[Review Short] This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This isn't space opera (as certain adulatory reviewers call it), it's space narcissism.

The two main characters, Red and Blue, are opposing superagents in a time war, traveling wherever and whenever they wish, manipulating and destroying people, cities, even civilizations, to further their side's agenda. They begin writing letters back and forth to each other as sort of a masturbatory exercise in mutual approval, then fall in love.

It's Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence with a time travel plot wrapper.

Remember: the garden-variety narcissist is the star of his or her own movie: everyone else is an extra. And this book takes modern narcissism to new heights: While Red and Blue enjoy the drug of attention from each other, not just other people but entire civilizations are their extras. Worse, this reader found himself totally indifferent to the fates of these two characters.

Finally and worst of all, the authors seem indifferent to their own story and don't even bother to resolve their own plot. Perhaps it's just another extra too.

Good Thinking: The Foundations of Probability and its Applications by Irving J. Good

This collection of scientific papers is a challenging but useful discussion on statistical methods, probability, randomness, logic and decision-making. Much of the book centers around Bayesian statistical methods and when and why to use them, as well as "philosophy of science"-type discussions on when a scientist should--or sometimes must--apply subjective judgments to scientific problems. It will help enormously if you've had a semester or two of statistics to really get at the meat of this book. If not, scroll down a few paragraphs for a short list of layperson-friendly books that address many of these subjects more accessibly. [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] Author Irving Good worked with Alan Turing at ...

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all "riddled" with errors and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction by J. Allan Hobson for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as Restful Sleep by Deepak Chopra for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...

Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis by Tyler Disney

Tremendously useful. This is a book about meta-preparation: about what it really means to be prepared when you don't know the future. It teaches readers how to think about skill development, optionality and flexibility--and by virtue of these meta-tools, how to earn true individual self-sovereignty. Deep Response is a sophisticated strategy-level discussion hidden in a simple story: a thirty-something man goes back in time to offer guidance to his twenty-something younger self. Their discussions are engrossing on many, many levels, as the two characters--with radically different perspectives, despite being the same person--work out various life problems. The older character wants to warn the younger man that all of his strivings will eventually cause him to achieve nearly the exact opposite of what he seeks, and worse, if he doesn't adjust, his life will soon lack enough flexibility to do anything about it. The reader is the lucky beneficiary, getting exposure to a wide-rangi...

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