rcmnd

The Book That Wouldn't BurnBook

by Mark Lawrence, 2023

Who uses, recommends or left The Book That Wouldn't Burn, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Russ Allbery
Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.
loved

The best book I read last year was Mark Lawrence's The Book That Wouldn't Burn, which much to my surprise did not make a single award list for its publication year of 2023. It was a tour de force of world-building that surprised me multiple times.

His year-in-review page summing up the 46 books he finished and reviewed in 2024. The page is undated; it covers the calendar year and links forward to the 2025 review. (undated page)

2026-01-01·eyrie.org ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.