Saturday, April 28, 2018

Minecraft!

I moved into the Sport section after science, another subject dear to my heart. Football biographies bore me, they are all the same, and the people are generally unexceptional apart from their ability to kick a ball. However I picked up Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus 'Notch' Persson and the Game that Changed Everything by Daniel Goldberg. I wasn't expecting anything great from this book but it was one of the best I have read on the Library Challenge. I am a software developer myself and used to write games as a teenager and wanted to be games developer until my early 20s. Sadly I never made it, and long ago abandoned doing so. However I could relate immensely to this book. Persson was just a geeky developer who struck gold, it could in another universe be me. Rating 9/10.




Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Books 88 and 89: Science

Books 88 and 89 saw me on home territory in the science section. This would normally be one of the first bookcases I'd head for in the library and contains dozens of books I have already read. The first science book I read was The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth. This is a subject dear to my heart and one of the most important things going on in science at the moment with massive long-term consequences for out species. The Planet Factory was a good book, I felt the author was dying to explain things with Maths, but the rules of the popular science format forbid it. Consequently it was a little hard to truly follow for the simple reason that the real language of the subject is excluded. Rating 7/10.




Book 89, the final science book was a big disappointment. Virolution by Frank Ryan was supposedly a book on a par with The Selfish Gene, according to the cover. It was difficult to read, repetitive and rambling and I think I didn't grasp the central point of the whole book. Rating 3/10.