Rating: 7.0/10. Novel that is a work of Latin American magical realism by Guatemalan author and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Miguel Ángel Asturias. It is challenging to pinpoint exactly what is happening or what the book is about. Broadly speaking, it depicts the struggles between the indigenous Maya people and the maize-growers from a…
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The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Rating: 8.0/10. A fairly short novel, about 120 pages, written by a South Korean author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. It centers around a young woman, Young-hye, and is split into three parts that examine this character from multiple perspectives. It is hard to say what this novel is about, and…
Tangi by Witi Ihimaera
Rating: 7.6/10. A notable New Zealand novel, published in 1973, it is one of the first novels by a Maori writer. It describes a tangi (a funeral), and there is not much plot in the novel, instead it follows the protagonist as he discovers his father has died, prompting him to return to his home…
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
Rating: 7.7/10. This novel is a well known piece of Nova Scotia’s literature, about the Scottish people on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. It starts with the narrator, a successful dentist, visiting his older brother Calum in Toronto: Calum is an alcoholic living in a sketchy part of town and feeling lost from his…
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr
Rating: 8.4/10. Classic science fiction novel, won the Hugo Award, written in the 1950s, portraying the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse that spans several millennia, it has three parts, the first is 600 years after present and each part is another 600 years in the future. The novel explores how humanity undergoes dark ages, a…
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
Rating: 7.3/10. A novel by one of the most famous contemporary Italian writers, Italo Calvino. It is about a boy, Cosmino, who, when he is twelve years old, refuses to eat snails at dinner and climbs a tree, vowing never to come down again. Despite his family’s assumption that he will descend in a few…
SQL Antipatterns by Bill Karwin
Rating: 7.5/10. SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming by Bill Karwin Book about different ways to misuse database schemas, intended for intermediate-level programmers, discusses various common patterns that junior programmers often employ when designing database schemas. I found the anti-patterns to be good, but the proposed solutions are often lacking; they tend to…
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Rating: 7.4/10. Novel of Norwegian literature, won the Nobel Prize in 1920; it tells the story of a homesteader named Isak in Northern Norway around 1850. The narrative begins with Isak settling in an untouched wilderness, far from any other settlement, where he starts building a home from scratch. Shortly after, his wife, Inger, arrives…
China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis
Rating: 7.5/10. An academic history book about everything you wanted to know about the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), considered one of the Chinese Golden Ages, is organized by topic and written in a fairly academic tone. It may be a bit long-winded for a casual audience, as it makes an effort to be detailed rather…
Deep Learning for Vision Systems by Mohamed Elgendy
Rating: 8.0/10. An introductory textbook on computer vision using deep learning, assuming no prior knowledge of deep learning; thus, the first half of the book covers the basic concepts of neural network architecture and training setups. The second half is more advanced, focusing specifically on computer vision, and covers topics such as vision CNN architectures,…
Pyomo – Optimization Modeling in Python by Bynum and others
Rating: 8.2/10. Book giving an overview of the Pyomo optimization framework, which doesn’t solve optimization problems itself but allows users to formulate them in a high-level, object-oriented format. Pyomo acts as an interface with solvers like CPLEX. The book talks about into numerous features of Pyomo but mostly stays clear of the solver algorithms’ internals,…
High-Performance Web Apps with FastAPI by Malhar Lathkar
Rating: 7.6/10. Book that explores the main features of the FastAPI web framework; it’s not super in-depth but covers the main use cases and components in fair detail. Chapter 1. FastAPI offers a number of improvements over other Python frameworks. First, it has type hints that allow the IDE to detect type errors. Next is…