The Friday 56 (237) & Book Beginnings: The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

The Friday 56 is a weekly meme hosted by Freda's Voice where every Friday you pick a book and turn to page 56 or 56%, and select a sentence or a few, as long as it's not a spoiler. For the full rules, visit the the page HERE

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader that asks you to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you're reading.

Synopsis from Goodreads...

Imagine, if you will . . . a flat world sitting on the backs of four elephants who hurtle through space balanced on a giant turtle. In truth, the Discworld is not so different from our own. Yet, at the same time, very different . . . but not so much.

In this, the maiden voyage through Terry Pratchett's divinely and recognizably twisted alternate dimension, the well-meaning but remarkably inept wizard Rincewind encounters something hitherto unknown in the Discworld: a tourist! Twoflower has arrived, Luggage by his side, to take in the sights and, unfortunately, has cast his lot with a most inappropriate tour guide—a decision that could result in Twoflower's becoming not only Discworld's first visitor from elsewhere . . . but quite possibly, portentously, its very last. And, of course, he's brought Luggage along, which has a mind of its own. And teeth.

Beginning: "In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part... See... Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge ancient shell pocked with meteor craters."

56: "The Luggage backed off slowly."

Comments: I have finally gone back and read the beginning of the Discworld series. This book was delightful and very funny. What are you reading this week?

Quarterly Recap: April-June

Welcome! It’s July…already, and I feel like the year is flying by. It's already time for the second Quarterly Recap of 2023. This time, I’m covering blog posts that have appeared on the blog from April through June. As always, I’m starting with reviews…

April, May, and June Reviews...

• The Cult of We: We Work, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
• The Book of Gems by Fran Wild
• Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo
• The Border Keeper by Kerstin Hall
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
• Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell
• The Thorns Remain by J.J.A. Harwood
• Breakup From Hell by Anna Davila Cardinal
• A Fire Endless by Rebecca Ross

**Note: Weekly memes (like Music Monday and The Friday 56 + Book Beginnings, can be searched with their labels: Music Monday, The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings)**

Other April, May, and June blog posts...

• Short Stories I Read in May
• Upcoming Music I'm Waiting For
• Short Stories I Read In April
• So I Played Ooblets
• Short Stories I Read In March
• So...I Played Aggro Crab's Going Under
• I Listened to So Much (For) Stardust by Fall Out Boy
• Quarterly Recap: January-March

Looking ahead, I’m pretty excited for the ARCs I’m going to be reading in the next couple of months. I won’t say too much here, but some of them are much anticipated sequels or new books from some of my favorite authors.

In July, there’s a new book by Silvia Moreno-Garcia coming out, plus I’ve finally gone back and read the beginning of the Discworld series.

As far as games, I'm slowly working my way through the Subnautica games. But, mostly, I’m knee-deep in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. This game is massive, and I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of the story or the areas available to explore yet. But, I’m having so much fun.

Music Monday (246): Tennis & Blanco Brown

Rules:

• Music Monday is a weekly meme hosted by Lauren Stoolfire at Always Me that asks you to share one or two songs that you've recently enjoyed. For the rules, visit the page HERE 

Breana: The last time I did a Music Monday post, I mentioned that I was listening to an indie pop playlist on Spotify. There was a lot of great music, and another one of my favorites was Let's Make a Mistake Tonight by Tennis.

Andrea: Hi all! This week, I'm listening to I'll Never by Blanco Brown. Have an amazing week and 4th of July!

What are you listening to this week?

Short Stories I Read In May

It’s the twenty-ninth of June. So it’s time to talk about the short stories, miscellaneous posts, and podcast episodes I read or listened to in May.

All These Ghosts Are Playing to Win by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles (Uncanny Magazine; Issue Fifty-Two)

I only got around to reading two stories from Uncanny Magazine in May, and the first was All Theses Ghosts Are Playing to Win by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles. This story, at its base, is about grief and regret and forgetting. And it does those things very well. It’s told from the perspective of Theo, a ghost, who is in a casino where memories are the currency. This was an interesting approach to this kind of story: by linking high-stake bets with the function of a sort of limbo where you go up (as a big winner) or to the “DARK.” Supposedly, but is everything really that simple? You’d have to read to find out. There was also ample time devoted to Theo’s reminiscing, but I liked those moments just as much as the other aspects, themes, and overall conclusion. So while the general tone had an air of melancholy, All These Ghosts Are Playing to Win was haunting but in a good way. And I enjoyed reading it.

A Lovers’ Tide in Which We Inevitably Break Each Other; Told in Inverse by K.S. Walker (Uncanny Magazine; Issue Ffty-Two)

The second one was this very short piece called A Lovers’ Tide in Which We Inevitably Break Each Other; Told in Inverse. I read this one for the writing, which was evocative and instantly drew me in with descriptions of a lonely night at a shore combined with a slight feeling of the fantastic and uncanny. And I liked it exactly for those reasons. All-in-all, this was another good one.

From around the web…

• Print Run Podcast Episode 162: Turning Over the Same Leaf
• Place and Tome: On Two Kinds of Unforgettable Reading Experiences [Molly Templeton; Tor.com; May 25, 2023]

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

Title: The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion 
Series: n/a
Author: Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Source/Format: Purchased; Paperback
More Details: Nonfiction
Publisher/Publication Date: Crown; July 20, 2021

Goodreads     Amazon     Barnes & Noble

Synopsis from Goodreads...

The definitive inside story of WeWork, its audacious founder, and what the company's epic unraveling exposes about Silicon Valley's delusions and the financial system's desperate hunger to cash in--from the Wall Street Journal reporters whose scoops hastened the company's downfall.

In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion--at least on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the 6-foot-five Neumann, who grew up in part on a kibbutz, looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation, with its fluid jobs and lax office culture. He called it WeWork. Though the company was merely subleasing amenity-filled office space to freelancers and small startups, Neumann marketed it like a revolutionary product--and investors swooned. 

As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann's ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn't just an office space provider, he boasted. It would build schools, create WeWork cities, even colonize Mars. Could he, Neumann wondered from the ice bath he'd installed in his office, become the first trillionaire or a world leader? In pursuit of its founder's grandiose vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital. In late 2019, just weeks before WeWork's highly publicized IPO, a Hail Mary effort to raise cash, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company--but still was poised to walk away a billionaire. 

Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork's extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks, from a Japanese billionaire with designs on becoming the Warren Buffet of tech, to leaders at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs who seemed intoxicated by a Silicon Valley culture where sensible business models lost out to youthful CEOs who promised disruption. Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley unicorns? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive account of WeWork's unraveling.

I remember the promotion for a company called We Work—which sublets office spaces—and, at one point, it seemed like it was everywhere. Building off of trendy marketing and a purported core purpose of being an interconnected space—a “community”—to appeal to those looking for a different office experience. However, with the pandemic, I forgot about them. So when I recently heard about a book called The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell I was, to say the least, intrigued, because I somehow missed the majority of the news as it was happening—and what I did hear about I didn’t delve too deeply past the surface.

The Cult of We does exactly as the synopsis promises, by delivering an in-depth look at the rise and fall of WeWork. Mapping out the company’s earliest days (and prior iteration)—as well as the founder’s life and the turning point when greed, a convoluted purpose, and false representations—warped what was promising on paper into a colossal mess with far reaching consequences. And the further I read, the more the first two sentences of the author’s note stuck in my mind, as what it had already succinctly explained was bolstered by a detailed recounting.

“The implosion of WeWork in September 2019 was an astounding moment in business. Nearly $40 billion in value on paper vanished, virtually overnight, as the investment world woke up to the reality that America’s most valuable startup wasn’t a tech company but simply a real estate company—one that was losing more than $1.6 billion a year.”—from the Author’s note

This book read like one long news report. Parts of it could be a little dry and, given the subject of the book, it was filled with financial jargon. However, I never felt lost when reading it, and by the midway point I was thoroughly engrossed.

So if you’ve wanted to know more about WeWork’s situation, then I’d recommend The Cult of We.