John’s Blog

2nd book in the series being billed as Harry Potter for Adults, although really it’s more like the Narnia books in most respects. I thought it was much stronger than the first book, The Magicians, but really pretty similar. A modern retelling of Narnia books, this one more like Prince Caspian.

I recommend it if you read a lot and like these sorts of books — you know who you are — but probably not if your reading list is super highly constrained and you’re trying to pick the very best books of the year.

I like reading a good space opera every once in a while, and really enjoyed this one. Or rather, it’s a space opera in content and themes, but structured more as a noir + horror novel. Good mix of gumshoe and sci-fi.

This is sort of a tweener in science fiction — not an immediate future type of book, and not a far future book like the Ian Banks books. It’s set in our solar system after we’ve colonized Mars and the asteroid belt — so the big political entities are the Earth and Mars, with the asteroid belt as a sort of frontier land.

Fun book, good pacing, entertaining. First of a trilogy.

I liked reading this — gave a really strong point of view on one way to think about building fun & great games. Some of it is strongly supported by recent trends in gaming, other parts look counter indicated by some.

But (especially) the first half was really good in talking about how game mechanics work, how story elements layer on top of them, and how humans crave learning — games are essentially pattern learning, and if the pattern is too simple, or too noisy, we’re just not that interested.

Very good overview, I thought, and a super-quick read.

Okay, we’ll get this out of the way to start: I would read/watch anything Tina Fey writes, ever, pretty much. So I was pretty much guaranteed to like this book, which I did. Pretty much what you’d expect — memoir with a bunch of jokes and self-deprecating humor. Great stuff. Will leave you with a trio of gems from the book:

First:

“That feeling of ‘I’m pretty sure this next step is wrong, but I’m just gonna do it anyway’ is part of the same set of instincts that makes me such a great cook.”

And:

“Saturday Night Live runs on a combustion engine of ambition and disappointment.”

Then:

“…when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your fucking life.”

So good.

I picked this book on the suggestion I saw on Twitter of @mikeyk (one of the co-founders of Instagram, and coincidentally an alum of Stanford HCI like me), and really liked it.

It’s pretty straight-up high fantasy, but much better written and way more inventive than most. It’s a thousand page book, the first in what’s intended to be a ten volume series, so it’s gonna take a while to get all the way to the end — the second book isn’t expected to be out until later in 2012.

Even so, I really recommend it. There’s something really disorienting, but awesome, about the opening book in a new universe — so much you don’t know yet, so many interactions that have nuance and backstory that you only really start to understand as you go through — lots of stuff just doesn’t make any sense except out of the corner of your eye on the first reading. It’s a confused feeling, but fun at the same time.

If you like this type of book (and if you don’t know exactly what I mean when I say that, trust me, you don’t like this type of book), I highly recommend it.