Review

6th book of 2019. tl;dr: How Not to Diet is better, but this book isn’t bad. After getting back into shape in 2019, I decided that 2020 would be the year that I start eating healthy. Little did I know that I would embark upon a minefield of controversy and pseudo-science. Finding worth reading was difficult; I ended up settling on this book and Omnivore’s Dilemma. Greger’s thesis is simple: Eat more plants. He gives us three categories to think about food: ...

3rd book of 2020. Sometimes I wonder if every topic is interesting when the right level of curiosity is brought to bear. Bernd Heinrich makes Ravens, and just about anything related to the forests of Maine interesting. In fact, Berndt could have written a book about paint drying and I would still like it. The book is structured with narrative, followed by info from published academic studies, and more general implications about cognition and intelligence at the end. ...

4th book of 2019. Scale: a superlinear hot mess with some great ideas Scale taught me that I need to pay much closer attention to subtitles of books. Scale’s is “The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.” That should have raised some yellow flags right there, the author couldn’t help but put 8 separate topics in the subtitle. The book is no less scattershot. Starting from power-law scaling and whizzing through fractals, allometric scaling, cities as organisms etc. the author covers much interesting ground but also embarks on strange tangents. ...

4th book of 2020. The Curse of Bigness: Read Master Switch Instead. I’ve read and immensely enjoyed Tim Wu’s previous books ‘The Master Switch’ and ‘Attention Merchants’. His historical perspective is perhaps one of the best ways demonstrating that the current changes the internet and smartphones bring have clear precedent from other modern times. The thesis is that America should have more powerful anti-trust laws, that the Chicago school essentially hijacked the intent of the Sherman act and defanged antitrust legislation which has had deleterious effects on the US economy. ...

1st book of 2020 Atomic Habits is a solid framework with dubious science. I like habits, at current count, there are ~40 things I do every day, spending 2.5 hours every morning doing things from clearing email to brushing teeth to meditation.I appreciate keeping habits small, so atomic habits seemed like it would preached directly to my choir. Unfortunately, it didn’t teach much beyond a useful but obvious framework: Habits are made into 4 parts: (1) the queue, (2) the motivation, (3) the action, (4) the reward.To change habits, tweak one of these steps: (1) make it obvious (or hidden), (2) make it attractive (or unattractive), (3) make it easy (or difficult), and (4) make it satisfying (or unsatisfying).Perhaps the tip that I appreciated most wast the two minute rule – habits should be formed at the level that they take two minutes to complete. This creates the right incentives to keep them going, and once habits have been started it’s much easier to complete even a hard task. ...

2nd book of 2020 When I was a kid, the X-Wing series was perfect for my imagination. After devouring a few of the books, I could spend entire evenings just imagining an X-Wing dogfight in my mind. I was curious what a new-generation X-Wing series would look like. The book was fine, and I was amused at how much time the author spends focused on bureaucratic wrangling, and leadership posturing within the team. I’m not complaining, this is my jam. Yet no detail or character was memorable enough for me to recall 6 months on. I’ll pass on the sequel.

46th Book of 2019 I will summarize this book with a parable: ‘Yanis negotiates with a brick wall’ Yanis - “Brick wall, you look reasonable I think we can make a deal for the good of the neediest, that can deliver Greece from debt bondage.” Brick wall - “…” Yanis - “As a gesture of good faith, I will give you a new coat of paint. In return, you will let me through the brick wall. This is in both of our interests, and can deliver the birthplace of democracy from eternal debt bondage.” ...

** 19th book of 2021: Slapdash ** Basic chapters on what it means to buy rental properties, no insight into short term stays at all. I could write a better book than this and I haven’t even finished construction on our short term stay units.

Kinda disappointed by the 1 star reviews here. The sparse words and for some reason strange illustrations have made this my son’s favorite book, despite the fact that he is far more comfortable with Chinese than English. Indeed, this is the first book that he’s learned to request by name (ca go fa!) and he requests it every night. We’re at least 50 readings in and there’s enough happening in the illustrations to do something new every time.

81st book of 2019. “Sleep is the bridge from despair to hope.” A good overview of the biological reasons for sleep, combined with some practical tips and a double serving of exhortations that we should all get more sleep. What I appreciated most was the studies brought up demonstrating the precise effects of sleep deprivation (less trusting, less emotional regulation), which is enough to convince me that my continued employment relies on 8h of sleep a night. Way better than [b:The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time|25893700|The Sleep Revolution Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time|Arianna Huffington|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453058792l/25893700.SY75.jpg|45775601], and worth a read for