Random Thoughts

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is one of those books that takes its time in setting up the premise. And, for that reason, it is slow in the beginning. As we read through, we follow each character's personality and journey during the good times until things slowly take a turn for the worse. This takes up a lot of time during which nothing happens, but we slowly learn what each one is doing and how they go about their daily lives. I think this captures the reality of war so beautifully, where things go bad in phases. For instance, in this story, one family is forced to move from Paris to a small coastal town, Saint Malo, and after this initial upheaval which is difficult, things calm down into a lower but still a fairly uneventful existence, and then, things go bad again. Each event is successively worse, but also allows enough time to settle into the new situation before becoming worse again. And, that is where lies the beauty of this...

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari My rating: 3 of 5 stars The first three-quarters of this book is brilliant and the last quarter is a drag. It starts off very well, there are a lot of examples and stories about each era. I particularly liked the parts about the agricultural revolution and religion and how human kind thrives and unties through stories which are mostly fictional. But, the last part, where he talks about money and capitalism and market forces is something that I am completely aware of and so this part makes for a very boring read. It therefore took me a lot of time to complete this, but I plodded along hoping that at some point towards the end it would become interesting again, but that didn't happen. The afterword is an introduction to his next book in the series called "Homo Deus". I have begun reading this book as well, but it suffers with the same problems. Starts out very well, but then derails at a certain point and for ...