John’s Blog

I really liked this book a lot. The author decided to go through a year’s worth of month-long experiments to try to be happier. To adjust her behavior in big and small ways to see if they made her feel happier day-to-day. And they did.

There’s a lot in this book, and I’m going to want to go back to it to think about the concrete actions I can take in my own life. I think it illustrates, more than anything else, a couple of ideas. First, act the way you want to feel — that will tend to reinforce. Second, being mindful and focusing on the things that are important, you can always make a difference.

I think some will view this as a bit of a hokey self-help type of book, but I didn’t read it at all like that. It’s an essay on mindfulness & intentionality, and making your life the way you want it, instead of just sliding along.

I liked this book by Sanjay, but didn’t love it. Interesting medical survey of the ways we think about death, work to prevent it. Lots of stories of surprises to doctors, of courses of therapy that are significantly more effective than the accepted conventions, etc.

I really liked this book a lot — it’s a look at our relationship with the 4 main “food fish” that we eat in huge quantities: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna. It starts by talking about salmon farming, something that humans have been doing for something more than 500 years — I had no idea. Goes into pretty good detail about the relative merits of wild salmon fishing versus farmed salmon harvesting — although it doesn’t really make it clear at all what to buy at Whole Foods.

He makes it clear that sea bass — or, more generally, perciforms — despite their relative ubiquity, are a pretty strange choice in fish to domesticate — very tricky. (Also, there are a lot of different fish that we call sea bass, but they’re all pretty different.)

Cod, of course, was well chronicled by Mark Kurlansky in his outstanding book Cod, about 10 years ago — and Greenburg does a good job of taking that work as a baseline and extending it in the context of sustainable oceans now, and what’s happened in the Grand Banks over the past decade or so.

And it’s a bit of an ode to tuna, especially the dwindling bluefin tuna, which he asserts is one of the most incredible fish species and that we need to stop fishing now.

Anyway, great book, and with real suggestions for sustainability at the end. (In short, pick fish more suitable for farming: tra, tilapia, and the Kona kampachi.)

My mom reminded me the other day that I have sometimes, um, esoteric tastes in what I read — and I guess that’s true. But I really liked this book, and think it’s relatively rare for books to change the way you think about your relationship with the world. Very recommended.

And with sentences like this:

“The hoki is a gadiform descended from a fish that ended up in the Southern Hemisphere after the great gadiform radiation tens of millions of years ago.”

How can you not want to read more?

I’m an unapologetic lover of children’s literature — really liked the Harry Potter books, grew up with The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, and some (now) obviously horrible books by Piers Anthony.

So when I heard that my 11 year old nephew really loved these books, more than the Harry Potter books, I gave them a try. I read all 5 books, in order, but didn’t really like them very much. They’re sort of like a cross between Harry Potter and Greek mythology, but with all the action, including Mt. Olympus, centered around present day Manhattan.

What could go wrong, really?

Yeah, everything you just imagined as an answer to that last question is pretty much true. This really isn’t a very good series of books. I totally understand why my nephew liked them — they’re basically fun books with a teenager in control, with some tortured Greek mythology thrown in the mix.

Anyway, since I read all 5 books, they’re obviously not horrible, but they weren’t really what I was hoping for. The mythology is pretty dubious, but it did cause me to run down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia a few times to learn about various Titans and minor gods, so that’s not all bad.

I liked the first book in this series, Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer, pretty well.This book was pretty different — the main character is still this necromancer named Johannes Cabal, and the setting is still this sort of Victorian era steampunk type of universe. But this time instead of a Faust type story, it’s more like a locked room mystery on a blimp.

It’s weird & quirky, and not the sort of thing I generally like all that much, since it’s a little, um, overly Victorian for me, but I read this one in a weekend, and liked it pretty well.

Not for everyone, for sure, but a fun read for me.