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Ultimately this book is about all the different ways one can lean against a fireplace

This is the first book of a series, so maybe they get better, but it wasn't great. The writing is very lazy. There's single sentences that cover things I wanted to know more about, and entire paragraphs where a word or two would've sufficed. There's a lot of casual racism and sexism throughout, which the reader is supposed to understand as problematic, but Wallander often seems to thinks to himself "Huh, that person is racist and/or sexist, but I'd rather not call them out right now." Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is Wallander's own problems with women and minorities, which as a character he seems to recognize and want to address, but the structure around it isn't good enough to make that meaningful or interesting.

This book does an excellent job of showing that 1948 and everything since then has amounted to ethnic cleansing by any definition of the term. That said, my copy has a lot of typos and the author seems to have a great love of using scare quotes which I did not find even remotely helpful.

Very little mention of the environmental aspects of bitcoin. The chapter on attack vectors is pretty vague. Most discussion of potential issues with bitcoin will look like real problems to a critical reader, but are always described as actually being strengths.

This was a decent, quick read, and a pretty good criticism of blockchain, but probably could've used another round of editing or two. I was excited to read some criticism of the music industry and blockchain, but unfortunately that was one of the lighter sections of the book.

I've read Uprooted and Spinning Silver and liked those a lot, but this book really clanged for me. I almost gave up on it a few times, but persisted through to the end and found it to be mostly okay. It's a pretty interesting concept for a book (I didn't realize until I was finished that the Scholomance is from folklore) and I could imagine the next book being ok, but I can also imagine that I might not bother reading it.

Detailed history of the CIA and its many crimes and failures from its founding into the early 2000s.

Over the last couple of years I've been reading King novels that I originally read when I was a kid. I had really fond memories of The Talisman but it did not hold up. It's long, and while there are parts that are great, it's a relic of the 80s and the age really shows.