Winter Solstice, Expect to win, Morningwood, How to Stay Motivated, Off to Be the Wizard, The Cuckoo’s Egg, How to Invent Everything

Voytek Pituła

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VP of Books

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3 min read

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Feb 9, 2024

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Non-fiction

• Expect to win (3+/4) — Great help book for our careers. The author presents a series of tips that have the potential to positively influence almost everyone’s career. She touches on subjects such as: being yourself, setting goals, perception, finding mentors/advisors/sponsors, taking risks, networking, and work-life balance. It’s very well written with a good structure and a helpful summary at the end of each subject. The only drawback: it’s based on personal experience, so you won’t find any strong scientific backing for the tips presented. Highly recommended anyway!
• How to Stay Motivated (2+/4) — The most stereotypical self-help book you can imagine. Based on “common sense,” the idea that “what works for me will work for you,” and full of babbling with no general structure to follow. Having said that, it’s not a bad book. Reading it probably can’t harm you, and I can imagine it might have, statistically, a positive impact on its readers. But that’s not enough for me to recommend it.
• The Cuckoo’s Egg (3-/4) — A sysadmin wrote a true crime. Ok, technically speaking, the author is an astronomer, but he plays the role of sysadmin here. It’s an account of an investigation into computer espionage conducted by him in the ’80s. It’s interesting, especially for people acquainted with Unix systems, networking, and related tools, because it’s also very technical. The book is as good as the format permits, but it’s not great — the tech is outdated, and the story has no great ending or major twists. It’s completely understandable (because it’s a real story in the end), but that doesn’t help the book. Still worth reading but don’t expect too much.
• How to Invent Everything (3/4) — The most information-packed book you will read. Premise: you got stuck in your time travels and need to reinvent civilization from scratch. The author goes through all the most important building blocks of the civilization as we know it, from language, through farming, metallurgy, medicine, chemistry, philosophy, to computers. It’s very dense, but the hard content is interwoven with decent humor which makes the overall experience rather pleasant. You could try to learn a lot from it, but it can also be read just for pleasure like any other popular science book, and you will unavoidably learn at least a few things, whether you want to or not.

Fiction

• Winter Solstice (4/4) — A new batch, a new Wandering Inn volume. This one focused on showcasing two major cultures: goblins and a mage’s academy. Most other books, even if fully dedicated to a particular imagined culture, don’t come close to the level of detail present here. The author tries to describe how goblins think, interact, and live. What their social hierarchy is, what their everyday problems are, what they care about. And that’s just one of many things present in this volume alone. We also get a very detailed description of a school of magic, a lot of adventures for main characters and reimagined classic Christmas themes, like A Little Match Girl or A Christmas Carol.
• Morningwood (3-/4) — The blurb is lying. Or more precisely, it’s misleading. Very misleading. Only the content warning is really true. It’s a LitRPG story but told from the perspective of a… monster. It’s full of gore and violence because the mentioned monster, as you could imagine, doesn’t really avoid killing humans. There’s no great plot, no super interesting world, almost no characters. Yet, it’s a fun, simple, lightweight, and well-written book that can be quite entertaining. I wouldn’t mind reading another part if it falls into my hands.
• Off to Be the Wizard (2+/4) — Interesting premise, average execution. Imagine we live in a simulation but have access to the data storage for that simulation. The main character modifies his time-space coordinates and goes to medieval England to become a mage. There, he meets more people who thought the same. Generally speaking, the book is not bad, but it’s also not good. It’s full of very average humor and follows a very average plot. I’m not going for more.

Stats:

• Books read this year: 17 (+17)
• Books on the shelf: 14 (-4)
• Books on the wishlist: 207 (+3)