Jaime

Meh. I kind of liked how it started but then it just seemed a little too…something.

meh, kind of cute concept but it just never pulled me in and I got irritated with how slow the plot was moving forward

I ate it up. It was easy to read, but touched on some real topics.

weirdly cozy fantasy vibes despite also being a bit dark. A nice read

A bit formulaic but still a cool topic. I really want to know how much of the consciousness research mentioned in the book is real.

It was fine

Huh. I guess it was a commentary on consumerism. Didn’t go anywhere super interesting with it though.

I enjoyed the previous three books but this one was a notch above

This was very YA - I might have liked it better as a kid.

The first half of this book introduced some novel and super-insightful frameworks for thinking about how society works, both on the individual level and at higher orders: the thinking ladder, the emergence tower, the thought pile vs speech curve, political genies vs golems. I kind of want everyone I know to read the first half so I can reference these concepts in any conversation.

The second half takes those frameworks and applies them to evaluating some major issues with the political left and right. I’m not going to attempt to explain them here because I think you need to read the first half of the book to be ready to be open-minded to the (IMO) quite valid concerns he raises.

The book wasn’t perfect - it got a bit bogged down with an over-abundance of supporting evidence in the second half. But it was a pretty enjoyable read (the illustrations add a lot!) and I’ll be thinking about it for a while!

“Delightfully humorous” is not quite how I would put it. There were some pretty funny scenes but the overall post-apocalyptic backdrop was still kinda grim. Still, I liked it

Got a bit in and just…didn’t care about the characters or the plot

I liked the plot enough to be curious how it ended but it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable read. It was painful watching Nathaniel make so many mistakes and seeing Bartimaeus just get ordered around. Maybe the series redeems itself in the end?

This was a bit like a tongue twister for my brain. It explores “recursive mentalizing” as in “he knows that she knows that he knows that she knows”, which taken ad infinitum sums to “common knowledge”.

The big takeaway was that humans treat something that is truly common knowledge (everyone knows that everyone knows) differently from private knowledge or even reciprocal knowledge, and the math supports that as rational.

Some really cool stuff in here. There was the usual game theory discussions of prisoners dilemma, but also of “stag hunt”, “battle of the sexes”, “chicken”, etc. In these games, common knowledge can be used to solve the coordination problems to get to win-win scenarios.

Conversely, there are many times humans desperately want to avoid common knowledge, and a lot of otherwise irrational-seeming social niceties make sense in this context.

If you fart in public but you're sure no one heard you, are you embarrassed? What if someone did hear you but you don't think they know you know that? If you can keep up the pretense that you don't know they know you know ... ad infinitum, you probably aren't embarrassed, but if it becomes ratified as “common knowledge” (e.g. by eye contact or a sudden loud silence) then you are.

Also:
- why it is rational to use innuendo (ie avoiding direct speech to avoid common knowledge) for veiled bribes, threats, or sexual advances
- the dangers of cancel culture and the self-muzzling of research institutions
- biological traits that ensure common knowledge (eg direct speech, eye contact, blushing, laughing, crying)

It was a bit of a slog to get through, though I think that was mostly due to the constant brain-bending recursion problems, which Pinker did his best to keep as straightforward as possible.

A slow, sweet book. Not much of a plot but I didn't miss it too much.

Lots of stuff about introverts vs extroverts. I couldn't quite decide where to peg myself - the introversion traits remind me of myself as a kid, but as an adult I feel right in the middle. And ambivert maybe but she didn't actually talk about that in the book.

The main new(ish?) idea in this book is the five types of wealth: time, social, mental, physical, financial. The book is broken down into corresponding five sections, and each section is pretty densely packed with what felt like essentially summaries or top points from an array of other personal growth books. I've read a lot of those, so for me this book didn't feel like it added many new ideas, though I did appreciate the speed refresher. For someone who hasn't read much on the topic, this might be a great one-stop-shop!

Another one of these Grishaverse books that are pretty enjoyable while reading but somehow completely forgettable after.

A thought-provoking critique of how modern American government fails to accomplish goals, eg by focusing too much on process and not enough on outcomes. The book digs specifically into housing, clean energy, and scientific innovation/deployment.

An important book for putting a name to the wild transition of becoming a mother - and for sharing the research that proves it really is a neurological transformation. It was more philosophical and memoir-y than I was expecting; I think I would have preferred more hard data & a little less musing.

I really did feel like a different person after becoming a mother, and reading about the ways my brain and hormones changed definitely helps to make sense of that.

This was just as incredibly pieced together as the first two books in the series. But it was also a bit grimmer and (like the second book) I didn't find it as enjoyable to read as the first.

Moderately enjoyable fantasy. Not sure I'll remember much of the specifics, but it did make me laugh.

An engaging story. He had a meteoric rise through the entertainment industry, seizing opportunity after opportunity. But what struck me the strongest was how clearly those opportunities stemmed from (or were supported by) his immensely privileged upbringing - raised in Beverly Hills and high school friends with the children of so many big names in the industry. Not to say he didn't work hard, but his path was probably only possible given his family wealth and connections.

Fun and fairly creative fantasy. I laughed out loud quite a bit

For the record, I don't think this applies to me (and didn't expect it to, going in). It didn't seem super well written (a lot of similar/repetitive sections), but it did have good content.