Hubbard

An epic of a story: long, heavily detailed, and with huge emphasis on character building. If you're just looking for something to engage you in a story for nothing more than story's sake, it's a great book, however, it's such a sprawling saga I found myself a bit lost at times, wondering almost what the "point" of it all was, the plot reminiscent of a run on sentence... Perhaps I missed things - it's so long, I almost certainly did - but it seemed like there was a sense of meaning and/or purpose lacking from the story, leaving me feeling a little hollow at the end. There's a lot of trauma and gut-wrenching parts that leave you hating the thoughts of some of these imaginary characters, but I can't say I really felt the opposite was as true; there are heroes, but none as captivating in a good way as the evil of the enemies was repelling, which I guess made it hard to get really invested in it all.

I might check out the TV show just to find out what happens, but I can't say I'm feeling to inclined to push my way through the rest of the books.

This book continues the story of Moscap and Dex meandering through the world in a very similar vein to the last one: gentle descriptions of one person's vision of a semi-utopian world focused on permanent sustainability and harmony with nature interspersed with mildly philosophical dialogues. There are some interesting ideas for how humans might come to live peacefully in perpetual stability with eachother and the world around them, but none are explored satisfactorily in depth, giving the impression on the whole of a relatively superficial and not entirely consistent vision - or am I missing the point? It's hard to tell whether details like the half-thought-out new economic system are serious or fun asides, or if the reader's actually supposed to pay attention to them given how naive the design is. At times I found myself wondering about what sort of audience this book is intended for.

That's the main issue with this mini-series: it straddles the line between young adult and full adult book, at times veering back and forth between these two. The characters are sometimes childish and polite to a fault, excessively sensitive and gentle in a way unrelatable to anyone over the age of 8, yet sometimes cuss out in frustration at odd moments; interactions between characters are sometimes banal and nauseatingly congenial, yet sometimes there's casual sex and polyamory. Given the utopian setting, there's essentially zero conflict of any sort throughout the story, which allows the plot to focus entirely on internal struggles or philosophical discussions like body vs mind, the origins of consciousness, similarities and differences between conscious creatures, the degree to which one should be accepting of death's inevitability, etc. - yet none of these are given the thorough treatment they deserve, and so leave the book feeling a little lacking of actual substance.

All in all, this kind of story could be quite interesting, but was too short and too superficial to make much impact. It would benefit from a more rigorous world building mindset and longer passages in many cases, as opposed to bringing up interesting points only to brush them aside moments later.

I read this book after reading The Easy Way to Quit Smoking by the same author. I almost didn't - after all, I figured (correctly) it would be more or less the same ideas, just applied to a different substance - but I'm glad I did. Since I don't smoke but do (did, actually) drink caffeine in the form of coffee and tea, reading this was much more relatable in a way that was surprisingly impactful. There's something different about thinking "I get it, you just apply those ideas to this other thing" compared to having those distinctions presented to you directly in a way that forces you to either reject or grapple with each of them as they come in a form of mental argument with the book. I've stopped drinking caffeine two or three times before for a period of a month, but always went back to it. This book gave me the psychological tools to provoke me into being more mindful of what compels me to drink these substances, objectively consider whether or not I truly "want" to overall, and whether it's truly worth doing so for the rest of my life.

It's not a long book by any means and was easy to get through. Most of my review for the smoking one applies to this as well. (https://hardcover.app/books/allen-carrs-easy-way-to-stop-smoking/reviews/@hubbard?referrer_id=6499)

I'm not a smoker myself, but after learning that the workshops Allen Carr started have an 80-90% success rate among even multiple decade long chain smokers, I was curious to find out what the ideas were. At times the book felt like it was repeating itself, particularly in the beginning, but I began to realize after a while that that's kind of the point: there's really only one (maybe two) fundamental ideas here, but numerous situations in which to apply them (and caveats to beware of), and it's obviously important to get the message across as clear as possible.

As a non-smoker I can't give my personal opinion on the effectiveness of what this book preaches, but some of the writing is vaguely reminiscent of strategies I've read are used during research into psychedelic therapies for anxiety, depression and, of course, drug use, which was interesting to note. Both share common themes of focusing on the individual's conscious relationship to the substance along with their gut feelings and thoughts that arise from interacting with it, while avoiding any focus on reducing the mechanism of addiction to something purely chemical or neurological. They heavily emphasize obtaining a certain mindset/outlook on the matter and downplay (or outright dismiss, in this book's case) the necessity of willpower in achieving freedom from addiction.

If you're a smoker looking to quit, it's obviously worth a try - not long, to the point, and backed my numerous success stories. If, like me, you're just intrigued by the psychology behind it, I'd say it's worth the time for a quick read, too - who knows, maybe you'll find yourself helped by similar ideas to these in a different situation some day.

~~ Fyi, I made it about halfway before abandoning this book, so take this "review" with that in mind ~~

The emotion of awe is an interesting area to research, and the book had some cool insights into why we feel it as well as other fun psychology tidbits. The best part, though - the author's synthesis of thousands of awe-inducing experiences collected from around the world and the 8 common themes they boiled these down to, termed the "8 wonders of life" - came right at the beginning and I gradually lost interest from there. There seemed to me to be relatively frequent inconsistencies or stretches-of-the-truth in the interpretation of some of the studies' results, and other parts were just less rigorous than I'd hoped - it's definitely less so than something similar like The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Much of the book is filled with short excerpts of the thousands of stories, which can be enjoyable to read in their own right (and some indeed left me awed at times, too), but I was kind of hoping for a more theoretical treatment of the topic throughout, and this felt a little more like "feel good science" that's dumbed itself down a tad too much in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience and sacrificed its integrity in the process.

A fantastic analysis of our current situation. Whether or not you agree with the author's conclusions, the insights into how we ended up in a state of affairs where almost half people living in rich countries are convinced their job does not contribute anything to humanity whatsoever and would be better done away with are worth reading. The issue's looked at from both economic and cultural/historic perspectives and backed up by data where available. There were areas where it was admitted more research needed to be done in order to really confirm or deny some of the author's suspicions, but I find this acceptable (even positive) compared to omitting or otherwise glossing over the details. This book had me revisiting several assumptions I'd grown up believing by default from the standard American capital playbook, just because everyone else did, and it was viewed as somewhat distasteful for someone without a PhD or other fancy credential to question them ("What do you know?"): the efficiency of the market and its correlation (or lack of) with social value, less discussed motives of political groups, where the value of work "comes from", and what the point of working even is (or if it varies among people). It was refreshing to read something with a somewhat out-of-the-norm perspective compared to what we're taught on how society should work and what we should value, especially since many writings of the sort are often half-baked and not all that thorough. This was not that at all, and certainly can't be dismissed out of hand like so many others.

One minor qualm I had is that a lot of interesting and often relevant information was buried in the footnotes, which were at the back of the book. I imagine the editor was trying to keep things "on track", but I could have done with less flipping back and forth.

I really hope you read this book.

I enjoyed this book for the most part. It has a slight philosophical bent, with some interesting dialogue about the meaning of "purpose", particularly toward the end, where I felt the book hit its stride with what it was trying to become. The plot takes a while longer to build up than I would have liked, but it's not excruciatingly slow (it's relatively short overall, too). Worldbuilding isn't a huge focus, but there was enough of it to spur my imagination on to wonder about the details left out. This isn't the kind of book that tries to be extremely realistic or predictive, and it incorporates some elements of fantasy into what could otherwise be tentatively described as futuristic science fiction, without the focus on the science. I found a good balance here, for this style of story, and liked it enough I'll continue on to the next book in the series, mostly out of curiosity for finding out what philosophical stance the story ultimately ends up on.

I do agree with other reviewers that it was too childish at times and a little hand-wavy on many of the topics it brings up. I think of this more as something intended to be short and sweet rather than carry any important meaning.

I really liked this book because it was intriguing and I wanted to read more and more of it. Certain parts of it are kind of dull, with not as much action happening as there usually is. Although, there are very few of those parts and the characters are very interesting. Such as Tancred, a boy who can control the weather. When Charlie went to the castle of mirrors, I was excited because I thought that he would finally find his father. Charlie ended up being disappointed though, as it was not actually his father. Maybe he will in the next one, at least I certainly hope so! I wish that another book comes out soon in this series, as it is a great [series]. I have read all of these books so far and can't wait for the next one to come out. If you are a person that loves fiction with magical powers, this is a book for you. Jenny Nimmo is a great author.