by Genevieve Cogman
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The Invisible Library
Tag: 4star
by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So many good ideas in this book – little ways you can improve your life, each supporting one of Dr Chatterjee’s four pillars of Relax, Eat, Move and Sleep. The author is a GP in the UK National Health Service, as well as an author and occasionally a TV doctor, and one of the nice elements of the book for me was the little stories of how he has used some of these practices to improve the lives of his patients, often without having to resort to additional medication. He is a strong believer in looking at the whole person and their lifestyle, rather than just the set of symptoms, and it’s clear that this is the way forward for health across an aging population serviced by a limited set of resources. So much more effective in the end, and the interventions seem likely to be both longer-lasting and less expensive. It’s great to see a well-researched, practical book with everyday, accessible, changes that can really make a difference to how you live.
My wife read this book first and although we are both fit and eat well, we have already adopted some of his suggestions, and I now I have been through it as well we have solid list of more things that we can try!
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Mr Mercedes
by Stephen King
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Words That Change Minds
by Shelle Rose Charvet
A detailed and hands-on look at the different patterns of behaviour that make up the Language And Behaviour (LAB) profile. Each pattern is explained, together with some guide questions that will allow you to determine how the participant fits against the profile. The patterns themselves are derived from NLP, and there has been some good work to establish that they are consistent within particular individuals in a particular context, and also that different interviewers will spot the same patterns in a person.
Understanding the patterns is very useful for a number of things. For example, if you’re interviewing for a particular job, you could usefully think about the characteristics of the job – do you need a creative person, or one who follows processes very well, for example? Each of the patterns will help you think about the role, and give you some very useful questions to ask candidates. Or if you’re selling a product face to face or online, thinking through the characteristics of your intended buyer will help you shape the language you use in the sales pitch. And I first came across the LAB profiles at work, where a consultant interviewed my management team and some of the staff and produced a very helpful set of profiles that allowed us to reshape the organisation to be much more effective.
As a particular example, some people are “towards” motivated, while others are “away” motivated. So when you ask someone why they did something in a particular context (e.g. why they took their current job), if they are “towards” motivated they might say “because of all the great opportunities this job offered”, whereas if they were “away” motivated they might say “because my old boss was quite difficult and I didn’t like the commute”. Both are likely true, but people will focus on one or the other depending on their towards/away inclination in the work context. Some jobs require “away” motivation (health and safety), while others are more suited to “towards” (sales).
Overall this is a very useful practical guidebook more than a pop-psychology book. Having said which, it’s hard to read the patterns and not think about where we might fit on them, and if you are reasonably insightful you’ll make a pretty good guess! My only negative comment would be that I read my copy on a kindle, and the formatting was a bit screwy at times – lots of tables and text boxes, which didn’t always come out perfectly. If I were to need to refer to this book a lot, I would likely buy a paper copy.
Full disclosure: I received a free ARC softcopy of this book. My comments and rating are accurately reflective of what I felt reading it.
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Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
There’s a lot that I liked about Team Human: the underlying thesis is that we have let technology into many corners of our lives without thought for many of the consequences, and that the motives of those driving the technology adoption are often very poorly aligned with those of the users of the technology. The result is often a significant level of social isolation and repression, and Rushkoff proclaims loudly that the default answer of “add more technology to fix it” is unlikely to improve things. For me, it’s undeniably true, and the author does a great job of assembling a manifesto make his points.
The structure of the book was interesting, too – 100 short sections, varying from a few paragraphs to two or three pages. I did find it frustrating at times, though, as very often you would meet assertions that you disagreed with, and although there are footnotes on each section at the end of the book, I often had to do a reasonable amount of googling to find the supporting evidence. I sometimes didn’t find the evidence very convincing, either – e.g. in #58, where he refers to Penrose and Hameroff’s “Orch OR” theory of quantum consciousness, which is widely regarded as at best somewhat hokey science, and likely to be just flat out wrong.
Also worthy of comment is that the physical book itself is beautifully put together, in a non-traditional way. I almost always buy on Kindle, but I didn’t with this one, because (a) I was able to follow the book’s own thesis of more local, distributed, human activity by buying it from my local small bookshop, and (b) I wanted to own the physical hardback. Definitely worth it (plus you get to Stick It To The Man by doing so…)
The ultimate question is I suppose whether there’s actually anything we can do about any of this. Can we stop the tech juggernauts taking all our data and using vast clouds of Big Data machines and machine learning algorithms to work out how to drive us towards their desired economic behaviours (usually, although interestingly not always, they’re economic)? I don’t know if we can stop it, but I know if we don’t try to at least chisel away a little at that rock face, we’ll very likely regret it.
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Kings of the Wyld
by Nicholas Eames
“It’s time to get the band back together.”
Many things to like here, in particular the core idea of the adventurer teams as analogous to rock bands, complete with tours and arenas and individual characters, and many lines quoted from movies about bands that you’ll know – from Blues Brothers to The Princess Bride to Spinal Tap. That worked brilliantly, and lent the book a different and often very funny perspective. The characters were well drawn, too, in particular Clay Cooper, but also some of the more peripheral characters – I would love to see more of Jain and her band, for example.
There are some very funny lines in here, though, even aside from the references to other things:
“Please,” he prayed to whichever of Grandual’s gods was in charge of killing people at random with the corpses of chimeras, “grant me this one… fucking… thing.”
Or we could go with:
“They served the most incredible brunch: poached basilisk eggs and toasted bread with brown butter preserve. No one does a good basilisk egg anymore,” he remarked sadly, and Clay heard Ganelon mutter under his breath: What the fuck is brunch?
For me, although there was a lot to like, the flow of the story didn’t always work, and there was perhaps a little too much “deus ex machina” intervention to keep the plot moving forward. In the end, this was still a very entertaining book, and an excellent first novel. I will read more from Nicholas Eames, for sure. But the original and still the best, for me, of this modern fantasy genre is Joe Abercrombie. Up against such illustrious comparisons very few can hold up, but I can still give Kings of the Wyld a happy four stars.
The Small Big: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence by Steve J. Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An interesting and generally very practical book: 52 short chapters, each with a specific, straightforward, and tested, suggestion for how you might influence people to get a particular outcome.
– Having problems getting people to attend their appointments for your clinic? Get them to write down the time and date on a slip themselves, or read it back to you over the phone – this improves rates over simply giving them a printed slip with the details.
– Want to improve your own likelihood of going to the gym or remembering to meditate? Visualise the specific details of what you’re going to do as you start the process, in advance of when you want it to happen. Better yet, write these details down in a short note to yourself.
– Want to improve your tips as a server in a restaurant? Put a sweet or a mint on the tray with the bill for each person in the group – and then come back after a minute with another mint or two.
And so on. Each chapter will only take you ten minutes to read, and although you may have come across some of the suggestions before if you’ve read the authors’ other works, there will very likely be some that are new to you. And by the way, the authors are not science journalists, but are among the most widely recognised leaders in this field – Cialdini, for example, is the most referenced author ever in the field of social influencing.
Clear, helpful, actionable: what more could you ask?
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Moon Called (Mercy Thompson #1)
4 stars
Three and three quarter stars, really, but rounded it up to four as it has potential for the rest of the series (and minus a quarter star for the cover art – I mean I know sex sells, and it’s fun, but it nearly put my wife off reading it, which would have been a shame as she loves them now!)
Quite a fun fantasy-in-the-modern-world story: you’ve got shapeshifters, werewolves, vampires, and the fae, all hiding in plain sight in the modern world. A slight twist in this world is that the fae – at least the “lesser” fae – have been outed, and their existence is known to us mundanes.
The plot is centred around Mercy Thompson, a shapeshifting car mechanic, and the troubles she gets into with the neighbourhood werewolves. Her next-door neighbour is the alpha of the pack, and tends to do things like leave Mercy’s pet cat on her doorstep with a note saying “please keep your cat off my lawn, or I might eat him”. Things get complicated when Mercy hires a drifter type to help out in the garage, who she quickly realises is a “lone wolf” werewolf, one without a pack.
The story is fun, with quite a lot of scene setting in the first half, but the pace picks up in the back half and I enjoyed the ride. I will definitely pick up the next one if I’m off on holiday and fancy an entertaining read on the beach!
How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life by Jordan Ellenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Four and a half stars, plus or minus half a star (to stay with the spirit of the book itself).
A delightful survey of a diverse array of subjects, showing how mathematics is important in our discussions in everyday life, from politics to podiatry. At the bottom, a lot of it comes down to logic and to numbers, and our ability to understand what’s going on is greatly aided by the wise words and examples that Jordan Ellenberg uses. Great discussions about p-values, about what use geometry is in our real lives, about how the Supreme Court makes its decisions, and more.
Loved it. Half a star off for the election rules discussion at the end – too much detail for even me to care about, and I really actually do care about it quite a lot.
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The Devil You Know
Entertaining writing and interesting characters, all set in an alternate modern-day London where ghosts and ghouls started appearing to everyday folks in the 1990s, and society is still making adjustments to this new reality.
The hero, Felix Castor, a self-employed exorcist, is suitably flawed – very much in the vein of gumshoe private eyes of old. His slow change of approach towards his job throughout the book was a neat story arc, with him thinking more about ghosts and what the really are, and the implications for his job as he’s been doing it.
Meantime, Pen, his landlady-slash-support has a great backstory, hinted at rather than thrown open, so I’m sure we’ll see more of that in the future. And the appearance at the end of a new apprentice for Felix was a great setup for the next in the series.
The writing throughout was strong, with enough intelligent asides and references to make it a definite step above some others in the genre. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and will look out for others in the series, so a good four-star book for me.