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.

I used to love reading productivity hack blogs back in the 2010s, which were all about min-maxing your life to get the most out of every day. Nowadays there’s a lot more talk about burnout, especially during and post-COVID, and I think the productivity space has pivoted a bit more into a healthy direction which recognises that we need to be kinder to ourselves. Cal Newport has hooked onto this idea with his latest book about the concept of “slow productivity”. The overall premise is that taking things at a slower pace in the short-term can lead to better results in the long-term, as you give your ideas enough time to mature and turn into something really great.

I did feel the book started to lose itself a bit towards the end, but overall it raises some fairly solid points, which were split into 3 principles:

Principle #1: Do fewer things

You should be limiting yourself to 3 projects. Each project you take on comes with invisible overhead. As a programmer, things like kick-off meetings, chats with designers and PMs to clarify scope and so on comes to mind. The more projects you work on, the more directions your brain is being pulled in, and so the quality of each project you are working on simultaneously will drop.

Of course life isn’t that simple, and you probably have a lot of little tasks you need to do - so he gives a bunch of tactics you can use here like outsourcing work to a software (i.e. solving your problem with money) and pushing back when people give you vague tasks, and asking them to give you more information upfront.

He also mention the concept of time blocking, where you get all those little things and complete them all in one chunk of time. Another interesting one was if you have a task you need to do each week, blocking that time off on your calendar and turning it into a ritual (grab a coffee, walk to a nearby cafe) so that you can just complete it on auto-pilot without having to worry about it piling up amongst all of your other tasks.

Finally there’s the “push-pull method”, which is about how the optimal way of working would be to “pull” a new task only after you have completed your old one. But in a workplace generally you will keep having new tasks “pushed” to you and the ensuing pile-up decreases your productivity. Since you can’t really stop being “pushed” to in a workplace, your best bet would be to only focus on your top 3 items, and communicate clearly to whoever gives another task - “I need to work on a, b and c first, so I expect x, y, z to be done in 6 weeks”. Once they see your priorities, they may go and try and give the task to someone else, or after time passes the task might become less important and not need to be done at all.

Principle #2: Work at a natural pace

I’m sure like me you’ve read a productivity life hack blog or two where it’s all about squeezing the optimal amount of work out of every day - we are biased towards evaluating productivity at these small scales. But when we look to the accomplishments of great scientists, they took years to develop and publish their ideas - so in the short-term, it looks like they are doing nothing at all. But when we zoom out, they accomplished a lot.

Newport brings up a couple of examples of scientists and artists (Marie Curie, Benjamin Franklin, Lin Manuel Miranda) who have achieved great things, yet might have taken long summer breaks to recover, or gave a project or scientific idea room to breathe while they work on other things. His point is that giving a project the time it needs and doing it more slowly will lead to something much better in the long-term.

I would have liked to understand a bit better how principles 1 and 2 are supposed to tie together, because it felt a bit contradictory at first. You’re supposed to focus on finishing your top 3 projects before starting any more, but in this case you’re seemingly starting and dropping projects as you go.

Another piece of advice he gives is to double your project estimates:

“The fear here, of course, is that by doubling these timelines, you’ll drastically reduce what you accomplish. But your original plans were never realistic or sustainable in the first place.”

Definitely something I’m guilty of!

Of course just taking a long break is probably not achievable for most readers of this book (who work regular 9 to 5s) so he suggests trying this concept of working in “seasons” at a smaller scale. For example, scheduling your work in a way where you do a large chunk of it in 4 weeks, and then work at a leisurely pace for another 2, before you start the cycle again. It does require you to be quite tactical (or I suppose you could even call it sneaky) with how you do your tasks though, but I can relate to this in a sense, since some weeks my code output is a lot higher than other weeks where I take it more chill. He also suggests “quiet quitting” for a month each year, which wouldn’t be noticed by your boss (hmm, not sure about that).

Principle #3: Obsess over quality

As part of taking things at a slower pace, you might miss out on opportunities in the short-term, but it can lead to the perfect artwork or science paper (or whatever you are working on) in the longer term if you give yourself that time to make something as perfect as it can be.

The first thing that popped into my mind for this principle was - how do you know when something’s good enough to be released? Personally as a blogger I wouldn’t recommend this tactic at all. People forever procrastinate on starting a blog because they don’t think their posts are “good enough”, and so I’m more of the opinion that you should just keep putting out new content (even if you don’t think it’s that great), and over time the more posts you write, naturally your ability to write increases.

Newport does try to address this point, but I don’t think he’s able to give any good strategies, which is sort of fair since it’s a pretty hard question to answer. But his solution is to:

“Give yourself enough time to produce something great, but not unlimited time. […] Progress is what matters, not perfection.”

His follow-on example is the author Stephanie Meyer, who would write in the small snatches of time after her kids had gone to bed, and after 6 months had produced the smash-hit Twilight.

For me this principle and example is where I felt the point of the book fell apart a bit. Stephanie Meyer was a full-time stay at home mum of 4. How is doing this slow productivity? Newport does notice the contradiction, and caveats that this is okay in the short-term if it’s for a temporary amount of time, because it can lead to something big and worth it (like a book deal). Honestly, I’m really not convinced. I think he should have been a bit more honest here that in some scenarios, the concept of slow productivity doesn’t work - and you’re just going to have to hustle to get shit done.

I’ll admit this also planted a seed of doubt for the whole premise of the book - there’s some great examples of where slow productivity has worked for people, but I suppose you could cherry-pick the other way and write a book where people maxed out their productivity and produced great things as well?

Conclusion

Overall though this book is good at reassuring the reader that it’s ok to be kind to yourself, and to not fall into the trap of trying to maximise your productivity. It’s a bit of a hard book to write and give advice on, since there’s a wide range of people (creatives, scientists, 9-to-5ers) who are all going to have varying amounts of flexibility in how they can change their working styles, but I think there were some good takeaways for me as a programmer.

What I would take away from this book are:

• Be more mindful of the tasks you take on. Create a short-list of projects you will focus on and if you’re given a task by someone else, be sure to communicate where that falls in the list of priorities.
• Use time-blocking: Batch small tasks, and schedule reoccurring ones.
• Double the amount of time you expect something to get done. And if that’s a really long time that’s ok - don’t try and squeeze something out in 6 months, let it take a whole year, and you will probably end up with something better if you gave that project the time to breathe.

… which is honestly sort of a vague list of takeaways that you could probably get in any other productivity book? But I do think this was a nice read just in terms of the food for thought it generated.

I think the one thing that I wish I could wave a magic wand and solve is just how many things I am interested in and want to work on - which doesn’t really fit into the “3 projects” approach. But I think I will take a closer look at trying to time-block my life and see how that works out.