Book Reviews – Curtis McHale: Recent Episodes

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Non-FictionDark PRFirst, Grant was kind enough to gift me a physical copy of this book when I said it wasn’t available at my local library. No request from him, just asked for my address and sent a book.

In this book the reader is provided with many frameworks to use when they think about the marketing efforts of the companies we interact with every day. From funding contradicting studies to disprove the ties between sugar and diabetes, to teaching that slavery provided useful skills thus was a helpful thing, to framing magical carbon capture as a solution to pollution so we don’t have to curb our purchasing, Ennis provides many ways to dig into the claims companies make to us to show how shallow they are.

If I have one regret about the book it’s that I haven’t done as good a job at applying the frames provided by Ennis to the world around me this year and then written about them.

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Democracy at WorkDemocracy at Work is all about radical democracy, giving only the workers that contribute to production a say in how the surplus of production is used. This would mean eliminating the ownership class (referred to as capitalists here) because all the workers contributing would be the owners, as long as they contributed.

Wolff does spend time addressing how companies formed with this structure would finance retirement, benefits, and even how they’d band together to help workers transfer industries as technology changed without workers needing to scramble for lost income.

For all the talk about democracy being the best thing, this type of radical democracy where workers get the only say is pilloried as fascism. After reading this book I wonder if that’s done by those with wealth so they can maintain their wealth without working.

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Against CreativityIn Against Creativity, Oli Mould, looks at how creativity has been pushed by capitalism to mask making workers do more work for less pay. We don’t call it being underfunded, we say a department has to be “creative” with their work. We defund libraries and tell them that they’re not “creative” enough while their mandates suddenly include spaces for homeless people.

Mould makes a compelling case for how capitalism wants befriend creativity, as long as it serves business. Art that’s just a bit edgy to attract the right type of person downtown to contribute to the economy. Nothing that would call society to account though, this is subversive and pushed out of the sanitary creative life most of us encounter.

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The Cost of Being a GirlYasemin Besen-Cassino takes a hard look at the wages girls earn and how the employment trends from the early teenage years set women up to earn far less than their male counterparts for their entire lives. For girls there is a very small window in their first teen years when they earn more than males, but then they continue to babysit where raises don’t happen. Boys often start in fast food or other service industries which may start lower, but often have established pay scale increases every year.

Besen-Cassino debunks the typical tropes that state the [[gender pay gap|gender wage gap]] comes down to training, as more women finish higher levels of education than men. But despite closing the main skill difference used to explain why women earn less, they continue to earn less.

From the retail jobs young women often work that make them purchase new clothes every season out of their wages, to the devaluing of childcare as work, women are systematically put down by a society run by men.

For more on misogyny read A Brief History of Misogyny.

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Disappointing ReadsAs I review my list of non-fiction books I’m reaching to find any that stand out. I read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport hoping I’d get a similar feeling as when I read Deep Work, but nope. Slow Productivity was fine, but mostly rehashed stuff you hear all the time if you’ve read about productivity. Don’t bother with it if you’ve read productivity books before.

I have similar feelings about Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish. I picked it up because I love his site Farnham Street but found the book underwhelming with the same comments I have for Slow Productivity. It hashes over a bunch of stuff I’ve already read on productivity.

I guess my take away for 2025 is that I need to stop reading productivity books because they don’t have much to say to me anymore. There is only so much you can maximize your life, and I’m clearly aware of all the strategies available and know which ones work for me and which ones don’t.

FictionBrandon SandersonBrandon Sanderson is the biggest Fantasy author currently, and my reading reflects that. I completed four books by Sanderson this year. Defiant continues the Skyward Saga, in theory with the final book. Defiant is written a bit more towards the YA reader than some of his other series, but it’s still a great read.

Elantris is a great book looking at broken magic and the toll a broken world is taking on the people. We follow the prince who gets afflicted by a mysterious disease that plagues the residents of his nation. He’s thrown in with the other untouchable immortals wasting away in a formerly glorious city and then works to make their lives better with the time he has before he goes mad.

The Sunlit Man stays in Sanderson’s Cosmere universe, but bends towards Science Fiction where his other books are Fantasy. We meet Nomad, who I quickly figured out was a character I’d met in other Sanderson books but couldn’t figure out who it was till the end, as Nomad is dropped on a small planet that spins so fast with a sun so scorching hot that you must stay on the move or be burned up. Nomad must try and keep moving on the planet while also continuing to run from the bigger badder enemy that has him trapped on the world in the first place.

The Emporer’s Soul is a short story about a thief that can imbue the artifact’s of the world with the way things may have gone. She can take an abused table and with some writing and magic change it into a table that was cared for with meticulous grace it’s whole life. In this world that makes her a forger, where she forges art just to show that she can do so good a job you won’t notice. Upon her capture she must forge a new soul for a person in a short time, while also figuring out how to save her own life from betrayal.

Christopher RuocchioI found Christopher Roucchio this year as well, who like Sanderson likes to write epic tomes. I’ve started his Sun Eater Series with Empire of Silence and Howling Dark both of which were excellent reads. Ruocchio moves much slower than Sanderson’s writing, but his payoffs are just as good.

I have the whole series and plan to finish the last 4 books during 2025.

Quill and StillI was introduced to Aaron’s writing via Mastodon this year and found Quill & Still very refreshing read. It’s an isekai story with Sophie being transported to a world where they encounter a huge surprise. This world just takes care of it’s people. A city isn’t a real city if it can’t provide for everyone’s basic needs even if people don’t work, and everyone contributes to the function of society.

When Sophie decides her chemistry background will fit with alchemy in the new world she’s astonished to see that the city will front all the costs for the business and provide a place for it to function. If she fails in the first year they bring in an established business person to help fix the issues. If that doesn’t work an the business still fails, they give you a standard house and help you find something else you’re good at. You don’t owe them anything as long as you do something to help the city survive.

A world that takes care of everyone regardless of wealth sounds like one I’d like to live in and I can’t wait for the next book.

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Heaven’s RiverHeaven’s River is book 4 in the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. In this book we encounter a new civilization run by an AI in a massive doughnut habitat as we look for a lost “Bob”1. I’ve enjoyed every book in the series reading in more than once this year.

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• Bob’s are autonomous AI space ships inhabited by the consciousness of the original Robert Johannson. They’re not all the same, and during the series they explore the personhood of AI. ↩︎

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I don’t remember when I first stumbled across Farnham Street but I do remember finding the content very helpful in my journey to be a life-long learner. Thus when I saw Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish I grabbed it hoping for the same feeling of great wisdom being imparted.

Parrish wrote this book to help us get the results we desire from our decisions. The first part of the book is meant to help us identify the enemies of clear thinking1. The second part is meant to show us how to put clear thinking into practice. Finally Parrish tries to help us understand when a decision was made soundly, even though the outcome may not have been what we desired at first.

What Stops Clear Thinking

In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things. We must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly. Pg X

One of the first things that Parrish outlines is the harm that our emotions can have on clear thinking. When we respond emotionally we reduce our capacity to recognise that we’re in a situation which calls for clear thinking2 often making us respond like idiots.

A second failure point we often fall into is overconfidence, where our ego leads us to believe that we are better prepared than we really are3. Overconfidence blinds us to the risks inherent in any decision4 and makes it easy to believe the world is as we want it to be instead of the world operating on rules we don’t have direct control over.

Third, social rewards easily trick us into going along with the crowd even when we know the crowd is wrong5. This is because the rewards for fitting in with the crowd are seen long before the benefits of going against the crowd are seen. In this phase we have the detriments of standing on our own, with none of the possible future unseen benefits.

Finally, the zone of average tempts us to stay exactly where we are because things are fine6. In this zone we don’t clearly evaluate our situation because things are just good enough that we have no pain and thus feel no need to change our circumstances. Without some pain most people won’t employ clear thinking and make any changes in their life.

Take Responsibility to LearnIf you want to think clearly you must know and recognise without malice your abilities and more importantly your inabilities7. Knowing what you’re bad at is important so that you can set up your environment in such a way to help ensure that you limit your opportunity to make bad decisions because your environment doesn’t allow for them. This is like not purchasing sweets at the grocery store so you’ve made the decision once to stay away from treats instead of having to say no every time you look in the cupboard.

A second powerful part of clear thinking is to take responsibility for your actions and their consequences8. Good or bad, the consequences of your decisions will reinforce a good decision or prompt reevaluation of your decision if the outcome went poorly. It’s far easier for most people to blame others for their bad outcomes because it absolves them of any responsibility and they can keep their perfect record. This doesn’t help you make better decisions in the future though.

Making Good DecisionsThe first step in making a good decision in defining the problem that needs to be solved9. That means not defaulting to the first plausible description of the problem so that you can move to the “decision” phase10, but asking yourself and your team hard questions about the true problem that needs solving. Are you only looking at the visible outcome of the problem or are you looking at the root cause that needs solving?

Once you’ve identified the problem and have some plausible solutions you need to start evaluating them. Assume that your solutions are not going to work11, what goes wrong with them? What parts of the process don’t go smoothly and need to be managed to make the solution work? What opportunities are you giving up when you choose one path over another12?

Should You Read Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish?Clear Thinking is a decent book about how to make good decisions and comes with many tidbits that can help your thinking, but I don’t think it’s revolutionary. You’d get many of the same ideas by reading almost any book focused on Stoic Philosophy from Ryan Holiday, or better yet go back to Marcus Aurelius with Meditations.

The biggest contribution I see in Parrish’s work is the idea that if the consequences of the decision is low and it’s easy to reverse than almost any time spent gathering information is wasted time13. We easily spend lots of time gathering information about decisions that don’t matter in some vain effort to assure ourselves that we haven’t made a small error in a decision that doesn’t matter. We fear being wrong in anything so we waste time on details that don’t matter.

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Slow Productivity is Cal Newport’s 5th entry into the adult productivity1 space, all of which I’ve read. My first entry into Newport was Deep Work which I wrote two extensive posts about. At the time it was saying all the things I was thinking but had no words for. But since then I’m not sure that Newport has moved on that much from the core premise of the book.

Slow Productivity has 3 base tenants2. First, do fewer things. Second, work at a natural pace. Third, obsess over the quality of the work you do. He contrasts these three ideas with the thought that we currently have a faulty definition of productivity3, consisting of doing more things faster and using more time to do work.

Newport also introduces his idea of pseudo-productivity4, which is define as doing visible action (chats, emails, butt in seat time) as a proxy for productive effort. In Newport’s view it’s hard to measure knowledge work so instead of doing a good job at defining success in a knowledge work environment we default to evaluating the worth of an individual in an organization by these visible but not that valuable efforts.

Do Fewer Things

Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most. Pg 53

Newport’s first step in embracing slow productivity is to do fewer things and he rightly points out that any new project you take on brings with it more work than the deliverable itself represents, it also brings extra administrative overhead by way of communication about the tasks that must be done to accomplish a project5. This highlights the Achilles heel of every productivity book I’ve read, Newport assumes that his readers have autonomy over the projects they take on at work6 and only makes passing reference to any worker that may not have autonomy. He certainly never steps deep into the waters of how economic incentives are set up and how many workers just have to show up and do what they’re told or they’ll be out of a job and then out of a house with nothing to eat.

After his statement about committing to less, he has generic productivity advice about asking your boss to remove things from your list as things are added7 and focusing on one major project per day so you can get deeply involved in it and make good progress on the project.

Work at a Natural Pace

Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance. Pg 116

The natural pace that’s recommended would have workers measure their “production” over the time span of months, but better even years or decades8 instead of the daily widget cranking pace that most workers and managers default to. But there is the issue, most bosses and managers at best measure productivity across a time span of a week. Newport never offers advice to combat this tendency either, he simply tells you to measure your productivity over a longer time frame and then I guess your boss will magically fall into line and also measure your productivity over a year or many years instead of defaulting to what you did last month or on the last project.

It does sound idyllic to take the months or years long breaks suggested by Newport so that you can learn more and then combine that new learning with old ideas to revolutionize a field but all his examples had wealth of some fashion so earning income in the moment wasn’t a pressing issue for them. While he does acknowledge this, it’s barely a passing reference9.

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Get the CourseSticking with the current buzzwords the author also addresses quiet quitting, but not in the same way I’ve come to understand it. While I’ve continued to understand it as just putting in your 9-5 hours and doing your work with nothing extra outside, Newport says that you still work a bit extra, but maybe you’re not available on weekends to your work and don’t take on that extra project that your boss wants you to do10. It seems that he still advocates for working more than the expected hours, just not quite as many as you would if you weren’t in a phase where you were “slowing down”.

Obsess Over Quality

Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more freedom in your efforts over the long term. Pg 173

Yes his final advice is more or less a shortened version of his main argument in So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Do such good work that you’re recognized at your job and then leverage that work into more choice in the work you do.

Newport’s first example of someone doing this is the music artist Jewel, who by her own admission didn’t need money when she said goodbye to the grind her label wanted for her and struck out on doing her own thing11. His second example, Paul Jarvis, is better in that Jarvis recommends buying less so that you need to earn less and living a small enough life that you can choose to do what you want instead of needing to grub for money all the time.

The rest of his examples about betting on yourself are deeply enmeshed with survivorship bias12 so we’re only seeing the winners that happened to have enough money or some connection that means they could outlast failure and “win”. Sure he does acknowledge that for every John Grisham and Clive Cussler there are many failed authors13 and recommends that you only quit your job and make a full bet on yourself if you’ve seen monetary validation that what you’re doing is working14. These are throwaway short paragraphs in a vast swamp of telling you to bet on yourself because that’s the way though. It’s not a serious engagement with the fact that most people fail and we never hear about them.

Should You Read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport?As I read more productivity books I can’t help but see that most of them fall firmly into the agreement that it’s all about your hard work and ignore the systemic issues with our economic system. This is what business and capitalism wants, to make you believe that wherever you are it’s because of your choices and that the system is working fine. If you believe this then you won’t step out and look at proper reforms that will give everyone the opportunity to thrive.

Newport sticks to the script in this regard. It’s mostly about the effort you put in and he barely acknowledges any external factors that could make your success impossible despite your best efforts.

If you’re new to the productivity space then Slow Productivity is a decent read. It covers most of the bases without treading into anything with much depth. It’s not Newport’s best work, but it’s not a terrible book.

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Fiction Read in March 2024Liberty’s Daughter – Naomi KritzerLiberty’s Daughter follows Beck Garrison, who was kidnapped by her father to live on a techno-libertarian seastead. We get to follow Beck as she reunites with the mother she thought was dead, and finds “stuff” for people. Beck is at the center of a quest for power over the seastead, while her father is part of the group that’s looking to build a virus so that all the little workers happily work to keep this utopia for the rich functional.

I found the story compelling, if a bit fast. I would have enjoyed just a bit more time spent on developing the world and some of the characters.

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The Sunlit Man – Brandon SandersonWe open up following Nomad (not his given name from other books) as he is deposited on the run on a world that has such intense sunlight and a short rotation and high energy needs, that people are staked to the ground as sacrifices so that they’re souls can be harvested later as a power source. It took me a while to figure out who exactly Nomad was, and then I realised I need to read Dawnshard again to put that part of Sanderson’s world back in my head.

As with every Sanderson book I’ve read, this was a great read in the fantasy genre.

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Beneath the Gods’ Tree – S KaethI read my first book by S Kaeth in February, and enjoyed it. This book steps back to a time that was referred to in the development of Taunos, a lost love and a big adventure. Here we get to see Taunos operate away from his people on his mission to keep them safe from the bigger world that really doesn’t care that they live.

If I have one criticism of this book, it’s similar to my issue with the first book I read by S Kaeth, some of the dialogue is just a bit lacking. It’s not crazy bad, but feels like it sometimes misses a beat. Despite that, I’m still looking forward to reading the other books in the series.

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Heaven’s River – Dennis E TaylorHeaven’s River is the fourth book in the Bobiverse series. Here we follow some “Bobs” as they travel to find the lost friend that disappeared earlier in the series. The entire Bobiverse series has been excellent as it asks what counts as “life” is it just the human bodies we know now, or does it encompass the digital people that exist in this future?

How should we treat the other species that are out there? Should they be “allowed” to flourish if that mean less interstellar real estate for humans? I’ve listened to these as audiobooks thus far, but owning copies in a physical form is also on my radar.

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Non-Fiction read in March 2024Dark PR – Grant EnnisI “enjoyed” this book, at least as much as you can enjoy a book that lays out how corporations frame media messages designed to save their profits at the expense of road safety, citizen health, and the climate crisis. Where I’ve often used mental models to help me make sense of ideas, I will now also be adding Grant’s frames before I apply mental models to help filter out the corporate bullshit we’re inundated with now.

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Ruined by Reading – Lynne Sharon SchwartzRuined by Reading was not quite the book I thought it was going to be. In fact a few pages into reading it I was sure that this would be a book that I quietly put down and took to the used bookstore for credit. But the deeper I got the more thought provoking the questions were that the book had me pondering.

Is reading too much a handicap because you never leave your mind free from others thoughts?

Being loud is not a sign of strength. Strength of character is shown by those that can quietly be unmoved in the face of the loud.

Are our pleasures once sanctioned less desirable?

I recommend this book.

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Never Enough – Jennifer Breheny WallaceNever Enough takes a critical look at the achievement culture pushed on teenagers today, specifically teenagers with parents that can afford to get them into the “best” schools or send them to many activities so that they’re College/University applications look the most appealing. Unsurprisingly this push to perform harms kids, in many ways just as much as poverty harms kids that are barely getting by.

If there is one takeaway for parents, make sure that you kids know they matter to you regardless of how well they perform in school or sports. They should matter to you just because they exist. If you have other kids in your orbit as a coach or mentor, make sure these kids know they matter without reservations.

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Everything and Less – Mark McGurlEverything and Less is an academic look at how Amazon has shaped the way literature is written. Specifically that which academics would refer to as “literature” instead of the “genre fiction” that most of us would normally be interested in. While I enjoyed the information, I’m sure there is much more depth to be had by someone that has read all the “literature” referred to by the author.

As it stands, this is a maybe read from me. If you’re into an academic discussion on the topic, then go for it. If you’re looking more for a book that deals with the economic impact of Amazon on the publishing industry then Book Wars is where you should be looking.

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I first grabbed Read Write Own from my local library because the subtitle sounded interesting. I’m ready for a new era on the internet, the current one of companies controlling everything and extracting the maximum they can from people sucks and I’m tired of it.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of who Chris Dixon was so I didn’t realise that he’s one of the causes for the enshittified internet that we have today via the investments a16z makes in companies that are around purely to transfer money from regular people to already wealthy people. Come on, wealthy people need more money..right.

What has a16z Invested in?A short list of companies that a16z has invested in includes many extractive companies that are making our world worse. Facebook, which lied to news sites about video and then pulled the rug out from under them once Facebook was big enough and didn’t need the news content.

Airbnb is another company that has benefited from investment with a16z. Yup the same Airbnb that is contributing to a housing/rental crisis for communities so that many people can’t get affordable housing.

Probably the worst one considering the content of the book is Coinbase. Dixon spends a entire chapter railing against casino crypto industry scams, but fails to mention the losses Coinbase has taken which users have ended up paying for while Coinbase earned money processing the transactions that stole from customers.

There are more investments made by a16z, many of which are touted as excellent companies doing blockchain right, though Dixon never has the self-awareness to cite his conflicts of interest…actually scratch that, he’s likely entirely aware of those conflicts and doesn’t care because if you believe his words and transact with the companies he’s invested in he makes more money.

Shit, YouTube personalities have a higher disclosure bar in the US via the FTC than Dixon does as an author.

So BlockchainIn Dixon’s mind the current era of the internet is in the “attract extract” cycle1. I agree with this assessment and Cory Doctorow has done a better job explaining it as the enshitification cycle. Both would agree that companies attract a bunch of users by catering to them and foregoing profit to get users.

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Get the CourseA good example of this would be Amazon’s continued increase in charges that sellers pay back to Amazon, about half of each sale heads back to Amazon in fact. Plus Amazon has a most favoured nation clause which says you can’t sell your goods for cheaper elsewhere. So that means if you have to pay Amazon 50% of your sale, and you mark up your goods to pay for that lost margin, your goods are 50% more expensive everywhere to keep up with the contract you have with Amazon. He calls this money going to Amazon the “take rate”.

Dixon does hit the nail on the head as he looks at how companies are making their products and services worse by extracting more and more value out of every transaction. In the ideal world of his book the blockchain will solve this…somehow.

By Dixon’s theory a blockchain is a contract that can’t be changed and if you code in terms that are favourable to consumers then those rules will stay in place forever2. Here Dixon claims that if you encode low take rates then they stay that way, and lower take rates are better for consumers and sellers because goods can be cheaper and more money can stay in users pockets. All we need is people to build good stuff on the blockchain.

Dixon’s Good Blockchain ProjectsOne of the good blockchain projects that Dixon cites is Helium, a crypto-powered mobile network. Helium comes with the same story of every blockchain project I’ve seen. It’s really crypto-currency under the hood. It lives on huge hype from the people at the top of the chain. It turns out to cost people lots of money and offer little in the way of returns.

With Helium, the C-Suite and board made lots of money while regular people shelled out $500 per device (around $500 million spent in total) to get a “next generation internet device” where connectivity would be owned by the people and they’d earn money back in the form of the crypto-token that Helium would mine on the routers provided. In the end, people spent $500 and the device still costs them money daily in electricity bills, while providing almost nothing in the form of a crypto-currency return.

So where did all the tokens go? According to Forbes, like most crypto scams, the tokens were hoarded by the founders and all the money stayed at the top.

A review of hundreds of leaked internal documents, transaction data and interviews with five former Helium employees suggest that as Helium insiders touted the democratized spirit of their “People’s Network,” they quietly amassed a majority of the tokens earned at the project’s start, hoarding much of the wealth generated in its earliest and most lucrative days.

So Helium isn’t such a hot project, oh and Dixon fails to mention that this good project he’s citing is one that he invested in. So he has a big interest in making you believe that it’s a good project and you should invest in it and believe in it.

There are other “good” project that Dixon cites, but they amount to the same thing. Stuff he’s invested in, that isn’t nearly as good as he says, that mostly further enriched people that have more money then they could ever reasonably spend.

Should You Read Read Write Own?Nope, you shouldn’t waste your time on this book.

Read Write Own is around so that Dixon can get a book out instead of a blog post. It’s little more than an affirmation of what crypto enthusiasts already believe. He never really engages with criticisms of the blockchain world and simply dismisses any critical view as people that are being dishonest and don’t get it.

If you’re on board with blockchain, this will affirm your ideas. If you’re not a believer, your mind won’t be changed by this, and you will not be given anything deeper to think about. I’d love a book that took a good look at blockchain technology and engaged with all the issues in a thoughtful way, this book isn’t it.

I’m very glad I borrowed this book from the library and didn’t invest my personal cash in a purchase.

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As we do every month, let’s take a look at the books I read in February 2024. Overall I “read” 9 books, 3 fiction and 6 non-fiction. I also added 3 fiction books on Audible this month for a total of 12 books. Unfortunately my current system of recording books read doesn’t have a way to cover dates for a second reading, so in my yearly statistics I’ll leave out the 3 Bobiverse books.

FictionBobiverse 1, 2, 3Looking at Audible I realized that Heaven’s River, Bobiverse book 4, was out and I had a credit coming up so I listened to all three of the initial books in the Bobiverse series before I got my credit and could enjoy the 4th book in the series.

While trying to avoid spoilers, Bob is a normal guy that gets hit by a car but he had already signed on to a company that would freeze his body to store him until such time as the medical technology advanced far enough that he could be saved. Unfortunately for Bob, politics changed and a religious government came into power that didn’t think these wealthy dead people had souls and thus had no rights. That left them free to copy Bob’s brain and turn him into a space ship that should go help colonize the stars.

Well, Bob has other ideas and does become a space ship to survive, but does a whole bunch more. Androids are made that resemble the alien races the ships encounter. Clones are made of Bob, and eventually they talk about replicative drift and make suppositions about the soul of a computerized entity.

I enjoyed this series just as much as the first time and while I don’t include Heaven’s River in the books I finished in February, I did finish it yesterday and it’s excellent just like the other books in the series.

Highly recommended series if you’re into science fiction.

Changer – Matt GemmellI’ve enjoyed Matt’s writing on his site, and a number of his short stories so I picked up book one of his Kestrel series expecting a decent read. Unfortunately I was disappointed. The dialogue is stilted, and while I don’t expect a deep story from a thriller book like this, it was far to unbelievable to get past about 10%.

I count this book as read because I’ve read as much as I’m going to read of the series. I don’t recommend it.

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Between Starfalls – S. KaethThe law says that you never leave the path because if you do you won’t come back. But when your son goes missing you throw the rules out the window and you rescue your son. This story follows 4 main characters as the first chases down her son, and the others try to find both of them to help with whatever rescue is needed.

I did find the language a bit stilted at times, particularly with the Kamalti. They’re supposed to be a very formal race under the mountains, so I get what the author was trying to achieve, but it fell a bit flat sometimes.

Overall, the story was good and I’m already into another book in the world that S. Kaeth is building.

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Quill and Still – Aaron SofaerLike many books out there, Quill and Still, starts with our protagonist getting magically whisked to a new world, but the similarities with other stories stops there. We don’t find out that we’re the chosen one or some long awaited hero. We don’t pick up a sword and fight our way out of anything.

We slowly are overwhelmed by a society that simply wants the best for us. No we don’t have to work if we don’t want to, and yes we still get nice housing and meals. Yes we can get a free loan to start a business, and if the business doesn’t start turning a profit to pay back the loan after a year they send someone to help with the business because they simply want happy productive citizens. If the whole thing falls apart, they sell the stuff from the business and you owe nothing after.

You still get a home and food no matter what.

The most emotional parts for me came as the main character realized that they were valued simply because they were there, without thought to the economic value they brought to the city daily. It very much made me long for a society that could treat everyone with the same dignity.

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Non-FictionRead Write Own – Chris DixonThis is a tech-bro techno-utopian book that’s trying to sell us on how the “blockchain” will democratize ownership in a way that previous technology never could. Dixon has long tone-deaf rants on how tech giants has taken far too much ownership of life and then brings up blockchain tech as the solution. I say this is tone-deaf because Dixon is part of a16z, who helps fund lots of these types of tech companies as they try to become the next platform that sucks up our lives.

The book was decently written, but it was hard to buy into his main premise that we should ignore all the crypto-scams that make the news and instead dispassionately evaluate the technology of blockchains without emotional baggage from the billions stolen from people that were funnelled into crime and the already rich techno-bros.

I’ll likely do a longer review of this once I’ve gone through some of the critiques of the Read Write Own.

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DevOps with Kubernetes – Stephen FlemingIf you’re a manager with no technical background of any kind then maybe DevOps with Kubernetes is for you. The first chunk of the book is a very high-lever overview of what DevOps is, and the second part tackles Kubernetes in the same manner.

Really these should have been blog posts. At least in blog post form you could fix all the spelling mistakes easily, because there are a number of them in the book. I found the overview so high-level as to be almost entirely useless.

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Foreverism – Grafton TaylorThis is an exploration of nostalgia and how it influences society today. Tanner defines foreverism as the tendency for society to continue to look back at the past as some golden age, and then try to recapture that age today.

I was continually struck by Tanner’s insightful commentary on how we never want anything to end now. We continue to reboot the same old ideas instead of creating new properties. Media companies do this because a new property is a greater financial risk than rebooting some old series. This is part of the Theory Redux series, and a number of those other books also look interesting.

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Breaking Busy – Alli WorthingtonBreaking busy is a typical productivity book that gives you some well trod advice about how to stop being busy. Compared to the other books I’ve read in this genre, the only thing that Worthington adds is a bunch of exhortations about how God doesn’t want you to be busy and that you should follow the God-given life that he wants for you.

On top of the strong Christian themes, we have themes of hustle-culture, both of which turn me off. It’s not a bad book that will harm you, it’s just a predictable book that delves into mysticism as justification for your actions. I’d recommend anything from Cal Newport as strongly superior to this book.

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Duly Noted – Jorge ArangoIf you’re looking to get started on taking notes then this is a decent book. Arango covers the basics of how to take good notes, and how writing/notes don’t simply influence your thinking, they are where thinking happens. I wouldn’t say that this is a ground-breaking book in the space, but it’s a decent entry if you’ve read nothing about how to take notes.

If you’ve read a few other books, or chased down all the videos/online writing you find then little will be new here. You may pick up a tip or two, as I did, but don’t expect the book to revolutionize your thinking on notes.

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The Apple II Age – Laine NooneyThis book takes a look at how the Apple II lead the way in taking computers and making them practical for home use. Nooney walks through the software ecosystem at the time and shows how Apple place no restrictions on developers, which meant that the platform gained lots of momentum in the software space.

My biggest takeaway is that Apple does the exact opposite now, which makes me sad.

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Ali Abdaal is a popular YouTube content creator that focuses on productivity and living a good life and his first book is all about helping you be productive without simply grinding harder. Instead Abdaal wants to help readers get stuff done while still taking care of ourselves1. He bases much of his thoughts on the Broaden-and-Build theory by Barbara Fredrickson and positive psychology.

In this theory broaden refers to the idea that when we feel good emotions our minds “open up” and we take in more information, are more creative, and are more inclusive in our thinking2. Secondly, as we broaden our experience we build resources that we can draw on in the future for our benefit3. Here think about having a good time with someone that becomes a friend because of the shared positive experience. You now how a friend to draw on in the future if things are not going as well.

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From here Abdaal breaks his book up into the standard 3 sections we see in most productivity/self-help books. First he tackles how to use the science of feel-good productivity to energize yourself. Second he shows you how to use it to overcome procrastination. Finally he uses feel good productivity to show us how we can be sustained long-term by the practice4.

Part 1 – EnergizeIn Part 1 Abdaal encourages us to take on tasks that energize us, that are fun. He cites Richard Feynman who made many of his break throughs once he started “playing” with physics5. When we find something fun we are more likely to enter flow state6, and when we enter flow state work becomes effortless as the time flies away.

One key idea that Abdaal continues to come back to is that having autonomy7 over our work is a key factor in the work feeling effortless. Think of a prescribed reading syllabus versus a list of books you find interesting, which one will you get through faster?

A final key factor I’ll highlight is the protege effect8. The protege effect shows that when you teach something you know you get to know it better as you do the teaching. This alone is a good reason to share parts of the notes you take and the ideas you get from the books you read. The act of attempting to share your ideas refines them into something better, and you feel some mastery over the content as you deepen your understanding through more research.

Part 2 – UnblockIn the second section Abdaal works to show us how to unblock ourselves, to reduce procrastination. He highlights the key idea that we often procrastinate because we don’t know what the next action is9, which is a key blocker that the Getting Things Done method attempts to alleviate by always getting people to list the next action in a project.

Abdaal also highlights the usefulness of time blocking (I have a course on that) and gives you a decent framework to get started with setting time blocks for different projects.

Getting Started with Zettelkasten

If you’ve been wondering about what Zettelkasten is and how to start organizing your notes with this excellent system then this course is for you. I’ll walk you through how I use this system to develop my reading research for posts like this one here. You can also become a member to get all my courses.

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Get the CourseThere is also a good amount of influence from the book Atomic Habits in the advice given here. Ideas like, making sure your running clothes are out and available in the morning so you don’t have to get them out before a run. Having your tools ready means you reduce the friction to get started, and it’s much harder to get started than it is to continue with a task10.

Part 3 – SustainThe final section in the book deals a lot with burnout, or how to sustain your productive practice over the long-term. Abdaal says that burnout can happen to anyone, and not just because you have lots to do. If your job stops feeling meaningful, or you stop seeing progress, burnout is possible11.

To help combat this feeling of overwork Abdaal suggests a few tactics. First he takes the idea of HELL YES or no from Derek Sivers as a way to filter that which you agree to do12. You apply this model to opportunities you have. If the opportunities isn’t a “hell yes I’d love to do that” then it’s a NO. This can help you reduce the responsibilities you take on, especially the ones you take on simply because you think you should, not because you want to take them on.

Second Abdaal introduces us to his CALM methodology to taking breaks13. Don’t doom scroll on social media, or endlessly search Netflix for something to watch. Instead do a task that builds your Competency, as you gain new skills. Take on something that you have Autonomy over and that gives you Liberty, because it takes enough focus that you can’t think about other things in life. Finally, choose something that is Mellow, no high stakes endeavour, or turning your hobby of building furniture into a side-hustle on YouTube.

Finally Abdaal gives us permission to simply write off a day14. Sometimes you need to step back and do nothing because you need a break. This is a hard idea to get across due to the strong Protestant Work Ethic of Western culture. Even though many of us are not religious people, we still fall into the old idea that working is akin to godliness and thus good. If you’re being productive you’re doing something worthy, if you’re taking leisure time, you’re doing something bad.

Issues with Feel- Good ProductivityThe first, and biggest issue with Feel-Good Productivity is that it’s based on positive psychology. If we look at Manufacturing Happy Citizens we see that there is a strong replication crisis in positive psychology research. Cabanas and Illouz claim that despite 20 years and 64k studies on the subject, there are only weak ties found and many of the studies contradict each other15. This means that the research Abdaal is basing his system on may be on vary shaky footing when it comes to its scientific repeatability.

Much of positive psychology is tied up in the “guru” fields as well16, where your chosen positive psychology personality says that you need to follow their 6 step plan to be happy and productive. If it doesn’t work for you then it’s because you didn’t follow the plan hard enough, but they do have another course you can take17. These gurus commonly talk in vague language that attributes all failing to you, and any success to the plan they provided. In many ways, they’re little better than con-men. In fact, sometimes that’s all they are, grifters latching on to the current thing they can get money grifting.

A final detrimental area that positive psychology enforces is the capitalist idea that you made a choice to get the things you have18. This idea entirely discounts the fact that economic circumstances and scarcity of resources plays a massive role in the outcomes for the lives of people19. Putting the entire end result on you removes any need for society to take responsibility in the world that has been built which limits the class mobility of most people in society. It negates the responsibility of governments to deal with billionaires hoarding resources while others starve, because if you’re personal choices led you to the life of poverty you have, then it’s your fault and society can absolve itself of responsibility.

This idea that you deserve what you have because of your choices also enables those with wealth to feel fine about keeping it while others starve. See they deserve what they have due to their choices, so they shouldn’t need to feel bad that others made different choices.

One other big hole in the ideas of Abdaal is the need for autonomy in your work. While Abdaal acknowledges that many don’t have autonomy20 over their time and work, he doesn’t go much deeper than a few paragraphs mentioning that family and bosses make control more of your time. The economic circumstances you’re born into have a huge effect on how much autonomy you have with your life and I would have loved to see him go deeper into how to deal with a lack of autonomy.

Unfortunately the answer to that is really a massive change in the economic model that we operate under in Western society, so I wouldn’t expect a full extra book on how to do that, but a bit more acknowledgement would have been nice.

Should You Read Feel-Good Productivity by Ali AbdaalYes I feel that Abdaal’s reliance on positive psychology puts his overall idea on shaky footing due to the lack of replicable results, but there isn’t any bad advice here. No I don’t think that Abdaal brought new ground-breaking ideas to the table. I’ve read many books on productivity and self-help and I’ve heard most of the ideas before.

What Abdaal brings to the table is his style of getting the ideas across. If you’ve watched his videos and like what he has to say, then you’ll probably like this book. If this is your first time reading a productivity/self-help book, you’ll likely get a bunch of good ideas out of it to help you live a more productive fulfilled life.

Go ahead and read it, at worst it won’t hurt and at best it will help you focus on the things you want to focus on.

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See my notes on Feel-Good Productivity

Footnotes1. Pg 4 ↩︎ 2. Pg 7 ↩︎ 3. Pg 7 ↩︎ 4. Pg 15 ↩︎ 5. Pg 22 ↩︎ 6. Read Flow for more: https://amzn.to/3wnJnY0 ↩︎ 7. Pg 57, 70 ↩︎ 8. Pg 67 ↩︎ 9. Pg 111 ↩︎ 10. Pg 160 ↩︎ 11. Pg 185 ↩︎ 12. Pg 190 ↩︎ 13. Pg 210 ↩︎ 14. Pg 224 ↩︎ 15. Manufacturing Happy Citizens Pg 29 ↩︎ 16. Manufacturing Happy Citizens Pg 10 ↩︎ 17. This also matches up with Conspirituality: https://curtismchale.ca/book/conspirituality/ ↩︎ 18. Manufacturing Happy Citizens Pg 46 ↩︎ 19. See Scarcity for more: https://curtismchale.ca/book/scarcity/ ↩︎ 20. Pg 107, 127 ↩︎

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The Climate book by Greta Thunberg, is not a book entirely written by the named author, it’s a collection of essays requested by Thunberg. She shows up with her own writing many times in the books, my copy had her writing on darker pages which actually made them harder to read.

The purpose of the book is to get us thinking about the climate crisis in terms that put the responsibility where it lays, with the Global North, which roughly adheres to the powers in the world that pushed colonialism on the rest of the world.

One of the big themes in the book is that the solutions to the climate crisis are known, but they don’t fit with the lifestyle that the citizens Global North, and specifically the United States, want to live. The idea that “we” collectively contributed to the climate crisis, only holds true if you look at North America and Europe where every single person uses far more resources than most other people in the world, who are not using meaningful amounts of energy.

Since citizens don’t want to change from driving SUV’s and trucks or reduce the size of their houses, or how much the eat…and then throw out…politicians have cover to do nothing about climate change. Oh sure, they say they’re doing something, but in an age where it’s easy to be judged on what you say not on what you do, the words are barely worth the air that it takes to transmit them to your ears.

This also ties into the idea that the poor are disproportionately affected by climate change, because they can’t simply spend more money and run away from it’s affects with air conditioning, or moving to a higher altitude that keeps them safe from rising sea levels.

We reinforce this pushing of climate change on the poor in how we count the emissions by each country. We count what a country produces, not what a country consumes. But this leaves so many poor countries counting the emissions for the production of goods that are consumed in North America and Europe. These developing countries wouldn’t be producing the crap if North America wasn’t consuming it, so why should they have to count the CO2 numbers against their country?

We don’t count the CO2 emissions at the consumption end, because it makes the numbers for the Global North look better, and since they are the ones primarily making the climate agreements, the rich get to decide the rules that the poor have to live by.

As I got to the end of the book I was really wondering what I could do to help with climate change, that’s more than the drop in a bucket I make by not using plastic straws. Greta Thunberg is here at the end of the book to give us some advice.

We need to get out there and be political. That means doing some tracking of what all levels of your government are talking about and making sure that they’re working towards climate justice. You should be voting to increase public transit, and decrease the access of cars to roads so that your city can become more like the cycling leader we see in the Netherlands.

Another thing we need to watch for is that we don’t leave anyone behind in the transition to sustainable usage of our environment. As we cut back on fossil fuel use, people that work for oil companies on the ground will need jobs. We should be pushing our politicians to stop oil subsides and use that money to help workers retrain, and support them while that retraining happens.

She has much more advice than those two points, but those are the ones that stuck out to me.

Should You Read The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg?Overall the book is a stark, but unsurprising wake up call for some. I fully expect that if you’re interested in the book you aren’t denying climate change, that you’re doing at least something to try and make the world a better place.

If you’re interested in where we really are with climate change, then this is a good book to read. If you’re deeply embedded in the fight for climate justice, there may not be much new for you here.

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Radicalized by Cory Doctorow is a set of 4 short stories that examine where our world is, and where it could be going if we don’t take steps to intervene in the path we are currently walking.

We start with a look at immigration in the US and watch Salima finally get a real apartment to stay in after a long period in camps which are much like prisons. The big problem is that the subsidized apartments come with capitalist trappings of freedom of choice in the forms of appliances that only allow her to use bread authorized by the company. That’s why you get the appliances cheap, the bread is expensive.

We follow her as the companies go under, thus appliances won’t work, and watch her jailbreak them. Then companies are bought out and she starts looking at real jail time, or deportation and loss of a place of safety.

Of course the capitalists in this tell her she had a choice to stay in a camp little better than jail instead of getting the nanny appliances that control her life. Though that never seems like a real choice.

Second we look at a superman like character who is finally done with racism in policing. He stands up only to find out that the veneer of “whiteness” that society has painted him with only lasted while he was willing to hold up the status quo of white supremacy.

Third, we watch the American health system knowingly let people die because it’s too expensive to allow them life. We watch regular people start a bombing campaign against insurance companies who do everything they can to avoid paying for the services you’ve been buying. Even in Canada I see health care getting gutted in a way that will make it easy to say that it’s ineffective and we should privatize more of our health care system. Of course this will only really affect those that don’t have the money to pay the inflated market rates for health care.

Finally, we follow a group of people as they try to survive the end of the world. Markets crash, pandemics come, and they try to survive it.

While these stories are fictional events, they contain plenty of truth in them and will leave you questioning many of the assumptions around us. TV companies already try to monitor everything you do with your smart TV so that they can sell the data. Appliances have computers in them that may break and render them inoperable even when all the regular parts work as intended.

Overall, I’m looking forward to more books from Doctorow I have coming be they fiction or non-fiction.

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Getting Started with Zettelkasten

If you’ve been wondering about what Zettelkasten is and how to start organizing your notes with this excellent system then this course is for you. I’ll walk you through how I use this system to develop my reading research for posts like this one here. You can also become a member to get all my courses.

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Today we’re going to look at another book, this time about the positive psychology movement and it’s relationship to consumerism and capitalism. Purchase Manufacturing Happy Citizens

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There has been a glut of note-making books in the last few years, some are decent, and some are thinly veiled attempts at generating intellectual property so the author can sell you on more courses. I’m happy to say that How to Make Notes and Write by Dan Alloso and SF Allosso is one of […]

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No, you shouldn’t and if that’s all you came for, go read something else.

If you want to find out why I don’t think the book is worth your time, read on.

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Points I Agree WithWhile I’m not going to recommend you read this book, Scott does have a number of points I can get behind.

First, most people take notes for the sake of taking notes and don’t focus on shipping things1. Just last week I did some coaching and the person was looking for a magic system that would ship things for him. Just like every other person I’ve coached, the answer was to schedule time to ship and put yourself on a shipping schedule (much like this weekly newsletter). There is no magic system, and most people don’t ship stuff. They say they want to, but they want to have shipped stuff, not do the work day in and day out to ship things.

Second, people aim for a perfect system because shuffling notes, and toggling plugins, and watching YouTube videos about taking notes feel like work2. Shuffling stuff around is easier in a digital system, so it’s easier to fall for the fallacy of shuffling as productive.

Third, people take notes on everything at first and most of those notes should never have been taken3. This is the same trap people fall into with task management systems. They write a bunch of crap down that they wish they’d be able to do (secretly knowing they never will) and then their task manager gets overwhelming and they drop it because there is too much noise. This is why systems like Bullet Journal thrive in a digital world. When something is too hard to migrate to a new page or notebook, you just said it’s not worth doing and you let it go. Bullet Journal is a no-first system. The default is that stuff doesn’t come with you and you have to do work to move things. Digital is a yes-first system, everything will keep coming with you no matter how trivial.

I can get behind Scott’s idea that handwritten notes force stronger selection because they take more work to work with4. This is why I start my book notes in a notebook before moving them into Obsidian. When an idea feels like too much work to write down, you just told yourself it wasn’t valuable enough.

Fourth, the more time you spend processing ideas the better you know them5. Scott says that because it takes time to write down your ideas and then file them you spend more time with them so you know them more. I see this with the people I’ve coached, they take notes and then never revisit them so they have no idea what’s in their notes. As I tell every single one of them, when have you scheduled time in your calendar to review your notes? Do it, then do it again, then follow the random paths you find linked together.

If you work your notes, digital or paper, you’ll know your notes better.

Fifth, almost every time your graph view looks pretty and makes you feel like you’re doing something…but it’s utterly useless6. When I see people posting their graph view my first question is, how did you use the graph view to provide value to your thinking this week? When I’ve asked this question, I almost never get an answer that is useful.

That doesn’t mean the graph is useless though. I used mine early to find that I had done little reading on racism and identified it as a node of knowledge I needed to expand my reading on. I dip into my graph view once a quarter with the intent of finding nodes that don’t connect well or are single branches so that I can expand my knowledge of them.

Scott’s ReachingSome people may feel I’m about to be a bit hard on Scott here, but after watching many of his videos and reading his emails where he talks about how well cited his work is going to be because he’s done so much research, I believe he’s earned these hard questions about the words he uses.

While there are lots of citations7, Scott has a number of ideas that he states and just leaves out there with no citations. He says that digital apps produce stunted thoughts8. He says that when you move communication to digital tools you water down your thoughts and strip them of individualism9. There were a number of other ideas Scott brings up without citation, though it’s possible that the idea was supported by one of the books he read or some research he cited. I did try and stop to figure out what supported his idea outside his own thoughts many times and continued to come up wanting. The two ideas above are fairly big so I’d love to see citations on them to even begin to believe them.

The premise of the entire book is that Scott is going to show readers that handwritten Zettelkasten is the best and truest version of the way you should take notes. Then he has a fairly passing reference to a paper that shows you retain information best when you use the note-taking system you prefer10. I’ll give Scott credit for even citing this study, but he doesn’t do much work to interrogate that idea and why he doesn’t believe it. He spends lots of time deriding digital note systems though.

Another point that Scott comes back to regularly is that history’s greatest minds used analog thinking systems11. This is clearly true as there is much more writing and thinking was done before we had any type of digital system available to thinkers. I could also say that history’s greatest minds didn’t drive and that was the key to their intellectual insight because cars haven’t existed for so long that this is obviously true.

I Just Couldn’t Finish ItIt’s very rare that I don’t finish a book, but when my wife starts asking me why I’m even bothering to read a book and I don’t have a good answer outside…I guess I should read it because the author is making waves…it’s time to put the book down and stop wasting my time.

There is just so much to fault in Scott’s book that every other page I was scoffing at the ideas and citing his own contradictions. He talks derisively about note people just selling you stuff12, while you’re reading the book he just sold you on how to take notes “best”. He doesn’t look in the mirror and say that he too sent multiple emails to launch the book because:

• It’s coming tomorrow
• One hour and you can buy
• It’s selling out
• Sorry you missed it, stay around to get notified
• Oh actually, check out Kindle

He doesn’t talk about his application only Neo-Intellectual Institute, which doesn’t seem free when I’ve heard him talk about it. Scott is engaged in the same things that he’s telling you make other people talking about notes fake, without noting his own inauthenticity. It’s easy for the readers to get Scott’s feeling that he’s better than that because he doesn’t have a course to sell (but don’t look at his Institute).

Around 80 pages in I was already struggling to read the book. Scott repeats over and over how he took 3 weeks to read a single paper from Luhmann to really draw out the best insights. He talks over and over how he’s spent a year reading about taking notes, and no one else has spent this time or gone back to the “proper” sources as he has.

Every author has this type of stuff in their book. It’s usually in the introduction and I always call it the “why you should trust me” section. It’s maybe 2 or 3 pages, but often a paragraph. Somehow Scott managed to spread this out to 80 pages though as he tries to explain the current landscape of Zettelkasten, and why he’s uniquely endowed to talk about it because of all the work he did.

The first three chapters could have been one chapter. They probably should have been the introduction.

He also spends so much time explaining what Luhmann did, but then tells us he doesn’t quite do what Luhmann did because he hasn’t seen the need for parts of it13. If you’re going to engage in calling people out for interpreting the “source” then maybe you shouldn’t be throwing parts out that you don’t see the need for. Scott spent entire chapters talking about why it’s so bad people threw stuff out and why it harms their note process, then does the exact same thing.

Should You Read Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott Scheper?No, you shouldn’t. Scott has a few good points in there, but they’re so buried by self-congratulatory verbose writing that you’re going to spend at least double the time you should spend to get Scott’s good points out of all the chaff he threw on the ground, and out the window, and covered himself in. From reading through responses to his book on Reddit, when challenged on his writing style Scott was adamant that he wanted to make it “conversational” but all he succeeded in was making the book way longer than it needed to be. Scott needed a hard-headed editor that would have helped him make his points in a more concise way.

What Scott is really engaged in is a religious argument. As he tells readers, over and over and over, he spent the most time reading the text. He went back to the sources best. Because he went back to the sources he has the best interpretation of them and we should listen to him.

Religious communities have done this for generations. Forget the King James Version of the Bible, it’s a bad interpretation of the original text and you should be reading the NASB. Actually, you really should read the original Hebrew and Greek if you want to properly interpret the texts. Now to do that you must understand the culture at the time so you can figure out what the little nuances of the text would have meant to the writers. You likely need an advanced degree to understand the culture the best though, so if you don’t have it, maybe you don’t have the authority as someone who does.

Scott spends 90 pages telling us he did the best work to get to the sources and that everyone else missed the boat. Though, I’m fairly certain he didn’t read the German. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t spent years studying German academic culture so that he can form his own opinions on why Luhmann did what he did and wrote what he wrote. He read interpretations from the best scholars he could find on the subject.

So if we follow Scott’s ideas to their core, we shouldn’t read his book, we should go closer to the source and read the originals. At least we should read the scholars that Scott cites in the book so that we can come to our own interpretation of what Luhmann would have done and see if it matches up with what Scott’s interpretation says we should do.

But Maybe You Should do AntinetDespite my not recommending the book, I can stand behind using notecards as a physical constraint in your note process. Physical constraints are excellent ways to help you prioritize what is important and if notecards help you avoid merely collecting information and shuffling it around, go for it. Physical constraints are why I use a notebook to start my book notes.

I’m never going to knock a system that helps you accomplish your goals. To learn it, I guess go with Scott’s YouTube videos because the book isn’t worth your time.

There is no link to this book because you shouldn’t read it.

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7. Seriously there are pages of citations after each chapter so when you look at the book pull about 10% of the page count out of it for citations. ↩
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I picked up Learn to Love Reading by Alex Wieckowski after learning about his site, Alex and Books. I like books and figured I’d find a kindred spirit, then I noticed his book and was ready for an insightful look at how to turn reading into a passtime you love.

Unfortunately that’s not what I got. Learn to Love Reading is a collection of quotes from various people (including some I find abhorrent) on why they like reading. While it’s a different book than I expected, that doesn’t mean there was no value in it.

Let’s highlight a few quotes I thought were worth tracking.

If you read only the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. – Haruki Murakami Page 15

This does mean you need to spend time looking for your own books that you find interesting and diving deep into subjects instead of just following the well beaten path of popular books.

People say they don’t have time to read but it’s just not true. The average person today reads more words per day than ever before. If you add up all the emails, Instagram comments, texts, tweets, and news articles you read on a daily basis, you’re actually reading the equivalent of a 200-page book each day. – Neil Pasricha Page 78

The biggest “problem” with reading is that it requires singular focus and each book doesn’t have a team of researchers behind it tweaking what you’re going to see next based on the latest research. They are not continually optimized to be engaging.

I find this to be one of the best things about books.

The quality of your thoughts is determined by the quality of your reading. – James Clear Page 89

I read plenty of fantasy and light fiction, but I also read fiction that challenges me. I read lots of non-fiction to try and be a better person.

Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media. – Mark Zuckerberg Page 120

Ironic as Zuckerberg makes millions on making sure we engage in shallow ways on his platform.

ORLY

ORLY – Oh Really, for things I find suspicious.

Now there was one quote that raised my eyebrows and made me question the entire book.

There is an undeniable correlation between functional illiteracy, poverty, and crime – in fact, eleven states predict their future need for prison cells based on the reading levels of their fourth graders. Books can change lives, yes, and so can the lack of them. – Roxanne Coady Page 7

No other quote in the book really required a bunch of research to verify if the statement was true, but this sounds so much like a political talking point that I couldn’t let it pass. The verdict is, no prisons do not predict future need based on 4th grade reading scores.

This didn’t even take me long to find reputable sources on.

Should You Read Learn to Love Reading by Alex Wieckowski?I’m going to say no it’s not worth the hour you’ll spend flipping the pages. Sure there are some decent quotes, but you could use that hour for much better things. I’m taking this book to the used book store to hopefully get some credit to purchase something useful.

DO NOT purchase Learn to Love Reading.

Getting Started with Zettelkasten

If you’ve been wondering about what Zettelkasten is and how to start organizing your notes with this excellent system then this course is for you. I’ll walk you through how I use this system to develop my reading research for posts like this one here. You can also become a member to get all my courses.

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While Book Wars doesn’t quite hit the mark for a full post pulling out the relevant take aways, I did want to highlight a few things.

eBooks Didn’t Kill PrintOne of the biggest takeaways is that ebooks didn’t kill print like many people thought it would. Unlike music, which ate the recording industry particularly through iTunes (now Apple Music) ebooks saw a steep rise then levelling off in popularity. Ebooks still make up lots of sales in the Romance and a few other categories, but it’s nowhere near eclipsing physical books. In fact after their initial rise, ebooks declined in many categories.

This mimics my interest in ebooks. I was an early adopter of the Kindle in Canada (ordering from the US) but after a few years I went back to reading mostly print. I still have a Kindle and find it excellent when travelling, but I don’t travel much so I read the books I own.

Amazon is a PowerhouseUnsuprisingly, Amazon is a powerhouse in the publishing industry with many small publishers crediting over 50% of their sales to Amazon1. Amazon not only holds much power over the publishers, it holds power over all of self-publishing with it’s different programs that allow authors to put their own works up without needing to interact with mainstream publishers at all.

Hey if you like this then this is what members get every week when the join. You’ll also get all my courses with your membership.

I’ve benefited from this in that I’ve written and released numerous books via Amazon and continue to earn income from them.

My biggest issue with Amazon is how bad they are for employees and for much of your local economy. At the same time, I purchase stuff there all the time and love the fast shiping and generous return policies.

To fix this we need to see more competition for Amazon. Unfortunately under US anti-trust regulations, we’re more concerned that consumers get a low price so as long as Amazon is giving us low prices we’re likely stuck with them.

Content vs Consumer DataOne big turn in the industry that caught the publishers out was the benefit of consumer data collection. Amazon knows what books you searched for and can market them to you. Until recently publishers didn’t have that data at all and viewed their relationship as one where the book retailers were the customer and not the readers.

This change in data collection as value also sees many social media companies at odds with publishers. Publishers want to have a sustainable economy for the creation of words so that they continue to have a product2. Social media doesn’t count content as the product, you and your data is the product they’re selling to advertisers. Thus they want to drive the cost of the product (your content) as low as possible. This means pits publishers against them because without writers publishers have nothing to sell.

Reading Isn’t Dead, Attention is DeadWhile many people say the book and reading is dead, it’s not, what’s dead is our attention. When we look at emails, tweets, posts….we read lots every day. We have lots of time to read, it’s just that the book is a form of reading that requires singular focus.

People say they don’t have time to read but it’s just not true. The average person today reads more words per day than ever before. If you add up all the emails, Instagram comments, texts, tweets, and news articles you read on a daily basis, you’re actually reading the equivalent of a 200-page book each day. – Neil Pasricha3

In the face of such a frenetic pace of life, with messages flying at us, reading a book is a refutation of that life. It lets us slow down and say no to the frenetic pace4 by getting us to focus on a single item for hours or days.

Further Reading

• The Shallows
• Learn to Love Reading
• Social Acceleration
• Slow Media
• Curation
• Page 141 ↩
• Page 446 ↩
• Learn to Love Reading Page 78 ↩
• Page 472 ↩

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I’m a terrible parent. Just a few weeks ago I left my kid stuck in a tree in our yard for an hour. She wasn’t very high, her head barely reached past mine, but she was stuck. Both my wife and I figure that some harm will happen to our children so we try not […]

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February was all about fiction this year. I read all three books in the Silo series by Hugh Howey. No spoilers, but it’s listed as “horror” and I think it’s more a thriller. Think of a plan to get people to live underground and just destroy the world now before it happens at the hands […]

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A few times in the last year I’ve heard someone read Ikigai and got a lot out of the book and recently it was my turn. Ikigai roughly translates to “the happiness of being busy”1, but as I read the book it felt more like your ikigai is your life purpose if we wanted to […]

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While ADHD has been recognized in children for a while now, it’s a fairly recent recognition that it extends into adulthood for many. This realization is where Kirsten Miliken positions PlayDHD to help by proposing that the best non-medication way to deal with ADHD in adults is to introduce more play into their lives1. Miliken […]

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When you think of being “better off” what is it that springs to mind? Do you think of homeownership, that white picket fence, and all the other trappings that come with the American Dream? The New Better Off by Courtney E. Martin is all about how people are changing their mindset away from generations past […]

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I’ve read a few of Seth Godin’s books over the years and The Icarus Deception is the one I’ve got the least out of so far. It follows the same pattern as Seth’s other books, loosely related short essays on a topic. It always seems like he collects the blog posts he’s written and turns […]

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Today we’re going to look at two different memoirs from famous people. First, we’ll talk about Steve Wozniak’s look at his life in iWoz and then we’ll talk about Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking. iWoz Steve Wozniak is the other founding Steve of Apple Computer. He’s the technical brain that invented the first Apple computers. He […]

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Many of us would love to have more time off for ourselves, at least we say that’s what we’d like. The truth is a bit more complex than that, in that produce far more than generations past, but get paid less for it and work longer hours. Part of this is addressed in Time Off […]

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Did you know that you have about 4000 weeks to live from beginning to end? Thinking of it like that reminds me of the life calendar which is a sobering look at how little time you have to hang out with those that you love. While this book is designed to help pull you up […]

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I got Footprints in part because my daughter is a huge dinosaur nerd and anything I can learn about fossils is a great thing to pass on to her. In this book, David Farrier digs into the trace fossils that our current society will leave around for the future. Trace fossils are footprints, arrows, burrows, […]