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  Slammerkin

  by Emma Donoghue

  • Rated 3 stars

  purplepeace wrote:
  Well, perhaps since this one had been so hyped up by friends I was expecting more. It was entertaining enough, but the characters fell a little flat for me. This most interesting bits were when Mary was living with Doll in London.
  
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  How Rome Fell

  by Adrian Keith Goldsworthy

  • Rated 3 stars

  John wrote:
  This was an interesting book, but struck me as an overly ambitious set of topics for a single volume. The complexity of the Eastern and Western Empires, particularly the massive turnover of leaders in the Western Empire and the sheer volume of foreign threats made it bewildering to follow. A couple of emperors and different invading armies would sometimes pass in a page, and left the book feeling rushed and lacking context which makes sense in a book covering basically two empires and several...
  
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  The Song of Achilles

  by Madeline Miller

  • Rated 4 stars

  Louisa van der Luyden wrote:
  Others have said that this is a retelling of the Iliad. Which it is, in a way, even though the first three quarters of the book describe the events that supposedly took place before the start of Homer's epic. I didn't expect to like this very much, but I was curious, having recently read Robert Graves' translation of the Iliad. The primary goal of the Iliad and the Odyssey, said Graves, is to entertain, and if scholars "treat Homer as a Virgil, Dante or Milton, rather than as a...
  
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  Thinking in Systems

  by Donella H. Meadows

  • Rated 4 stars

  Ryan L wrote:
  Generally, a great introduction into systems thinking, focusing on examination of the structure of how things work. Inventory, information, intelligence: the applications are broad. There's much to be gleaned from various angles here, describing buffers between "stocks" and "feedback loops." I don't quite know what to make of it, though, I'm glad I read it. I have a feeling that this is one those books that act as a gateway, leading to another jaunt through topic that I haven't read much...
  
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  Mountains of the Middle Kingdom : exploring the high peaks of China and Tibet

  by Galen A. Rowell

  • Rated 4 stars

  Michael E wrote:
  I didn’t realize what a treasure I gained when I nabbed this at a library book sale. It looks like a coffee-table book of Himalaya mountain photos. But they aren’t just any photos. They are from a master photojournalist and serious adventurer and mountain climber. And the narrative of his trekking and climbing is of historical significance. Rowell in 1980 was among the first set of Westerners allowed access to the mountain provinces of Tibet and neighboring Chinese provinces since being...
  
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