Barry
What the ** did I just read!? ... was how I felt after reading Bloodchild. It was so unexpectedly creepy and weird. I immediately went back and read it again—and it was even better the 2nd time.
I enjoyed all of the other stories too, particularly The Evening And The Morning And The Night, and Speech Sounds.
The 2 essays are amazing!! Positive Obsession was great for understanding Octavia's background. Furor Scribendi is wonderfully inspiring. Such fantastic advice not just for writers but anyone on how to approach work with passion and consistency.
This book is a fantastic introduction to western Buddhism. It's now my top recommendation to anyone new to Buddhism—it's just so accessible.
The Dalai Lama describes his worldview and beliefs in a simple and practical way, relating it to western culture. His takes are succinct and powerful. The sections on compassion are particularly great.
I enjoyed this. 80% of the value was in 20% of the book. Specifically the chapters:
- Escaping The Moses Trap
- Phase Transitions II: The Magic Number 150
Reading those 2 chapters and then the conclusion gets the core value quickly. The rest of the book is long stories providing supporting material, mostly good, but verbose.
Loved this. Didn't want it to end. As a hardcore player of Doom and every Quake game, this was right up my nostalgia alley.
I enjoyed the perspective the book gave on founder/team dynamics and the company politics that were going on behind the scenes for each of the games. A ton of drama, and a surprisingly poignant progression as (mild spoiler here...) the team continually reached for and failed to find that euphoric state of team dynamic and flow that they had during Doom development.
Not quite 5 stars, as it could have gone deeper, especially with Carmack. Carmack's work is just so damn impressive—could read about it all day. What an absolute force.
This audiobook was way better than I expected for a 3 hour length. Focused, concise, and powerful.
TL;DR: Over time you've built up habits of being irritated or frustrated by certain triggers. Some of these are minor irritations, some are bigger and may be negatively affecting your own mental peace and relationships with loved ones. This book helps you to observe and question how you react to your triggers, in order to potentially change your perception and response to better align with your goal (presumably happiness). This audiobook explains that it's your own inner dialogue that's causing most of the pain, and gives suggestions for how to validate that, and fix it.
Pema Chödrön's personality made this teaching enjoyable. She was direct, funny, and relatable. I appreciated all of the personal examples, poking fun at people, and cursing (unexpected, and all the more delightful from a Buddhist nun).
Highly recommended if, like me, you're interested in working on being more patient and less irritable. A timely read as I'm stuck in my NYC apartment 24/7 with my family during COVID lockdown :)
This book is phenomenal on multiple levels. I might go as far as saying if I could only have one book, I'd take this one. It's certainly up there. I'm sure I'll revisit and reference it many times.
On the surface, The Five Invitations is a book describing how to support those who are grieving or dying, and how to grieve yourself. As a hospice founder, Frank Ostaseski sat with over 1000 people as they died, and supported thousands more loved ones in grieving. He tells many stories of those who have died, their feelings, what the process looked like, and lends his experience and wisdom on how to best approach these situations. There's no secret or formula, as individuals and circumstances are so different. He gets exceptionally detailed with the examples; no nuance is missed. I learned a LOT here and found it to be very practical, lots of skills to learn in supporting people.
Under the surface, The Five Invitations delivers a huge amount more value. Frank himself is an inspiration. His patience, kindness, and intellect are remarkable. As you progress through the book he gradually reveals a number of horrific experiences he went through in his own life, and how he dealt with them. Some of the thought processes he developed around forgiveness, compassion and letting go of anger were, for me at least, world-view changing. e.g. it being in your self-interest to forgive, to release the mental burden.
This book isn't just about death and grieving, it's about how to be present, supportive and loving in any challenging life event for someone. It's about how to approach adversity, and how to mentally and emotionally process extremely difficult events. It's about how to live your life with impermanence in mind—knowing that you will die in the future, as will all of your loved ones.
Frank's approach is rooted in Buddhism, quoting Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh The Dali Llama and other Buddhist teachers throughout the book. One of the things I love most about The Five Invitations is that it's filled with detailed, real-life, applied examples of Buddhist concepts. The examples in typical Buddhist books aren't nearly as gritty and real-life as those in The Five Invitations. Frank isn't perfect, he's doing the best he can, and I found the journey of his own improvement in supporting himself and others to be authentic and remarkable. This book pairs wonderfully with Bhuddist writing on impermanence, e.g. from Pema Chodron or Thich Nhat Hanh.
This was better than I expected, a worthwhile read after Ender's game. The author really nailed it. Great new origin story around Bean, great new villain story thread, great additional perspective on the Enders Game story.
Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, and Speaker of the Dead were all fantastic, each in their own way. I decided to stop reading Enderverse books at those 3, the main story is covered nicely, and I hear the other books aren't as good.
The Black Swan is a book about prediction. It describes our many challenges and failings making predictions. It's probability and economics heavy, with examples often focusing on socioeconomic factors.
Surprisingly to me, the 2009 financial crash and global COVID-19 pandemic are NOT categorized as black swans—they're gray swans—as the occurrence of them was very predictable (just not the exact timing, scale, or specifics). Black Swans are unknown unknowns; unforeseen positive or negative events that create huge effects, that typically sit outside of the expectations of common predictions (as there was no reasonable way to predict them).
There were so many highlights for me it's hard to pick any key bits out, the entire book was fantastic, even the big essay at the end of the second edition of the book that I read.
Taleb is fantastic at explaining his theories, using multiple examples to illustrate each one. I felt like this rounded out my understanding of each of the theories. Fair warning: he can be quite egotistical and rude at times.
I love any books that illustrate different world-views, and The Black Swan was fantastic for that, hence 5 stars. I highlighted a lot, and expect to re-read after reading his other books.
P.S. As a software engineer, I also found the book very applicable to estimating complex software projects.
Thinking in Systems takes a LONG time to get going and deliver its value. All of the super insightful content is buried behind a LOT of lead-up.
The first half of the book is 3 stars. It dives into the fundamentals of systems thinking, describing numerous commonly found systems in detail. It's more of a reference and primer to set up the terminology and concepts for the second half of the book.
The second half of the book is 5 stars. It broadly describes how and why massive complex real-world systems operate the way they do. Using lots of real world examples from politics, economics, the environment, etc to explain common patterns, traps, and thoughts for remedies.
Best sections: Resiliency, bounded rationality, systems traps and opportunities, leverage points—places to intervene in a system, living in a world of systems.
It's worth considering reading these sections first, or jumping forward to them if the first half of the book begins to get tiring. The appendix is really good too, serving as an index to each of the best sections (strange and suboptimal way to structure the book, you almost want to read it backwards).
I'm thankful that the editor was able to pick up the manuscript and drive this book to completion after Donella's unexpected death. Such an incredible, experienced, caring worldview that Donella shared.
It was an effort to make it to the end of this book.
I enjoyed the first quarter, particularly Dostoyevsky describing (through Myshkin) the incident where he was being executed but it was called off at the very last minute, before the shots were fired. Hearing the details of what went through his head was super interesting. The retrospective on his time in exile in Siberia was great too.
I found the main story dull. Painful levels of detail. Not a lot of change in the environment to mix things up. Had to trudge through hoping it'd perk up again (it didn't until right at the end). Parts felt like reading a daytime soap opera. Nowhere near as enjoyable as The Brothers Karamazov. There were good parables in the last 3/4, but they were scattered amongst stacks of details.
Overall, a few awesome chapters, but the majority of the book was not my jam.
The Maus books really blew me away. Authentic, touching, and absorbing from beginning to end.
Two streams alternate back-and-forth throughout: Art's discussions in NYC with his increasingly demanding, quirky, aging father who's problems Art struggles to accept, and tales from his father's time enduring Nazi occupation in Poland and Germany.
Both streams are completely engrossing. The pacing and interplay are wonderful. Art and his father were both relatable, with their flaws and challenges laid remarkably bare and honestly explored.
The Maus books really blew me away. Authentic, touching, and absorbing from beginning to end.
Two streams alternate back-and-forth throughout: Art's discussions in NYC with his increasingly demanding, quirky, aging father who's problems Art struggles to accept, and tales from his father's time enduring Nazi occupation in Poland and Germany.
Both streams are completely engrossing. The pacing and interplay are wonderful. Art and his father were both relatable, with their flaws and challenges laid remarkably bare and honestly explored.
5 stars for shock, suspense, and the journey through the story. Loved the structure of Cora moving through different locations, with characters moving in and out of the story.
3 stars for character development. There was some depth to Ridgeway and Cora, and some good depth to the couple in the house, but I'd have enjoyed more. Cora's feelings could have been conveyed more too.
Fantastic book, strong recommend.
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations
The exploration of the 4 key metrics of high performance engineering teams was great. The 24 capabilities and sections on leadership were really useful. There was a meaty 30% of this book that was fantastic.
The rest other 70% of the book was very fluffy. The examples never dove to any meaningful level of depth. Lots of surface level, generalized assertions. It felt like it missed that every technology organization is different, with different trade-offs to be made, and gave completely generalized uncontroversial advice.
I do appreciate this book, but it could have been so much better given the data set they had access to. Or it could have easily just been half the length.
Love this book.
For me, Thich Nhat Hanh writes about Zen Buddhism perfectly. In this book he uses precisely the right words, with precisely the right tone, with just the right balance of connecting practically with modern western life.
I've been looking for a concise, powerful, and snackable book on mindfulness applied to everyday life to revisit frequently. This hits that need. It's split in to small segments, each one roughly 2 minutes to read and addressing a specific point. With segments grouped together into likeminded sections. Perfect for dipping into for 5 mins.
The back of the book references which of his books the segments came from, making this book a highly accessible jumping off point to more of his writing.
I highlighted roughly half of the passages in the book on Kindle, which is ridiculous.
My favorite sections were the initial basic section on Mindfulness, and the one on Emotions and Relationships.