Nosemonkey > Recent Status Updates

Read the first one a few years back, picked this up in a charity shop and started reading a few days back. Very solid fantasy worldbuilding, but *damn* does it unfold slowly. If this is truly meant to be wrapped up in a trilogy, he needs to pick up the storytelling pace sharpish. (Then again, considering it's been eight years and vol 3 still isn't out, speed isn't his thing...)

Extremely readabke while being packed full of ideas that make you want to stop, think, re-read, take notes, underline, and start quoting it at people. I'd be reading a lot faster if it weren't too chunky to carry around with me. Need the Kindle edition too...

Just because I'm not already reading too many books (a fair few of which I haven't even added here yet)...

Very good so far. Flows very nicely indeed. I don't think I've actually read any of Schama's stuff before, but based on this I'll be hunting down more. Also regretting not picking up that copy of his Landscape and Memory I saw in a charity shop for a fiver a while back...

Continues to be nicely readable, even while explaining concepts pretty well. However, have started to notice some sloppy errors - so far all minor - which are making me get slightly suspicious. Fisher gets TB after a river swim in 1899 on page, then he's recovering a year earlier two page later; he gets married in Paddington, then it's Piccadilly. If basic, if hardly important, facts are wrong, how reliable is it?

Solid on Kant, then leaps neatly and appropriately to quantum physics and the 20th century crisis of scienticic certainties. Thematic leaps like this work nicely - even if it once again means skilling over a huge load of people I'd have expected to be covered.

Picking this up again after a long lull, and really rather readable. Humanising economics by contextualising how the economists came to their conclusions is a sensible move - focusing on the people rather than the ideas makes the ideas much easier to grasp.

Better in the modern section than the Early Modern. The Enlightenment passed by with little enlightening about the individual thinkers that helped shape it (and hardly anything on Spinoza, who gets a totalnof four mentions in the entire book) , but now lots of depth on Hume and Kant. Much more like it.

Well written. Flows neatly - but slightly repetitive in places. This brings the argument home, but a bit more focus on individual thinkers rather than the evolution of the ideas might have helped get the point across with a bit more variety of approach. Will keep on, though - coming up on Kant, so should be interesting.

Re-reading, and much more instantly accessible than some Eco novels, and than I remember. Lighter, more light-hearted. Infinitely more fun than The Prague Cemetery, despite similar themes, and much easier going than The Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum, both of which I love. More like The Island of the Day Before, only considerably tighter and better paced. A mid-ranking Eco. A good entrypoint to his stuff.

Very readable, as ever. Repeating much of what he's said in previous books, but in an engaging enough way that you don't really mind.

Confusing, convoluted, but really rather good. Reminiscent of Ben Okri's The Famished Road in style - and apparently this was deliberate. Halfway between dream and reality.

Extremely readable so far, albeit quite top level, focusing on the major thinkers (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, etc.) with little mention of the lesser-known names. But I've got Jonathan Israel's chunky three volumes waiting for me for that...