Death's End was a gripping read. Once I got into it, I could hardly put it down, similar to his previous books. I would highly recommend this series.
The parts of the book I enjoyed the most were the short stories sprinkled throughout, especially "The New Royal Painter". I thought that Ken Liu did a masterful job translating this story and created beautiful flowing prose. I would have forgotten I was reading a translation had it not been for the translator's overuse of the words "trial" and "tribulation" in various permutations.
In Cixin Liu's writing, I am most in awe of his technolgical vision. He clearly defined the massive scales of progress between humanity's epochs and wrapped his tale in believable physics (I am not a physicist, but he seems to have a strong understanding of modern physics). While Liu's characters are individually convincing and nearly tangible, I find that when he talks about societal change in broad strokes, the societal changes are much less convincing. However, this may owe to the cultural differences between the author and myself, so we view society very differently.
Liu's characters are masterfully crafted. The primary protagonist of this novel, Xin Cheng, embodies the tender ideals of humanism, although Liu is quick to point out the self-inflicted defanging that this presents. In this way, I find that Liu is writing both a critique and eulogy of the clemency and kindness stemming from this philosophy. At some places, it feels as if Liu is taking a swipe at modern-day individual liberties, which, unencumbered by many of the norms of the Old World, may appear externally as hedonism.
Finally, as the pedant that I am, I found a few typos in the book. First, in listing the prime numbers, they are listed as "2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13" at first, but on the following page, they are listed as "1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13"-- an obvious oversight. Second, toward the end, a volume of space is referred to as a "cubit kilometre", clearly meaning a "cubic kilometre". A cubit is another form of length measurement. Now would be a great time for me to argue the metre's arbitrariness. It is based on a mismeasured line passing from the North Pole to the Equator through Paris. Due to this fact, it would be little better for one to select the cubit as measured by some dead monarch, cast it into a platinum artefact, and centuries later define it based on fundamental constants. At least the metre is somewhat related to some random rock flying through space that we decided to measure a certain way. However, I would argue that the Nautical Mile is slightly less arbitrary because it is based on this rock's circumference, which can only be measured in one place. This is still arbitrary, however, hence, we should use Natural Units and base them off multiples of 10 of the Planck Length (have I mentioned that I would prefer base-2, base-6, or base-12?). Irregardless, these minor oversights are not surprising given the book is over 600 pages long.
To both Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, I must say, bravo!
Breitman introduces an interesting perspective that modern performers can use historical instruments to inform them about what the composer would have wanted, and do one's best to bring this out on a modern instrument. His summaries of the stylistic expectations of classical composers and analysis of general conversions between the historical and modern instruments were especially interesting (e.g. slurs imply a decrescendo; the raising of dampers was used for a specific effect; old-style rubato keeps strict time in the accompaniment, while new-style rubato modifies the overall tempo; old pianos have different sounding registers, so the voices are more distinct but on the homogenous modern piano, one must voice/articulate the melody stronger to avoid a muffled jumble; old pianos have faster decay, thus requiring faster tempo; the pedal used to be for emphasizing harmonic shifts (harmonic pedalling) rather than connecting harmonies (syncopated pedalling); older pianos have smaller dynamic ranges, so large chords could be build up to increase the amount of volume; etc).
This was a fascinating but long read. While the translation (many analogies were lost in translation) and mannerism of the characters is at times awkward (possibly due to cultural differences), Liu's world building and solution to the Fermi Paradox are exquisite. While in general, I found the plot to be rivotting, I found the entire premise of the Wallfacer project to be utterly absurd. Liu's characters (especially Zhang Beihai, who fakes his own conviction in victory) are powerful and deep wells of mystery and surprise.
I had high expectations for this book. I have enjoyed the two previous books in this series and moderately enjoyed Fallis's Albatross. Reading this superficial attempt at a spy/action novel in the wake of "The Awakening of Spies" was a sore let down. The characters lack development and feel more like charactures (especially his use of weakly defined female characters who play strictly backup roles to the men) than the goofy, delightful souls we met in the first novel. The plot is entirely linear and predictable. The most unexpected part was that there was no plot twist, even when I thought there ought to be one.
After getting over the authors awkwardly sparing use of commas, I very much enjoyed the intricacies of this book. While the plot was extraordinarily dense, the fitting conclusion explained the reason for the convoluted plot. The characters are very convincing and the plot nail biting. I would highly recommend this thrilling novel (although I am not sure if I would enjoy the sequel).
This is an exciting novel, impressively built off of the N-body problem, where N is equal to three. The prose took time to get used to and was awkward at times. However, after getting more into the book, the middle to end were especially engaging.
I found this book as dreary as the word "grey" would suggest. While the book makes strong arguments demonstrating the high positions that many of the former Stasi (East German secret police) members occupy, Hope falls flat on his more outlandish claims.
The conclusion of this book is a lamentation of the author's perception of the West moving toward "communism". He makes a convincing argument that the powerful former-Stasi members are trained extensively in the use of propaganda are no doubt a threat to free democracies. However, his reliance on circumstantial evidence (which may also be due to the fact that the Stasi were able to destroy much of the most incriminating evidence) detracts from the book's credence.
Finally, his repeated branding of anti-fascist groups as fascists and liberal use of the quote: "The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists" show that much of his thinking is built upon the circular (and obviously flawed) logic that denial implies guilt.
Offit makes an exciting and convincing read, although he lists nitrogen-fixation as one of the banes of humanity, saying the ecological costs is greater than the benefit of staving off mass human starvation. This seems to be a hard selling point. However, he makes some surprising, but very well supported claims (especially around cancer screening).
I read this as an introduction to Chinese culture and literature. Surprisingly, much of the text warns of the ruins of war and the importance of bringing a swift end to hostilities. One of the most compelling means of doing this is by obtaining information about the opponent, terrain, weather, etc. (through spies) and that the use of strategem to achieve victory is necessary.
This book was as dreary as one can imagine an ancient text to be. The maxims lacked specificity and rigour-- few examples and many opaquely-defined words. The text is somewhat specific in that it gives layman estimates of what war costs the state and such. However, it does not distill its own principles into a more axiomatic system (which I admit is a Western construct, but one that I strongly believe in). It is more a collection of fun facts rather than a convincing treatise from first principles. The imprecise instructions seemed to be only be helpful to someone in retrospect. It includes a bit of psychology, a bit about camping, and the like. It is important to note, as Galvin points out, that this text was not meant to be instructive, but rather codify what should already be known by a general. Galvin claims that many ancient Chinese texts are simply pneumonics for the strong existant oral tradition. What the book (and especially Giles's notes) made me appreciate was the difficulty Giles experienced in being the first to translate the tome directly from the original Chinese. Sinology was not as fashionable then as now, which makes Giles's feat all the more impressive.
At times I found this book compelling, but often times felt the characters to be insufferable and much too frank (no pun intended-- one of the main characters is named "Frank", although I quite like him). I felt the book made light of the social issues of the time with the characters being much more progressive than most of their contemporaries. This made the characters more amenable to a 21st century audience, but made them seem fake and superficial. I would have appreciated the characters show some prejudice to lend more credence to the fact that minorities indeed suffered horrible injustices. As a murder mystery, I found the list of likely suspects to be quite narrow, since I had a strong feeling about who the murderer was by the middle of the book (I guess that is how it is supposed to be!).
Walker makes a convincing argument that Britain's policy of appeasement toward the Soviet Union during the Second World War led to the demise of Poland's independence movement vis-a-vis the collapse of their resistance to Nazi Germany's occupation. More specifically, he chronicles the Soviet Union's refusal to help the British help aid the Polish resistance and Britain's weak response to the Soviet Union's refusal. He takes us through the tragic horrors of World War Two right up from the Nazi occupation to the Soviet so-called liberation. He also addresses atrocities committed by the Soviet Union, such as the Katyn massacre, where the Soviets executed 22 000 Polish prisoners of war.
A brief critique of the book is that the ordering of the events does not seem to be entirely chronological. I often found myself forgetting what year the book was talking about.
Exhalation is a compilation of short stories by Ted Chiang, bundelled under the titular story, "Exhalation", which is about our steady march toward entropy. Like in his previous book, Stories of Your Life, I was drawn into because of his intricate detail in each story's background. Reading it, I get the sense that he has a strong grasp of each subject about which he writes. From entropy (although my take-away was much more directed toward the more pressing decline of our non-renewable fossil fuel resources) to the quantum wave function. There are minor details, which I think he glosses over, such as the magnitude of the quantum wave function determining the "probability" of its existence in an alternate reality. An excellent read, although I would recommend skipping some of the stories in the middle. Chiang tends to make terrific parallels and therefore arguments in each of his stories. However, in The Lifecycle of Software Objects, I found his characters too distant to relate to, and so found the story unconvincing.
The stories that I enjoyed most were the "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" and "Omphalos".
A memoir about Moller's exploration of Bach while suffering from Carpal Tunnel's syndrome. Moller is a Professor by day and a Bach-aficionado by night.
The most interesting part of the book is Moller's guidance on how to critique others' work. He draws parallels to the Bach's life and his own, but ultimately the book falls flat since he injects it with baseless opinions that alienate the reader from him. Excellent writing.