Emma Goto

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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 😂

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.

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.

When I saw my favourite book roasting podcast (If Books Could Kill) covered this book, I figured I'd read it first and then see how the podcast would roast it.

The book posits that thanks to feminism, women no longer need to rely on marriage (and men) for financial stability. But that it has left men in a weird spot where their societally defined role as a breadwinner hasn't really been updated with the times.

The author offers 3 solutions to try and help men in today's society:

1. Start boys a year later than girls at school to account for the different rates at which boys and girls mature. The podcast raises a good point that a) what do you do with childcare for the boys for an extra year and b) won't that cause stigma because it sends a message that boys are dumber than girls (at a young age anyway?)
2. Similar to the STEM drive for women, we should be having a HEAL drive for men to get them into traditionally "caring" roles like nursing, teaching etc.
3. Men and women get 6 months paid parental leave each - which ties into the idea of making childcare a bigger role in a man's life, since being the breadwinner is no longer the default option. The author does say though that maybe women can handle more of the younger years while men take on the older years... Could be interesting but not sure I agree.

Points 2 and 3 sound good, although it sounds quite expensive to get governments to implement. HEAL roles are criminally underpaid, and I feel like are less respected as professions in society - maybe bringing more men into the field could inadvertently help fix this as it becomes less of a "woman's job"?

And similarly with parental leave, at the end of the day women having to do more of the childcare is the real career killer, so we need to remove that assumed responsibility as much as possible so I'm in full agreement there.

However the author also doesn't think we need gender parity in STEM - his reasoning being that although it's taboo to say, some women are more likely to tend towards "caring" roles as a gender, and so maybe we should aim for a slightly lower number (I forget what he suggested, maybe 40/60?)

He also points to statistics where the gender ratio in STEM is closer to even in poorer countries, but surprisingly still very skewed in richer countries that have better gender equality overall - and so posits that this is because women are more likely to enter STEM when they need to financially, rather than because they truly want to do it as a career.

... A quick Google about this finds a study which terms this as the "Gender Equality Paradox" and that this could just be because the male/female stereotypes are stronger in richer countries, so it seems like the author may be wrong on that point. STEM does pay more, and so if we want to close the gender pay gap we probably should continue to aim for parity as much as possible.

Listening to the podcast afterwards, it went less roasty, and was more a good faith take on the topic. I only ended up getting halfway through it before being distracted by other things. Although the comments on Spotify were all pretty outraged that the podcast hosts went too easy on the book, I do think we need more conversations like this. I think people get a bit outraged because women's rights isn't really a "solved" issue and we still have a long way to go so it's like, why are we focusing on men? But I think with stuff like parental leave or a HEAL drive, it can help men and women at the same time, doesn't have to be an either or.

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.