Emma Goto
Half of the Galvin family's 12 children (incl 10 boys!) have schizophrenia. A riveting read into the Galvin family, the toll schizophrenia takes, and the advances made in the research of schizophrenia over the last 50+ years.
Commendable that the many of the Galvin family came forward to give interviews for this book. They suffered a great deal. I hope this book helps them to heal and/or gives them some consolation that their family ended up being a help to the advancement of schizophrenia research.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
In a way you can't not like this book because it's a memoir about someone's final years on earth, but it is well-written. Especially considering that the author passed away before he finished it, the editors did a good job of turning into a “finished” product.
I only cried a little bit! And that was right at the end when his wife wrote the afterword.
This works really well as an audiobook. McConaughey will shout, use Australian accents (actually quite well - I'm impressed) and at times it felt almost poetic.
At 6 hours in length, I think this would be way too short (and all over the place) to read as a conventional novel and I would probably dock it a star or two if I did.
The author has had a very, very impressive career helping to champion the art of hostage negotiation within the FBI.
It goes into detail on both Ruby Ridge and Waco, which has coincidentally been mentioned in a couple of other books I have recently read (like Educated) so it's been good to get that additional context on American history.
Obviously Gary Noesner's done a lot of great things and has saved a lot of people but I felt at times he was patting himself on the back a bit too much. There was a lot of “I'm right and you're wrong” which I wanted to take seriously but at the same time felt like I had to take with a grain of salt due to the heavy bias throughout the book.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
3.5 stars - I wouldn't recommend you go out and read it, but it's not complete trash either.
The book covers the concept of nudges - how small changes to the way people are presented choices will change their decisions. The key point being you aren't removing the ability to choose or removing certain choices, just the way they are presented.
E.g. adding health warnings to cigarette packs or making organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in.
However the book also does a lot of pondering on the way American society could be improved by these nudges (e.g. healthcare) and even gets side tracked onto the topic of changing how marriage works.
As a non-American and non-politician, a lot of this felt irrelevant to me. The authors made good suggestions but at the same time they're just telling me things that I'm not going to be able to do anything about anyway.
It's also a bit dated. At one point the authors make a joke that women in Sweden were more likely to choose a portfolio because the authors' wives are organised (idk, some sort of stereotype about women? Felt weird to read).
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
A meandering look at the Mormon religion - its history, right from its founder Joseph Smith and his secret proclivities for polygamy, the founding of Utah, through to present-day Mormonism and its many offshoots (notably the fundamentalist Mormons who still practice polygamy). Krakaeur also makes a connection between some of the violence committed by Mormons in its early history with the murders carried out by two fundamentalist Mormons in the present day.
Published in 2003, I can imagine this book did some good towards exposing some of the church's dark sides (for instance it wasn't until 2013 when they stopped discouraging interracial marriage at their youth groups). However it did feel anti-religion and anti-Mormon (although weirdly Krakauer preferred to express this via quoting from books/other resources rather than outright saying it himself) which as a non-religious person I'm fine with but is probably very off-putting for any potential Mormon readers.
I was also expecting more of a “true crime” style novel but instead I felt like there was a lot of jumping around. The author would mention present-day Mormons towards the start of the novel and then reference them again towards the end (although making sure though to remind you who they were) which didn't really help me to connect with their stories.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
Listened to the audiobook version, well narrated.
A very “Aussie” coming-of-age story, set in 1980s Brisbane, filled with a bunch of colourful characters - Vietnamese drug dealers, a bikie gang member, and real-life Slim Halliday (“The Houdini of Boggo Road”) who escaped twice from a Brisbane jail. What makes it all the more amazing is the book is partially based on the author's own childhood (Slim was once his babysitter, and his dad really did spend his days living as a chain-smoking recluse who read books all day).
One of the major themes of the book is what makes someone a "good man". The main character Eli is trying to figure out if he is a good man, as well as if the people around him (who have criminal backgrounds) are also good men. It's interesting that people like convicted felon Slim and bikie gang member Alex are portrayed in that "good man" light even after their past misdeeds, but someone like Teddy is "bad" once their bad deeds are uncovered. Maybe would have been cool to get that redemption, but also highlights Eli's potential naivety / young age throughout most of the book.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
Originally published in the late 1990s, The Power of Now was written after its author, Eckhart Tolle, had an epiphany at age 29 and became “enlightened”. The book achieved huge success once it was recommended by popular talkshow host Oprah Winfrey.
The author holds some very strong beliefs which almost feel like his own religion in a way. This may turn you off if you are fairly anti-religious or already follow a religion.
He also makes some (to me, dubious) claims about his teachings. For example, that it will help you age slower, and strengthen your immune system.
(Although I was left feeling sceptical as I read his claims, I am open to acknowledging that his teachings could help lower your stress, which in turn probably helps you to stay healthy and live a little bit longer).
Nonetheless, for all that I disliked about the book I still enjoyed it enough to write this blog post about it!Acknowledge the thoughts in your head, and let go
People spend almost all of their time thinking. Sometimes, we might dwell on things that have happened to us in the past, or worry about things that might happen in the future.
Holding onto these thoughts isn’t very useful. It prevents us from enjoying the “now” because we spend so much time stuck in the past or the future.
When these thoughts come into your head, you should take a step back and observe the thought impartially. Don’t beat yourself up about these negative thoughts either (because that’s just creating more negative thoughts). Acknowledge it, and by acknowledging it you’ll have an easier time of letting it go.
In a way, a lot of what Eckhart Tolle talks about is very similar to the concept of mindfulness, which you may be familiar with. Using meditation apps like [Headspace](https://www.headspace.com/mindfulness) can help you to hone your mindfulness skill, even for as little as 5 - 10 minutes a day.
Don’t yearn for happiness in the future, because you’re never going to get there
This is something I’m very guilty of. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking “I’ll be happy once I attain X” or “I’ll be happy when I become Y”. But the truth is that you’ll reach that milestone, and then you’ll set yourself another one! You’ll forever be chasing happiness in the future, when instead you should be focusing on happiness in the “now”.
Being happy today is easier said than done. I recently listened to an audiobook, Habits for Happiness, which gave a couple of tips:
* Every day, think of three things that you are grateful for
* Make sure to get enough sleep, and regularly exercise
* Create a vision board for yourself that outlines all the things you want to achieve to be happy
* Set yourself goals to work towards achieving your vision
I love goal setting and creating vision boards, although it technically does seem to conflict with what Eckhart Tolle talks about. I think the way to approach it is that it’s okay to have a vision, but you have to enjoy the process of getting there, rather than putting off the enjoyment for until you get there.
## Conclusion
As much as I rolled my eyes at some of what Tolle had to say, I still did feel that this book had an impact on me. Especially during this pandemic I sometimes do feel myself struggling a little bit and this book was a helpful reminder to spend less time worrying or yearning and to try to enjoy the “now”.
From looking at its reviews on Goodreads, if you are already fairly familiar with meditation, zen or other spiritual books I would give this one a miss. However if you are fairly new to the topic (like me) and are open to books on spirituality or willing to look past the dodgy bits, I would recommend giving this book a go.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
Listened to this one (+ its follow-up, “Habits for Happiness at work”) for free through Audible.
There's the usual suspects - getting enough sleep, getting enough exercise. Tim Sharp also recommends creating a vision board for what happiness would look like for you, and then setting SMART goals to work towards achieving them.
One highlight for me was the mention of the “tyranny of when” (which after Googling looks like is a phrase he coined himself). i.e. we shouldn't be falling into the trap of “When X happens I will be happy”. I'm definitely guilty of this one!
Might be worth a listen if you've used up your credits on your Audible account but I wouldn't go out of your way to listen to it otherwise.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
Nadia Eghbal's recent book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, covers what the open source experience is like for maintainers today.
It ends with the following sentence:
“We don’t have all the answers yet, but I’m hoping this book helps point us towards the right questions.”
This felt like a very apt conclusion, for I did walk away from this book feeling a lot more sympathy for those who do work in open source, but also without any real answers or solutions for what we can do about open source.
This post is a summary of some of the things I learned from Nadia’s book. At around 250 pages it’s not too long of a read so I would definitely recommend buying the book for yourself if you have any interest in this topic.The open source community has grown friendlier, and more inclusive
Eghbal points out that open source has come a long way in becoming a more open and inclusive community. Repositories now have codes of conduct, and there is a culture of being generally welcoming and friendly towards first-time contributors. This contrasts with the earlier “benevolent dictators” of open source like Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux) who in 2018 apologised for his many years of "unprofessional and uncalled for" behaviour.
I’ll admit gave me a chuckle when I turned the page to see Torvalds giving the finger, juxtaposed with Sindre Sorhus surrounded by Huskies.
Github is also credited for reducing the barrier to participating in open source. Since we have standardised on Github as the place most open source repositories live, this means users are more likely to be familiar with the interface (and to already have an account). This makes it a lot easier for users to open issues when they encounter bugs or have questions, as well as to raise pull requests to fix these bugs or add new features.
Popularity can lead to maintainer fatigue
The generally welcoming nature of open source combined with the ease by which users can create PRs or issues can result in a lot of work for maintainers (especially those who maintain a repository by themselves). They may feel pressured to respond to every issue and pull request received, and to spend time helping contributors to get their pull request to a state where it can be merged.
Of course, not all contributors are a burden. It may be that by taking the time to help a first-time contributor merge a pull request, they could go on to contribute more useful pull requests in the future. But if more than 50% of contributors are one-off contributors to a project, that can be a lot of time invested by maintainers that they're not going to see a return on.
This pressure can cause some maintainers to want to quit. However even quitting can be hard! Deleting a popular repository could “break the internet” as was the case with left-pad. And finding someone to take over your repository might mean needing to put your faith in a relative stranger, who could end up adding malicious code to steal your Bitcoins.
Should open source be a one-way mirror?
One of the potential suggestions Eghbal poses to this problem is to make open source a "one-way mirror". In practice, this would mean that users would be able to see the code, as well as any discussions that maintainers are having, but would no longer be able to open pull requests or issues asking for help.
Maintainers would be able to opt-in certain contributors who they know would bring value, or they could allow people who are sponsoring their project access as well.
This would drastically reduce the amount of time maintainers have to spend responding to users’ requests, and allow them to do more high-value work.
With the inclusive and welcoming nature of open source, there could be some anger directed towards maintainers who take this approach. I think it would be too drastic of a change to be widely adopted any time soon, but I think there's a lot of inspiration we can take from this idea. Maybe there's some sort of middle ground?
Looking for solutions
Eghbal has pointed out some of the problems plaguing open source today, but given this is a very hard problem to solve, understandably there are no perfect solutions yet.
To some extent, we can mitigate some of the busywork maintainers have to do by using bots and other automation (like running tests when contributors open PRs). Maintainers can also uphold a certain set of standards that a pull request must meet before it becomes reviewed, and provide clear documentation to help first-time contributors meet these standards.
Maintainers could also employ curators who could maintain a similar role to what moderators do on Twitch - weed out any low-value issues or pull requests, and surface to the maintainers only the issues and pull requests that are worth the attention.
As Github is the platform of choice for open source, maintainers are also reliant on Github to provide the features they need to work effectively. For example, users can now vote on issues by using the “thumbs up” emoji, but for a long time this feature was not available, and so maintainers had to deal with receiving notifications from users leaving “+1” comments.
## Conclusion
As someone who has dabbled a little bit in the open source community, Working in Public has provided me with a lot of food for thought, and definitely makes me more sympathetic towards maintainers!
The book feels especially relevant this month with Hacktoberfest, which has unfortunately caused a lot of difficulty for maintainers of open source projects.
I'm interested to see what direction the open source community takes into the future. I think the idea of curating issues/PRs on repositories (similar to Twitch moderation) could also be a great way for people to start contributing to an open source repository if they don't feel comfortable enough with the codebase, but want to help out.
Maybe there's some way we can crowdsource this and create some sort of platform so that maintainers can ask for help curating, and volunteers can step in. Could be interesting!
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
Follows the story of two sisters living through Germany's invasion of France during WW2.
Isabelle starts off as a reckless, fairly unlikeable character who thinks she can get out of any situation with her beauty and charm. She redeems herself with her heroics and bravery, and seems to grow up, however it seems like she never really faced consequences for her initial naive and impulsive behaviour and got away with everything.I did like the sort-of twist where you hope that it might be Isabelle who's the elderly woman in the present day and then it turns out that she passed away fairly soon after the end of the war, and that it is in fact her sister. That present day reveal in Paris was probably the best bit of the novel.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
A glimpse of the struggles and discrimination Koreans faced living in Japan, as well their struggle of trying to find an identity - never being accepted as Japanese, but not quite Korean either.
Dialog felt clunky towards the end, and the characters introduced in the last section felt more shallow and one dimensional.
I'll give it a 4.5 stars. An interesting retelling of Achilles' story, focusing on his relationship with Patroclus. The Iliad itself doesn't outright mention any sort of romance between the two of them but interestingly, other ancient Greeks did interpret it as a romance. It's only more recently that people were keen to interpret their relationship as a friendship instead.
I enjoyed how flawed Achilles' character became as his pride got the better of him.The ending didn't really make me as sad as I thought it would, since in the end the two were reunited in the afterlife. Another fun fact I learnt was that Achilles and Patroclus were really buried in the same tomb, and that Alexander the Great and his male "companion" (friendship or romantic, who knows) paid it a visit.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
A very gripping memoir. I found the audiobook reader's voice grating at first, but her impressions of other people's voices were really good and I came to enjoy it.
Even though it should seem unbelievable that Tara would keep returning to visit her family to experience yet more abuse, her way of thinking is clearly laid out, and you can see why she does.
I wouldn't go into the Night Circus expecting a lot of action or a well-explained magic system, it's a lot more vague than that. But I did enjoy the author's writing style and the mysterious/magical vibe I got from reading it.
It's interesting to see how divisive this book is, looking at the Goodreads reviews, so I guess you'll either like it or you won't.
I had a couple of nitpicks:
Tsukiko felt too much like a stereotype of a Japanese person, doing a tea ceremony, etc. and it feels like the author chucked her in for the exotic-ness of it, or made her Japanese to make her seem more mysterious.There was no depth to the love story either - there's not really any reason for Marco and Celia to fall in love, other than that both are strong magicians dueling against each other. You could also see it coming from a mile away, so I was confused that Marco initially got together with Isobel, and stayed together with her for a long time. The break up between them didn't end up being that big of a deal either so it felt a bit pointless.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
There was a lot more action in this than the first book (which I gave 4 stars).
I'm really hoping there isn't going to be a love triangle in one of the future books but it seems like it's heading that way. Or maybe Adolin can be killed off so that Kaladin will swoop in. Also it felt convenient that in the end the Parshendi were considered the bad guys, and it was the right thing to do to kill them off, so that our characters could remain as the heroes of the story. Would have liked to see more of the "good" Parshendi (maybe that will come in a future book?)
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
So Scout finds out that her dad Atticus is a racist, and she's not because she's “color blind” (but would never marry a black person so is she really) and then in the end she forgives him and all is well.
Feels bizarre to me because the climax of the book is Scout's argument with Atticus, and the resolution is that she was wrong to argue because Atticus is a racist but at least he's not a mega-racist?
Feel like the book should have come with an introduction explaining that it's just a draft of a book, it feels wrong that it's been sold as-is.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.
Somewhere between a 4 and a 5. I think I got a bit bored partway through, and it took me a couple of months to come back and finish it off. Most interesting part for me was how a lot of things in human society are imaginary (like money, the concept of a company, etc) but we all buy into them being real, and so that's what makes it “real”.
Loved how the Angela's backstory (one of the main characters) was revealed throughout the book. The potential alien lurking throughout the book was pretty gripping too. The book was longer than it needed to be though.
I didn't find Angela's romances to be that convincing either. She's put on such a pedestal (in terms of appearance) and then gets with some ordinary dudes. She uses Paresh, but then ends up caring for him, but I feel like a hardened badass like Angela would end up ditching him?Also Ian's creepy stalking near the end of the book was sort of acknowledged, but then all swept under the rug as soon as he got with the girl. His coworkers didn't even care that he was abusing police powers to watch her on cameras. Felt useless as a side plot if there wasn't going to be any consequences for it.
Originally posted at www.emgoto.com.