Lewis knows how to write, and despite my doubts, quick research couldn't find any obvious faults in his reporting in this book. It's a fascinating blend of how NFL has changed over the recent history and Michael Oher's life story.

Possibly the best book he's ever written. He abandons his wanderings outside what he does best and doesn't waste our time with stories about football players in Italy or family holiday plans gone wrong or whatever, and gets back to writing about the career choices faced by intelligent young people today, the stress of working for a huge corporation that cares nothing about you and having to remind yourself each day of the money and trying to convince yourself it's worth it. Oh and there's also blackmail, thievery, and other stuff going on in the background, but that one's not so interesting.

The book feels more real, and by real I mean mostly more pessimistic (or realistic, as I like to call it) than his other books.

Grisham should've tried his hand at short stories a long time ago. He's very good at thinking up interesting scenarios but sometimes lacks the skills to weave them into book-length stories. Here he doesn't have to stretch out his ideas beyond what they naturally fit into, and the result is pleasing.

It is one thing to read a book about the immigrant experience in East London's Bangladeshi areas and to think you've learned something about the matter. It is quite another to read the same book while on a bus going through those very areas, on your way to the climbing gym there where you're going to buy a six-month pass despite the news that morning that right in that very neighborhood a man (a martial arts instructor, no less) was brutally attacked in bright daylight by a gang of five masked Asian men, and you're sitting next to a brown woman wearing a sari, while in front of you a black woman is yelling at her kids in a language you don't recognize.

I thus realize the need for books to explain to outsiders what it's like living in these communities. I just refuse to accept this is the best example of how to do it.

The book is world-famous, and the reviews at the time of publication were extremely positive. But reading those reviews almost a decade after, I wonder how many of the critics still feel like that. They are all hyperbolical, but to take perhaps the worst example, would anyone nowadays agree with the sentiment that Ali is "among Britain's greatest writers"? Her two follow-up books have sank without a trace.

It seems very much a case of political correctness and wishful thinking going overboard. A halfway-decent book about people-not-like-us-yet-living-amongst-us arrives from a suitably-ethnic-new-author, and who is brave enough to be the lone voice among the critics calling out the book for its maddeningly passive main character, stereotypical other characters, lack of anything much happening, and dissatisfying and unbelievable ending? Much safer to go with the crowd and bestow meaningless praise on the book for its "effortless style" or its "emotionally literate story-telling", whatever those mean. Hey, at least nobody can argue with you about those since they're so vague as to be meaningless.

The worst fault in the book is the curious lifelessness of everyone. Tragic things happen to people but nobody seems to really care, least of all the reader. Researching the author after finishing the book it did not surprise me the least that she left Dhaka at age of three and has no memories of living in Bangladesh; that she doesn't even speak Bangladeshi; and that she has never lived in the Brick Lane area or worked the dead-end jobs that the characters in the book do. Nope, that was not her path. For her, it was a university degree, some cookie-cutter "creative" jobs, a white "management consultant" husband, some time off to "take care of the babies", and then writing the book and becoming a millionaire. In other words, she's writing about things she's just researched, not lived, and she's not a good enough writer to pull it off.

She saw an opening in the market and was just talented enough to grab it, I have no problem with that. But with that other young British mommy who happened to hit the publishing motherlode with her stories about a young boy going to wizardry school, at least nobody pretended her books were great literature. It does a disservice to Monica Ali herself to pretend she's something she's not.

It has been 17 books (counting only his original fiction novels) and 22 years since the last memorable King book (Misery). Many (most?) had counted him out as a has-been, me included.

Then he goes and writes this book. The man always did like a surprising twist in his made-up stories, only this time he's outdone himself and the twist happened in real life.

So what is my opinion after reading 877 pages in a week? It's un-put-downable, entertaining as hell, but in no way serious literature, no matter how you define that term. His good characters are all good and his bad characters are all bad; there is no mixing of character traits whatsoever. It gets tiring after a while.

I'm not going to nitpick the reasons why things in my opinion probably wouldn't go the way they do in the book in real life, but I will say that the map of the town at the front of the book bears no resemblance to the town described in the book. I suspect King wrote whatever he wanted without thinking about the spatial relationships between locations, and when the book was done the publisher insisted on a map to be included, but it proved impossible to draw a map that fits everything in the book because there are contradictory descriptions in the book, so they just slapped one together and hoped nobody would notice it doesn't fit at all.

Certainly gives a completely new attitude to reading the endless "British soldier killed in Afghanistan" news. Before it was a meaningless statistic, after reading this book you have some inkling of what's actually going on in there. I learned more about the war there from this book than I have in a decade of reading newspaper articles about the war.

If that's all the book had going for it, it'd be enough, but it's also wildly entertaining. It almost manages to achieve the impossible, i.e. making me miss my days of stripping down my assault rifle blindfolded in the Finnish army. This effect lasts for a few seconds at a time and then reality kicks back in and I remember how much I used to hate being in the military.

First time I've read any Tolkien in English. Some slight confusion at the familiar names not being present in their Finnish translations anymore, but other than that, no problems.

The book achieves what are, in the end, its modest aims. The characters are lifelike, the plot moves along nicely, the tension keeps building, and the resolution is, if predictable, satisfying enough.

In other words, not a bad first novel, and a potentially perfect launching pad for a new writer to build on. But I just checked and in the decade since this book came out the author has apparently decided to switch to Hollywood instead, which is too bad.

I have to say I was disappointed by this book. I'm used to excellence from Dawkins, and this book contains stretches of flat-out boring material I struggled to get through. I don't mind that much, but it prevents me from recommending this book to other people who perhaps wonder why I am an atheist. Dawkins has written a book denouncing religion that contains nothing new to anyone who's already non-religious and that's so boring that anyone who is religious would never bother reading it.

Good hard science fiction short stories. I'll have to read more from Mr Reynolds in the future.

Looking at my history, I see the last Palahniuk book I read was five years ago, and that I didn't like it much. I'm sad to say this book was not an improvement on things.

He has a great imagination, and aspects of the book are approaching science fiction, but in other areas like developing characters or a plot you'd actually care about and that went somewhere, he draws a complete blank.

Interesting stories about the histories of companies, but what keeps it from greatness is the dishonesty. Nobody admits to doing anything nasty, so what you're getting here is the polished, dishonest version of events.

I haven't previously added any computer-related books here, but I'm making an exception for this book as it's really more about people than computers, and most of all, because it's read as a normal book, straight through.

It's enlightening hearing 14 awesome programmers reflect on various things they've learned over their careers, see how many things are shared by all of them, and think about the wildly contrasting opinions they have on other things. It's also nice to know they still need that unique rush you get from programming, even after 50+ years of doing it for some of them. It really is an awesome field to work in.

But the book is more than that. While reading it, almost immediately I had to grab a notepad and a pen to start scribbling down TODO items for myself to look up / do things they were talking about. Some of them I have known about for a long time but have never had the energy to actually do, some were brand new to me, but all of them, once I get around to doing them, will improve me as a software developer. So in addition to being first-class entertainment, the book also serves as an inspirational coach.

You may wonder why I said "14" before when the book actually has interviews with 15 people. That's because only 14 of them actually fit the title of the book, "Coders At Work", and only 14 of them actually talk about the craft of coding, how they do it, why they like it, why they think they're good at it, and so on.

The remaining person is not famous for any programming achievements, admits to never being a good programmer to begin with, switched to a management position very early on, has not coded in over three decades, and talks about everything else but the actual subject of the book in the interview.

So why was this person included in the book, you ask? Because instead of having XY chromosomes, this person has XX chromosomes.

Nobody dislikes the lack of women in programming more than me, but facts are facts, and if the author was unable to find a female person to fit the book's profile then he should've been content with an all-male cast instead of clumsily putting in a token female who doesn't fit the book's chosen topic at all.

Bowden is a gifted journalist, and all of the articles collected in the book are enjoyable reading. In some of the later ones he comes across as a bad American stereotype though:

On torture: "The Bush administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter."

On national health-care: "...ignore ballooning deficits and widespread public disenchantment with huge federal spending programs — not to mention the disastrous history of such socialist schemes worldwide."

He may think it's awesome that USA tortures innocent people to death and lets others die because they don't have health care, but since I assume he'd change his mind on those things instantly if he or somebody he cared about was the victim of either program, we can only conclude he's either lying or stupid. There really are no other choices.