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★★★
Robert Nystrom
—

Well-written, beautifully designed, split into two parts that at first glance seem like they’d be redundant and perhaps become boring but remain fresh and interesting throughout. This was a very good “read a little bit with my morning coffee every day” book.

★★
Christian Marclay
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I wasn’t expecting this to be a kind of memory game. Worth sitting through the whole thing.

★
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Parts of this feel a little half-baked and unsuccessful, but there’s enough of a movie here and I enjoyed it. Colin Farrell is very good.

★★★
Ben Rich
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Awesome story, both about engineering and managing a startup. The backdrop of the area near Tonopah, Nevada just captures my imagination.

★★★
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The scene of horse riders storming Aqaba still feels awesome. There is so much detail here large and small. Peter O’Toole’s gait is nearly its own movie. Just amazing.

★★
Campo Santo
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A game with an anti-game plot, excellent voice acting and beautiful trees.

★★
Tracy Kidder
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Engineers get excited about building a computer.

★★
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A very good travel mug.

★★
Fabien Sanglard
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Kind of a weird, lovely book. There is a full-page graphic of what the full catalog of 791 Super Nintendo games looks like on a shelf. Author’s enthusiasm makes it.

★
Kevin Fedarko
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No John McPhee (not for lack of trying), but interesting and entertaining anyway.

★
Kent Beck
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The actual language, Smalltalk, is super weird. But this book has a very simple idea and stays pure to it: figure out patterns in coding, name them, write roughly a page about each one. There is value is getting hit over the head with that. Feels like a classic.