Book Reviews

Having worked with three nannies this year, I found the content surprisingly unuseful. The vast majority goes about how to hire a nanny and run an interview process, which while important, is the same as hiring any employee at any company. Managers or small business owners won’t find anything useful here. There is no discussion of how working with a Nanny is different than a typical employee employer relationship, or how to be a good employer, both areas that I would have hoped to see in a book like this but didn’t.

**Mathletes v. Machos ** I used to be good at math. Not ‘A student’ good, I mean win the competitions, calculate faster than friends with a calculator good. As part of a young math team, and as competitions progressed through 8 years of scholastic competition, I watched as the trajectories of the mathletes diverge. The girls drifted away from math team, and focused on areas outside of STEM. The boys prided themselves on calculus grades, picked up video games and code, and went straight into tech. ...

4 stars for this book existing 2 stars for how much I enjoyed it

Raw notes: Lawyers talking about principles of litigation Influence from the grave Capital is more than financial

** Leviathan Deflates ** She was reaching for supernatural answers, when memory and mundanity were enough. * Frankly disappointing. Tiamat’s Wrath had managed to take what was good about the series and use the massive shared context with readers to satisfyingly increase complexity. Along with Winds of Winter, this was one of the books I was looking forward to taking time off work to inhale in a day. Unfortunately Leviathan Falls pairs back to the plot to a few main characters and a pseudo-science arc. ...

aka: the dangers of attending a masquerade ball and credulity of accusations of adultery.

3.5 stars. Review TBR

**Offending the Culture Gods in Reassimilation ** A stressed lesbian medium fights gods, ghosts, gangsters, and grandmas in 21st century Penang. * In a book about feeling alienated, I feel seen. First is the difficulty when trying to re-assimilate into a foreign culture, especially when that culture is your own. The look Aku gave her was familiar. Jess had seen it at different points points from, Mom, Dad, Coco, and their friends. It was a look of realization that here was an alien to whom even the most basic things, even the things everyone understood, would have to be explained. * Then the basic desire to find people that have shared context. * It was just nice to hang out with somebody that was her age, somebody that was more like her than her parents. Jess could guess what kind of restaurant Shang went to, what he did for fun, what he watched on Netflix. * Sure I didn’t grow up with Asian parents (* Mom would kill her if she got murdered here, she thought. * ) but some feelings are universal. I appreciated the focus on filial relationships, and the visceral setting. Plot twists weren’t entirely predictable, and to the detriment of my sleep schedule, I finished the book in one sitting. Recommended.

** Mindgames ** Fast and loose with scientific conclusions. Approaching god as an applied linguistics topic is a compelling perspective with fascinating methodology. Reasonable overview on meditation. ** 93rd book of 2021 **

** Pop Buddha ** In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, every story follows the same basic template with only the director’s touches to differentiate one story from the next. Self help books suffer the same monotony. In Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach takes Buddhist thinking as a means to administer a saccharine dose of self help, and I had an allergic reaction. Rumi quotes to start off chapters, references to ‘The Right Stuff’, and so many anecdotes about how this one strategy solved a lifelong problem for this one patient was too much. If I were on a desert island and this was the only book available, I would read it and even benefit from its lessons. But with every book of civilization at our fingertips, Radical Acceptance is a pass. ...