cal3b

It was fine

I liked it!! However exactly half of it. In my opinion you could stop reading at the start of the mask chapters. I listened to the entire things but they made zero sense to me.

The best book i've read in the last year. it was so cathartic reading this, and described so much of what i disliked about university. It's also a page turner! I was finding reasons to walk around so i could listen to it. Which, btw, i would highly recommend because Tim has the most soothing voice and the way the images are linked makes it easy to pull up your phone when you get a chance to see the visuals.

I also genuinely think this made me a better thinker, even though it's about political tribalism I could feel how so much of this applied to more than political tribalism and just _thought_ tribalism in my own life, ideas that i had become an attorney for, for no reason i could think of.

It has made me so much more self aware about the areas of my life i am closed minded and in unconvincable land and given what feels like a path forward to leaving this kind of attachment to idea behind me.

I'm writing a review about this, but tl;dr it's really long and the end is kind of amazing but the first half is a slog, but still good, but also bad. But in many ways good.

I just finished this and read it for the weirdest reason. Someone told me a couple of months ago, they couldn't sleep the entire night because they were up all night reading this book called dark matter. They said it was a love story about parallel universes. I was like hell yeah, there are only so many books i would be able to read in one sitting and i'm all in on parallel universes, so when i got home i googled the book and this came up seemed like it was about parallel universes and love so when i found a copy on fb marketplace i bought it. I certainly enjoyed it while i was reading it, and there was definitely something page turnery about this book, i was actually trying to savour it because there were some cool vibes, and when the inciting incident in this book happens, i was like, oh damn, they're going to have to switch universes to get out of this mess, that's why this was recommended so highly. Alas no, that's not what happened. Parallel universes and the many worlds theory were only used as a subtle theme throughout the book, employed not for narrative but for stylistic choices. I also loved the detective who thinks in the third person. And despite not having the kind of interaction with real parallel universes i was hoping for, I still found it kind of charming and cute, like the parallel universes were there but just on the edge and you could never reach them, as much as the characters wanted to. Two characters in this book, Oskar and Sebastian have completely opposite views on the many worlds theory which leads to a super heated tension in their friendship, and no matter how many times this tension in their scientific theories comes up, i still genuinely have no idea what position either of them hold. It doesn't seems to be a typical many world vs the other one. It feels different than that, but i have no idea if the reason i don't understand it is because I'm too dumb to understand it or because the author uses lots of technobabble to talk about their competing theories and has no actual content. Either way i enjoyed it, but i have no idea what position Oskar held vs what position Sebastian held. This is a detective story and follows most of the tropes of one, and yet still feels pretty interesting. I really liked how it was resolved. Except the very end where i actually have no idea what happened or what the reason for [REDACTED] was.

But now you might be wondering, is this the kind of book someone could say is their favourite of all time and that kept them up all night? What's more is it even one i would describe as a love story? I'm not sure. In fact i was really so unsure (not to judge the person that recommended it to me) that i had to triple check he was not talking about a different book. And when i googled this like 20min ago it is pretty clear this was not the book he had recommended it was Dark Matter by Blake Crouch 🤦

But i'm somehow so glad for this, because there is no way i would ever have read this book without such a glowing review - and i'm glad i did read it. If you've read this book you'll also know that:

- Mishearing a word

- Coincidence

Are probably the two best ways anyone could hope to have been recommended it.

Wow have I been reading this since APRILLLL!!!! Okay wow, wowowowowoow

So I think I liked this more than Iron Gold and allow me to start by saying if anything happens in the next book to Darrow or Lyria I am going to cry so just keep that in mind.

Lyria is a really cool character, she was introduced in iron gold and has quickly become maybe my favorite character in the whole series, and whole dynamic btwn her and volga and victa was so cool. I just love how Iron Gold and Dark Age split the stories between different characters, it feels like you're watching infinity war and everything is slowly building to a crescendo. You know these characters are going to meet at some point and then they do and then it's incredible.

So yeah I'm just going to be waiting around doing nothing until 2023 dono bout you guys tho.

Note to myself: This book was really good, you should watch a recap when the next one comes out, drop what you're reading, and start reading that. Because you really liked this one a lot and if I were me in the future, I would be soooo mad if you had the chance to read a page of #6 but didn't.

I'm tired.

There was a surprising amount of duplicate stories from the version of stories of your life I read. However, this was on the whole so much better than stories of your life. I remember overall really liking stories of your life but skipping a 2 stories at least. With this one, however, I don't think I skipped any. And not only did I not skip any but I think I basically also loved all. Like really loved.

Off the top of my head my favorites (in order) were:

- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
- Omphalos
- Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

I actually preferred this one a lot to the 1st

So good, in a way that's hard to describe. Nearly the majority of this book feels like it is technical instructions on formally practicing zazen, yet it's really so much more than that. Every page feels like it has something beautifully relevant to your own life despite the fact that it came from a chapter on the right posture you should hold during meditation. Going to be reading random pages from this for conceivable future.

I enjoyed it a lot I think.

It was pretty good, however a a significant chunk of the book was focused on what I would consider quite basic functions of omnifocus and I was more interested in the last few chapters where the authors went over how they personally used omnifocus.

Not really sure what to say, read because mentioned by Scott in We Are All Msscribe, and also because I was curious. The first two chapters are objectively hard to follow IMO it was only at about the third chapter I started following the abbreviations. It was super long, but was it “super worth it” i'm not sure. It's kind of absurd that I spent a nontrivial amount of time reading about harry potter fandom but also I love that I spent a nontrivial amount time reading about harry potter fandom.

I don't know what else to say but:

Can't recommend this enough, every chapter is perfectly concise enough to get its point across in an extremely interesting and inspiring way. I love it.

Um
I'm not even sure what to say. I feel like I need to read a book to understand what I just read. The beginning and ending were great, the end really great, the middle felt mostly like gibberish.

This was literally the pepe silvia meme in book form https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-silvia

I enjoy optimistic Sci Fi

Some parts are very good, some parts are - I will just say less good. But on the whole it was a very soothing read. The first 2 or so chapters, and the last chapter are the ones that stuck the most with me.

Overall a pretty interesting description of a fast takeoff event. I really enjoyed the moments just before the change and I really liked how this fleshed out some possible motivations of a godlike ASI more than just something that wants paperclips. But the torture porn was a bit dramatic.

3.5

My only complaint is the title. This books is meant for everyone and everyone should read it, whether you're a student, book writer or not. Perhaps those groups of people will find it the most useful, I certainly wish I has read this before university. But I truly do believe that almost anyone will find the slip box useful in an extremely significant way.

I really can't explain how much I like this book but I like it in this unexplainable way because it gives you such a helpful and useful system for organising raw knowledge. Before this book I had never even considered that this is something that should be organised, even though in GTD terms it definitely has represented an open loop in my mind for a very long time.

All I can say is: the sooner you read this book the better. The more books and articles and youtube videos you realised you could have watched with a slip box will depress you all the more after you finish Smart Notes.

The arguments for having a slip box really do seem sound, and after reading the book I can't think of an alternative.

This was not great.

While I appreciate the core idea of “GTD but one at a time” the book never really goes beyond this and ends up repeating a bunch of sentences over and over again. And I'm not even sure if the strategy of only doing one habit of GTD at a time makes sense.

For example if I decided to to the collection habit for a month and was very diligent at collecting all my open loops, productivitywise I think I would still be in a terrible position because the collection habit only makes sense if you are reviewing the lists you make also. If you are not regularly reviewing the list you collect open loops on your brain is probably going to pick up the loops because it doesn't trust that you will deal with them at some point. Or at least this is what David Allen would probably say, and I would definitely believe it.

The problem, though, is that it's not just these two habits that depend on each other but almost every habit in GTD and ZTD depends on each other. You can't have collection without review just as much as you can't have review without organisation.

The idea of doing only one of these habits at a time is not something I could imagine happening in any succesful way.

On top of that, even if I had to assume that you could somehow make this work by only doing one habit at a time, I found the actual content in the book very light and not nearly well substantiated enough.

I think this was a really important book for me to read. Sure some sections could have probably been shorter, but there are some ideas in here that I don't see myself ever forgetting and that could also lead to some significant changes in my life.

Some parts felt a little like trying to meet a word count (ahem last chapter), but funnily enough I found the 2001 edition somehow way more applicable to non paper based methods than the 2015 edition.

I definitely found rereading as useful as David Allen said it would be.

Will review, but very very good

An amazing book which made me think a lot about a lot of things.