‘Still Too Much Stink’

Score: 4/5

The smell (again) from this Rivers Of London graphic novel was bad - it really detracted from the reading experience for me. Turn a page and yay - more gorgeous graphics, more of the plot and characters, but boo more bad smell.

I’m wondering if it’s just me.

‘More Beauty, More Stink’

Score: 4/5

Again, a beautiful short graphic novel from the Rivers Of London series. And again the smell from the printing process was bad.

The story was good, the art gorgeous, but the pages stank.

‘Beautiful, But Slightly Stinky’

Score: 4/5

I do enjoy the Rivers Of London books but I wasn’t sure what I’d make of the graphic novels.

Well, this was beautifully drawn, if a little short, but the biggest problem I had with them was that they stank. Literally. I don’t know why - some combination of glossy paper and colour printing maybe - but they pages all smelled. And it wasn’t a nice smell.

Maybe it was just as well it was short.

‘Octopuses And Other Brains’

Score: 5/5

I find the study of consciousness fascinating but I wasn’t sure what I’d make of a book that investigated it by examining octopus behaviour. Turns out I enjoyed all the octopus and cephalopod bits of the book more than the consciousness studies.

Octopuses come across as charming, curious, playful creatures. I’ve no idea what I’d make of them if I visited their world, or what they’d make of me. But their camouflage, colour changing, ability to squeeze through improbably tiny holes, and all-too-short lifespan make them come across as wonderful little critters.

It does make a good lens to study consciousness and its evolution. But I got much more fun just learning about octopuses.

‘Big Bucket Of Nope’

Score: 2/3

I just didn’t enjoy this. I’m sure that says more about me than the book, but it wasn’t fun. I didn’t like any of the characters, I didn’t care what happened to them, and didn’t really care if I was shown what they did.

The person that recommended this book to me has been incredibly good at picking wonderful books, so this rare miss again makes me think it’s me, not the book.

But I didn’t enjoy it at all.

‘Captivating But Quite Long’

Score: 5/5

I enjoyed Wool but it has taken me a while to build up to the next in the trilogy. (Side note: does no-one write standalone science fiction novels any more?) I can’t tell you how long because it looks like I didn’t mention reading it on this here blog. But read it I did. Honest.

This second one is still captivating, and still in a distinct setting. The timeline jumps around a bit, which I found annoying - it’s not a version of the How We Got Here trope but sometimes it feels like it.

I didn’t really feel for any of the people though, while I did in the previous book. I can kinda see why some motivating factors were put in place, but unlike the previous book this felt like pieces being deliberately placed on a chessboard to bring about the outcome the author needed (something which is often true but that I reckon’s best hidden).

‘Compelling, But Still Scary’

Score: 5/5

I enjoyed The Girl With All The Gifts, but maybe more after it had settled a while than at the time. Looking back I think I’ve enjoyed it more than a 4/5 merits.

This is in the same world as TGWATG but it feels a little different. Still enjoyable, just different.

‘Didn’t Really Feel It’

Score: 3/5

I enjoyed the first of this trilogy but this one just didn’t really grab me as much. It felt a bit unsurprising and formulaic. Maybe the third will be better.

‘Coping With Extreme Numbers’

Score: 5/5

I think I could read Brian Kernighan’s writing about anything. One of the reasons C did so well as a language was, I think, because of the straightforward way Kernighan & Ritchie’s book ‘The C Programming Language’ explained it all, and continued to serve as a useful reference once read. (When I started programming professionally, we always had a copy of K&R within easy reach.)

This book isn’t about programming though. It’s about trying to make sense of numbers.

Some of the fun bits of the book are headlines and stories from newspapers, where the numbers... just don’t add up. (Sometimes literally.) There’s a tendency to take numbers at face value without really thinking about whether the numbers could be wrong or what the implications would be if they were right. That’s the author’s hobby-horse here - that we should think about the numbers more.

My favourite part of the book covers Fermi estimation - making reasonable guesses at knowable parameters to come up with rough answers to tricky questions. For example, the classic Fermi estimation problem is (I think) how many piano tuners work in Chicago? On the face of it, most people wouldn’t know and would struggle to come up with any answer, but if you break it down into smaller questions that can reasonably be estimated (such as: How many people live in Chicago? What percentage of them own a piano? How long does it take to tune a piano?) you’ll generally get close enough to a decent answer.

That’s only one part of the book though - there are plenty of other fun chapters covering many of the fallacies we humans have when numbers are involved.

‘A Good Pandas Introduction’

Score: 4/5

Since I was starting to learn Python, I wanted to learn a bit more about its data processing and visualising aspects. Just about everyone in Python-land uses Pandas for this kind of thing so I wanted a quick way to get up to speed on it too.

The good news - this is a decent introduction to it. The bad news - it’s such a huge area that the book just can’t give complete coverage. It does a good job covering the basics - just about any data processing task can use it as a jumping-off point. But then again, just about any data processing task will require some level of thinking and programming that’s not quite in the book.

And that’s when the fun starts, I suppose!