduce the main (or more common?) philosophical lines for thinking about ethical questions ( Virtue ethics, Deontology and Consequentialism) and use them to analyse different situations, from the famous trolley problem and its variations to things like “What are the ethics implications returning or not the shopping cart to its proper place after you finish shopping?”.

One of the aspects that I really liked about the author approach was to present all those philosophies as a toolbox to think about the situations, instead of trying to prescribe one or another as the better one. And this for me it the main thing you can take away from the reading, is having these tools and using them based on your own values.

Important: The author make a lot of jokes (and a lot of huge footnotes with more jokes/comments) throughout the book so YMMV, but as I enjoyed the humour in The Good Place series it also worked well for me here :)

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Calculating Stars Cover 3 out 5 stars rating

This book own a bunch of awards in 2018/2019 (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, etc) and I really like the Hidden Figures film, so maybe I set my own expectations too high and in the wrong way? The book was not bad … but I didn’t really like it either …

The story was alright, all the science too. Most of the time I was really vested into the character goals and objectives. But at some points the character actions/narrative sounded very cringe. I don’t know.

I can believe that people really liked it, but for me I’m dropping the series after this one.

Decision at Thunder Rift by William H. Keith Jr.

Decision at Thunder Rift Cover 4 out 5 stars rating

At the start of the year I entered into an intense Battletech phase and while looking for material to read I found that these books (this one is originally from 1986) were recently republished! So I dived right into it!

Being honest, the writing will not earn any awards. But if the idea of huge robots going pew-pew entices you, this is a very nice book. By the way, there is more than just robot battles (which might be a surprise if you never read a Battletech novel), including some character development and political plots (that the author makes it obvious that there was a plot).

I’ll agree with most of the reviews I read about this book, that it is a nice and gentle introduction to the Battletech universe :)

Currently Reading

  • Procedural Generation in Game Design

    I started this book in the middle of 2022, read like a third of it and then stopped. Got back into it this month and I’m looking forward to reading the remaining chapters.

  • Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

    A book that has been on my to-read list for ages and I saw it for very cheap in a local thrift shop. I’m liking it so far.

  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

    Saw this as the winner of Goodreads’ Best Fiction book of 2022 and while I was really on the fence about this one, the fact it was about a game development story made me go for it. I’m about one third in and it has been ok, but I’m only keep going with this one because it has this whole game dev topic around it.

On The Radar For Next