Review: Batman: Year One

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Historic, intense and definitely a really interesting read.

This is a version of Batman who is reflected in all modern portrayals, the darkness bleeding into the hopeful naivety of the character. Not the smart detective or the scheming trickster, neither the force of nature that future comics would make him, but a Batman still reeling and struggling against his inner demons and the demons of Gotham city. Jim Gordon is also a new man. There are some really cool scenes that flesh him out more than most other places (though there is a teensy bit of corniness).

The true power is in the portrayal of the city. In a sense, reading this makes all other versions of Gotham feel like vague parodies of the horror that the real Gotham contains. That’s what the comic captures best, Gotham at its worst and needing the bright lights of Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon.

At the same time, to someone who has grown up with a modern Batman, the comic doesn’t feel...new. It’s the problem that seminal works within a canon face, the Batman canon and persona was so changed and influenced by this work that all modern interpretations carry it, improve upon it in their own ways. Amidst all of this, it’s hard to find the original as engaging and interesting as it would have been in its day.

Still, for fans of the hero, it’s a really cool read, not to mention an important one if you want to understand how we got to a modern-day Batman. (Or if you’re a fan of the history of DC comics and want to understand Miller’s influence and DC’s reorientation in the late-80s better.

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Review: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A brilliant book that I started reading slowly and then couldn’t put down by the end, mysteries slowly being unfolded up till the very end. It’s as if the book created a beautiful fruit, surrounded by layers, and then proceeded to peel those layers off very slowly with a sense of delicate beauty and balance. The enjoyment gotten from seeing the answers at the core of the layers being peeled compounded by the enjoyment gotten from the very act of peeling.

If that was all it was, a masterful novel with mystery and intrigue, it would’ve been amazing anyway. However, that was not all it was. It was more, because at every stage I couldn’t help but think and try to decipher my own reactions to it. By the end, I was feeling a torrent of emotions but I couldn’t name any of them. No, these were not garden variety emotions of grief or sadness. They were more complex, more full of thought and horror and questions.

I’ll dream of this book, I have no doubt. Of the ending, of the people, of what it means to me and my life. It was a journey, so beautifully cathartic and intensely powerful in the truest sense of the world.

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Review: Circe

Circe by Madeline Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There was a power to this book that I did not expect.

There is a scale here, a breadth to the journey Circe takes that is hard to overstate. It moves rapidly, but if you reach a later section and flip because to the previous one, you’ll see what I mean when I say this. You’ll see stories retold, characters introduced through perspectives that you forget because they seem aeons past.

There is closure, a strong structure, a powerful story with characters that are deep and multi-faced. It is enjoyable to read, but also profound and questioning. If you know of Greek Mythology, there are Easter eggs, rediscoveries of myths.

There’s a lot here, but I don’t want to go into spoilers.

At its core, it manages to embody the power one would imagine the myths having, and nothing better can be said for a book of this kind.

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Review: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The thing about Never Split the Difference is that all of the advice is easily testable and very accessible. On a personal level, I’ve seen it work. It’s incredibly simply to start using some of the more basic advice in the simplest of conversations and see powerful results.

Chris Voss is more than qualified with his experience, suggests a number of academic and business-oriented books about negotiation and psychology and provides clear and actionable directions. I like this book (if that wasn’t already obvious). Amidst a sea of advice that feels slimy, ineffective or psychobabble, this is clear and concise and powerful.

The one major criticism I have is not a fault of the book but a limitation of the medium. Inflections, tone, body language and voice are hard to convey through the written word. It’s hard to see what the book talks about without a video. It requires the reader to put in the legwork by looking up Chris Voss and his group on YouTube or going to their site (maybe even buying a course) to understand the advice better. That is missing, but I’m unsure what else they could’ve done to make it more accessible (maybe complementary video content?)

Is it life-changing? For some people, it probably will be. For me, I can’t judge without a few years of trying the advice out.

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Review: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I must start with the disclaimer that I went into this book with unfair assumptions and not a clear idea of how long or detailed it was going to be, and as a result was personally disappointed at the lack of depth and the absence of detail.

It’s a decent list, if a little haphazard, of important ideas when it comes to democracy, tyranny and power, very specifically when it comes to the seizure of power by despots and leaders. The book used Communist Europe, Nazi Germany and the Trump-years of America as examples. (Maybe, in a sense, it would’ve been more relevant and powerful while he was President. To me, the examples felt a bit forced and unnecessary to the core message, almost misleading in some places when suggesting similarities between Trump and Hitler. They’re there, just not as strong as it sometimes feels in the book. Russia felt a much more apt comparison.)

The ideas are briefly and breezily touched upon. I flipped through the thing in a very short period of time, coming out having learned slightly more and with a small list of people and things to look up. That was it.

If you want a strong basic understanding of politics and totalitarianism, read Orwell, read Hannah Arendt and read about political thought and theory. That will be significantly more meaningful and powerful. They’ll be more explicit, more detailed, more interesting because of how deeply they consider ideas and force you to think.

However, if you want to find the basics in the briefest time possible with relatively decent examples and references that you can follow to find good books, this isn’t too bad. I was definitely not the target market for this, but it was a good reminder of the ideas that are easy to let slip into complacency.

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Review: Many Different Kinds of Love: A story of life, death and the NHS

Many Different Kinds of Love: A story of life, death and the NHS by Michael Rosen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Please read this book. Read it because it’s relevant. Read it because it’ll make you cry. Read it because the poetry is beautiful, but it is so much more than that.

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Review: Games People Play

Games People Play by Eric Berne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think the primary value of reading this text is historical. It’s a snapshot of psychology in the 1960s, it illustrates some of the ideas that preceded modern ideas. If one reads this for theoretical knowledge, it needs to be looked at very critically with a modern eye.

The simple fact is, we know much more about human behaviour today than we did 60 years ago. We have much more information as to what motivates people, the kind of things that impact thinking and behaviour. We know how important biological factors are (something the book doesn’t really seem to account for). Plus, terminology has completely changed. Also worth mentioning is that fact that the opinions regarding sex, gender and orientation, as well as other cultures, is outdated. Very Freudian in some ways, but that ties back to how this review started. It’s a historic book, it’s a snapshot of the past. Like Freud himself, it has very flawed conceptions in places, ideas that have been refuted or replaced in modern theory, but it is still important if you want to understand the history of modern theory.

Transactional Analysis is a place psychologists still draw from in some ways, and there are select insights that are quite interesting. There is a lot of observations Berne makes and lists, and applying modern theories to them is fascinating. It’s a matter of expectations. In a field so young and rapidly changing, where the fundamentals are barely established, a 60-year-old book will not give you the best information per se if you’re trying to understand why we behave the way we do in social situations. If you’re interested in psychology and know the basics of modern cognitive theory, it’s worth reading to see where the field was 60 years ago. If not (or if you’re just not interested in the historical patterns), then it’s probably better to start with a more modern textbook or publication. .

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Review: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was a really good book. Well-researched, clearly laid out and definitely introduced to me things I'd not known before, hadn't even properly thought of before. There's a lot of data, a lot of footnotes to follow and get more information and some well-backed claims.

Not all the logic and conclusions drawn were in line with how I think of the issue, nor do I find myself agreeing completely with the suggested solutions. At the same time, they're all decent potential options for us to consider and things we need to base our future on.

At it's core though, it's a book that inspires frustration and rage at the blatant and unbelievable sexism, especially sexism that is easy to miss when you're not the target. It's sad in a way few things are. It's powerful because it inspires shame when you realize you've not noticed a lot of this before, whereas every single incident of sexism seems ludicrous. Why do we still let this happen? We need to do better.

A genuinely interesting book, beyond the theoretical into a real issue. It brought the concepts and problems closer to me on a personal level.

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Review: The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts

The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this because it was on the New York Times How To bestsellers list (at the time of writing this review). In fact, it had been on there longer than any other book in the Top 10.

The book is very readable, simple, the anecdotes are interesting (though not exceptionally so) and the core ideas are clearly presented with actionable steps that can be taken by most people.

Out of all the books I’ve read, I’ve never felt one was not directed towards me as intensely as I felt in this case. The advice in this book has little to no bearing to my personal life at the moment, it’s information I have filed away to get back to in the future. Maybe then, it’ll make more sense. As it stands, I don’t feel like I can review it any further.

It was interesting to read, but not overly so. It’s an average book.

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Review: Guards! Guards!

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My first Discworld novel.

I can’t say much about this other than the fact that it is probably one of the best fantasy novels and humorous novels I’ve ever read. It was funny, satirical, full of a subtle sense of humour and wonder. There were unexpected Easter eggs, genuine surprise and a beautiful story that had so much character.

It was character galore. The story had character, the characters had character, even the setting had an incredible amount of character. So well-written, the fact that I consumed it in less than 24 hours is a better indication of how awesome it is than anything I could say.

If you like fantasy, a must-read. If you don’t, worth trying the first few bits anyway because of all the subversions.

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Review: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s an absolutely brilliant graphic novel. Dark, gritty, satirical. The art is beautiful, the writing is as Frank Miller as it gets. It’s a book one consumes in one sitting, then stops and reconsiders with the desperate desire to absorb it better. There’s so much happening in it, between the different issues, but combining them makes it a true Batman story.

I think this is the one that got to the heart of what Batman is and why fans love him, yet also stands as an anti-thesis to that primal powerful spirit that earlier novels represent. It has the detective, the crime-fighter and the tactician, traits that make Batman a hero worth rooting for. At the same time, the Batman has lost some of the morality, the brute force that made him feel like an almost-otherworldly being, replaced by a throbbing pragmatism that is terrifying. Between these ideas is the spirit, the force of nature that shatters criminals through sheer will.

This ambiguity and tension, combined with the backstories and the interruptions that show other characters and areas, make a beautifully introspective novel that questions the nature of vigilantism, heroism and power.

For all my praise, I couldn’t bring myself to give it five stars. It is terrific, but I think it’s missing just a little bit more that would bring it home. A tiny bit more depth, more closure, more exploration. The satire, sometimes, falls just a tiny bit short. I think that might be because I’m a modern reader commenting on a very old book, but that has been my experience regardless.

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Review: Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fairly interesting on two levels, I think the book maintains a steady reasonable pace of actionable ideas with a healthy mix of storytelling. The most engaging thing about it is the potential it has to inspire someone to take on something new, to get out there and connect with people.

Some of the advice is...difficult...to execute without a certain level of resources, but a lot of it delves into principles that can be edited and refocused towards one’s individual capabilities. A little bit of bragging, as others here have mentioned, but I didn’t mind that too much. I liked the personality of the voice.

Overall, a decent read. Though the actual value of the book will be judged a decade down the line once I’ve tried actually following through with some of the ideas he presented.

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