Reviews and Comments

Man this family moved around a lot.

This was another enjoyable mostly-lighthearted tale about the Ingalls family moving yet again. This time Pa got a job doing payroll for some railroad workers with the intention of claiming a homestead once the work was done.

I still enjoy Pa's optimism in these stories, and the fact that he can build a shanty in less than a day.

Came back to try to finish this series.

The characters are brilliant. Lots of meditation on religion and philosophy. The interplay between the villains is almost as good as between the heroes.

The plotting is good too. Keeps you guessing.

Some of the action is a bit rote. Feels like "studio notes" in some places where the author had to refer to some element in the D&D rules.

Still, definitely an enjoyable read.

Another read with the kiddo. This series has been really fun!

This is a prequel to "Poppy" featuring the adventures of her boyfriend(?) Ragweed as he leaves home in the country and heads to the big city.

I really enjoyed the way the mouse culture in the city was so different. There's a skateboard punk mouse and lots of characters referring to each other as "dude". I may have used my best Bill & Ted impression when reading the dialogue to the kiddo.

Definitely a fun read. There's some tension with local cats that feels at the same time silly and full of real threat.

I can see why this book has the reputation it does. It's very simple and beats you over the head with its main points. If my boss gave me this to read before a giant restructure I'd probably launch it at his head.

That said, some of the bits about overthinking changes and fretting so much over how a change might negatively affect you did resonate with me, and I recognized myself in there, so maybe thinking of this silly tale will help with that.

The whole thing is around 100 pages. Get it from the library, take an hour to read it, try to get from it what you can.

Oh, skip the final "discussion" session. It's short, but it feels like a really bad after-school special about business.

I use this metaphor constantly but I realized I'd never actually read the book.

When they say "Big Book" they don't mess around.

~1100 pages of two column text. 108 stories. This is going to be an undertaking...

The latest in a series of "self-help" style books I've gotten from the library this year.

This one had by far the "loosest" prose. Probably because the author started as a blogger rather than an academic. But this style helped the "anecdote interspersed with lessons learned" pattern that these books tend to use feel less stale.

I do think the overall lesson of "you are mortal and therefore can only give so many fucks, so choose carefully what to give a fuck about" is probably more necessary now than ever and I'm so glad I read this one.

Enjoyed this one. Compared to some other nonfiction/self-help-type books I've read recently this one spent way less time on anecdotes and more on actual, actionable advice with examples of how a conversation might go, how it might go wrong, and how to recover. Exactly what I was looking for.

A lot of the breakthroughs in this book seem too good to be true, and I've read elsewhere that the results discussed are controversial and no one else seems to have reproduced them, which tracks even if it's disappointing.

This book came out in 2019 and makes a few references to a "future pandemic" that raise eyebrows in 2024.

Overall I'm glad I read it, and I hope the author is right about our imminent ability to slow/reverse aging and keep folks healthy and hale into their 100s but I'm not exactly holding my breath.