Books Read Since 12/12/16, My Shelf, and My Tricks

There are roughly sixty books here, so expect a long post. I’m only inspired to write this because I have something else I really ought to be writing instead.

Read List

The Austraeoh Series

Austraeoh - Eljunbyro - Innavedr - Odrsjot - Urohringr - Yaerfaerda - Ynanlhuutr

A wonderful series I’m still not caught up with. I started it during its hiatus, between the end of the eighth book and the start of the ninth, and I got through the first seven in that time before the ending of #7 hit me so hard I had to step back for a while. This is the longest series I’ve ever read straight through, and I hope to become up-to-date soon.

Other FiMFiction

Reincarnation or Immortality - The Library of Discord & A Place for Pinkie - The Blink Trilogy - Optimalverse Stories - Other Short Stories

A lot of what I read was very small - polishing off the last remaining corners of the Optimalverse, or looking at odd stories like 6s and 7s and Death is Optional. Not that I don’t do much reading on this site; I’ve read The Chase and I’m beginning the Lunaverse and the Manehattanverse, and I really ought to read the Weedverse and find out what’s so great about Fallout Equestria, not even mentioning a number of other stories I haven’t read yet. In general I just treat MLP stories like wine - I fully intend to still be coming into the cellar in twenty years for a nightcap now and then.

The biggest thing I’ve read here recently was the Library of Accord trilogy by Chinchillax, although I read it entirely out of order. It was good enough that I made an audiobook of it - check out my last blog post for more information on that.

Greentext

Sperglight Act I - Sperglight Act II - Safe as Houses 1 - Safe as Houses 2 - JoJo greens

Greentext is one of the most interesting formats I’ve ever stumbled on, and it’s offered some amazing second-person fiction from time to time. The last open-source character I remember being invented was Jenny Everywhere, and no one used her, but as a literary character Anonymous outshines her by a mile. Make a Mistake With Me is a magnum opus of this style which (again) I need to get caught up on, but all of these were also pretty high-quality.

Sperglight was interesting psychologically, because it took Sci-Twi and developed her by giving her most of her pony-self’s behavior without any of the cutesiness, and I’d like to think that seeing her learn to socialize is somehow helpful to a fraction of the readership. Safe as Houses I loved because it was so inescapably brutal that I had to keep putting it down and coming back to it, a story composed of hard decisions and conversations you never want to have with people. Both deal with depression, abuse and bad relationships, and both are written wonderfully in a medium where they really don’t have to be.

And my current workstation, JoJo general, the crossover empire. As a writing group it’s lovely, because almost everyone has at least one serial they’re working on, and any day there could be an update to any of them. It can be tough to keep track of all of them, but I have read and enjoyed something in each of them, including Jovial Journey’s quest to defeat Nightmare Moon the first time around, Anonymous and company fighting against the strange organization Eight Days a Week, the ongoing adventure of Pinkie Pie and her destiny as a “rock pony”, and a just-begun adaptation of the prog-metal album Into the Electric Castle.

Published Fiction

Starship Troopers - Annihilation - Authority - American Gods - The Diamond Age - Lord of Light - Quarantine - Rendezvous With Rama

I mostly listened to these. The Diamond Age was a lot better than I was expecting, especially when it broke momentarily into a musical number. Starship Troopers is a wonderful entry into the understanding the mindset of the military, and Greg Egan’s Quarantine took the idea of brains collapsing waveforms further than any other writer’s even tried thinking about - having read this book, I am offended that books today are still explaining Schrodinger’s Cat.

VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy was sadly pretty lackluster - the prose was very thoughtful, but it couldn’t survive revealing anything to the audience, and I didn’t have the patience to sit through the third book. And Lord of Light would have been my favorite of the bunch for combining Hindu mythology, Buddhism, action, comedy and post-Foundation sensibility, if not for the fact that its plot is mostly told in medias res and gets resolved too quickly.

Not Written

Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji: Kazuya-hen - Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji: One Poker-hen - JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 8: JoJolion

I don’t read many comics, but JoJo and Kaiji are my weak spots. It’s novelly annoying to be actually caught up to both of them now.

Time Management

Eat That Frog - Gettings Things Done - 8760 Hours - The Skinny on Time Management - Self-Discipline in 10 Days - The Checklist Manifesto - Mini Habits - The Procrastination Equation - The Now Habit

These books all have decent advice, but after a while it starts to overlap and meld together. I remember them now and then when they become relevant, but typically I couldn’t even have told you I’d read them. Eat That Frog is the best of the bunch, Getting Things Done is very ambitious but could work if you stick to its program, and The Checklist Manifesto is a great book-length argument for using checklists to do anything important.

Other Self Help

Hacking Your Education - Emotional Intelligence - Getting Past No - Rejection Proof - How to Become an Expert on Anything in Two Hours

Most of these were pretty useless, to be honest. A few good ideas, a couple internalized habits, but very little worth the price of admission. Nothing here’s on the level of something like Tim Ferriss or Tynan, although they aren’t as cynical as outright scams.

Rationalist Adjacent

Decisive - Superhuman by Habit - The 48 Laws of Power - Lifehacker - How to Solve It - The Logic of Failure - In the Beginning Was the Command Line - The Age of Em

Decisive was great for its genie idea, In the Beginning Was the Command Line was Stephenson straight through, and my thoughts on Age of Em almost perfectly mirror Slate Star Codex’s. This was also my third try on 48 Laws of Power, and listening to it as audio made it feel a lot less edgy.

Parenting

How to Talk So Kids Will Listen - Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - MACK Daddy

Having finished The Chase, I have an interest in learning about being a good parent. How to Talk was a great book for "motherly" behavior, while MACK Daddy was a surprisingly sensible book considering that I got it from a dollar store. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is one of my favorite of this whole year's reading - although that's partly because it confirms my own biases about how many kids people can really get away with having.

Writing Books

Poetics - The Art of War for Writers - Steal Like an Artist - 2000 to 10,000 - Outlining

Good writing books are difficult to find, mostly because people need advice that’s too singular and specific to apply to a wide demographic. Outlining was the best one here, and Art of War was full of pretty novel information. Poetics was a waste, although the original text added a lot of words into ivory tower vocabularies; I’m probably not going to bother with The Nicomachean Ethics or anything else he’s written unless it's advertised really, really well.

Other Nonfiction

Short Cut Math - Waking Up - Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake - Lucian: Hermotimus - The Friendship Factor - The Innovator's Dilemma - Longitude

I read Lots of Fun for the foreword, because it was slightly less impossible to get a hold of than Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. Short Cut Math helped my mental math skills in the real world, and Waking Up was nice to hear read by Sam Harris himself. Lucian's dialogue Hermotimus was pretty funnily bad, especially because I found it as an example of Epicureanism and its conclusion is that people should forget philosophy and go do something else instead. Out of all of these, the best one was Longitude, which was an incredible history.

Five Rules for Faster Reading

A tool is a trick I use twice.

-George Polya, quoted in Street-Fighting Mathematics

None of these have to do with speed reading, which I haven’t mastered because it hurts my eyes. I’m a naturally faster reading than most people, but it would still have taken me several times longer to get through most of this if I hadn’t learned or figured out these principles.

1. It’s the book’s fault if you’re not entertained.

Being bored doesn’t make you a bad person. From English classes onward, the expectation set up around reading is that it’s too high-level for the average person, and it only starts because they intentionally try to push new readers out of their comfort zones. Reading for personal reasons isn’t like that, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, literature or schlock; it’s the difference between watching Eisenstein films for a grade and watching an Edgar Wright movie on Netflix. Unless you’re having a really crap day, assume the book’s responsible for your lack of enjoyment and not you. Which leads into...

2. Know when to let it go.

Don’t let your self-esteem ride on whether you can finish as many books as possible - in fact, if you can, pull in the opposite direction and see how many you can throw away unsatisfied. Only some of the books in your reading list are going to appeal to you, and you’ll get to them five years too late if you can’t drop one here and there.

The rest of these apply to nonfiction only.

3. Take the author’s word.

A nonfiction book is like sitting in front of an author at a bar and listening to them lay out an argument in painstaking detail. Often they have charts, citations, endless anecdotes and sources and friends who all agree with them, and they make sweeping philosophical points before each node of their case because they’re a little sloshed. If you agree before you go in that they’re at least not trying to deceive you and you should listen to them, you can tune out all of the subtle argumentation and accreted evidence until you reach something you actually need some convincing about. If you can’t agree to do that, find a book with better credentials.

4. Read the table of contents.

It’s not just for helping you if you lose your place. See that Foreword? Skip it. Introduction from the Second Edition? Skip it. Is there only one chapter that’s about the things you wanted to read this book for? Read that, see if it mentions the other chapters, and if it doesn’t then consider it finished. There’s no teacher looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re reading in the right order or paying attention to everything in sequence, so get in there, get the information you need, and get out again.

5. Judge by the first sentences.

So much of any book is filler. It’s like getting a page of notes from a lecture - an hour of talking for something you can rattle off in under a minute. Some paragraphs tend to be mostly air, and you can tell by reading their first sentences. Just as in #3, stop and take stock when you find a sentence that isn’t automatically agreeable or platitudinous. For example, turning to a random page of my nearest book, Thanks for the Feedback, the first sentences look like this:

“Labels always mean something specific to the giver. ... Nicholas is told by his boss, Adrianna, to be “more assertive” on the sales floor. ... Adrianna’s original advice was based on watching Nicholas on the sales floor relate to customers during a potential sale. ... This “what was heard” versus “what was meant” coaching mismatch is surprisingly common:”

This was a two-page section with a story. But you can see the point of the story, because authors rarely have the trust to speak only in parables, and you understand what the section was about. You can actually take this to even further extremes by reading only small portions of sections, looking mostly at the charts and data, only reading the final paragraphs of parts of the book. Each one has its place depending on what you’re trying to get out of the reading, which is something you shouldn’t forget for as long as you’re holding the book.

My Bookshelf

Not counting online stories or my Read Later list, and in no particular order:

Fiction

The Best of Harry Harrison - The Mabinogion - “Princesses of Equestria” - Death of a Salesman - Hamlet - Annual World’s Best SF (1976) - The Azathoth Cycle - The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - Finnegans Wake - Ulysses - Neuromancer - Flatterland - Worst. Person. Ever. - Raptor Red - The Time Machine & The Time Ships - Distress - Dubliners - Extreme Paranoia: Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Shot - The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles Vol. 1 & 2 - A Fire Upon the Deep - Infoquake - Sundiver - Time Enough for Love - Earth (David Brin) - Startide Rising - Reality 36 - A Fire in the Sun - Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Globalhead - Excession - Starfish (Peter Watts) - Doctor Who: Alien Bodies - Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency - Shipstar - Blue War - The Coming (Haldeman) - The New Space Opera 2

Nonfiction

Robert’s Rules of Order - The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook - The Rough Guide to Belize - The Prince - The Unending Mystery: A Journey Through Labyrinths and Mazes - The Tipping Point - Dictionary of Linguistics - Supergods - “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” - This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly - Freakonomics - How Not to Be Wrong - Writing Movies for Profit - A Random Walk Down Wall Street - Time Tactics of Very Successful People - Lonely Planet: India - Lonely Planet: Mexico - Yours to Reason Why: Decision in Battle - Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations - The Signal and the Noise - Playing Against the House - Risk Savvy - Essential Homeschooling - Berkey Applied Calculus Second Edition - What to Expect When You’re Expecting - What to Expect the First Year - What to Expect the Toddler Years - What Color Is Your Parachute - Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge - Chaos (Gleick) - Godel, Escher, Bach - You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought - Winning Through Intimidation - Lucid Dreaming (LaBerge) - Culture Smart! Ukraine - Culture Smart! Norway - The Art of Teaching (Highet) - The Peter Principle - The Memory Book - ExamCram CompTIA Security+ Exam SYO-201 Guide - All In One CompTIA Security+ Exam SYO-401 Guide - All In One CompTIA Network+ Exam N10-006 Guide - All In One CompTIA A+ Exam Guide (9th Ed.)