Danny Yee’s Book Reviews | Hacker News Reader

Danny Yee’s Book Reviews

dannyreviews.com

32 pointsTomte10 comments

I remember joining a gamelan music group and meeting Danny a few years back. He would bring books to rehearsals and sometimes read during them. I had no idea he had such a huge collection of reviews online, apparently completely devoid of advertising and SEO and with only a tasteful/light social media presence. This sort of sharing was the promise of the old-school web. It's such a nice surprise to stumble upon these reviews via HN.

I find this inspiration. I do something similar. My book reviews also have quotes from the book which I tag for cross reference to other books ‘[r]’ and words I didn’t know ‘[t]’

So I found this syntax very interesting:

    %T A Void
    %A Perec, Georges
    %M French
    %F Adair, Gilbert
    %I Harvill Press
    %D 1994 [1969]
    %O paperback
    %G ISBN 1860460984

This is the format used by the 'refer' bibliography tool, part of GNU groff.

Props for having the Bridge on Drina first on the list of best books, it's my first time seeing it in my internet circles

Question for all those who find his reviews valuable: What is it about them that you so value? I've gone through a few, and they're rather short and nondescript. I can get a much better sense of whether a book is of interest to me from an Amazon page.

Take https://dannyreviews.com/h/Plant_Evolution.html

I would have never come across that book, but the single sentence "Not only did I learn from it an immense amount of botany (including much of the anatomy and taxonomy that I had never previously retained)" made this an immediate addition to my Amazon list.

This single sentence already makes the review valuable to me.

I've previously read https://shop.rhs.org.uk/books/general-gardening/beginners-gu... (Gorgeous illustrations! Fantastic explanations!) and this seems to be a great follow-up to taxonomy, since I'm also interested in evolution (see also Danny's reviews of Gould's books).

I like this book list much better than the one from the Sound of Silence guy from a few weeks ago! I like how the reviews jump right into it, as if there was an introductory sentence or paragraph which was then deleted before publishing

I wish I could read like this. I have such a hard time. I'll read a chapter or two a day of a book I enjoy, every night for days at a time. But I can never keep it going. I'm not sure what it is

I love the design of this, btw

I'd say "retro", but it's more than that. It's like a homely functional design that has worked for decades in older sites.

Danny is awesome

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