Dave

I read this overlapping with another book that offers advice on being a better you. I found this book to be superior and re-listened to try and internalize some of the points. I think the guidelines offered are relatively simple to understand and the author provides evidence and data to support the conclusions that following these steps will help you attain a bit more tranquility in your life.

I am not familiar with the author but I'm guessing he is paid by insurance companies or was for a long time. I think annuities do have a time and place as part of your total plan but this dude sells it pretty hard. I give this pitch and the first portion of the book making that pitch like zero stars.

The second half of the book walks through fairly detailed planning of converting a traditional 401k into a Roth IRA this part of the book I think is well thought out and well laid out. All the stars in my rating come from this portion of the book.

I might be too hard on annuities but I feel like if you've gotten into social security then you already have some form of annuity built into your retirement program. I don't know if they're cool enough to double down on. I do kind of like the idea of a life insurance vehicle that will pay for long-term care and provide a death benefit if you don't use it I'll have to look into it.

Poetical telling of how it is to be part of a culture while adopting a new one. And also the new one maybe doesn't care for your culture. And also there's Djinn.

I liked it.

I really liked the story, honest. But I take a star for the large variety of racist terms that don't really add anything to the story and I take another star for the solution to a great old one rising to reclaim the planet is running it over with a boat. Put a damper in the terrible god like being.

I recently read How Democracies Die and I found this book to be very similar in its analysis but this is very American specific and makes no bones about hiding it. It looks at how the US federal government is not equipped to handle divisive partisan politics with the checks and balances peculiar to the system of government. It has some recommendations on how the system could be repaired and also some thought experiments on why some of the common ideas on how to reign in government maybe won't work. I found the ideas of how to improve the system to be very impractical in the current environment. I guess it's just a sad time and a sad book.

It is fairly shallow reading. If you are looking for some deep revelations or sage advice, this is not the book for you. If you want to repeatedly be told to be kind and think about how others feel in your actions in various mildly amusing ways, this book is for you.

I read Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls right on top of each other. They are fast food reading and I enjoyed myself enough. I checked out a bunch of other Patterson books after finishing those and discovered that the Alex Cross stories are really repetitious and quit after a few others read.

If you are down to read some schlock, this is fun enough. I wouldn't go much further than this one in the series.

Kind of like a girl interrupted story crossed with the movie Kids. I thought the writing was interesting, but the quick shifts from reality to fantasy/hallucination really made it hard to understand why you care about this terrible thing described vs. some other terrible thing being described.

It was alright, I wouldn't tell you to not bother finishing it but I wouldn't recommend you start.

The art was ok for me, and it was interesting to learn that Dahmer had friends in high school and to get some information about this time in his life. But, as a story it was just mildly interesting and just kind of sad.

This book doesn't go deep into how crypto works, but rather it tells you enough to have some idea of what's happening on a technical level. What the book really looks at carefully is the hubris of it all, the various characters and chaos that surrounded the crypto boom of the last few years. It is an engaging story, and it doesn't have a super satisfying ending (not the author's fault).

The subject matter is fascism in the U.S., as told by someone writing in the mid-30s. As a story, and the main subject of the book both are interesting enough and the book seems fairly realistic if a little jaunty about people facing life and death.

The reason I don't give it full marks is the writing style was difficult for me to parse and keep coherent. I'm fairly well-versed in history and I still didn't understand a good chunk of the references and asides.

Given the time we're living in now, looking at the government converting to more authoritarian rule is quite interesting. But the read was quite a slog.

Overall, I liked this book a lot. I really appreciated thinking and describing ways that you could feel some outrage. I quote the Atlantic:

“That the five most important taste receptors of the moral mind are the following...care/harm, fairness/cheating, group loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation. And that moral systems are like cuisines that are constructed from local elements to please these receptors.”

So my major challenge with the book is that I want morality to be reason based instead of based on my monkey brain. I have a kind of stoic feel that while our feelings and passions will drive us to do things, we should constantly strive to apply reason to our feelings and live a happier life for it. This means that while I recognize and feel the moral ‘senses' of loyalty, authority and sanctity I often dismiss the feelings as not useful in modern life and a evolutionary dead end in some ways. The book doesn't seem to want to take a stand as to if these moral senses that are ignored by WEIRD people is the right thing to do. Maybe there's some cultural relativism at play here or something, IDK.

Anyways, it gave me lots to think about and was interesting and engaging so it gets full marks.

I had a hard time suspending disbelief for some of the other things that Dan Brown has written, this one is no exception.

While this is not the worst of Stephen King, it's not the best either. But I am a bit biased as time travel stuff just usually doesn't work for me. Reviews saying that Stephen King likes to romanticize the 50s in general and this book in particular are correct. I don't agree with the haters on the love story.

If you like to read there are certainly worse things to put yourself through. It read pretty easy, and I thought the ending was decent.

I've read a lot of Stephen King and considered myself a fan. I would not recommend this book to anyone other than a completionist. I thought desperation was a bit better even though it had a lot of God rolling around in it. This seemed to be a rehash of some ideas that brought us desperation and didn't really gel as well as desperation did for me.

I thought Ride the Bullet was probably one of the better ones, but none of these stories are bad. I also really enjoyed 1408.

Comes close to the old school King that I remember reading voraciously as a kid. I think King's best form is the short story or maybe even expanding to a novella (The Mist and 4 seasons are great).

This is a little practical advice wrapped in some made up nonsense supposedly from antiquity. The advice is sound enough I guess. Save 10% of your money, and invest it in less risky endeavors.

I couldn't finish it. It made me gag reading this guy brag about being a jackass. An ignorant jackass no less.

The author forgot the low hanging fruit of labor oppression, genocide and outright slavery. We didn't just walk into an empty continent and find a bunch of natural resources ripe for plunder.

I agree with the premise that as we try to do less of that (mostly because there isn't much left to steal anymore) it's going to get harder to get productivity gains. But have we considered hunting the billionaires like dragons? If we slay the dragon, we get to take the dragon hoard for ourselves? It would also be an economic activity that has a lot of usefulness. I think we should consider it.

Anyways, short book kind of meanders along. It's not terribly important to read imo.

I am really all over the map on where to rate this one. Personally, I think the Trojan war was not exciting reading in it's original form when I read the Iliad. So I thought the author did as good as a job as I can imagine being done given the source material I really hated most of the characters in the book, and that made it a bit hard to stick through

Oddly enough, the way the human empire is portrayed in this docked it a few points. They were not well developed or believable.

The book has an interesting quandary that is posed by the alien society, but in the end I thought the book was just alright.