Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
I’m not a big fan of books with short stories. Too much context switching. Context switching is hard. Makes you stop reading the book. Not all short stories are good. Some are bad. Bad stories make you want to throw away the book.
Safe Enough is no exception. But it’s Lee Childs. The good stories are good enough.
4.5/5
PS. Lee Child is known for his short sentences and simple vocabulary. Tried to replicate it in the post.
We went to Slaveykov this Sunday because of @knotty‘s comment about their visit to Sofia in the 90s. Back in the day, the square was a book market. My high school was 15 minutes walking from it so I visited it almost daily for many years. It had crowds of readers and piles of trash. The municipality reformed the area a few times, slowly pushing the booksellers out and to the surrounding buildings.
The building in the back of the first photo is the Sofia Library. The first floor is a ДКЦ – 2nd Diagnostic Center. Go there in case you have non-urgent health issues.
The fountain on the second photo has a sad story. Same spot had another fountain that electrocuted a person and was named “The Killer Fountain”. It was demolished and rebuilt after that.
The McDonalds in the back is the first one opened in Sofia in 1995. The queue was hundreds of people long. I liked it very much, it was a favorite spot in the center before Covid. It has a secret second floor where you can chill over your large Coke and nobody will bother you. One of the few McDonalds that operate somewhat normally, most of them are a shadow of their former glory.
The third photo is the Slaveykov monument. The father, the poet Petko Slaveykov, lived around that place, and the monument is with his son Pencho Slaveykov, also a poet. The heavy use of the bench for photos damaged the shadow, which is now replaced with a more durable but much uglier copy.
I’ve been a big fan of book fairs ever since I was a child. I hunted for comics and Karl May books, then gamebooks, then sci-fi, and so on. I usually visit them multiple times so that I don’t miss anything. Couldn’t do the multiple-visit tour this year due to my work trip where I damaged my computer and the consequences of that. At least I visited it once.
The Alley of Books’24 is happening right now on Vitosha Boulevard and near NDK.
Here’s my record-breaking harvest:
There were more books I wanted to buy but sitting on the shelves is not perfect. I challenge myself to read 5 out of these 7 by the end of October. I’m the most excited about Bion and Dodger.
“The Sum of All Men” is an epic fantasy set in a world where the strong and powerful can extort and extract skills from ordinary humans. The poor give up their intelligence, strength, or beauty in exchange for care and protection for themselves and their families. Once they make this sacrifice, they become disabled and are kept in storage until their rune lord dies.
This is the most brutal magic system I’ve read. Most of the gifts come at a great cost, causing severe suffering on the donors. It’s not a typical RPG-style system where taking a thousand strength gifts makes someone superhuman. The strongest gift is metabolism, which grants extraordinary speed but each gift taken reduces the lifetime of the lord.
The main antagonist of the story has taken tens of thousands of gifts from people and has superhuman strength, speed, and healing. His voice can make the strongest people submit to his will. He wants to conquer the world and become the sum of all men, a person with the talent of millions. The main protagonist is also a superhuman of a slightly different kind – one that can get away with anything. He understand that taking gifts is evil. Who is going to win?
The top review on Goodreads is by Mark Lawrence, the author of Prince of Thorns. If there’s a fantasy book more cruel than Runelords, it’s Prince of Thorns. Mark Lawrence gave it a 4, and I would agree.
4*/5
An adventure gamebook in the shape of a comic book. Best of both worlds 🙂 It has 5 sub-stories, each with 100-ish episodes.
September starts strong with a 5/5 book that I would not dare to review. It’s Deadpool. I hate superheroes but Deadpool hates them too, so I think it’s fine.
Veselin.blog 