Travis

Uhhh. I'm not sure how this got on my list or what I thought it would be. I just finished “There's No Such Thing About Bad Weather”, which is insights into the difference between Swedish and North American parenting. I thought this book would be something more like that, an examination of happiness told through the lens of the author's experience. Maybe that's what it was supposed to be but, man, after listening to this on 1.5 speed for 45 min I couldn't take it anymore. This book seems like it was a pamphlet that was expanded to a book. I can't handle the overly flowery descriptions of what your kids are doing every minute of the day which serve as padding.

After 45 minutes I'm not even sure what this book is supposed to be about, something about a “happiness project” but beyond that from what I can tell just reading the extremely long title of this book gives you enough information to infer the rest of the book. The other thing that put me off was the comparison early on made to Eat Pray Love, if that's what your striving for then I'm already out.

I thought I'd like this but I worried it would read a lot more like The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism rather than a compelling fiction. Indeed, things slowed down a bit for me when we got to the reading of Goldstien's book.

Much like Animal Farm I found this book supremely frustrating because the tactics of authoritarianism remain, largely, unchanged to this day. If it weren't banned in so many public school libraries I'd say this book should be required reading for every high school student.

I liked it, but honestly, I would have preferred to read a biography of Aviya Kushner. It's a fairly quick read but I did find myself struggling in the first few chapters however once the book stopped being so focused, ironically, on Biblical grammar and more about Kushner's life, reflections and ideas about her own identity it became a lot more fascinating for me.

I like Duhigg's style, similar to Malcolm Gladwell: making his point with lots of interesting stories, to the point where it reads almost like a collection of short stories. I really enjoyed the book, the central thesis: cue, routine, reward is fairly simple and could easily be summed up in a much shorter article but that's ok because the stories are so interesting.

Loved this book in high school, something tells me I would not know.

The first few chapters were interesting but this is not a “History of Thought”, this is a history of a very few specific schools of thought cherry picked I assume by Ferry's personal preferences. Normally, that'd be fine but when reading “A Brief History of Thought” I'd prefer a more comprehensive primer. Also, this book is hugely weighted towards Nietzsche and deconstruction, the last 100 pages, of this 260 page book are dedicated to these topics while Stoic thought, Christianity and Humanism are given a Cliff Notes treatment in the first two thirds of the book.
Ferry attempts to create some hope for salvation out of a secular humanist perspective but for me, as a subscriber to the Christian ideal, this largely fell flat. Ultimately the promise of “salvation” as Ferry defines it felt hallow and a pale imitation of the far greater reward promised in Christian theology. While I realize that not all readers are Christian and many, like Ferry, may be looking for an alternative source of hope equal to the Christian ideal of “salvation”, but if that's the case then I would argue that Ferry is not a very good spokesman for the task.

You could read this in about an hour, it's on their website in PDF form for free, I wouldn't recommend paying for it since they openly distribute the free version.

I love Basecamp and their corporate philosophy, this book is sort of a Cliff Notes version of Basecamp (formerly 37 Signal's history). The book was written in 2006 or 2007 so a lot has changed with Basecamp and the industry as a whole since then but it's still a great guide on how to create a lean, humanistic corporate culture.

Why I only gave it 3 stars: I wish it was longer with more detail.

Full disclosure I didn't finish this book, I read Benji's section the end and maybe a dozen pages of Quintin's.

Two stars for interesting writing style and concept but ultimately I just don't want to spend the hours required to read the inner thoughts of a suicidal Harvard student and his older brother who is a complete jerk.

Lots of interesting anecdotes and history of various typefaces. I was generally happy with the examples the author gave (often when describing a typeface the first few sentences would be in that font) but there were some times when a lot of effort was used to describe the character of a typeface but the letter or font was not actually shown. In these cases, the description left me with a feeling somewhat akin to when a person describes a comic without showing the pictures.
Another, slight, I found was that a lot of ideas and concepts were not overly well defined or laid out. For example, the author talked in detail about the competition between the Linotype and Monotype companies without really getting into detail about how either machine worked or why one would be advantageous over the other (this was touched on but it was not overly clear).

All in all, though the book is a great introduction to the world of typography and has enough interesting anecdotes to be engaging to someone with even a marginal interest in typography.

Interesting tour of Italy during WWI but that's about all I can say for this. I read this because I was interested in learning more about Hemingway's style, specifically his sentence construction, which incidentally was one of the best parts of the book as it was an enjoyable and easy read my eyes glided through the text easily. But story-wise everything about this book felt hallow, there were a few sequences that I felt accurately depicted the horrors of war but these seemed to be cheapened by the very shallow interactions and romance between Frederick and Catherine.