Batched Book Reviews #9
Site Reliability Engineering, The Right to Arm Bears, Three Mages and a Margarita, Time to Play, Making Friends, Defiance of the Fall, Book 10
Published in
3 min readAug 8, 2023
Non-fiction:
- Site Reliability Engineering (3/4) — A great resource and a decent book. The important thing to note first is that this is a book about SRE practices at Google, not about SRE in general. As long as you approach it with the right expectations, you should be fine. It contains a lot of valuable insights into various aspects of building software products, such as toil, monitoring, deployments, releases, and more. However, the book is very uneven, and the usefulness and generality of the chapters differ a lot. Some chapters are very specific to Google and can only serve as inspiration, while others are general and can be easily applied to other companies. It can be helpful to anyone involved in building software products to develop an understanding of reliability, but don’t expect to gain much directly applicable knowledge from it.
Fiction:
- The Right to Arm Bears (2/4) — Sad end to a promising series. I struggled with this one for a couple of months and I still can’t accept the fact that the series, which had such a great start (I loved the first part), turned out so poorly. The book transformed into random pieces of action connected by almost nothing, with no plot, no interesting characters, and no deeper insights. I was barely able to follow the action and had almost no interest. The LitRPG part also leaves much to be desired — each character has 10 “classes” overall, and it’s not possible to keep track of the progression, especially for side characters. Then, on top of all this, the author decided to throw in the concept of dungeons to complicate the view even more. The only good thing that remained was the title and the picture of a bunch of toys adventuring.
- Three Mages and a Margarita (3-/4) — A human bartender thrown into a world of magic. There is nothing particularly great about this book, but there is enough good stuff to make it worth the time. I finished it the same day I started, and I will go for the next chapter when it shows up on sale. The book is very well written, has a strong female character, and a lot of action.
- Time to Play & Making Friends (3+/4) — A parent in a world of LitRPG apocalypse. I devoured the two available books of the series in a couple of days. The book is not great by itself, but it was super fun to read a LitRPG story that primarily focuses on parenting and survival. Yes, people have skills, but what skills should a 3-year-old pick? And what skills should parents give to their 6- and 9-year-olds so they can survive in the new world but still be manageable kids? I strongly recommend this book to parents with a taste for progression fantasy.
- Defiance of the Fall, Book 10 (3/4) — It’s the 10th book in the series, so there is little to say here. It remains my second favorite progression fantasy series (just behind “He Who Fights with Monsters”) and it is a classic one — no twists, just a straightforward path of progression. Continues to deliver on a stable quality level.
Stats:
- Books read this year: ~95 (+6)
- Books on the shelf: 15 (+0)
- Books on the wishlist: 166 (+2)
