Reviews and Comments

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.

Pretty breezy and engaging. Some things I'll definitely try to put into practice.

Kiddo is really enjoying this series.

I thought this one started off a bit slow and anecdote-heavy which is a complaint I've had about several recent nonfiction books I've read. Fortunately this time those anecdotes were just laying the emotional groundwork for a treatise on how our (humans in general, but particularly humans in wealthier countries) lives are only possible as we know them because of big investments in infrastructure made decades ago.

I appreciated the author's emphasis on needing not just to invest in maintenance of what we have but a hopeful tone about what's possible if we rethink our tendency toward large centralized structures and consider smaller, more localized solutions that can be combined (like a series of smart micro-grids for power that use wind in windy areas or solar in sunny areas but also use storage and interconnects to let those solutions complement and supplement each other).

Taking a break from the Series of Unfortunate Events, started reading this one to the kiddo.

Still enjoying reading these with the kiddo.

I thought it was interesting that Count Olaf is barely in this one, and the misery and cruelty mostly come from the situation and the setting, as well as their caretaker, "Sir".

Still, a fun read full of dark humor and a bit more absurdity this time. Already starting on the next one.