read: bad blood

About the silicon valley investment bubble.

All you need for success is not a viable product. All you need is a very charming leader with good connections and unscrupulous lawyers.

The money bought ruthlessness rather than ingenuity.

read: spare

It felt painful reading it.

A story of an entitled rich kid who refused to let go of his mommy, so eager to seek validation, and self-important, imagining feuds and conflicts and conspiracies. Self-righteous but weak-spined. 

The romance was sweet but felt too artificial. I don't believe Meg is perfect but maybe she's the strength he never had.

read: Billy summers

Another non scary book by Stephen King

Enjoyable read albeit somewhat improbable character and plot

Not too sure where the ending was going with a new character introduced, but I guess it showed the humane side of Billy as he introduced more and more errors into his operation. 

Always great build up of a foreboding sense similar to his scary stories

Wonder what the significance of the portrait in the summer house was, it felt like it was going to amount to more but it remained simply a portrait.

read: fairy tale

By Stephen King 

So not your typical fairy tale but surprisingly loyal to those components: the hero, the beautiful princess, the evil, castles and strange creatures.

But cos it's Stephen King u get the huge bats and roaches, the foreboding gloom of a haunted house and maimed people. 

All in all a pleasant read. It seemed strange that half the book was dedicated to the set up (finding of the fairy tale land) and the hero was slightly unreal (although he did add that he was not perfect at parts). But it's a fairytale so you can ignore logical flaws.

read: facial justice

By L P Hartley

Whom I've actually never heard of

As a book concept it was quite fascinating. Equality to the extreme, where even the pretty have to be brought down a notch in pursuit of equality. Instead of pursuing the implications of such a society, I felt that the author went instead into the petty story of an individual. I suppose she(maybe he) did touch upon the decay in a high conforming society (things not upkept), the need for the inspectors who were ironically above the rules. It touched a little on the idea of the underground/aboveground society split although to no effect unlike The Time Machine. All the interesting ideas but explored rather superficially methinks.

Read: First they killed my father

Cambodian massacre from the eyes of a 5 year old survivor. It's so far away from the life I have now I cannot imagine most of the things she described. At such a young age, to feel so much hatred you want to kill, to see so much deaths and where survival is so difficult that there is no room for others (stealing food from her baby sister, from an old granny, ignoring her best friends mother hugging her best friends corpse). It's written in the simple language of a 5 year old, but which made the horrors all the more stark. 

Read: The Quiet Earth

Not quite a science fiction, but more of a human nature story on what happens if everyone else (or most people) in the world got wiped out.

The building up of the character foreboding the eventual outcome where he kills off his only other companion. 

The science is fairly inconsequential to the story, and the bizarre loop ending, reminiscent of Groundhog Day also doesn't quite make sense.

Interesting read with a fair bit of drama though.

Watched: The Life of Pi

Because my memory is appalling.

Just to capture my thoughts on some of the things I spend time doing.

The Life of Pi

• Colourful movie by Ang Lee, or maybe it was cos it was about India. Indian movies/books tend to be super colorful.

• About a boy in between. In between traditional and modernity, between a mom brought up in religion and a dad who believed in science. Raised in India, but named after a French swimming pool and nicknamed after a mathematical Greek?Roman? Symbol Pi. In between Hindu, Muslim and Catholicism. In between practicality (he saw how the tiger ate a goat) and idealism (right till the end he still fantasized he had a relationship, he sees the soul in his eyes, with the tiger)

• Lovely images of the animals, the sea, the island with the meerkat

• Incredible story about his survival with a large carnivorous and hungry animal

• Wildly fascinating but I'm not sure about the meaning. Is it about the presence of God?