Category: Books

Notes about everything related to books, including reviews of books I’ve read

Book: Timur Aslanov “I Know What to Tell Them”

No comments

On the recommendation of a good acquaintance, Anton Vert, I read Timur Aslanov’s book I Know What to Tell Them. In the blurb, the author promises to explain how to deal with negative comments about you, your company, and your products online. To do this, he introduces the concepts of the “Light Knight” and the “Dark Knight.” The latter is ready to act tough, respond rudely, and wipe out comments he doesn’t like. However, the greatest benefit comes from the “Light Knight,” who constantly monitors his emotional intelligence and knows how to respond to the substance rather than the tone.

My direct work has never involved responding to user comments; more often I’ve been on the other side of the barricades — and I’ll admit that at times I can be overly emotional in voicing my criticisms. Still, I’ve always tried not to stoop to personal attacks or mudslinging just for the sake of it.

At the same time, I’m active on social media, I have my own blog, and sometimes my position or certain statements can provoke negativity — both from subscribers and from people who just happened to drop by. So I was curious what exactly Timur Aslanov might advise, especially after such a strong recommendation from someone I know.

Read more

Book: Henry Lion Oldie “Invasion”

No comments

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Pavel Filatyev’s book, which was essentially an account of the first days of Russia’s war against Ukraine seen through the eyes of a Russian contract soldier. Even then, I wanted to believe that all this horror would soon be over.

But two years have already passed since Russia attacked Ukraine, and there’s still no end in sight. As a child, reading about the Great Patriotic War, I used to think that four years of that war was a whole lifetime. By that measure, Ukraine has already been at war for half a lifetime.

The initial shock has long since faded, and any hope of a quick ending is gone for good. And then a book came out by the remarkable Ukrainian authors Dmitry Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky, whom all fans of sci-fi know under the pen name Henry Lion Oldie.

Both authors are from Kharkiv — a city where, before the war, Russian was heard far more often than Ukrainian, even though its residents considered themselves Ukrainian. Before the war, Oldie were seen as purely Russian-language authors. They wrote in Russian, a language they command better than most Russians do.

But on February 24, 2022, war came to their home; Russian missiles and bombs began to fall on their city. And both of them, Dmitry and Oleg, started keeping a diary.

Read more

Book: Stanisław Lem “Solaris”

No comments

Stanisław Lem is a classic of Polish science fiction, hugely popular among Russian-speaking readers since the Soviet era, when we weren’t exactly spoiled for science fiction. Apparently that very status is what kept me from writing a review of Solaris for so long—because, shame on me, I only read it recently.

If Lem himself is a star, then Solaris is probably one of his most famous works—yet most people who know it do so through its screen adaptations. The best known is the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Soviet actors Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk. In 2002 the Americans made their own version too: Soderbergh cast none other than George Clooney in the lead. And there was also an earlier TV adaptation with Vasily Lanovoy, released four years before Tarkovsky’s version.

It’s worth noting that Lem himself treated the adaptations of this novel rather coolly, because, first, he couldn’t imagine how it could be filmed at all—and second, he really disliked the way directors chose to reinterpret his idea. He even quarreled with Tarkovsky, calling him a fool, and later said that instead of Solaris, Tarkovsky had made “Crime and Punishment in space.”

Read more

Book: Pavel Sanaev “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard”

No comments

Bury Me Behind the Baseboard by Pavel Sanaev was, for many years, a bit like Pasternak was for Soviet citizens. Meaning: I hadn’t read it, but I’d heard so much about it from all sides that, deep down, I didn’t even want to read it—I “disapproved” along with everyone else.

But the years went by. The book kept coming up, stage adaptations were made, and it even got a screen version with fantastic actors. So at some point I decided you can’t judge a book based on third-hand retellings.

Pavel Sanaev is the son of the actress Yelena Sanaeva, whom most people know as Alice the Fox from the film The Adventures of Buratino. He’s also the stepson of actor and director Rolan Bykov (a name that really needs no introduction). And he’s the grandson of the famous actor Vsevolod Sanaev (he appeared in all sorts of films, but Belarusians probably know him best as Fedos in White Dew).

And Bury Me Behind the Baseboard is a slightly fictionalized set of the author’s memories of his childhood. The names have been changed, but overall he’s simply telling the story of how he lived—separated from his mother—under the care of his grandmother, and to some extent his grandfather too.

Read more

Book: Damien Mecheri, Sylvain Romieu “Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave. Volume 1: Demon’s Souls – Dark Souls – Dark Souls II”

No comments

The term souls-like is now well established in the video game industry—players immediately understand what to expect from a game in this genre: it will be very hard, you’ll die many times, respawn, try again and again, learning your enemies and honing your skills along the way.

But just fifteen years ago, that wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone. “Souls-like” as in… like souls? What souls? Because it was only in 2009 that a game called Demon’s Souls came out and challenged the established rules of game design—at a time when the industry was increasingly trying to hold the player’s hand and help them at every turn. FromSoftware showed that if you kill the player from the very first minute and make it clear that their entire gaming experience means nothing in this world, it won’t just fail to scare people off—it can create a whole army of fans and, in essence, invent a new genre.

The book Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave promises to tell the story of how this series of games was created—starting with Demon’s Souls and continuing with its “offspring” in the form of the Dark Souls trilogy and beyond. And I was extremely interested to read how the creators came up with this approach, why they decided to bet on it, and how they built these games. First, this really is an entire subculture within gaming—and I’m not exactly its best representative as a player (I don’t like suffering all the time). Second, my team is currently making a game with similar mechanics, even if we want to push further (and who doesn’t?).

Read more

Book: Boris Akunin “The Pit”

No comments

I haven’t read all of Boris Akunin’s work, but I’ve read a fairly substantial part of it—enough to say that the series about Erast Fandorin is probably the most significant thing the author has come up with so far.

And so, when the hero’s life path started nearing its end, true fans were very saddened. The thing is, in my view the later books in the series fell far short of the first ten. Still, they were bought and read as soon as they came out. And when it seemed like Erast Petrovich was finished once and for all, first there was Just Masa, telling the story of his constant companion, and then suddenly The Pit came out, bringing back the wonderful detective himself.

The narrative throws us into a time when Fandorin is still a long way from death, but in Russia he’s already persona non grata, so he makes his living investigating cases in Europe. For example, together with Sherlock Holmes he fights Arsène Lupin. Yes, that story appeared earlier in the collection Jade Rosary Beads, and now the author takes us back to the very end of that investigation to tell us what happened next to our heroes.

Read more

Book: Allison Schrager “An Economist Walks Into A Brothel”

No comments

Tell me—how can you possibly pass up a book with the title An Economist Walks Into A Brothel? And on top of that, it promised to talk about risk management. So I couldn’t resist. True, from the title you expect to learn about risks of a very different kind, but still…

In reality, the book is meant to explain the risks in our lives through examples of how people in completely different professions deal with them. And yes, the book starts with a description of how one of the largest brothels in Nevada operates: what risks sex workers face, and how a legal brothel helps address them compared to freelance sex workers.

I have to admit, it’s a genuinely unconventional approach, and Allison Schrager—who specializes in working with risk—managed to attract a lot of readers that way.

And besides sex workers, her examples include paparazzi, a professional poker player, surfers, horse breeders, and even the military. Using those examples, Allison tries to show both what risk is in itself and different sides of dealing with it, including insurance and hedging.

Read more

Book: Olga Gromyko “Cyber Vacation”

No comments

So the As*trobiologists series has hit a kind of anniversary, because Cyber Vacation is already the tenth (!!!) book in the series. And the further it goes, the more Olga Gromyko focuses on characters who, in the earlier books, only flickered in the background. Though you can’t really call Roger Sakai—now a police officer, formerly a buccaneer of the space seas—a truly second-rate character.

No, Roger was practically the main antagonist at the very beginning of the whole story. And after becoming a cop (well, who can catch pirates better than an ex-pirate?), he also popped up in the adventures that followed.

The new book is, on the one hand, a collection of novellas, each with its own small story—and on the other hand, one investigation that our dashing Roger has to carry out.

In fact, he came to the planet Cassandra—populated mostly by sentient cyborgs—not for work at all. He was planning to spend a pre-wedding vacation here, but at the last moment his fiancée couldn’t make it. So Roger goes looking for something to do, so he doesn’t just sit around twiddling his thumbs out of boredom.

Read more

Book: J.K.Rowling, John Tiffany & Jack Thorne “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”

No comments

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is, first, a play—and second, it was written with J. K. Rowling’s involvement, but still not by her alone. Both of those facts affect the way it’s presented. A play doesn’t really need vivid descriptions or direct access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings. You can’t show all that directly on stage; interpretation is the job of a specific director and a specific production. And having two co-writers as well also makes a difference.

Chronologically, the story begins almost exactly where the last novel of the main series ended—where, in the epilogue, we were shown the now-grown-up Harry, Hermione, and Ron seeing their children off to Hogwarts. Among them is Harry’s second son, Albus Severus Potter.

Up to this point, I hadn’t written reviews of any Harry Potter book. I mean, why would I, when tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people have read them already, so everyone knows what they are and what they’re about. But with this play I decided to make an exception.

Read more

Book: Yuri Voskresensky “Voskresensky’s Gambit, or How I Overthrew Alexander Lukashenko”

No comments

When I started reading Voskresensky’s Gambit, my wife looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Like, do I really have nothing better to do with my time than read something like this. Because it was obvious that this creation has no documentary value whatsoever.

First, a few words about the author of this “book.” Yuri Voskresensky has been in politics for a long time: he served as a district council member in Minsk’s Pervomaisky District, he was involved in business (there are plenty of questions there too, but that’s not the point), and later he joined Viktor Babariko’s campaign team—until Babariko was arrested on fabricated charges in 2020 and thus removed from the presidential race in the Republic of Belarus.

Yuri Voskresensky himself was arrested as well; he spent some time in the “Amerikanka,” the Belarusian KGB detention facility, and then changed his views and set about building a supposedly democratic and positive opposition under the name “Round Table of Democratic Forces.” He also actively helped (by his own claim) secure the release of several political prisoners (who, in the view of the official Belarusian authorities, are not political prisoners). And the charges against Voskresensky himself were never fully dropped and still haven’t been to this day—which, however, doesn’t stop him from engaging in politics and publishing books that receive glowing reviews in the very first days after publication.

Read more