Zelma
3.5
The first half of the book is really strong but then withers away, dragging on, describing just factual events, lacking the philosophical insight which the first half has. It is a worthy read nevertheless.
It might be a good book for someone who doesn't know anything about habits. However, it doesn't bring anything new or interesting.
I got a reminder of why I don't like self-help as a genre.
A good part of this collection just flew over my head. I did not have the energy to check all the references that only americans or californians or new yorkers and so on get.
Some essays just hit the right spot.
Incredible writing, of course.
I will be returning to it.
(This is not a “proper” review. Many people have written about Borges and his writing and definitely are more eloquent and accurate than I could ever be so I leave that to them.)
I had been wanting to read Borges for a while now and finally managed to get a copy of my own. And he is as great as I imagined, even though there were some stories in this selection I didn't really care about that much (which is why I gave it 4/5). But so many were mesmerizing, so universal, yet so eccentric. And the poetry in this collection is great as well. His writing is just so charming and entrancing.
I now am on the search for anything and everything Borges has written.
A great short but dense book that gives an insight into how intelligence research has been progressing. The major ideas are well explained accompanied by some looking into specifics.
It was personally a good refresher and sorted some ideas in my mind.
I'd say it is non-psychology-neuroscience (or related) reader friendly.
I did not like this at all.
In most of the stories I couldn't make any sense of them, they were so confusing for seemingly no reason.
I had a completely different impression of what this book would contain. I'm not sure where that impression came from, but once I started reading, I was rather disappointed.
First and foremost, this book is a product of its time and culture. By today's standards, it feels outdated and shallow - though perhaps that speaks more of our culture's progress.
That said, there are still aspects worth critiquing, even considering that the book is 25 years old. It leans heavily on quotes from other authors, often to the point where it feels like they were collected simply to validate the author's ideas rather than support them meaningfully. There's a noticeable lack of arguments backed by anything resembling evidence, though, to be fair, the book never explicitly claims to be objective—despite frequently using rhetoric that suggests otherwise.
The most annoying part, though, is the pompous writing style, presenting the author's views as absolute truths. She frequently refers to “many people nowadays,” yet as a reader, I have no sense of whether this reflects a broader trend or just something a friend mentioned over dinner. It is difficult to take the arguments and ideas seriously as the source is unreliable, often contradicting herself throughout the book.
There are still some valid ideas here, but they could have easily been condensed into a magazine article rather than extending them to a book that repeats itself, droning ever on.