March in Books

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

I completed 8 books in March.

Best

  • The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey – a teenager leaves the safety of his village to explore a hostile post-apocalyptic world where trees move and eat humans. The trees won’t eat Koli but have managed to do eradicate our society. 5/5
  • Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells – The Murderbot, who is a little bit human and a lot more a bot, moves around to find the truth about something. We don’t remember what exactly but it’s cool and the pages turn themselves quickly.
  • Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding – an airship and its strange crew run around to get through the day. The crew gets involved in battles and death. 4/5
  • The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey – a zombie apocalypse, followed by more zombie apocalypse, from the point of view of a teenage zombie. She isn’t really threatened by zombies. 4/5

Worst

  • The Cipher by Isabella Maldonado – A tiny FBI agent will face off against a giant serial killer with incredible reflexes, intellect, and combat skills, who has made it his goal to finish her off. The killer is so smart that he constantly streams and provides clues but everything goes through so many servers that it becomes untraceable 🙄. 3/5, barely read it.
  • The Alchemyst – two kids have the same very special gift. We’d expect something like playing a piano, speaking languages, or being good at math? No. They have strong auras. The idea isn’t bad but the book was hard to read. 3/5
  • The Boy on the Bridge by M.R. Carey – DNF. Suffered through about 100 pages with nothing happening. After all, what can happen so much given that the world is over, and then over again in The Girl with All the Gifts. End again? It’s just pointless and whatever the idea is, it doesn’t reveal itself within the first 100 pages. 1/5 DNF. My first DNF for 2025.

Reading Challenge Update

I read 27 books this quarter, a bit less than last year. I still try to read every evening after 10pm but seems to fail on some days. I haven’t been able to find a good new series to make achieving the goal easier. Chris Wooding’s Ketty Jay and Sten were both 4s, and nothing else had enough books to matter.

The Trials of Koli by M.R. Carey, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I’m not sure how I feel about M. R. Carey’s work. I purchased five books by this author. Two are fantastic 5⭐ sci-fi, one was a 1 ⭐ DNF. Now comes The Trials of Koli, my fourth out of five.

Published in 2014, it’s a book about the survivors of a terrible war that changed the ecosystem. The trees are on a hunt for people, the animals are insanely dangerous, and old drones are still flying and killing people. The much larger populations of the past couldn’t resist all of that but the barely existing current populations seems to holding, although still in a decline. It helps that most of the old drones broke down or ran out of ammo.

The book is engaging, the trope is a form of the leaving-the-small-village-to-discover-the-world, well known from LOTR, The Wheel of Time, and so on. The type of demons out there are not unheard of either, we’ve seen them in The Mist, and The Finisher, and maybe even The Day of the Triffids.

What makes this book unique? Not sure, maybe nothing. But it is very interesting and sucks you in, you want to have more of it, and when you reach the end, you want to start reading the continuation immediately.

The two main characters, Koli and Spinner, are well-developed, though some of the supporting cast feels less successful. The story features two AI demigods—had they existed 200–300 years earlier, they might have either prevented the apocalypse or ensured its total devastation, leaving no survivors. In that sense, The Trials of Koli falls short when compared to The Book of Koli and the more recent Infinity Gate.

That’s enough for 4⭐/5. Looking forward to reading the final chapter.

Naples vs Sofia

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

I spent a week in Naples for a team meetup with my team. I kept comparing the city with Sofia for reasons that may not be immediately obvious. At least not obvious to me. Don’t take this post seriously.

Here’s this spreadsheet with an honest and unbiased comparison between Sofia and Naples.

Sofia 🇧🇬Naples 🇮🇹
Volcanic activity🚫✅
Nearby mountain✅✅
Mountain tries to kill you🚫✅
Lots of pizza✅✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Lots of trash✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 🍌 💩
Dog poop💩💩 💩 💩 🤦
Frequent dealers🚫✅
Sidewalks blocked✅,✅,
Pineapple pizza✅🚫
Roman ruins✅✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Has skyscrapers✅✅
Has skyscrapers everywhere✅ 🚫
Has a giant brutalist trash can🚫 in progress ⏳✅
Restaurant food prices💰 💰 💰
Restaurants offer salads✅ 🚫
4-course meals for tourists🚫✅
Food is usually great🚫✅
Yogurt is usually great✅ 🚫 🤦
Coca Cola Zero bottle size500 ml ✅450 ml 🤦
Number of cats🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈
Crowds of tourists🚫✅
Drivers sometimes stop for you✅🚫
Taxi prices💰💰 💰 💰 💰
Taxis may attempt to scam you✅✅
Walkable🤦🤦

Naples for me was a place with a long history, old buildings, too much pizza, and lots of cars.

The Cats of Pompeii

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

Pompeii is a city of the dead. The tragedy captured them, covered everything with ash, and petrified the last remaining citizens who didn’t run away from the first stages of the eruption. Their houses remained almost as they were, frozen in time.

The ruins are now ruled by cats, or at least the cats think that way.