Emma Goto

I first saw a bit of a buzz around this one in a Slack channel for books at work, and was again reminded of it as I was browsing through the trending books section of Hardcover, so I decided to give it a read. The concept itself is rather intriguing - it follows a group of women locked in a jail for reasons unknown (and the women seem to have lost part of their memory in the events leading up to being jailed). The protagonist, who is the youngest woman locked in the jail, has never known life outside of it and so has never met a man.

I don't think I was as blown away by it as others have been though. It's interesting, but the book leaves you with a lot of questions and I didn't really feel that satisfied with the ending. It's sort of sci-fi, but I guess I like sci-fi when it actually answers the questions for you.

The women escape after the men disappear and then one by one as time passes, they each die, eventually leaving the youngest. She never figures out how the men escaped (and where to), but they do come across many other jails where other people (either a cell full of women or full of men) have all died. None of this is ever explained either!

A fun read about a girl trying to escape the clutches of her mother, a sorceress, who is trying to find a rich man to marry. I mean, as fun as having an evil sorceress for a mother can be - but the plot moves along quite quick and it's easy to read. Even though the main character is only 14, the side characters are more middle aged so it's a pretty solid book for adults.

The book follows a female scientist who enters training to become an astronaut. Taylor Jenkins Reed clearly did a lot of research for this book, but to the point where I felt like there was too much info dumping at the beginning as she was explaining how astronaut training works, etc.

One of the main plotlines of the book is a lesbian romance between two astronauts, and them having to keep it a secret, since it was not yet accepted in the 70s and would have gotten them kicked out of NASA. If you've ever seen the show For All Mankind, there's a pretty similar plotline in that one - and I feel like that did a better job of pulling it off.

I usually really like Reed's books but this one felt a bit so-so to me! The ending and overall romance felt more cheesy than anything. Not sure what was the point of killing off all of the other astronauts, and then leaving behind Vanessa to have this unlikely survival. And the "confession" scene in the command centre where they talk in metaphors to get around the fact that they can't reveal they are in a relationship to each other.. feels a bit like anyone would be able to pick up on what they were saying.

A solid rom-com book! About two chess prodigies who battle each other with also lots of yearning and pining. It's a little bit unrealistic that the female lead suddenly becomes a chess prodigy after years of not playing chess, but I'll let it slide. I still think the author has a hard-on for Adam Driver though, are her male leads always Adam Driver-esque?

Winner of the Arthur C Clarke award in 2018.

There's a lot of interesting concepts in this book - exoskeletons, babies born from the genes of a single parent, gene editing and so on. I felt like there was too much jumping around between all these different stories, and not enough time spent in depth with each story like I would have wanted.

I hesitated between 3.5 and 4 stars, because it's not a bad book per se - so I decided to bump it up to a 4 for the concepts that it raises!

About 6 astronauts who are continuously circling the moon on the space station. Not much actually happens on board the space station, and the book is more about how the station rotates around the earth and what the crew members see on each rotation. Even though the timespan of the book is quite short, the station speeds around the earth in 90 minutes so there's a lot of rotations.

Somehow the author can just keep on describing each new rotation, and the countries that it passes, in really interesting ways and it doesn't get boring at all. The author clearly did her research on how the station would actually rotate.

A very fantastical-yet-not-fantasy book, sort of similar to 100 Years of Solitude. It follows the story of a family in Iran post the Islamic Revolution in the 1960s. Although the book has magic, ghosts and even a mermaid, it's missing that something that would make me want to categorise it as a fantasy book - maybe because of its very serious subject matter, and really the lack of anything good happening. (It's just one tragedy after another). The author escaped from Iran herself, and with little cultural references explained in the footnotes, you can see how it's a lament for what could have been for her country.

I gave it a 4 stars because it has a bit of a slow start, with the fantasy elements feeling quite overwhelming and confusing at first.

A murder mystery about two children who both go missing from the same summer camp, 15 years apart. The book jumps back and forth between the two time periods, introducing the children before their disappearances, as well as their (sometimes troubled) relationships with friends and family.

The middle part of the book was a bit hard to read as we started to see seemingly innocent people get framed, but it all ties up at the end for a mostly satisfying finish.

It became unexpectedly relevant when less than a week later, I saw all the news about the flooding of the summer camps in Texas. Sad stuff.

It ends with it turning out that the second child pretended to be murdered and actually ran away to live on a friend's deserted island away from civilization, until she could be emancipated at 18. I'm not too sure how much I agree with the logistics of a child living on an island for 5 years though. Is that really the best approach, especially since the dad went to jail for covering up her brother's murder anyway? And wouldn't her friend get in trouble for harbouring a minor on her island?

About first contact with an alien species (after Children of Time, I suppose this is Tchaikovsky's specialty). These aliens are interesting because they live on a planet devoid of light and communicate solely via electromagnetic waves. The book follows the POV of both human and alien, who can't communicate with each other and many misunderstandings ensue - albeit not so much in a a comedic way, but slightly more verging on horror.

Quite a short one. An elderly couple start seeing each other, after each of their respective partners have long passed away. Living in a small town, they continue to meet while ignoring the disapproving eyes of their neighbours. It's quite a cute, almost wholesome book (with some tinges of bittersweetness) about finding love in your old age.

The book centres around a young activist/hacker student and his university professor in London who has connections in rather high places. As his famous friends become embroiled in scandals, it seems like the professor is careening towards a downfall of his own.

I found the first half of this book really hard to get into. The author clearly knows what he's talking about, and the professor inhabits a very different world from us normal people (talking with Dukes and the like) and I think with a bunch of different characters being thrown at you it's hard to keep up with it all (or even care, if I'm being honest).

It did start to all come together in the second half of the book though, and I do appreciate that rather this just being a book about the student hacker and his underdog story, we get to see the perspective from the other side of the rich and famous. Overall though I didn't like it enough to recommend it, and hence why I'm giving it a 3.5/5.

If I had to sum up this book in one sentence it would be that the key to happiness and life satisfaction is to spend as much of your time in a “flow” state as possible. Even if you’re not familiar with the concept of flow itself, you’ve probably experienced it before - it’s that feeling when you really “lock in” to a task at hand, and can focus on it without any distractions, where time feels like it passes quicker, and you emerge with that satisfying sense of a job well done.

This isn’t just another pop science book on “how to find happiness” though, since the author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist who had quite extensively studied and was the originator of this concept of “flow”. Although the book is over 30 years old now, it still feels quite relevant. It’s aimed at regular readers so it’s not too heavy on the scientific concepts and is quite an interesting read, although I do feel at times it does get quite wordy and meander a bit.

How to enter a flow state

To enter a state of flow, there’s a fine line to tread between finding something that’s challenging enough that your brain wants to lock onto it as a problem that it wants to solve, but not so challenging that you feel defeated and have to give up mid-way. For me, the most common time I enter flow is when I get stuck into some code and can spend some number of hours on fixing a bug or programming a new feature without my mind wandering anywhere else.

The kind of activity you need to be doing to enter a flow-state is something that requires a skill. You don’t need to necessarily be skilled though - it’s as long as the activity is appropriate for your skill level. A natural example is a sport, or a hobby like art, or suprisingly even walking can get you in a flow state, if you use the time to observe the environment around you, or are working towards achieving some sort of goal (visiting landmarks, or walking a certain distance and so on).

Something that doesn’t require flow would be something like watching TV, where you are a more of a passive consumer. I could imagine that it is still possible to get into a flow state when watching TV though - maybe if you used the time to notice certain visual techniques that are being used, or if you watched something not in your native language as a way to improve your language skills.

Flow at work vs for leisure

It’s towards the end of the book where I feel the book finally gets to the good part, and introduces a rather interesting paradox - people tend to spend the majority of their time in “flow” while at work, and not in their leisure time. And although they may say that they wish they had to work less, they actually reported higher levels of satisfaction at work rather than in their free time, due to the amount of time they spent in flow.

You can imagine plopping onto your couch after a tiring day’s work and just switching on the TV to decompress. It can take your mind off things, but since there’s really no challenge in it, you don’t enter a state of flow and it might not quite be as satisfying.

The book’s answer to this is quite complicated and it would be a disservice to sum it up as “don’t be tired” but it is sort of like that a bit. Or at least be able to see the work at you do from a more positive angle, so then you still have the energy at the end of the day to do other things to keep you in a flow state (or find a new job).

Live your life in a state of flow

The book ends with suggesting that you strive to live your life always being in a state of flow. This is not an easy feat, since even if you find a satisfying job or multiple hobbies to help you enter flow states, jumping between these different activities will have you exit in and out of flow. And so you must find an overarching goal (basically your life’s purpose) such that all your sub-goals and the things you do are helping you proceed towards that main goal, which should help you be in a sense of flow all of the time.

Much easier said than done!

Goal-setting is such a personal activity that the book can’t really give you the answers on what they should be. This book doesn’t have a sequel, but if it did I feel like a natural follow-on would be find some sort of book on goal-setting. Or possibly Cal Newport’s book on “Deep Work” which is essentially about removing distractions so that you can spend extended periods of time focusing (and thus being in a flow state).

My thoughts

Overall, this was a book that leaves you with a lot of food for thought. Since it mostly makes reference to past studies done in the 60s and 70s, I would have loved a follow-up book or a revised edition, just to see what else has been learned from the science in the past couple of decades. But alas, the author passed away in 2021.

Another thing that wasn’t really covered in the book, but that in hindsight I would have liked clarified, is the difference between hyperfocus and flow. Although hyperfocus can have its merits, it’s also sometimes characterised as a negative thing, where you focus on something to the detriment of other parts of your life. In contrast, Csikszentmihalyi describes flow positively as being in a state of “optimal experience”.

If I get so stuck into a programming problem that I skip lunch and only stop when I realise it’s gotten dark outside, is that still flow, or is that hyperfocus? (Or both?) When I was younger, I can similarly remember getting hooked on video games in the same way. I suppose when you come up for air after a period of being locked in, the difference between flow and hyperfocus would be how you feel afterwards. Satisfied, or a sense of dismay at how you whiled the hours away?

I actually originally read this book a couple of years ago, but I felt like it was worth the re-read so I could more properly digest its contents (and write this book note on it). I actually bought a physical copy of it too. It’d been a long while since I’ve read a physical book (everything is on my Kindle these days) but man does it feel good! It’s unfortunate that living in my tiny Japanese apartment makes it hard to buy books, but I’d love to go back to having a proper physical library of books one day if I get a bigger place.

The book starts off quite slow-paced, as we are introduced to a character who has decided to quit her job to run a local bookshop. I'll admit that at first I didn't see the point of it - I didn't feel like anything was happening plot-wise - but by the end I felt really charmed by this one.

As the bookshop becomes a community and a place for locals to gather, the owner starts to grow into her role as bookshop owner as well. By the end I really wanted to visit the bookshop myself.

When I was a kid I wanted to run a bookshop (and live on the second floor above it) which I'm sure is a common dream for bookworms. But I guess running a bookshop is often more about the people that come to the store rather than the books themselves. I'm not much of a people person so I guess I'm glad that dream didn't pan out 😂

In comparison to the long-accepted belief that diseases can be spread at short distances via droplets that are coughed onto people, the field of aerobiology has been trying to prove that diseases can instead float long distances through the air since the 1940s.

Unfortunately the idea didn't quite take off. It's quite a hard thing to have enough evidence to convince people (even though scientific studies were done), and there was also a lot of strong opposition from some scientists, partly because the miasma or "bad air" theory from a much earlier time in history had already been disproved.

It was only once we were months into COVID, and enough scientists made some noise that it started to become a more accepted theory in scientific society, as we discovered that COVID was indeed airborne.

I think it's an interesting book which goes to show as rational and logical the field of science seems to be, scientists are still human and can be quick to dismiss a theory if it sounds "stupid". I'm sure the environment of COVID didn't help, since people would not have wanted to stir up more panic by considering the fact that COVID could be airborne.

Interestingly, famed aviator Charles Lindbergh even makes an appearance as he helps a scientist carry out tests to see what’s floating up at high altitudes. I got a bit sidetracked and found out that he was quite the cheater, and there's even a conspiracy theory he killed his first child.

Overall an interesting read, it provides a fairly interesting overview of the field of aerobiology.

A robot steps out of his regular routine as a manservant and discovers that the human world as we know it seems to have died out. What's left are robots stuck with their programmed conditions - to wait for guests to arrive to serve them tea, for instance.

But since there are no guests coming, they are destined to wait forever.

Although Uncharles the robot is quite fixed (well, programmed) in his ways, it's not in an annoying way, and his POV adds an interesting layer to the story as we more immediately grasp what's going on compared to the naivety of Uncharles. Another great book by Tchaikovsky.