#1

You must read this book if you own your home before beginning HVAC work. Sadly I made the mistake of doing my HVAC work BEFORE I read this book but luckily I was not too far off the mark. Most HVAC professionals sadly do not actually know the "whys" of what they are doing and simply offer cookie cutter solutions that do not fit what your house needs – especially an existing home.

Things to remember - If you want to do anything, ensure you also insulate your home! Ensure there are no leaks in or out of the home. Otherwise, all of the other work will have to use more energy due to leaks of air. - A ductless mini split is highly recommended to condition air around your homes - A ventilated dehumidifier is highly recommended to bring in fresh air & dehumidify it - Ensure you always run the ventilator in the bathroom / kitchen when you are using them - Water moisture is the #1 villain and try to not have temperature differences in surfaces that will cause moisture to develop - A manifold is a way to send hot water through a smaller plastic pipe such that less water looses heat as it stays in the piping - Try to prevent thermal bridges to ensure home is fully insulated

This is book #4 in the series, but it's not the fourth part. Apparently there's a short story, "Omega Night", and it contained both plot and character developments that significantly impact this book. However, even on the official author's website it's not listed between books 3 and 4. It's listed after the final book, among other "related works".

And the author doesn't really do a good job of recapping what happened, it's just an abrupt jump, and now Hope/Astra's angsting over a new crush that started during that book, freaking out over a danger to one of her friends that's due to events in that book, and a number of other sudden changes.

And these changes continue to casually come up over the course of the entire book, so that put a serious damper on my enjoyment of it.

Beyond that, the premise/setting was unique and somewhat interesting, but a lot of it felt like repeating "same song, different verse." Just marking things off a checklist. Astra has a crush that she doesn't want to act on (thankfully not the same one as at the end of book #3). Astra asks for advice, then ignores it in a way that could cause trouble for the one who gave it. Astra manages to get separated from her team (but thankfully not abducted this time). Astra makes mistakes and spends time berating herself. Important rules get massively broken but a loophole means it's okay. And the Perfect Defenses get destroyed via the most plausible method, which somehow no-one saw coming.

I did really like that, after introducing a terrifying Islamic terrorist supervillain in book #1, the author chose to introduce a character that showcases the more peaceful side of Islam. I wish the character was ongoing, but it doesn't look like he will be.

I really didn't like the friend drama for this book - it felt pretty contrived, but Astra was utterly poleaxed. Honestly, the number of times something relatively trivial knocks Astra so off her stride that she can't think straight for several days should probably be cause for serious concern among the team leadership.

Among the reasons I hated this book:

• Haidt pretends that he's going to argue for some position X, sets us up for an argument for X by explaining what he hopes to prove, and then jumps immediately to "and now I think I've shown that X" without actually making the argument. (In his section on "group selection", for example, he mentions in passing an important reason why group selection is typically considered a poor explanation for natural selection in animals like us, then promises to refute that reason and defend group selection, then he completely bypasses that reason entirely to tell us why group selection just feels right to him, then insists that he's saved group selection from its detractors.)

• He's utterly cynical about ethics and moral reasoning. "Glaucon [is] the guy who got it right," he says. "We are all self-righteous hypocrites." I mean, you can do that, sure. Say morality doesn't exist, or that it's just convention, posturing, superstition, or what-have-you. But you have to follow-through with this consistently and confront its implications. Haidt doesn't. He's just amorally cynical when he wants to be, and then ducks back behind something like moral realism when he prefers that perspective.

• When some study shows that, say, only 20% of subjects behaved ethically when they had the opportunity to do something unethically self-interested instead, he insists that this proves that nobody is really ethical and we're all in it for #1, instead of the conclusion the data actually indicate, which is that behaving ethically in the face of temptation isn't easy, and some people are better at it than others.

• He uses as evidence a lot of dubious "priming" studies and other such things that I doubt have held up well (that's probably not his fault considering when he wrote the book, but it made his failure to argue competently for his positions worse: I couldn't even trust the ostensibly more-rigorous studies he was citing).

• His rose-colored view of the moral sincerity of the American political right hasn't aged very well, and you can't help but roll your eyes as Haidt naively takes at face value that Republicans believe in respect for established institutions, family values, and the like.

• Haidt tries to disparage utilitarianism and Kantian deontological ethics not by offering arguments against them (except his haphazardly-argued-for assertion that we should "reject rationalism and embrace intutitionism" in ethics) but by trying to tar the developers of these philosophies as people who had Asperger's Syndrome and who were therefore unqualified to speak to the human experience! (Then, to make matters worse, he disingenuously insisted that wasn't what he was doing.)

Disclaimer: I rage quit at the half-way mark.

Haidt I think would argue that I have intuitively rejected his argument for irrational reasons and am now coming up with "rational"-in-scare-quotes reasons to reject it. But I went into this book sympathetically, hoping to find some useful perspectives that would help me understand the world better. All I wanted was for the author to meet me half way with some good evidence and good arguments to tie the evidence together. Instead he handed me a steaming turd.

By chance I spotted this in a book-swap telephone box in Gnosall, thinking it was Five Go to Smuggler's Top which I remember reading about 40 years ago. It didn't take me long to realise this was Famous Five #1 as the three siblings Julian, Dick, and Anne are introduced as visiting their cousin Georgina/George for the first time. This edition of the book from 1997 (55 years after original publication) doesn't mention the other stories in the series, nor any kind of bibliography for Blyton - a missed marketing opportunity!

As expected the style of writing is quite simplistic and now terribly dated. The style reminds me of a radio play - just enough description for one's imagination to conjure up filler for the gaps. For a story written in 1942 there is a curious lack of mention of the then on-going war. Geography is kept vague too - the main detail is that Quentin, Fanny, and George live in a house overlooking a bay with a rocky island featuring a ruined castle. The other children live closer to London and it takes an all day motor car journey to arrive.

All the children have their parts to play, but the real star of this book is George. More than just a tomboy, she reads as transgender. Boy clothes, boy hair, boy strength, boy independence, and a rejection of everything perceived as girly.

I will admit that, when I was first offered a review copy of Postcards From Beyond Reality, I wasn't sure how well the project would work out. I knew how convincingly Bernard Jan had managed to inhabit Michael Daniels' personality within the novel Cruel Summer, but to repeat the feat for a whole poetry collection did seem ambitious to say the least. I should have had more faith!

I loved being given deeper insights into Michael's character through his poetry. It often felt as though I was surreptitiously reading his journal or diary instead. The work is so personal yet also addresses universal themes, particularly those that are important to young people. On remembering how the events of Cruel Summer affected Michael, I could see echoes within the poems however I don't think it is necessary to have already read the novel in order to appreciate Postcards From Beyond Reality. The two works are very much companions rather than a series so I can imagine that it would be just as rewarding to experience Michael's poetry before learning more about his life.

P.S. It's not often that I'm up on reading trends, but I spotted, on the day after Bernard Jan announced Postcards From Beyond Reality was available for pre-order, that it was already the #1 New Release in Amazon.com's Teen & Young Adult Poetry eBooks category!