Jase

It's hard to rate short story collections as a whole when it contains so many different writers and styles. I loved a few of the tales, hated a few of them, and was indifferent on a few more. My favorite story of the bunch was “Judgment Passed” by Jerry Oltion, and as a computer programmer myself I had a soft spot for “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” by Cory Doctorow.

It is totally worth reading just to see 22 different views on the Apocalypse in rather short order.

As much as absolutely loved the first three books of Martin's A Song of Ice And Fire series, this one along with A Feast For Crows felt like a lot of filler. Originally, by Martin's own admission, he planned to have a gap of years after the third book and then to jump back in, but in tracing out the events that would occur during the gap so that he knew where all the characters would be at the start of his new story cycle, he got excited about the stories and decided to write them rather than have them skipped. The beginning of the series, A Game of Thrones, doesn't begin at the beginning. Much has happened in the land of Westeros, and part of the brilliance of the first three books is how they weave in details of the wars and events that came before without bogging down the story. You get the information you need, you understand that those tales you aren't being told are exciting and important, but you are in this story here which is also exciting. AFFC and ADWD contain elements of that, flashing back to days before AGOT, and those turn out to be the best parts of the books. The rest of it feels like moving chess pieces around a board with the occasional taking of a pawn and little else.

Despite the lackluster experience with these two books, I'll continue reading the series, but I can't help but feel that Martin should have stuck to his original plan, skipped some time and picked up the story again when all the players we in place again.

I'm not usually one to read a bunch of self help sort of books, though I occasionally will run through one on a recommendation, such as the odd finance book about getting debt under control. But, despite other problems that I have in life the single biggest, hands down, is procrastination.

People who don't procrastinate will look at a procrastinator and see only that that person is either not working hard enough or putting off work. They don't procrastinate and as such don't understand the motivations and reasons behind why someone would. So they demand “get to work” and “just do it” and “work harder” which more often than not will just cause more procrastination.

This book is the first I've ever come across that actually understands procrastination. Reading through its pages I found myself nodding my head a lot because it described my internal struggle with work almost perfectly. And more importantly, the methods and exercises it provides for battling procrastination seem perfectly valid and easily doable. I've already started changing my habits by simply recognizing when I'm headed toward procrastination and being able to head it off before it happens.

And most importantly, this book isn't just about working harder. It's about working better and integrating play into your schedule because it recognizes the single most important element to procrastination - the reason we get bummed out and piddle around is the prospect that work is going to take away time from play. So by putting play on your schedule first and building work around play, you flip the whole thing on its head.

The only hesitation I had in giving this 5 stars is that the last couple of chapters delve into the sort of hippy zen breathing chanting mantra type stuff that I tend to loath in self help books. But up until that point it was an excellent book, and really you can ignore that part and still get a lot out of it.