Emma Goto

A fun YA sci-fi book with some good world-building.

To me it felt a bit stupid that Spensa would go to her enemy's space school, proceed to show off her skills as a pilot (these aliens have seen her skills in combat, couldn't that blow her cover?) and teach them the best way to train their pilots.. so that they could come and kill some humans. Of course through the power of friendship it all works out in the end. She didn't really try and blend in and try to pretend to be a different alien race either - she was her usual loud/angry self, with a lot of human mannerisms.Feels like throughout the book there wasn't really many consequences for her actions. Maybe I've read too many depressing adult sci-fi/fantasy books lately (looking at you, The Fifth Season) and this is just how YA is.

Two college students realise that they can gain super powers if they try and kill themselves, and manage to not die in the process.

I found the bits where they go in-depth into their suicide attempts super uncomfortable to read (am I a wuss? Maybe). The two main characters are both terrible people but I enjoyed the side characters, and the overall story was pretty decent.

Really liked the contrast between Bebe - a Chinese immigrant who wants her biological child back from her new adoptive (white) parents, and Mia, who has essentially stolen and raised a child that she gave birth to, but was not biologically hers.

I was rooting for both of these mothers, and they both come out on top - but who should a child belong to? The parents most equipped to care for them? The biological mother? The woman that physically gives birth to the child? I wanted Bebe to get her child back but at the same time I didn't see Mia as a “bad” character even though she's stolen a child from her biological parents.

The fact that the author grew up where the novel was set, Shaker Heights, makes the subtle racism you encounter throughout the book even more impactful since it probably comes from direct experience.

Alex is a girl with an edgy dark past who can see ghosts. So she ends up at Yale with the job of watching over a bunch of rich kids in secret societies perform very unethical magic (e.g. operating on some random dude to tell the future).

For the short period of time Alex's mentor, Darlington, was around he came off as super pretentious mansplainer. As soon as he disappears though I kept reading hoping for him to come back. The book doesn't feel as exciting when Alex has to fumble through solving a murder mystery by herself.

I do enjoy how the story jumps between different periods of time as we build up to finally learning how Darlington disappeared.I also liked how it turns out that Daisy was right there all along, but the concept of Alex and other murdered girls being a “wheel” kind of comes out of nowhere and just feels like the setup for book #2.

A very melancholy “will they or won't they” book about two people dipping in and out of each other's lives. It could have been very frustrating, since a lot of their issues boil down to miscommunication but I think the author pulled off the reasons for their breakups really well.

I do like that the ending is ambiguous, I don't think I could have been satisfied if they did end up together with a fairytale happy ending. If anything I would have been fine with an ending where they don't end up staying together at all (seems more realistic).

Set in a land where there's devastating earthquakes and societies either try and survive through the aftermath or end up dying out. There's magic users (Orogenes), who have the power to prevent these earthquakes and wield its power (as well as the life force of other people / nature). Even though they alone can keep the world from falling apart, untrained Orogenes can be a risk to society, and so they're considered to be less than human and are kept under the control of Guardians who will eliminate anyone that steps out of line.

It's a good fantasy book, but it's not a fun fantasy book.

The Orogenes are required to have sex with other Orogenes to produce babies, they lobotomise Orogenes that are too old to be trained and then use their natural instincts to subdue earthquakes, the book begins with a small Orogene child having her hand broken so that she is taught a lesson by her Guardian.

I liked the way the author brought together the storyline of three separate Orogenes - one just embarking on her training, another much further along, and a third woman who living a peaceful life, hiding her powers. I found it really engrossing and hard to put down. So for that I give this one a 5, but I also find it pretty depressing and so I won't be reading the next two books in the trilogy

One of those books about slavery and the treatment of Black people in America that is really hard to read, but worth reading.

I went into this not knowing that much about American history so I took everything at face value, not realising this was an alternate history / fictional version of America (in hindsight the underground railroad being a literal railroad is a bit too crazy to be true. Whoops!)

I thought it was uncharacteristic of Cora at the end to give up the location of the railroad, she was threatened with a gun but surely being shot by a gun would be a better fate than what was in store for her if she was tried for murder?

I wish it was a lot longer!

I think this book got over-hyped for me from all the Goodreads reviews. Good concept, straightforward writing. It's sad but not that sad.

3.5 stars. I read it one sitting so it wasn't completely bad, but I wasn't convinced by the romance subplot, I don't think the main character had enough going for her that a god would fall in love with her? I also didn't really connect with most of the characters because we didn't really get a chance to know them, only on a surface level.

A fun fantasy read about breaking in/out of a maximum security prison. It ended on a huge cliffhanger which is kind of frustrating. Won't be picking up the sequel but I might check out the Netflix series when it comes out.

Letters between two time-traveling agents on opposite sides of a war. It started out really slow and I didn't really see the point of it but everything came together towards the end. I preferred the parts of the book that weren't letters and were proper descriptions of what was happening.

Giving this a sort-of 4, I wouldn't necessarily recommend buying this one though.

I almost gave up on this book 30 pages in because it felt like JK was trying to cram in 7 books worth of “adult” themes that she hadn't been able to do in Harry Potter. But then I kept reading.. and I got really hooked on all the characters, and before I knew it I had read the whole book in one sitting.

Plot tl;dr - the main character, Genly, is on a planet where everyone is is neither male or female. It reminds me of the Ancillary Justice series where everyone is referred to as a “she” (although this book came 40 years earlier!)

The book defaults to “he” pronouns for everyone. I wish it used “she” instead, since it becomes very easy when reading to just imagine all the genderless people as men, since Genly does a lot of interacting with people in power who are traditionally men e.g. a prime minister and a king. However this can be explained away by Genly being a male and being biased towards choosing “he”.

A couple of times Genly gender stereotypes (“he was graceful as a girl”) and even right at the end of the book he mentions that a child must be a boy because “no girl could keep a grim a silence as he did”. I guess the author was trying to prove a point by being overtly obvious with the stereotyping but at the same time it's kind of frustrating to read since Genly is a likeable main character otherwise and it's not really pointed out that he's doing it.

I wish we could have seen some more growth from Genly and for him to move away from gender stereotyping as the book progressed.

Still it's a 50 year old book so considering its age, it's pretty good!

Wells had his own affair and this book was apparently partially based off that - I'm not sure if we're supposed to feel sympathetic as the main character and his mistress have a whole Romeo/Juliet “I can't bear to be parted from you and I might kill myself” moment because the guy is cheating on his wife! No sympathy for you sir!

The book really trudged on too. I don't have any interest in politics and we had to read the character's whole life story of how he got into politics. It only got interesting right at the end where the guy decided to abandon his wife and run away with his lover.

I went into this one with a bit of scepticism, considering that the “10,000 hour rule” talked about in the book has been to a certain extent debunked.

I question some of the claims he makes, sometimes it didn't feel like there was enough evidence for what he was saying. But it did make for an interesting read!

Not sure that I'd recommend anyone to read it (there's better classic English literature out there) but it was interesting. My favourite part was the way the judge's death was described at the end.

A quick, fun sci-fi read with a unique concept (people over 75 choosing to become soldiers). The dialogue felt a bit wooden which made it harder to feel any attachment to the characters, and there's the cliche of the seemingly ordinary main character being really good at everything he does which comes across as forced and unrealistic.

I've enjoyed some of Murakami's other books but this one just didn't grab me. The main character's friendship with the underaged girl kind of creeped me out too.

I recently read the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. It explores the note-taking method of a famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who published a *huge* amount of work in his lifetime (70 books and 400+ articles) - and it was quite possibly due to the efficient way he took notes.

Although the book was primarily aimed at students and academics who have to write papers, I still gleaned some really good lessons from it that I think are applicable to developers, especially those who write blog posts about what they learn.

Write notes in your own words

When studying and making notes, a common approach is to copy down definitions of things straight from the textbook or learning resource that you are using. If you’re attending a lecture or listening to a course online, and are a super-fast typist, you might even be able to directly quote what your instructor is saying straight into your notes.

The problem that comes with writing notes this way is that you’ve been able to skip the work of actually understanding the content. If you go back and re-read your notes a couple of times, this will create the illusion of understanding (as you will be able to recall bits of it in your memory) but saying it in your own words takes a bit more thought and brainpower to do.

When writing your notes, it is important that you do the work upfront of understanding the meaning, by making sure they’re written in your own words. This will save you the hassle of trying to understand it later.

Where writing notes can turn into a problem

You probably will have some sort of notebook (whether it’s paper-based or digital) where you jot down all your notes. If you’re organised, you may even have some sort of tagging system too! Keeping notes is good practice, but problems can arise depending on what you do with the notes after you’ve written them.

Over time as you learn and note down new things, your collection of notes will grow bigger and bigger. It can start to be a bit overwhelming, especially if your notes are disjointed and all over the place without much clear organisation. If you’re looking through your notes for a new topic to blog about, it may be hard to find something worth blogging about.

Even worse - you may have documented the solution to a particularly gnarly problem you solved at work (which would make for some great blog content!) but after coming back to it later you’re finding it hard to turn it into a blog. What made solving this problem so difficult, exactly? Why did we need to solve it in the first place?

When you quickly jot down notes, you’ll probably skip writing down all of the details, because in that moment, you can remember all of it just fine. But when you come back to these notes later, you may have completely forgotten the context in which they were written, and thus these notes will lose some of their value.

Understanding and writing down your notes gets you two thirds of the way there. But there's a third thing you need to do to write truly effective notes. Step three involves something called a **slip-box**.

What is the slip-box (or Zettelkasten) method?

Soon after you’ve jotted down your notes you need to rewrite your notes into “permanent notes” that will live in your slip-box.

A slip-box, also known as a “card index” or “zettelkasten” in German, is where Niklas Luhmann would store all of his permanent notes on index cards. Today, you can also accomplish the same sort of thing thanks to using various software, some even specifically made for Zettelkasten.

Each of these notes shouldn’t be excessively long - Luhmann kept things succinct by only using one side of each index card. But at the same time, he made sure that the notes themselves were written properly with full sentences, and were able to be understood without any additional context.

As he created more notes, he would find links to other notes he had created, and with a numbering/lettering system would denote certain notes as “sub notes” of other notes. If a note was related to two separate notes, it might be made a sub note of one, and the linkage to the other note would be noted on the index card itself.

The act of writing these notes (properly) and finding the connections between them and other notes isn’t easy. It’s a lot harder than just jotting down notes in a notebook and calling it a day. But by doing this expensive brainpower up front, you’re essentially building up a library of interconnected knowledge from the ground-up.

As you build up your knowledge library and find the relations between bits of knowledge, the real beauty of this system is that it will organically let you find topics to write about - they essentially will have written themselves because you will have done the work upfront of explaining it in your own words, and connecting it to other notes in your slip-box.

Implementing the slip-box method as a developer

Prior to reading this book, my collection of notes was messily stored in Dropbox Paper without much categorisation, and missing lots of context. In some cases, it was just a link to an article or some documentation with a "TIL" written underneath it.

I've taken a little look around at what's available to store and write my notes in, and for now I've settled on Notion. I've started to make the effort to convert some of my "messy" notes into "proper" ones, and I'm finding that I'm actually skipping the act of putting the permanent notes into a slip-box and going straight to creating blog draft out of this content. So I can't yet comment on the effectiveness of properly using a slip-box but for me at least it is providing some results!

If I do find this approach useful in the long term, I'll be sure to write up a post detailing my experiences. In the meantime, I'd love to hear about your note-taking experiences - what does and doesn't work for you?

Thanks for reading!

I look up to Flavio as a great content creator but I don't think there was enough value/depth in this book to make it worth the price.

I knew of the atomic bombings from the Japanese side but going into this book I didn't know about Oppenheimer (the “father of the atomic bomb”) so I learnt a lot. However at 600 pages this book is very dense, which I guess serves its purpose as a very-detailed biography. I do wish it was a bit easier to read, though!

It's insane the amount of fraud that Theranos managed to pull off. Pretty compelling read.

The book explores the rise/fall of a bunch of different societies. I found most interesting the bits about the people on Easter Island and the Norse in Greenland. Took me a fair while (2 weeks) to get through this one, a bit of a long read.

Left slightly confused by some inconsistencies - seems like the donors at the hospital / recovery centres weren't treated as poorly as you would expect, considering that the Madame / Miss Emily mentioned how badly the students at other schools were being treated. Wonder if each patient getting their own room, carer etc. is cost-effective. Is raising the children in schools really cost-effective either? Allowing the donor adults to live alone after high school also runs the risk of them getting into drugs etc. that could ruin their organs too.