T.H. Ponders

A beautifully written coming of age story. The beats are pretty familiar, but Jessie's perspective is so carefully considered at every moment. Jessie is more than a collection of the character tropes associated with the new to high school. The way Khalilieh considers her autism diagnosis and her Palestinian-Canadian background make Jessie feel like a real person, which is aided by how well Khalilieh has captured the actual voice of a teenager. Reminds me of the best parts of Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade.  Would highly recommend to anyone entering high school, or wanting to have a deeper empathy with the experience of what it's like to be a high schooler with an autism diagnosis.

(I rate on a 5 star scale and a 4/5 is “I really liked it” so don't take the missing star as any indication of lesser quality.)

Some of this poetry is beautiful. But extremely bummed when it got to the anti-semitic bits.

Read this with the explicit purpose of collecting background research for a project that relates to the 2019 movie. And while I really enjoyed reading it in the context of the research I'm doing, I'm not sure I can say as much for the actual reading experience. 

First, the art is great- it's a very unique style and I thought the pen work and frame composition was fantastic. Let's get that out of the way.

But the story itself was pretty thin. The characters would often say things that had the appearance of being deep, but there was never any follow through or exploration of those ideas. The characters were either one-dimensional (Ido, Vector) or inconsistent. (Alita, Yugo) And of course, because it's early 90's Japanese Manga, there's a healthy dose of misogyny, even with the “kick-ass” female lead, and at times because of it. (I found the nothing comments about Makaku's infatuation/love of Alita to be particularly repellent, and the attempt at giving Makaku a sympathetic backstory a miss.)

And I'm adding nothing new to the conversation by bringing up that Alita's love of Yugo is so unfounded as to face plant head first into the “She loves him because she's a girl, and girls are supposed to be in love.” This compounds with the revelation of Yugo's actual doings and intentions and Alita's willingness to forgo all her morals and life choices to stay with him.

I'm going to read the second volume to continue my research, but I'm not really looking forward to it.  

As self help books go, this one is really solid. The advice is extremely actionable, concrete, and well defended. My main problem with most books in the self help/productivity space is that they are written by people whose whole productive output is writing about productivity. But Forte keeps the book grounded with examples of people doing a breadth of creative and knowledge work, which tethers this one to the ground. Really excited to operationalize the ideas here and apply what I wasn't doing before to my PKM system.

Read the 1959 Lysander Kemp translation. Hoping to get a copy of the new Weatherford translation for a reread.