Emma Goto

The main character is a PhD student at Cambridge, studying a form of academic magic that involves a lot of drawing circles and logical proofs with chalk on the ground. Her professor - the top guy in her field - is dead after an experiment gone wrong, and she's focused on opening a portal to Hell to get him back. Not for altruistic reasons, mind you, but because she's decided that she absolutely needs his influence to help open doors in her future career. (Yes, this is a pretty neurotic reason). She's joined by a fellow graduate student, and together the two of them journey through all the realms of hell to find their professor.

Similar to Kuang's Yellowface, the main character is a flawed one. She's overly fixated on her academic career, but the book does a decent job of showing why she is the way she is, so I'm not mad about it. There's also a lot of philosophy and academia references in here, some of which go over my head. And apparently from reading a Reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1nw569x/i_recently_finished_reading_katabasis_from_r_f/) there's a fair few references to Dante's Inferno in it as well.

Alice is joined by Peter, a mysterious but very smart fellow PhD student, who runs hot and cold, and Alice can't quite figure out what his motivations are (but she's half in love with him). It turns out he has Crohn's, which is why he's always going MIA due to hospital stays or reoccurrences of it. The book leaves Peter's absenteeism and sudden coldness as a mystery for the first half, so it's an interesting twist once that's finally solved (albeit a little silly, but hey we all have our insecurities). And in the end it turns out that he loved Alice all along as well. Alice straight-up betrays Peter in the middle of the book, and she's so depressed (almost suicidal) for parts of the book. But it all ties up (too) nicely at the end when she revives Peter from the dead and then they go back to enjoy their lives in the real world, happily ever after. I mean, I probably would have been pissed off if the story had a sad ending where Peter did stay dead, but considering the overall depressing tone of the book the ending felt a bit too nice, if that makes sense.

Overall though I quite enjoyed this book! It had a really interesting concept. From reading reviews online, it seems this one wasn't as well-received as I thought it would be - it seems like RF Kuang can be a bit divisive. I suppose since RF Kuang's books comment on themes like colonialism, sexism, racism, etc. and she can be a bit heavy-handed in her approach, people try to take it more seriously than they would something like ACOTAR, but then are also quicker to find flaws with it as well.

So this book was originally a Hermione/Draco fanfiction that got adapted into a proper story, which probably already reveals a lot about what the book is going to be like. It's not one of those more wholesome "Hermione meets a reformed Draco" type ones though, and instead is one where Harry dies, Voldemort wins the war, and then Hermione is auctioned off to the highest bidder (Draco). The way they explain the need for the auctioning thing is that there is some form of magical power that can be sourced from a marriage bond.

I'm not sure I'm convinced a story that involves an auction is something that should have made it out of the fanfiction world, but it does feel a bit tamer than what I assume the original fanfiction might have been like and the author does a pretty good of setting it up for book 2 in the series. It's a bit cringe (maybe in the vein of ACOTAR?) but like a guilty pleasure you can't help but read to the end. Obviously all the characters have been renamed (and some even gender-swapped) and so it's not quite a 1-1 duplicate of Harry Potter, but it is very easy to see a lot of the parallels, and that does distract from the story a bit as you try and figure out who each character is based off of.

As a side note, I found out about this book because I heard about the recent release of Alchemised (another Hermione/Draco fanfiction adaptation). Apparently the original fanfic for Rose and Chains was inspired by the original fanfic for Alchemised, so I suppose I might be tempted into checking that out too.

Wow this book is so crazy in a good way. You settle in for a comfy (and possibly slightly trashy) spaceship romance book where you can just switch your brain off and enjoy... and then it totally does a 180 and goes deep into this almost horror-like scenario which I can't really explain any further without giving it away. But damn was it a good plot twist. The definition of not judging a book by its cover.

This is such an unexpected horror book. CLONES!! The ending felt a little bit weak, but I guess it's hard to wrap up such a plot twist in a way that leaves you satisfied with the ending (to be honest if they had all just died that would be the most realistic).

In a way I can understand why the book starts off so light-hearted and YA romance-like as the main character moons over the other guy on the spaceship - that helps make the twist mid-way through the book and the tonal shift all the more impactful. But also I wonder if the way the book was marketed and starts off would put people off from reading the book? Which is a shame, to me the plot was good and they could have done it as a more serious sci-fi book and gotten more readership.

About 2 journalists vying to take the coveted spot of writing a biography for Margaret Ives, a super rich lady who was married to a famous singer but then disappeared for 20 years.

The book starts off slow, as Margaret wastes time diving into the backstory of her parents and grandparents to delay having to talk about herself. Once she gets to her own life story it gets really good, and sort of reminds me of the sort of family drama you'd see in a Taylor Jenkins Reed novel, though not quite as good since it's being narrated by Margaret rather than being directly in it.

And of course, it's an Emily Henry novel so throw in a serving of romance. It's decently ok, nothing mind-blowing, to be honest I felt like I'd rather hear the story of Margaret Ives more than anything!

If you've never read Why We Sleep it's a book that basically scares you into getting more sleep by explaining how important it is for your health. (I recommend you read it if you haven't already). Outlive is sort of like the diet and exercise version of that book, where the author really drills into the importance of getting and staying healthy at a younger age so you can reap those benefits as you get older.

The author kicks off the book by emphasising the idea of focusing on your healthspan, not just your lifespan. There's no point making it to 90 if you spend the last 20 years with a fairly poor quality of life, and so it's more about figuring out how you can live to an old age and be fairly mobile and healthy to right near the end.

The other concept he introduces is a term he has coined himself - Medicine 3.0. Today's medicine, or "Medicine 2.0", is about finding a cure for a disease after you get diagnosed, while Medicine 3.0 is about preventing you from needing to be diagnosed in the first place. The author runs some sort of a health clinic, so he sidetracks a bit into the sorts of niche tests he runs on his patients as part of this Medicine 3.0 approach. It's interesting, and I think it's great he's trying to push for something like this, but at the same time, the average reader is not going to have access to those tests for themselves so it's not super helpful. (Also the cynical part of me sees this as marketing for his health clinic).

The middle part of the book goes into his "four horsemen" of diseases that we should be trying to prevent much earlier, which are heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases (i.e. Alzheimer's) and type 2 diabetes. Sometimes you can just get unlucky with cancer, and there's no known way to stop or cure Alzheimer's, but the general advice here is that exercise and diet are important.

You might mistakenly assume that if you are not obese, you will be fine, but some people (including Asians) are genetically predisposed to not be able to handle even small amounts of extra fat so they could still be experiencing poorer health even if their BMI might not suggest it. I've never been at an overweight BMI but even so have had issues with high cholesterol in the past, so I felt like I could kind of relate to this point.

One of the problems with Medicine 2.0 is that if you don't have an over 5% risk of a heart attack in the next 10 years, then you're not considered at risk. But really we should be aiming to live healthily, for a long time, so you should start caring about these risks earlier, before you reach that 5% risk level. So as an example, although medicine today recommends that people should be aiming for below 70mg/dL for LDL cholesterol, you should actually be aiming for as low as 10-20mg/dL to reduce the risk of heart disease.

Finally the most useful part of the book is near the end, where he gives some actionable tips. The first big one is exercise and your VO2 max level (basically how out of breath you get when you run / how well you can run). There's a table with what is considered an average or above-average VO2 max level per age range, and the author recommends you should be aiming for the elite level in your age range. If you hit that, you should aim for the elite level of 2 decades below your age range.

Your VO2 max declines 10% per decade, so as an example, even if you have the sufficient VO2 max to comfortably hike today, you need a score that is way above that now, to be able to hike into your later years. Your body is going to decline, it's inevitable, but it's about shoring up your health and fitness as much as possible while you are younger so that you can still enjoy life while you are old. As for how to improve your VO2 max? You should do most of your runs as zone 2 (you can still hold a conversation) but do 1 sprint workout a week which involves sprinting for 4 minutes, then dropping back down to a jog until your heart rate drops, and repeating that 4 - 6 times.

The second component of exercise is strength training. Muscle mass is impossible to put on in your 70s and will continue to decline each decade, so you need to put on as much as you can now to make up for it. He doesn't advocate going as heavy as you can, as an injury can put you out for months (which I did to my back this year so I can relate). Instead you should be focusing on stability. He goes into detail about a bunch of exercises you could do for that but it gets a bit harder visualise what he means.

And finally, nutrition! Reducing calorie intake can lead to a longer life, but comes with increased risk of injury, plus it's kind of depressing to diet all of the time, so the author doesn't really recommend it. What's more important is just eating well. He doesn't recommend a specific diet since different things work for different people (Keto, Mediterranean) but the key point is something that's sustainable. Factoring in your weight training, protein becomes really important as well, and he recommends a daily intake of 1.6x your weight in kg.

Surprisingly, although he acknowledges that alcohol has no upsides, his recommendation is to restrict your servings to 7 in a week. I found this point really interesting in that he's recommending people aim for such a high VO2 max level (elite level is no joke, right?) yet is still so lax on the drinking aspect - I would have expected he would just recommend you cut out drinking altogether. So I do feel like there's a bit of the author's bias coming into play here as well.

Finally he caps off the book with a chapter on his own mental health struggles (which were quite severe) - longevity is meaningless if your life sucks - which is fair enough.

Overall, I think that Outlive does inject a bit more of the author's personal bias into it compared to Why We Sleep, hence the 4 star rating, but I definitely recommended reading if you need a bit of a kick up the backside when it comes to your own health.

Aliens have come along, demolished Earth, and let a couple million of the remaining humans participate in a televised fight to the death for the rest of the universe to enjoy.

It's obviously an absurd situation, but the main character Carl is quite aware of the fact that a) most of Earth has died and b) more are dying every day. He also has a talking cat named Princess Donut.

So it's kind of this mix between humour and the depressing reality of it all? Good if you're looking for a fast-paced action book with a twist.

About a prodigious chess player and his older brother, who both end up in complicated age gap relationships.

I'll be honest age gap relationships make me a bit leery (at least when the younger one is like early 20s) due to the power imbalance, but the story is partially about the relationship between the two brothers as well so it turned to be a fairly interesting read.

So I assumed this was going to be a "How to Win Friends and Influence People" kind of book from the title but it was completely not. Gladwell jumps around a bunch of different stories - Amanda Knox, police shootings in America, Brock Turner, Cuban spies in the CIA. Ultimately his message boils down to:

1. People are really bad at determining whether someone is telling the truth or not, especially if they don't behave how you would expect a guilty person to behave. And vice versa - some people just have a natural tendency to act shifty even if they are not guilty at all, but they get mistaken for a guilty person.
2. Random police stops work effectively in areas of high crime (or at least the downsides of it are outweighed by the amount of crime stopped) but the problem with American policing is that they do random police stops everywhere, leading to all the unfortunate death-by-cop incidents we see on the news.

The two points are linked by the fact that police officers don't know how to talk to strangers and determine whether they are guilty or not I suppose? It felt a bit random - I would have preferred Gladwell do a deep dive on American policing, or on not being able to judge a person's truthfulness - but seemed more like he was trying to figure out the best way to bring these stories together and didn't quite succeed. Easy to read and interesting, though.