Brief reviews #9

Here are a few brief reviews of some of the things I have been watching and reading lately. This is most likely my final blog post with brief reviews for a while. Accordingly, expect this post to be the last in the series. I might pick it up again in the future, maybe in five to ten years' time, but for now it is a done deal. I will still continue to rate movies and TV shows on IMDb and books on Goodreads, and do expect the occasional blog post about something I have seen or read, but do not expect any 'brief reviews'.

The reason is the same as always. When something starts to feel like a chore, it is time to do something else. I have stopped writing brief reviews for most of the movies I watch and books I read, simply because I do not feel the motivation to write anything in particular related to the specific movies and books.

Movies/TV series

• 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025): Mstyslav Chernov's first documentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 20 Days in Mariupol, was a masterpiece. His second documentary, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, is great but not working as well as a documentary. We follow Ukrainian soldiers wearing body cams fighting back for a piece of land. The POV of the soldiers provides some brutal scenes that are not for the faint-hearted. In other words, both Chernov's documentaries are important, but if you have to only watch one of them, I would stick to 20 Days in Mariupol.
• 8-ban deguchi (2025): An existential horror movie. I can see that it is based upon a video game, but it does not feel like that at all when you watch the movie. It is minimalistic in its setup and story, and if you need a fast-paced horror movie with a lot of variation, this is definitely not the movie you should watch. The movie deals with topics such as conformity and fear of responsibility, and it is among the better horror movies I have seen lately.
• Amsterdamned II (2025): The first Amsterdamned from 1988 is actually a fine movie with a fine plot. The sequel is a bad movie with a bad plot. You cannot escape the thought that this is a movie made by and for boomers. You know, people who find a lot of fun in pointing out that plant-based steaks do not taste good and that homeless people are dangerous, and without the eyesight to notice low-quality visual effects. The movie is severely limited by weak practical effects and ridiculously bad special effects. If you watched the first movie in 1988 and think everything in the world has gotten worse since then, you might enjoy this one.
• André Is an Idiot (2025): If you are above the age of 45 and have never had a colonoscopy, go get one. This documentary follows André Ricciardi as he deals with his terminal cancer diagnosis. I don't know why I mention his name because he is not famous (he worked in advertising), and while he seems like a nice guy, there is nothing unique about his story or perspective that makes this movie worth seeing.
• Animal Farm (2025): Did we need another animated movie of George Orwell's Animal Farm? No. Is this movie any good? Also no. I have to admit that I expected to dislike this movie before watching it, and part of my motivation to watch this movie was that exact anticipation. At the time of writing, the IMDb rating is 2.5, and I ended up giving this movie a two out of 10. There are a few funny comments saving the movie from a one out of 10, but generally this is just a really bad movie. Any deviation from the source material works against the movie, and there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to watch this movie, especially not if you actually like George Orwell's Animal Farm.
• Anxiety Club (2024): A lot of comedians have anxiety and this documentary follows a few of them. There are a lot of interesting reflections on how it is to live with anxiety, but the documentary is somewhat uneven and, at the end of the day, you are left with a couple of loose reflections and jokes about anxiety. It is worth watching for some of the jokes but time is better spent on watching an actual stand-up show.
• Are We Good? (2025): A documentary about and with Marc Maron. I have listened to a few episodes of WTF over the years, and while Marc Maron seems like an interesting person, I found this documentary tedious. A significant part of the movie is of course devoted to the death of his partner, but it is surprising how little the movie manages to capture these experiences compared to what could be achieved with a podcast episode of the same length. In other words, Marc Maron works better as a podcast than as a movie.
• Az ember tragédiája (2011): The Tragedy of Man, a Hungarian animated movie. The movie started production in 1988 but only premiered in full in 2011. It is an ambitious movie starting with the creation of God and travelling through history and into the future and back again. There is a lot of variation in the quality of the individual segments, and specific segments work better individually than as part of a coherent movie.
• Bad Thoughts (2025): The comedian Tom Segura's sketch show. There are some really funny sketches to be found here, but they often rely on shock value related to sex to create the humour. That is, I would have preferred for the show to branch out a bit more in terms of themes and comedic devices.
• Begyndelser (2025): Yet another mediocre Danish movie. There is nothing new under the sun and no particular reason for this movie to exist. The main story is one about a couple going through a divorce and a stroke, which works well in the intimate scenes but the movie cannot resist introducing more drama than needed. A few scenes take place at the University of Southern Denmark, and it is fun to see how the publication of a scientific article (singular) is being treated as such a significant event.
• Champagne (2026): There is a good idea for a movie here, but the movie itself is weak. None of the roadtrip elements are working as they are reminiscent of typical Dutch 'comedies'. Much better to watch the documentary Den sista resan from 2024 than this one.
• Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown (2026): A good documentary about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It manages to shed light on the interactions between politics and technology, and how it is difficult to view the challenges and opportunities of one without the other. I also liked the fact that it went all the way up to the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia to show how the disaster is even relevant to this day (and will be so for the next many, many years).
• Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (2014): A jejune documentary about the JFK murder. I do not mind a good conspiracy documentary to better understand how such narratives are constructed, but this is just a random guy concatenating various facts and then expecting the viewer to believe that there is more to the JFK murder than we thought. No reason to watch this, even if you are interested in JFK conspiracy theories.
• De lift (1983): Do not see this as a horror movie. It is primarily a dark comedy. I can accept a stupid A plot, but the number of stupid B plots in this movie is astonishing. The scenes with the villain (the lift) are funny, but there is not much else to get out of this one.
• Disclosure Day (2026): This is by far the worst Steven Spielberg movie I have ever seen. Full disclosure: Nothing works in this movie. There are so many things that make no sense whatsoever, and the more you think about the plot, the more stupid it all is. I guess you are supposed to believe that the actual disclosure is emotional, but it was ... nothing. The movie was on the wrong side of two hours and you feel that through every single passing minute. It can best be described as Spielberg doing AI slop (and the animals look like something straight out of a generative AI model). The 12A rating is also not doing the movie any favours.
• Finding Satoshi (2026): Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? There is no smoking gun in this documentary but it provides an answer to the question. I did not find the answer particularly satisfactory as it seems to be used mostly to celebrate the people involved in developing the Bitcoin technology rather than providing clear evidence. Rather than looking at evidence and using that to shortlist the potential candidates, the documentary begins with a shortlist and then concludes, by method of elimination, who is behind Satoshi. There are a lot of interesting points about mathematics and encryption, data analytics, programming in C++, and if you are not familiar with Bitcoin at all, the documentary is doing a good job at introducing the core aspects of the technology.
• Folichonneries (2025): A comedy about a couple that decides to open up their relationship. The premise is interesting but the execution is bad. The movie is trying to do something different, but it is not funny and it does not make you reflect about (open) relationships in any shape and form. Easy to avoid, and no need to watch.
• Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare (2026): A documentary about the Fukushima nuclear accident. I learned a few new things, but I was also left with the impression that the documentary left out a lot of details and relevant information. I would have preferred for the documentary to focus more on the actual decisions made by people in power before and after the accident, rather than focusing almost exclusively on the Fukushima 50. A fine documentary if you know nothing about Fukushima.
• Goulag: Une histoire soviétique (2019): A three-episode documentary on the history of Gulag. The documentary does a great job in providing the history of Gulag within the context of the Russian Revolution, communism, the Second World War, the death of Stalin, etc., and uses footage of interviews with the people who experienced the Gulag first-hand. It goes without saying that a lot of these witness statements are heartbreaking and thought-provoking.
• Hitler: Uncovering His Fatal Obsession (2021): A documentary on Hitler's invasion of Russia. A lot of reflections on what went wrong and why, including how Hitler tried to learn from Napoleon's mistakes only to end up in a similar fate. A lot of clips with talking heads, mostly British academics, but overall yet another good documentary on the Second World War.
• Hoppers (2026): Another good animated feature film from Disney and Pixar. There are a lot of political layers to this movie, implicit and explicit, and it is a good reminder that Disney has an ideology. Whatever sells. I can best describe this movie as a mix of Avatar, Animal Farm, and Watership Down, and that alone should make you interested in seeing this one.
• In film nist (2011): This is not a movie, except it is. Jafar Panahi is an amazing director. He is uncompromising in the best possible way (something that is dangerous when living in a dictatorship). I find Taxi to be a better movie dealing with some of the same topics, but if you are into Iranian cinema, this one is also a must watch.
• Jackass: Best and Last (2026): The title is quite telling here. You get the best and the last of Jackass, and those circles are not remotely close to each other in the Venn diagram. If you feel nostalgic about the early 2000s, you might enjoy the nostalgia of a lot of the 'stunts' performed here, but there is not much new under the sun worthy of a feature-length movie. They present it as the 'end of the franchise' but in this day and age I do not believe these words for a second (and as I write this, I can see that there is a new Jackass podcast). I had low expectations for this one and I guess they were met.
• L'insulte (2017): One of the few Lebanese movies I have seen. It works best when it is dealing with the microcosmos of the personal conflict between the two main characters. Alas, the movie loses momentum as we get further into the story and the universe gets bigger, especially all parts related to the courtroom drama and the family conflicts.
• Last One Laughing: UK (2025): I do like social experiments, but I also prefer comedy shows where people are incentivised to laugh. I have only watched the second season and it is fine, but nothing special. I am not sure what to think of the format. I know it is hugely popular (most likely due to the high number of celebrities and the low production costs), but I will not be watching any other seasons (or any of the shows from other countries). A few funny scenes here and there, but overall not a format for me.
• Les plages d'Agnès (2008): We follow Agnès Varda reflecting about her life and work through a series of vignettes. There is a great quote in the movie that goes along the lines of 'My memories swarm around me like confused flies', which is a good description of what you will find in this documentary. A good documentary, but mostly of interest if you are already familiar with Agnès Varda's body of work.
• Magazine Dreams (2023): Stan on steroids. A strong performance (no pun intended) by Jonathan Majors, but a weak plot. This is one of the cases where I do not like one person doing both the writing and the directing. There are a lot of good ideas in the manuscript and the direction, but with a better (co-)writer or director, this could have been Taxi Driver in the 21st century. A good movie, but primarily due to the acting.
• Michael (2026): This is a blatant attempt to reframe Michael Jackson as an innocent and sweet person. What a weird movie this is. The plot is extremely bad. Or, I am not sure there is much of a plot. The fact that the main character gets older is not the same as character development. I was expecting all of this, but I was still surprised by how positive it was towards Michael Jackson. He just wants to make the world a better place! And he is so great with the kids in the hospital. Well, if you decide to watch this movie, make sure to also watch Leaving Neverland.
• National Theatre Live: The Importance of Being Earnest (2025): A really good play due to Oscar Wilde's snappy and funny dialogue. The challenge is for a comedy to stay funny for almost three hours, and the story was simply not strong enough to keep me captivated throughout.
• Never Change! (2026): It is difficult to make a movie, and even more difficult to make a good movie. The problem with this movie is that it looks like the people involved have gone out of their way to make a bad movie (and it is not working in a 'so bad it is good' way). Never watch!
• Onkel Jens (2025): A funny Norwegian movie about cultural differences. There is a lot of humour and heart, and the basic dynamic is reminiscent of Mon oncle. I do not agree with the low IMDb rating of this movie, and I will for that reason call it underrated. My theory is that you get most out of this movie if you are familiar with both Norwegian culture and Kurdish culture, and if you are only familiar with one of them, you might miss out on a lot of the comedy.
• PAAZ (2026): Another bad Dutch movie. PAAZ is an abbreviation for Psychiatrische Afdeling Algemeen Ziekenhuis, and this could be an interesting movie about depression and mental health. However, you do not obtain psychological depth simply by setting a movie within a psychiatric ward and talking about suicide. I am not sure why the focus is primarily on interpersonal relations between people with mental health issues rather than the psychological issues themselves.
• Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (2026): This is so far the worst movie I have seen from 2026, and it is not even close. There is no reason for this movie to exist, and I am not even among the people who believe the final season of the show had a satisfactory ending. This is a typical example of style over substance, and the style is pretentious and annoying. This is what you get if you take the worst from Netflix and the worst from BBC and give it a global distribution.
• Pressure (2026): 'How can the weather be boring?' Well, leave it to this movie. An okay movie at best but you never really feel the pressure. Some interesting conversations on the nature of forecasts and the data being used in such forecasts. The acting is great (as is to be expected from actors like Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser). The problem is primarily with the writing. I am confident that there could be something truly great here if it was written (and even directed) by Aaron Sorkin. It would also have worked better to not have any actual war scenes in the movie. It will not make it to my top 25 list of World War II movies.
• Sawt Hind Rajab (2025): Is this an important movie I believe everybody should see? Yes. However, if the movie did not depict real events, this would objectively speaking not be a good movie. The acting is not necessarily bad, but it is too aware of the context and what we know is going to happen. Accordingly, I might have found this movie even better as a documentary than as a docudrama.
• Shrinking (2023): This is a weird comedy. None of these characters contain multitudes which is fine for a comedy. The problem is that we are expected to care about the drama between these one-dimensional characters and their apparently complex inner life. The interactions between the characters are superficial, and if you are in the market for a lighthearted American comedy, this show could be worth your time.
• Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026): It might be a brand new day but there is nothing new under the sun in this Spider-Man movie. It is the same-old still-boring collection of superheroes in an MCU movie. There are so many storylines and you feel every minute of this long movie. For example, there is absolutely no need for Florence Pugh's character to be part of this story, which only reminds the viewer that Thunderbolts is dealing with some of the same themes in a much better way.
• The Death of Robin Hood (2026): The death of my patience. I like an atmospheric movie as much as the next person, but the pacing is off in this story about Robin Hood. The premise is great. How can and should Robin Hood come to terms with his past as a murderer? The problem is that there is not much drama in this psychological drama. I feel like I have seen Hugh Jackman playing this role in Logan. My recommendation will be to first check out Michael Sarnoski's Pig from 2021, and only if you want to explore more from this director, then check out this movie.
• The Drama (2026): This is not a romantic comedy, but a comedy about romance (including aspects related to romance, such as identity and empathy). Kristoffer Borgli is yet another great Norwegian director, and this is his best movie so far. Robert Pattinson is great in this role (one of my favourite actors these days). This is not an American movie, but it is a movie taking place in the United States. It is telling that the couple in the movie consists of an American and a European, and this works brilliantly on multiple levels. I cannot describe why in detail without spoiling key elements of the movie, but all I can say is that it is worth seeing.
• The Promised Land (2024): A workplace-comedy in the style of The Office following Moses and the Exodus. I like the premise but I did not find it particularly funny. It is also easy to see that this was made on a small budget (or, if not, they wasted a big part of the budget on anything but the set design).
• The Sheep Detectives (2026): A murder mystery with sheep. You get what you expect if what you expect is a light comedy with talking animals in an English village. While it is based on a German detective novel, it still feels a bit too American in its execution (e.g., you do feel the involvement of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller). In terms of recent movies with talking animals that humans cannot understand, I still prefer Hoppers to this one.
• The Simpsons (1989): There is not much to say about The Simpsons that has not already been said before (including by the show itself). I have been catching up on the most recent seasons, and I can confirm that the show is, with the occasional good episode here and there, still bad. If you ever consider watching more of The Simpsons, stick to the old episodes.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023): I do like the idea of a good Super Mario movie in a similar way to, say, The Lego Movie, but this is not it. There is a lot of nostalgia and references to the games, but a stupid plot and mediocre animations. Play the games instead.
• The Traitors Australia (2022): It is difficult, having watched The Traitors UK, to watch the first season of The Traitors Australia and not find it bad. But it is bad in a fun way. There is no castle, the production is second-rate throughout, and it is difficult to care about any of the participants whatsoever. Ironically, the thing I will most likely remember the most from this show is the character you see the least. Paul. What's up with Paul? Seriously, I would happily watch a behind-the-scenes documentary about this season only following Paul. Well, if you want to watch The Traitors, go for the UK, not Australia.
• Time Is Illmatic (2014): Illmatic is one of my favourite albums of all time. This documentary provides a general recap of Nas' life and career and goes into detail about the production of the album, such as the creation of the beat of The World Is Yours. Alas, the documentary covers too much ground in its short runtime, and I would have preferred a much longer format, similar to the Dissect Podcast on Kendrick Lamar, to fully get into the album.
• Train Dreams (2025): The life of Robert Grainier. The cinematography is impressive and the movie is full of beautiful scenes. This is everything I had hoped Hamnet to be. There are strong vibes in the movie but the plot could have been stronger. I would have preferred to see a bigger difference in Joel Edgerton's appearance throughout the years being depicted. A strong recommendation if you find yourself browsing through Netflix.
• Untold UK: Liverpool's Miracle of Istanbul (2026): A documentary about the 2005 CL final between AC Milan and Liverpool FC. I believe a good documentary can introduce a subject matter to people unfamiliar with the subject matter, and that is why I do not find this documentary good. It is primarily a trip down memory lane for people who are already familiar with the CL final and want to hear what the people involved in the match have to say about it (spoiler alert, not a lot). However, in the Untold series, I can highly recommend the episode Chess Mates about the conflict between Hans Niemann and Magnus Carlsen (here you do not need to be familiar with the subject matter and will be entertained).
• Walking and Talking (1996): An underrated drama and comedy (but not dramedy). Nicole Holofcener is great at putting her characters in uncomfortable situations and getting dark comedy out of it. I liked this one better than some of her recent movies (e.g., You Hurt My Feelings).
• World War II with Tom Hanks (2026): Yet another World War II documentary. But with Tom Hanks! It is always great to see famous people use their fame to attract attention on lesser known historical topics. Did we need this one? No. Is it good? It is. There were new facts (as in new to me) in each episode, and as we get further into the season, the better it gets. Also an interesting choice of talking heads (including Dan Carlin from Hardcore History). This is a documentary made for people who will find typical historical documentaries boring (e.g., you will hear a lot of visual effects such as bullets being fired). Well, my theory is that the worse the United States is doing in terms of war today, the stronger the demand for content showing the United States as a force of peace. World War II is great for that purpose.
• Y tu mamá también (2001): A coming-of-age road trip movie set in Mexico. I was primarily interested in this movie because of the director, Alfonso Cuarón, as I like movies such as Gravity, Children of Men, and Roma. There are a lot of good things to say about the movie, especially its style and sentiment, but the plot and acting are lacking. Only recommended if you are into Mexican cinema or you are an Alfonso Cuarón completionist.

Books

• Afdelingen for magisk tænkning by Morten Münster: A self-help book for middle managers. I liked this one a lot better than Münster's previous books, and I agree with a lot of the points presented throughout the book (and they are not all self-evident). The tone and humour is not my taste, but that might be because I do not read a lot of books like these in Danish. If you think you need to be a perfectionist in order to succeed at work, this one might be for you.
• Art But Make It Sports: Epic Matchups Where Art and Sports Collide by LJ Rader: I care little about sports and a lot about art, which makes this coffee table book great. You will find a collection of photos of athletes and, next to each photo, an artwork that resembles the photo as well as a short description. I find that the best comparisons are the ones where concrete sport photos are matched with abstract art, such as 'Rund und Spitz' by Wassily Kandinsky and 'Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying' by Kasimir Malevitj. If you are not sure whether this is for you, you can check out the associated accounts on social media.
• Be Funny or Die: How Comedy Works and Why It Matters by Joel Morris: A funny book about comedy by comedy writer Joel Morris. It is difficult being funny in writing, let alone write about being funny, but this book is doing a good job at both. There are a lot of good examples on what makes a joke or funny story work (throughout 50+ chapters), but you should not expect a tight structure that binds everything. The first part of the book is more academic in tone and content, and the further you get into the book, the more it deals with practical examples (and you will get out of it if you are familiar with American television, e.g., The Simpsons and Frasier, and British culture, e.g., Withnail and I).
• Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess by Ben Mezrich: 'At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.' The story of the Carlsen-Niemann controversy told in great detail by Ben Mezrich. I have been following some of the people involved in this scandal for more than a decade (e.g., Daniel Rensch and chessbrah), and I enjoyed reading about the story of Chess.com, the life of chess players, etc. While it is difficult to have sympathy towards a person like Hans Niemann, you can only feel sympathy for him (especially when you take his young age into account).
• Colours of Wes Anderson: The Films in Palettes by Hannah Strong: Fifty shades of yellow. A movie-by-movie breakdown of the colour palettes in Wes Anderson's movies, going all the way back to the jumpsuit in Bottle Rocket. If you are a fan of Wes Anderson, this book is for you. I do not understand why so much space is used on showing HEX codes and RGB values, but I guess that is less important when reading a digital version of the book.
• Crip by Caspar Eric: A collection of poems on the life and politics of living with a handicap. I preferred the personal poems more than the reflections on the policies (or lack thereof), but I found the book interesting throughout.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann: I read the 2nd edition of this book. If you are into designing data systems, and want to get into data engineering, this book provides a good overview on different techniques and approaches to build scalable and reliable data systems. There are great considerations of the pros and cons of different approaches, but I found a lot of the examples a bit too abstract. My recommendation will be to read this book in parallel with a more applied book using the tech stack you are interested in or already use.
• Ignorance: What We Do Not Know, Cannot Know, Must Not Know, and Refuse to Know by George G. Szpiro: A collection of sixty small chapters on topics related to the theme of ignorance. This is an easy book to get through and I can definitely recommend it. If you are already familiar with the core idea within a chapter or ignorant(!) about a particular topic, it is easy to move on to the next chapter. Or even if you do not find a chapter that interesting, you will most likely only have to read a few pages and then you are on to a new idea. I also enjoyed the discussions about the reasons for not knowing things.
• London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe: The story about the death of a teenager, Zac Brettler, in great detail. There is no need to know anything about the story prior to picking up this book. While the book is longer than it needs to be, and maybe should be, I appreciated all the deep dives into each of the people and the family trees of the people involved in the case, directly or indirectly. Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the most interesting true crime writers today, and I have already started on Empire of Pain.
• Lost London: From Crystal Palace to Heston Airport, a History in 25 Missing Buildings by Paul Knox: There are a lot of great buildings in London. There are also a lot of great buildings that are no longer in London. This book goes through 25 of those buildings, their history and legacy. There is an introductory chapter and epilogue providing a bit of context to the 'lost London', which I found more interesting than the chapters about the individual buildings (with a few exceptions here and there). Only recommended for people who are into architecture and London.
• Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham: If you have not read any books on Chernobyl, or even if you have, this one is a great pick. There are a lot of details on the Chernobyl disaster with a particular focus on the key people involved in dealing with the disaster. The parts I found particularly interesting in this book were the ones describing how incentives could work against people dealing with the disaster in a timely manner. I do not know enough about the literature on Chernobyl to say whether this story is untold or not, but I am confident that you will learn something from reading this book.
• Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky: I read Crime and Punishment around ten years ago, and I remember thinking that I should read more Dostoyevsky. Notes from Underground is a brief but brilliant book. You do not need to relate to the protagonist, let alone understand all the ramblings. The existential self-analysis makes the book a timeless classic. Well, I plan to read more Dostoyevsky within the next ten years.
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir: I decided to read the book after having seen the movie (I saw somebody correctly describing it as Pixar's Arrival). The book is better than the movie, and while the characters are rather one-dimensional throughout (something that is also clear in the movie), it is a book I will recommend to anybody with an interest in getting into sci-fi literature.
• RAG with Python Cookbook: Practical Recipes from Data Preprocessing to LLM Agents by Dominik Polzer: There are various ways to set up tools and work with AI these days. You can use tools that work straight out of the box, tools that are easy to use, and tools that you need to build, deploy, and scale on your own. This book focuses on RAG tools that are easy to use in Python, with some good examples on multimodal models and agentic frameworks. You are introduced to a specific problem and that is then followed by one or more solutions and a discussion. The book would have worked better as an online resource (e.g., a blog), and you can find a lot of the material available in the associated GitHub repo. I am always surprised at how these state-of-the-art books focusing on AI in Python rely on pip and pandas instead of being a bit more ambitious (e.g., uv and polars).
• Responsible Software Engineering: With Real-World Case Studies from Google by Daniel J. Barrett: If you care about responsible software engineering, this is a book for you. I want to say that everybody working with software should read this book, but as with all books you need to care about the subject matter to get anything out of it (and I am not convinced, alas, that most software engineers care about this topic). The book deals with a lot of timely and relevant topics (from fairness in AI to making sure not to do harm to the earth and its inhabitants), and outlines relevant values for responsible software engineering (proactivity, humility, equal opportunity, curiosity, complexity). I do not see the added value of the cartoons provided throughout the book. It is funny that many of the case studies are from Google (the don't be evil corporate motto is from a long gone era). I would also have liked for the book to deal more with how much responsibility we should actually assign to individual software engineers (many of the problems in the field are systemic and I am not sure it makes a lot of sense to devote significant resources to estimate your code's carbon footprint). In sum, a lot of practical advice throughout the book that will (should?) be of interest to many.
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: A classic that has been on my reading list for years. I read this while in Germany (although not in Dresden). The matter-of-fact tone used to describe the horrors of war makes this both easy and tough to read. While it is technically a sci-fi, I find it easy to interpret this as using the sci-fi elements more as a psychological coping mechanism rather than actual sci-fi. A must read.
• Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt by John Cooper Clarke: These poems by John Cooper Clarke work better as spoken word than on paper. The individual poems are hit-and-miss, but they are also brief and to the point, making it an easy collection of poems to enjoy.
• The Data Hero Playbook: Developing Your Data Leadership Superpowers by Malcolm Hawker: There is a severe lack of data in this book. It is ironic that a book about the power and importance of data is made up of anecdotes and stories about the author's own career. There is also, on a related note, a severe lack of structure. You get the same points repeated again and again, within and between chapters, and it ends up feeling more like a long essay that could have been a LinkedIn post rather than a systematic guide to developing data leadership skills.
• The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning -- And How To Help Them Thrive Again by Jared Cooney Horvath: As I am working in edtech I am obviously biased in my reading of this book. That is, I do believe edtech serves a net positive role in society (but I accept that it is a complicated topic and a lot of the evidence out there is weak at best). There are a lot of sensible arguments being made in this book, but at the end of the day it is unable to make a convincing case. The main issue is that it simplifies matters a lot and concludes that edtech, across the board and without exceptions, is a bad tool. Not only that, but it tries to make an argument that any tools are unnecessary (with a reference to how education prevailed without tools in the Warsaw Ghetto!). There are some references to scientific studies, but you will see that most of them have weak research designs (correlational and small N), but the interpretation throughout is causal and with no caveats. Too much of the book is also made up of drafts of letters the reader can send to the principal/school board. While I find it interesting to discuss to what extent edtech companies can be engines of 'deep learning', this book is not able to facilitate such a discussion.
• The Economics of Airlines by Volodymyr Bilotkach: A brief book on the economics of the aviation industry. I read the 3rd edition where there also are a lot of discussions on the COVID-19 pandemic, but you will only find a few references to studies published after the pandemic. If you have a basic understanding of economics, you will have an easy time skimming through this book. There are some interesting facts provided throughout the book, but that is also pretty much all there is to this book.
• This Beautiful, Ridiculous City: A Graphic Memoir by Kay Sohini: A love letter to New York. A lot of good reflections on the immigrant experience, culture and economics, and nostalgia. That being said, it did not work for me as a graphic novel, and it felt more like a series of text boxes attached to semi-related drawings. It might as well have been a novel.
• Too Weird to Believe, Too Plausible to Deny by Cliff Sosis: A collection of essays covering various philosophical topics. As this is an edited volume, there is of course a lot of variation in the quality, but in general the entries are of low quality with too much of a 'philosophy 101' vibe. I also don't like the confident writing style in most of the chapters with little to no room for nuances, caveats, etc. If you care about any of the topics being covered in the book, I will suggest you check out books dedicated to these particular topics instead of the chapter-length treatment they get here.
• Ultimate Python Polars for Data Analytics: Transform Your Large-Scale Data into High-Performance Analytics with Python Polars by Sunny Khilare: There are better books and online courses to pick if you want to get into Polars in Python. This reads as if it were written with the help of an LLM, and not a good one at that. A lot of the titles and content throughout the book scream AI, e.g., 'hvPlot vs. Altair: A Comparative Analysis', and all the talk about the chapters providing a 'comprehensive guide'. What is worse is that you will find (unintended) anti-patterns, including code that looks more inspired by Pandas, e.g., df.filter(df['Quantity'] > 2).
• Yearbook by Seth Rogen: A funny book by Seth Rogen on his upbringing and career. It is from 2021 so there is of course nothing on his life from the past five years, but I will definitely recommend this to anybody who is a fan of Seth Rogen or any of his work. I caught this as an audiobook read by Seth Rogen himself, which I can also recommend.