Content tagged with “travel” under “My Library”

“My daughter read this for school and asked me to read it too. It’s essentially the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ for tweens. I enjoyed it. It was well-written and had a nice theme of redemption and the need to be good to other people. Much like the movie, the protagonists can’t continue their lives until…”

“This was recommended to me by a friend, and a Hacker News thread. It was recommended as a short work of fiction, and it is – it’s a novella, at best. ‘Murderbot’ (a name she gave herself) is a SecUnit – a cyborg security unit, hired to protected a surveying crew on a wilderness planet. Near as I…”

“A thoroughly enjoyable book discussing the five Nordic countries – Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark – and their supposedly unassailable credentials as the utopia of the world. The author is an Englishman, married to a Danish woman and living in Denmark. He deconstructs the myth of…”

“This is the second book of The Murderbot Diaries. Again, it’s a novella – only 149 pages. This picks up right after the first book. In this installment, she (1) helps a group of scientists get some research back, and (2) investigates a very bad episode from her past. In this sense, it’s like a…”

“This is a book about a place. Not the Badlands of South Dakota (which I initially thought), but the ‘bad land’ of Eastern Montana. It’s the story of immigrants who settled there and claimed homesteads on the promise of dry farming techniques and decent weather. But the weather was bad, and dry…”

“I bought this because (1) I loved Broad City , and (2) I have always wanted to drive across country. This is a book of essays and personal reflections from Abbi Jacobson – one of the creators of Broad City while she decided to drive across the country, from New York to Los Angeles. About a third of…”

“Not my jam, really, but my son and his girlfriend were reading it, so I decided to give it a shot. There are a lot of characters, and time travel is involved, so the book is all over the place. At any given moment, I had the barest understanding of what was happening. Characterization was poor, and…”

“This is the story of several things, simultaneously. Most prominently, it’s the story of Percy Fawcett, an explorer from England who ventured into the Amazon twenty-some-odd times. He was utterly convinced there was a lost civilization somewhere therein, which he called ‘Z’ It’s also the story of…”

“I had just seen the movie, so I knew what the big plot twist was. In that sense, I was reading it less for the story, and more to get a feel for how Christie wrote. Turns out, she writes well – very clear, with a minimum of fluff. And perhaps unsurprising given the context of her hero, there’s…”

“This is a fun book. It’s not gonna change your life or anything, but you’ll probably enjoy it if you accept it for what it is. It’s basically a series of short chapters – blog posts, essentially – describing some adventurer, from Charles Lindbergh to Christopher Columbus to Harriet Tubman to…”

“The definition of an epic sci-fi novel. This a long read, and prepare yourself for the second one, because the first one leaves a lot of questions unanswered. There are a ton of different story threads going on independently, and they don’t come together neatly in the end. It’s almost a…”

“This is a wonderful book, more for the format than the topic. First, the topic – it’s about a river. The Seine starts in southern France and flow northward through Paris to the English Channel. The book is all about this river. (I wasn’t actually interested in the topic, but there was a ‘Buy Two,…”

“ A spectacular history of Asia. This is a book where I stopped tracking what page I was on, because I just wanted to keep reading it. Also a book that could have been boring, but the writing style is just effortless and wonderful. ”

“I didn’t like this. But what bothers me is that I don’t know why I didn’t like it . I am very interested in the subject matter. This should absolutely be a book I like. I have no idea why I couldn’t connect with it, but dreaded picking it up. It’s about a journalist who wanders around the Holy…”

“I miss Anthony Bourdain. I miss his voiceovers. He was such a great writer when he was writing for himself to speak. This book is useless to me, but I still loved it. It’s ostensibly a travel guide. There’s a chapter for each country Tony went to in any of his three shows: No Reservations , The…”