Sylvia Chi

There were many parts of this book that I found problematic (the absurdly flat, semi-misogynistically-written female characters; the incoherent critique of television) but could have chalked up to interesting ambiguities until I read the Afterword and Coda by the author, who turns out to have written this polemic/parable as an ill-considered response to criticism (you know, censorship by women's-libbers and homosexuals) and new media.

Otherwise, Bradbury is clearly a virtuosic writer in a showoffy way, but the story pacing and structure is pretty strained. Although Captain Beatty is a pretty terrifically villainous bad guy.

Not sure if I really need to read this, but Joan Acocella's review in the New Yorker was so irritating that I feel I ought to so that I can at least hypothetically form a rebuttal.

I just spent some time reading the Wikipedia article on Venusberg.

I'm very disturbed that Goodreads has capitalized the V. in the title.

ETA: They've fixed it!

I just wanted to read the sections on fat loss/the “slow carb diet” and the PAGG stack. Those were pretty informative and at generally the right level of detail that I require. The book is a good starting place for learning some of this stuff; if you try starting to learn about it by straight Googling, you're likely to get pretty overwhelmed pretty quickly.

That said, at least some (if not all/most) of the key material in the book is also on Ferriss' blog. For example, re: the basics of the slow carb diet: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs-of-fat-in-30-days-without-doing-any-exercise/

However, the whole tone of this book is written as if you're an idiot, by a person who is not a very good writer. You really get the sense that Ferriss had to meet some kind of page/words quota and so he tried to meet it by including long excerpts from emails/writings by other people. It's a really palpably lazily put together book.

I was also interested in the exercise section, but as a kettlebell/weight-lifting n00b, I found it pretty confusing. (Although I didn't check the online references for further clarification.)

I skimmed the section on sex and it looked pretty worthless to me, plus obnoxiously heteronormative, but might be helpful to some.