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I had high expectations for this book at the beginning. It starts off as a beatiful story of a cementary keeper, Violette, living in a small house in the French countryside, tending to graves, plants in the garden, selling flowers to visitors and quietly but thoroughly observing the funerals and people attending them. We slowly learn about the backstory of Violette and the lives of people surrounding her - gravediggers, the priest, morticians etc. - it's beautiful, well-paced and very often moving.

However, at some point we learn about a tragedy in Violette's past and from then on things really start going downhill. We no longer only get the perspective of Violette now and Violette in the past, but of so many different random characters she encountered in her life. Be ready to keep notes of the dates and character's names because I really coudn't at one point. What's more, the book gets so obnoxious when it comes to love and sex. Practically every chracter is cheating at one point. So many scenes of one-night stands in hotels, sex on the side of the road, or my favourite - nephew inviting his aunt to to the garden so that she could watch him making love with his girlfriend, which was supposed to be some kind of revenge for her rejecting him? Who even thought of that? Shortly after that I stopped reading because all of this was just getting ridiculous. Such a letdown in my opinion.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a really well written novel. Telling a story of 2 childhood friends, Sam and Sadie, reuniting to develop games together, which eventually launches them into a world of fame, business and opportunities but also hatred, dilemmas and rivalry. The character development of these two, their family and their friends is really superb, it's definitely one of the strongest aspects. There are a lot of references to games of the era and gaming culture in general. The only thing that didn't quite meet my expectations is how the actual process of developing games is a bit unrealistic and often just glossed over. While the first game that the duo makes is explained in detail, the next games just mostly happen in the background while the drama takes the stage, which for me feels like a missed opportunity, even though a typical reader might not be interested in that aspect.

"Free as in freedom" is a great book telling the story of Richard Stallman and the early days of the free software movement. Although quite dated by now it's still informative and insightful. Being based on interviews, talks and articles in the era of the early Internet it shows a few different perspectives on the issues of copyright, software licensing and also the private life and works of Richard Stallman and other notable people that worked with him. My only gripe with the book is that the author doesn't always fully understand the technical aspects of software and copyright he's writing about as he's clearly an outsider to the topic (this was largely corrected by Stallman himself in the 2.0 version, but he also modified the book in other ways giving explanations, comments etc). The book is strangely quite harsh and also slanderous at times, but overall it's a solid piece of historical work.