Reviews and Comments

Lovely little surreal, poetic short stories that talk to each other like crows in a tree.

Genuinely good organizational advice wrapped in an obnoxious self-helpy presentation, all explicitly written to a target audience of cishet white male executives with assistants and maids and summer houses. Useful if you can grit your teeth and push through it, totally understandable if you can't.

There's so much in here. It bears another read, and I'm very curious how they managed the film adaptation.

Let's see if I can get this book done

I appreciated Sarah's general outlook on management, and I'm sure there's plenty of good advice in the book, but it needed an editor. Or a different editor. Or a different writer and editor.

Too much of the first few chapters were like trying read a marketing blog or an HR email, not a book I wanted to study or curl up with. I gave up as soon as I got to to this sentence:

"A larger action item: try to change any processes or patch any misalignments that exist around the person that might alleviate the disconnects."

The layout is really nice, though.

I've been reading this in small bites in between other books since kickstarter fulfillment, whenever that was. I might even finish it someday.

Great collection of genre stories, all with a strong transfeminist anarchist bent. Lots of horror, some dark fantasy, some cyberpunk, some just, I don't know... metal? A couple misses for me but I love her overall outlook and approach and all her protagonists feel like they could be real people in my friend circle without being too same-y, either.

Remind me not to climb Sagarmatha (Everest) no matter how much it's there.

What a lovely tale of identity, family, acceptance, and binge-watching Pirate Exiles under a blanket fort.

This follows the Imperial Radch Trilogy much more directly than Provenance did - I would definitely read those books first. But do. And then read this one.

I appreciated Hon's willingness to avoid oversimplification in favor of accepting nuance throughout the book, which otherwise could have come across as an extended TED talk. I found the chapters on workplace and educational gamification particularly relevant and galling, and thought the exploration of ARGs as an insight into Qanon was fascinating.

One minor source of eye-rolling is Hon comes back a bit too often to his own small business as a counterexample for how gamification can be resisted or done well. His bona fides were established early in the book, so it could have gone a long way to have some more variety in the "Do" column.

If you're already in that camp much of the book will read like preaching to the choir, and it's not exactly a fun read, but it's extremely well researched and provides a ton of insightful background.