Review: Peaks and Valleys: Making Good And Bad Times Work For You--At Work And In Life

Peaks and Valleys: Making Good And Bad Times Work For You--At Work And In Life by Spencer Johnson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I can't say I got much out of this. I kept hearing that sometimes you are in a valley and sometimes you are on a peak, and peaks are better places to be. You want to get to peaks more often, but understand you might end up in a valley sometimes. Seemed kind of inane, or at least over simple. This was a very short audiobook, but it was stretched by adding some questions and answers by the author. And it was still short.

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Review: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Watching yourself slide down a slope, knowing it's happening, and feeling you can do nothing about it. A kind of out-of-body experience. Were this written today, it might be about Trump and called The Cable News Network. When you want to believe the worst, your mind can make up plenty of stories, given real and imagined inputs, to get you there...

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Review: A Half-Century of Conflict

A Half-Century of Conflict by Francis Parkman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Seemed a bit drier than some of the earlier works. Looking forward to finishing this series off with the next one. The scalpings by the Indians continue. You really start to feel for the remote settlers.

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Review: Eating the Dinosaur

Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Only my second read by Klosterman, after his "The Nineties". These essays fit roughly the same time period. And they seemed about the same in that they were hit or miss. I found myself laughing at some new topical connections I hadn't thought of, but also found myself wanting to fast forward at times.

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Review: AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was right up my alley. I really enjoy those realistic-ish near future speculative stories like this, and I also really like using fiction to explain things. Both worked here. But, as other reviewers noted, this felt a bit off kilter. Others felt it was just not great writing. I felt it was more telling of the Chinese perspective as opposed to the American perspective we get every day. I noted that some of the characters in the story seemed more at home in a controlled economy and environment, more so than most American characters would feel in the same situations. It made me wonder if sharing that perspective was the point of the book.

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Review: The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal by Philip Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this at the same age as the protagonist, and I greatly appreciated the thoughts and feelings of the impending decline and loss that drives this story. Timely.

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Review: Foundation

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I decided to read the Foundation novels in chronological order, and before this I read Asimov's two precursor novels about Harry Seldon. I greatly enjoyed those books, which were just odd enough. I also liked the literary feel of those books, that felt like the writing from an Analog short story, where you had generally one deep thought and wove a whole story around it without engineering levels of meaning so prevalent in literary novels. Asimov kept that up here, by breaking the story into a few illustrative short stories. But I did miss the longer story arcs from the prequels, and I greatly missed the characters, who have "aged out" of this chronologically distant set of tales., While this one wasn't my cup of tea, it didn't scare me off of reading the next one -- I want to see what the worlds have in store.

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