cal3b

Super fun as always. Like Elijah and Daneel a lot.

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 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.

woah...

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.

Everyone read this, last chapter might make you not want to look at stars tho

Some really good and some really okay stories: From best to worst

Tower of Babylon 5/5
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate 5/5
Understand 5/5
Exhalation 5/5
What's Expected of Us 5/5
Division by Zero 4/5
Story of Your Life 4/5
The Lifecycle of Software Objects 4/5
Hell is the Absence of God 4/5
Seventy-Two Letters 2/5
Liking What You See: A Documentary: Got bored never read to the end

The title is accurate, this really is a life changing book and a surprisingly easy read. Was kind of on the edge of my seat the whole time.

Super interesting.

Everyone read this book.

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.

This book is just brilliant. There is a chapter on art schools which has changes the way I think about a lot of things.

“I was not afraid, I just didn't want this to end”

I have no doubt one of the most special and meaningful books I've ever read.

Will update with a full review.

Amazing! What else can I say?

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

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.

This book is dense with deep and profound ideas.

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.

This book is expertly crafted, and an excellent primer on many diverse areas of Psychology, Morality and Philosophy.

The thesis of this book is, I think, extremely well supported and carefully explained. After finishing the book - I think you would be hard pressed to find any part of the book that does not present a nuanced view of what is usually a polarising issue.

Moreover I loved that Haidt seemed to genuinely want people to understand the core thesis and engage with it. The little summaries at the end of each section and the end of the book will go a long way in helping me remember the contents for, I hope, many years to come. It made the book feel accessible to a non-academic audience, and I appreciated that Haidt seemed to not be trying to convince Professors of his theory, but just normal people.

As usual it's always very comforting to read anything by Steven Pressfield.

Will review, but very very 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.

Oh my god. Chills.

The beginning reminded me of some of Asimov's early empire novels, which I just found, boring, but by the middle, we are in full Robots territory levels of good and the ending, is incredible.

I don't know what else to say but:

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.