Tag: Books

Books I regret reading

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?
View all responses

I have this rule that if a book doesn’t go well, I just stop reading and move it to the donations pile. This rule prevents 1* reviews and makes my life a tiny bit more positive. I also don’t suffer through bad fits for too long, as I clearly don’t like what I’m seeing. This rule got me from 30~ish books read/year to over 50.

However, there are at least two ways to get to the end of a bad book without realizing it’s that awful.

  1. It can be a good book with a terrible ending. Like, it looks like a great thriller or crime, and they kill the main character, the main supporting character, or it reveal the main character as the killer. John Grisham does that often. Sooley is a good example.
  2. It can be a passable book with hints it might contain AI slop or really poor ghost writer work. I complete it and then the memories about it sit less and less well, and what was once a 3* book turns into a 1* slop in the weeks after. The most recent works by Lee Child and Harlan Coben fall into that category. I recently had a thriller where the main character was misgendered in the text and a very suspicious stats book, with issues hinting AI use.

AI doesn’t produce readable books for me, also doesn’t produce readable chapters, paragraphs or blog posts. It can turn a perfectly fine paragraph into a grammatically correct and unreadable slop. I wouldn’t even be able to point my finger at what’s wrong with it.

Daily Harvest

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

My first visit of the Alley of Books lead to this. Was it a mistake? Most books are very thick.

Top to bottom:

  • Mochila (Gamebook, not on Goodreads)
  • Warhammer The Horus Herecy: Horus Rising
  • Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
  • The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman
  • Bloody Rose by Nicholas Eames
  • Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

I think I’ll start with The Daughters’ War. I rated the first book 4.5 here but it grew on me. It will be a tough choice in a few days.

Alley of Books, Sofia

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I grew up with the book fair. Reading is my thing, and the book fair is a way to get books cheaper. I visited almost all of them, except maybe a few when I was in the military. They used to happen twice a year – one for Christmas, and one for the 24th of May. Over the last few years, a third one has formed, called Alley of Books. It’s essentially the same book fair but in September.

It will start on September 7th and will be located on Vitosha Boulevard. The highlight of the event for me will be a book signing with Nicholas Eames on September 10th. He’ll be at Artline Studio’s tent and then will do a talk at Gramophon Club, starting at 19:00.

Book fairs give the chance to buy books directly from the publishers. Even if their discounts are not as high as what we can get online, the money, I think, goes to a better place. There are still writers, translators, illustrators, printers, and so on I can support this way. Even though I see AI slop entering the book market, the real thing still exists, despite some sloppy book covers and somewhat worse translations. Better pay the publishers than some big software company that resells their work with a large margin and zero risk.

Reading in August

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

August was a good month for my shelves. I was on vacation and read a lot. Had a week with 3 completed Dugoni books, and a day in which I finished the entire Dungeon Crawler Carl in one go.

Best books

  1. Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments – I have the feeling this will help me be better at my job but it just as well may not. It’s a guide for running better experiments, written by engineers from Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn.
  2. The Trapped Girl by Robert Dugoni – out of the many Dugoni books I completed this month, this one felt the best. A crime/thriller with a good flow and difficult to guess culprit.
  3. Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman – Carl continues advancing through the Diablo 2 style maze. The book was a bit worse than Carl 1 but still 5/5. Looking forward to the 3rd part.
  4. Her Final Breath by Robert Dugoni – I finished 5 Dugoni books during the month and it’s difficult to remember which one is which 🙂
  5. My Sister’s Grave by Robert Dugoni
  6. In the Clearing by Robert Dugoni
  7. Close to Home by Robert Dugoni – probably the worst Dugoni book for the month, I think I gave that one 4/5. Still very good.

Worst books

  1. Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek, this was just bad. I have another book by the same author but I now question my choices and may just donate it so I don’t need to read it. Goodreads rating 3/5 but really 1/5.
  2. Glass Houses by Rachel Caine – I recommended two of her books about the Stillhouse Lake. However, this one is a YA fairytale and I exhausted my faith in the author to get to the end. 2/5
  3. Experimentation for Engineers: From A/B testing to Bayesian optimization by David Sweet – for the most part, it felt like the pages were filled with the purpose to provide a complete guide, rather than to teach me anything I have a remote chance of trying. I wasn’t able to separate the practical, useful bits from the filler, so I can’t tell for sure how much is filler, and how much is real content the author tried in their career. All the examples are hypothetical, there are no citations. The other book on the subject quoted a source for every claim. This one? Nope. Rating – on Goodreads was 3/5 but it could be 5 for the right person and 1 if I wrote it while in bad mood.

My three-month sabbatical

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

I spent three months not working. Today is the last day of AFK, already mentally preparing to get back to work, starting tomorrow.

Automattic has this fantastic benefit that for every five years of tenure, you get a 3 month vacation that you can take all at once. You can’t split it, and you can’t work while taking it. Just sign off from everything and do whatever.

I had big plans for the sabbatical. You know, stuff I want to do, can do, busy things that would’ve eaten up most of the AFK. Thankfully, I didn’t share the big plans here, as that would’ve committed me to following up. I did a little bit of planned activities but mostly had a vacation.

My grand plan was that I’m going to master experimentation. I was under the growing feeling that something about my understanding of how experiments should run is wrong, and built myself a study plan with six books. I read four, though not four of the original six because I changed what I want to read next twice.

So, if not doing the grand plan, what did I do?

First two weeks were pure unwinding. It’s a feeling that’s really difficult to explain, I’ve had one sabbatical before and didn’t experience it. Doing any type of work is stressful and each morning, your body wakes up thinking about it, and willing to face that stress, and expend energy there. This stress accumulates and puts some permanent weight on you. Remove that and it leaves a void of some kind. The body still wakes up, ready to face the challenges of the day, but there are no challenges. So, two weeks of slowly adjusting to the feeling I don’t need to worry today. Around the end of these two weeks, I understood that my grand plan won’t happen.

What I did instead

  • Played football with my kids.
  • Went to Musala (twice) and Vihren with my family, three successful summits.
  • Had joint reading sessions with the kids. As a result, the little one read six books about the Ninja boy, and is at the end of Alice. The big one read the Dungeon Crawler Carl 1 & 2, and most of the Three Musketeers.
  • Did math classes with the kids. Little one understood some of the second and third grade math and got stuck with text problems. Big one went over most of the material for his next grade. Not sure how much he understood, but I feel like we both improved.
  • Kept walking, kept doing pull ups almost daily.
  • Watched lots of YouTube. I now know how engines are disassembled, how to solve higher degree polynomial math problems, and a lot more about local AI setups. I watched a guy repair a Bugatti, and another one waste endless hours to online scammers, and a third guy fix broken video cards.
  • Visited my parents more often.

I think the reading with kids was probably the most impactful thing I did. I feel the AI revolution is negatively affecting them, lowering the quality of the text and video they’re exposed to. Learning and improving still requires reading and understanding advanced text. Books don’t come naturally to their lives, like they did in my, when I was their age. So I’m happy that they read some books and will be a bit more prepared for their next grades.

I’m very thankful to Automattic for the Sabbatical benefit. I feel I used it well.