The Invention of Nature

Oh, what a book! I am not sure if I hated it. This is a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, and I really like him. I have very fond childhood memories of going to the Museum of San Ildefonso to see an extremely beautiful exhibition of his life and work. But this book!
  I find it extremely repetitive in the most banal way. This novel could have most certainly been reduced to a short story without losing any of the main things that were said in it. The main point of the novel should definitely be restated here: it would be cool if more people knew about Alexander von Humboldt. I am actually not sure if that was the main point of the novel, but that is what I would like more people to know.
  Also, I really did not appreciate the many vague insinuations that Alexander von Humboldt was not heterosexual. I think that if that is what the author wanted to say, she should have said it explicitly. In conversation with my friend Jo, she pointed out that maybe nobody knows, and because he lived so long ago there might not be many records in that regard. Is that what the author wanted to convey? Who knows!

How to Win Friends and Influence People

First of all, thank you Chris for my wonderful birthday present. It took me a while to read this book, mainly because I have been lazy and I have not been reading as much as I would have liked.
  I did like this book. It very much reminded me of John Bridge's How To Be a Gentleman. Except this book goes more into the theory of dealing with other people, gives example scenarios, and strategies to solve particular problems. Overall, they are good advice. An issue I found with several of those strategies, however, is that they can be severely optimistic in what they are trying to achieve. The book does tend to be somehow repetitive, which makes me think that maybe the book would have benefited from being a little shorter.
  Certainly, I recommend this book to whomever wants a reminder on how to be a nice person. I was many times surprised by how often the book made me aware of my rude manners. I will try to be better.

The Man in the High Castle

The first few chapters of the book were not only promising, but the praise that the author received ("The most brilliant science fiction mind on any planet", Rolling Stone) helped convince me that this was going to be an excellent novel. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the second half of the book and my final opinion is that one can skip this book altogether.
  I suppose it is to be expected that certain science fiction books start looking odd when the future they were imagining starts diverging from what actually happened in the future. Yes, this book tries to conceive a world with an alternative history but I am sure that even if Germany and Japan had won the Second World War, certain technological advances, such as being able to read the newspaper on your smartphone instead of having to wait for physical copies to be delivered, would come first than the ability to colonise other planets. Even though these discrepancies in the history of technological advances are fairly common in the novel, they are not enough to invalidate the whole story. Yet, certain aspects of the book, specifically the racist comments against white people and the anti-semitic remarks, seemed to me quite gratuitous.
  Trying to imagine a world where Germany and Japan won the Second World War is indeed a difficult thing to do, but I think this book does a bad job in its attempt.