Short Book Reviews: Volume VII
Short Book Reviews: Volume VII
The difficulties of space settlement, early medieval history (x2), a near death experience, resilience for the 1%, Crichton — but not as I remember him, a murder mystery, and a lot of narcissism.
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by: Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe by: Judith Herrin
The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century by: Paul Collins
Missing: The Need for Closure After the Great War by: Richard van Emden
In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife by: Sebastian Junger
Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness by: Steve Magness
The Last Devil to Die: A Thursday Murder Club Mystery (#4) by: Richard Osman
He Who Fights with Monsters 8: A LitRPG Adventure by: Shirtaloon
He Who Fights with Monsters 9: A LitRPG Adventure by: Shirtaloon
He Who Fights with Monsters 10: A LitRPG Adventure by: Shirtaloon
I recently returned from my final trip of the summer. My annual trip to GenCon. It was a lot of fun, mostly because there’s a group of friends I only get to see at such cons. The con itself was enjoyable, though it was even more woke than last year. If wokeness has peaked then I don’t think they got the memo.
Hopefully now that I’m back, and done traveling for at least a little while, I can finally dig into the backlog of writing I want to do. For one thing I’m behind on book reviews, but hopefully these eleven will begin the process of catching up.
I don’t take as many pictures as I should at these events, but I’ll leave you with this picture of a Shadows of Brimstone battle:
Non-Fiction Reviews
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
By: Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Published: 2023
448 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The enormous social and technological difficulties which would accompany any attempt to create a space settlement.
What's the author's angle?
Ostensibly they went in with a fair amount of optimism, and were just looking to create a popular science book, but they ended up profoundly pessimistic about humanity's chances.
Who should read this book?
If you already felt like space settlement was going to be a lot harder than people thought, but would like a good compilation of evidence to back up that feeling, this book is for you. Or if you think that space settlements are going to save humanity and you want to make sure you understand the other side of that argument, this is also a very beneficial book.
Specific thoughts: Won’t someone please think of the (self-replicating! autonomous!) robots???
I largely agree with the Wienersmiths’ pessimistic analysis of the situation (see here for example) but I do think they have one big blindspot: von Neumann probes. If we’re going to colonize other planets, I think that’s the only way it will happen. So what’s a von Neumann probe? It’s a robot that can make copies of itself, while also being capable of doing just about anything else you can imagine.
To take a simplified, but also very ambitious scenario: if you had just one such probe you could instruct it to “Set up a Mars Colony”. It would then journey to the asteroid belt and start mining for materials. Shortly thereafter it would begin constructing new probes from that material. Some of these new probes would continue mining, others would do nothing but make new probes, and still others would head to Mars and start digging underground habitats. (They have to be underground. Mars has no magnetosphere!) At some point things would be ready for humans to move in. There wouldn’t be a long hard slog to bootstrap the colony from nothing, it would already be there.
Unfortunately even in this scenario, the Weinersmith’s point out numerous other challenges, from Mars’ toxic soil to the effects of low gravity, but having robots who could autonomously construct whatever you needed would be enormously useful to any colonization endeavor.
As I said, this is an ambitious scenario and we won’t have the tech to pull it off for a very long time. But what if the robots were 80% self-replicating? That is 80% of the components they need could be constructed locally, and 20% had to be imported from Earth. One of the reasons people, including the Weinersmiths, don’t consider something like this is that when people imagine robots they imagine sleek high-maintenance stuff from Boston Dynamics. But what if we designed very basic robots, the kind where we didn’t care about elegance, or how much material got used (we have a whole world after all). Clearly they couldn’t construct their own CPUs and there are probably other components that would be exceptionally difficult to craft. But getting a thousand CPUs to Mars is orders of magnitude easier than getting a thousand people to Mars.
Perhaps 80% is too ambitious, and these Martian robots could only supply 50% of their components. Start revising things down like this and suddenly these sorts of robots don’t seem that far off (particularly given recent advances in 3D printing) and they would make the whole project considerably more tractable. All of this takes me to the key problem with the book, the Weinersmiths don’t mention even the possibility of such a thing, and beyond that I found even their broader discussion of robotics to be lacking.
To be fair to the Weinersmiths, I haven’t heard Elon Musk discussing such things either. He imagines that in the next few decades there will be a million people on Mars. I will bet anyone $1000 at any reasonable odds that this will not happen in the next 30 years. (I’d be willing to go even longer, but I’m not sure I’ll live that long.) If someone ends up adopting my semi-autonomous, semi-self-replicating robot idea, perhaps we might end up with as many as 1,000 people. Though even that seems like a long shot.
Like the Weinersmiths, this doesn’t make me happy. I wish that we were on track for a glorious future of extraterrestrial colonies and rugged space pioneers. The kind I read about when I was young in books by Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Niven and Pournelle. Their worlds seem way more interesting and hopeful than the one we ended up with.
Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe
By: Judith Herrin
Published: 2020
576 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A history of the city of Ravenna starting in 402 AD when Emperor Honorius made it the capital of the Western Roman Empire—it was more defensible than Rome—through 814 and the death of Charlemagne.
What's the author's angle?
It’s clear from the introduction that Herrin feels Ravenna has been unjustly overlooked in the many discussions of Italy, and she wants to bring to light its pivotal role during this early medieval period.
Who should read this book?
This is pretty niche as far as history goes. So I would only read it if the description I already gave piqued your interest. That said, given Ravenna’s central role if you’re interested in this period at all, you’ll get a lot from reading this book
Specific thoughts: A city trapped at the interface of west and east, and every early Christian controversy.
Canonically the Western Roman Empire is said to have ended on September 4, 476 AD. But as many people have pointed out, offering up a specific day, or a specific year, or even a specific decade is misleading. The fall of Rome was very gradual, and for many people the differences were subtle. On the other hand, don’t let anyone tell you it didn’t fall, That there wasn’t a significant regression in industry, infrastructure and technological prowess in Europe. (See Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome if you want a short, accessible overview of the evidence.)
But returning to the idea of the gradual nature of this decline, Ravenna provides an excellent snapshot of the process. As many people will point out when you talk about the fall of Rome, Constantinople lasted until 1453. So there were still “Romans” around and they still had deep connections back to Italy. And there were many serious attempts to reconquer Italy, some more successful than others. Most of the time when people are judging that success they’re looking to the status of Rome itself, but Ravenna was where the Eastern Empire really had a toe hold, and where this connection between the “fallen” west and the surviving east mostly played out.
And while it played out a lot in war, it played out more significantly in the numerous theological debates. I don’t have time to cover them all, and as a Christian who rejects the Nicean Creed (which some argue is an oxymoron) they all seem pretty pedantic. Even Herrin admits they’re pretty esoteric. Talking about one such controversy (The Three Chapter Controversy) she says: “To modern sensibilities there is something incomprehensible in the way the Three Chapters continued to envenom ecclesiastical relations.”
I totally agree with this, and I would talk more about such controversies if I thought I could explain them accurately and quickly, but in a sense the fact that I can’t is one of the reasons to read this book. The past really is a foreign country and much of the charm of this book is in illustrating how much that’s true.
The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century
By: Paul Collins
Published: 2014
496 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The various convulsions Europe went through, both physical (external invaders like vikings) and spiritual (the many convulsions of the papacy) before finally birthing the Christian west.
What's the author's angle?
Collins is a former Catholic priest (he got in a spat with the Vatican and quit) so there is a heavy religious inflection to the narrative.
Who should read this book?
If you’re interested in Europe in the centuries after Rome fell this is a great book. More comprehensive than the book on Ravenna, though not quite as evocative of the time and place.
Specific thoughts: Christianity triumphant!
This book dovetailed well with the Ravenna book, and also the Holy Roman Empire book I reviewed a couple of months ago. The through line on all of them appears to be the central role played by Christianity. In the HRE book it was Christianity as culture. In the Ravenna book it was Western Christianity in conflict with, and eventually breaking away from Eastern Christianity. And in this book it was the survival of the papacy despite the fact that Rome itself was constantly under threat, and also a shadow of its former self. They survive by making themselves indispensable to the authority of the German Emperor. First in the person of Charlemange and later with Otto the Great. In the latter case Collins has this to say:
In a sense the coronation of Otto was the actual birth of the West. While in itself a relatively unimportant incident, the coronation was actually a symbol of something more fundamental: the recognition of an authority abroad that transcended the local and the parochial and that actually had the power to project that authority in Germany, Italy, the Eastern frontier, and, to a much lesser extent, West Francia. Later, in the eleventh century, the empire was also to step in to reform the papacy, itself a potential international player.
If you squint you can see all of the aspects of the European West: the way it’s starting to cohere, the central role of Christianity, the role of the pope and the formal church structure. As a consequence of all this as Christianity expands so does the idea of Europe. Encompassing the Vikings to the north, the Magyars to the east and just about everyone else other than the Muslims. Which is another story the book covers quite well.
Missing: The Need for Closure After the Great War
Published: 2019
300 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The book alternates between detailing the efforts by the UK to honor and memorialize the WWI dead, and the story of one mother’s quest to find the remains of her son.
Who should read this book?
If you’re really into WWI and will read anything on the subject, or if you want a very deep dive into how treating war dead changed in the aftermath of the largest war the world had seen (up to that point).
Specific thoughts: Perhaps this would have been better as two articles.
I can imagine that for someone in certain very narrow fields of study that a book like this would be a god send. It offers up details that might take considerable effort to track down otherwise, and it’s clear that van Emden did spend enormous effort to compile things, but for the average WWI buff it was too much. As Tolkein (himself a WWI veteran) said, it was “like [too little] butter scraped over too much bread.”
It was interesting to hear about the conflict between the desire to do everything they could to honor their dead and the fact that the UK had serious financial problems after the war. I was also particularly fascinated by the tension between the British desire to memorialize Ypres and the Belgian desire to reinhabit it. It was even a little bit interesting to hear about the difficulties of maintaining and landscaping the graves, but only a little bit.
The story of the mother looking for her son was excellent, but even it got bogged down in a description of every last detail. All of these numerous details could have been curated into a couple of very interesting articles, but instead it ended up as a decently sized book that was something of a slog.
In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
By: Sebastian Junger
Published: 2024
176 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Junger’s experience with nearly dying, along with his near death experience (NDE) and other associated mysteries which accompanied it.
Who should read this book?
I’m a big fan of Junger, not only is he a great writer, but his books are tight. This one is only 4.5 hours on audio. There are podcasts longer than that. In other words it’s a low cost high reward endeavor.
Specific thoughts: Everyone focuses on NDEs but really there’s lots of hard to explain stuff around death.
Hopefully I’ll get around to doing a full post on this topic at some point, but it seems clear that we have large amounts of evidence for various supernatural phenomena, particularly in the period adjacent to or accompanying death. I got really started down this path when I read Encountering Mystery (see my review here), and while Junger’s account is only a single anecdote it’s interesting how well it matches the stories in Encountering Mystery.
What strikes me most in this whole space is phenomena other than NDEs. Everyone’s heard about NDEs and the arguments against them are well trod. I don’t find these arguments particularly convincing, but the fact that they exist allows many people to dismiss NDEs. But there are a host of other phenomena, which seem equally mysterious but are entirely ignored. Junger’s book is a great example of this.
The event which causes him to nearly die is burst aneurysm, and in the day or so leading up to it bursting several unusual things happen.
First, the day before, he is awoken by a very vivid dream. Junger dreams he has died, and he can see his distraught wife and children, but he can’t comfort them because he has “crossed over”. He never has such dreams and it’s intense enough that he relates it to his wife.
Second, the fire chief had told him that he needed to clear the road to his house, otherwise emergency vehicles couldn’t get through. He had done it once in 2000. At the time the book takes place it’s 2020 and it had been apparent for years that he needed to do it again. The morning of the day his aneurysm burst he felt an “overwhelming urgency” to do it again.
Third, both he and his wife had the impression that they needed to make the afternoon count because it might be the last one they had together.
As he says:
None of this was normal: not the dream about dying, not the compulsion to clear the driveway, not the passing thought of mortality.
Later, at the moment when he’s closest to death, he’s visited by his father, and that’s what he spends much of his attention on, offering various examples and explanations of NDEs. But he never attempts to explain the unusual nature of the events preceding the emergency. I understand that they are less obviously supernatural than having a dead relative show up, but at first glance they appear unusual and significant.
Obviously if we’re seeking for explanations we can’t rule out coincidence, or hindsight bias. Perhaps he and his wife frequently have thoughts that it might be the last day they have together, but normally they don’t remember them, but this time, because it nearly was their last day together they did. The same might be said of the dream, though Junger claims he’s never had such a dream before or since.
Explaining why he felt an “overwhelming” compulsion to clear the driveway is more difficult. Perhaps on some subconscious level the body knew it was in trouble and it managed to communicate that to Junger’s conscious mind. But given that the aneurysm hadn’t burst at this point, and it had been going on for years, that seems like remarkable foresight. Also is the subconscious smart enough to translate a general signal of ill-health into “clear the driveway”? Wouldn’t it be more likely to translate into something like “take it easy”?
To be clear I am not saying that this is ironclad evidence that some outside supernatural force was inspiring Junger to do what he did. But on the other side of things, given the strangeness of things, would you really assign a 0% chance of it being supernatural? I wouldn’t, and at a minimum it seems unusual enough to invite further examination and introspection. Also once you get to talking to people about stuff like this you hear such stories all the time. Having a little extra humility about how much we actually understand is probably a good thing.
Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness
By: Steve Magness
Published: 2022
320 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
That resilience and toughness are not created through top down brutality, but neither are they created by standards-free self-esteem. If you want to create resilience and toughness in children, athletes, etc. It needs to involve understanding and collaboration.
What's the author's angle?
Magness is a performance coach. He works with very driven individuals, not with average children. This will come up a lot in my review, for example…
Who should read this book?
If you’re looking for a self improvement book for people who are trying to be high-performers or support high-performers then maybe read this book? If you’re looking for a society wide diagnosis of resilience and toughness with solutions, then no.
Specific thoughts: Dealing with the top 1% is a lot different than dealing with the 99%
It is widely believed that young people in America are not as tough or resilient as their forebearers. This belief is backed up by pretty solid data. Mental health outcomes just keep getting worse, PTSD diagnoses doubled from 2013-2017, and anecdotes of fragile overprotected children are legion. For a good example of that see my recent book review of Bad Therapy. It was while I was drafting that review and getting feedback on it that someone pointed me at this book. So what does it say about how to solve this problem?
According to Magness, it’s definitely not by doing whatever we did in the past. He comes to this conclusion mostly by offering up examples of brutal athletic coaches. How this applies to a normal child in a normal home is left to our imagination. As is any discussion of the worse outcomes I mentioned above. Despite these failings he pushes for a new approach to creating toughness. But haven’t we been taking a new approach? For example Magness references the following:
Over three studies, researchers found that better goal authenticity contributed to better goal achievement. When people chose goals that reflected their true selves, not their public selves, they were more likely to follow through. Those who failed often chose goals that were imposed on them by a parent, coach, or society in general. For those who were successful, goals came from within, reflecting who they were and what they cared about. A high degree of self-knowledge is what allowed these individuals to see clearly.
Doesn’t this sound like what we’ve been trying to do for the last several decades already? It’s possible that we haven’t done very well, that it’s been mere lip service, but either way it’s not clear what Magness is bringing to the table for an average parent dealing with an average kid.1 He does make a strong argument that being abusive and brutal definitely doesn’t work for creating toughness. He goes on at length about how counterproductive brutal coaching is, mentioning people like Bobby Knight, and Paul “Bear” Bryant. College coaches who were legendary for being brutal, but also for winning.
The problem is most of his examples are around athletic coaching. And this is when you realize the core weakness of the book. Magness is almost exclusively talking about high-achieving self-motivated people. Yeah, if you’ve been playing football, or doing track and field, or cycling for a decade, and already shown enough talent and perseverance to end up on a college team, or doing it professionally, then a brutal and abusive coaching style is entirely unnecessary. And even being tough on athletes is overkill because they’re already being harder on themselves than you could ever be. In this case the more collaborative tools Magness mentions are probably exactly the sort of support that’s needed. Also it’s entirely possible that coaching is a place where a certain amount of brutality has lingered, but as for the rest of society, it was banished long ago.
In other words, my argument would be that, in terms of coaching people who are already self-motivated, Magness is exactly on point, and probably does valuable service in dispelling the Whiplash paradigm of greatness. (Though I still think that movie touches on something we’ve lost.) But outside the elite, already-driven, individuals, I don’t know that Magness has anything useful to say. Certainly almost all of his data and all of his anecdotes are around top-level athletes. And figuring out how best to encourage them is a worthwhile endeavor. But, if we need to figure out how to create resilience among the vast masses of iGen children growing up tethered to a phone, then I don’t believe Magness has anything compelling to add to the conversation.
Fiction Reviews
Eruption
By: James Patterson and Michael Crichton
Published: 2024
432 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A large eruption on the big island of Hawaii threatens to release some very unwisely stored radioactive pesticide, unless John MacGregor, a ruggedly handsome volcanologist, can do the impossible, and redirect the flow.
What's the author's angle?
I normally don’t include this section in my reviews of fiction, but the backstory of the book is interesting. Apparently Crichton had been working on this book for a long time when he died. His widow hoped to get it published, but it seems clear that a lot of work still needed to be done. She eventually persuaded James Patterson to write the book based on Crichton’s notes.
Who should read this book?
I’ve never read anything else by Patterson, and there’s a reasonable chance that this is exactly the sort of thing Patterson’s fans enjoy. I have read lots of Crichton, and, insofar as this is a Crichton book, it’s the worst Crichton book I’ve ever read. So: Crichton fan = NO! Patterson fan = Maybe?
Specific thoughts: Not as sad for Crichton’s legacy as the debate is going to be for Biden’s, but it’s close.
The characters are all one dimensional. And many of them are one-dimensionally stupid. The premise of storing radioactive pesticide near an active volcano is so dumb it could only happen in the real world, it’s too dumb to happen in fiction. Many characters are introduced only to disappear. I almost didn’t finish it, but I did, only to find the ending entirely unsatisfying.
All that said, I suspect that the true genius of Crichton has grown in my mind since his death. As such I went in expecting something really great, the difference between my expectations and reality resulted in me coming away feeling like it was awful, when it was merely profoundly mediocre.
The Last Devil to Die: A Thursday Murder Club Mystery (#4)
By: Richard Osman
Published: 2023
362 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
The further adventures of the Thursday Murder Club, a group of four English pensioners, who solve old and new murders. In this one they are investigating the murder of a friend of theirs while simultaneously dealing with the decline of someone else that’s even closer to them.
Who should read this book?
If you enjoyed the other entries in this series, you’ll enjoy this one as well. I think it might actually be the best entry in the series.
Specific thoughts: Surprisingly emotional
The murder mystery is a well worn genre, so it’s surprising that Osman could come up with an innovative new angle, but he has. Having a group of people that all solve mysteries together is not unheard of, nor is making the central detective old, but having a group of old people might be completely unique to Osman. And once you add in the fact that they are actually suffering the effects of aging you’ve got a really affecting alchemy that made this book quite enjoyable. This is on top of the normal joy of trying to figure out whodunit.
He Who Fights with Monsters Series
By: Shirtaloon
Published: 2022
624 Pages
Published: 2023
662 Pages
Published: 2023
758 Pages
*WARNING* If you are enjoying this series and want to continue to enjoy it you might just want to skip this review.
Briefly, what is this series about?
This series is about Jason Asano. It’s REALLY about Jason Asano. There is no plot except as it relates to Asano, people do not appear “on screen” unless they will eventually interact with him. Characters do not talk unless it is to say something about him. They do not act unless it either assists or opposes him. And yes, like many fantasy protagonists, Jason is the only one who can save the world, but even if we grant that, by book ten it’s just all too much. And I guess underneath all that it’s a fantasy series about someone pulled from Earth to a different world. You can search my site for reviews of books 1-7
Who should read this series?
About 2/3rds of the way through book ten I stopped reading. Asano and his snarky narcissistic whining had finally broken me. I took it for as long as I could. Certainly longer than I should have, but I had finally had enough. Given that, what advice would I offer?
There’s certainly a case to be made for not starting the series at all. And if you don’t like pulpy fantasy, or if the word LitRPG means nothing to you, then you definitely shouldn’t. If you have started it and you find Jason annoying, it’s probably only going to get worse for you. Though people who have read on keep assuring me that it gets better.
Specific thoughts- Book 8: Sanctimony central
I just about gave up on the series at the end of Book 8. It reached a peak of sanctimony that I found hard to swallow. I’ll try to describe the situation without spoiling things. Imagine that there was a robot army advancing on the city. But one of the heroes, ostensibly standing against the robot army, was a cyborg. As someone who is part robot you might be able to study him and get a better idea on how to kill robots. This isn’t even an invasive study, it’s more like observing the cyborg in action to help understand the principles of how robotic limbs work. The cyborg might refuse on the grounds that it would make it easier to kill him as well. This seems like a thin basis on which to oppose such a request, should we also close all medical schools? But I guess it would be his right to refuse such a thing, still, given that there is a giant army of seemingly unstoppable robots at your door, you’d be completely justified in asking. And maybe even pressing the question. Should the cyborg refuse, you would be justified in feeling like the cyborg was being petty, particularly if he didn’t even want to help us with our understanding of general principles.
In the book the metaphorical cyborg is Jason, and not only does he refuse, he FLIPS OUT about the request. And then of course because he’s the protagonist, all of the other characters immediately take his side, and the guy that had the temerity to even ask for help fighting the metaphorical robots ends up being painted as something akin to a Joseph Mengele. Perhaps this would be easier to let slide if Jason’s mouth wasn’t 100x likelier to get him killed than esoteric research on his physical makeup. If he’s worried about being easier to kill, he could dial down his oppositional defiant disorder by a couple of percent and more than achieve his harm reduction goal and still have risk left over to help better understand the hordes invading the city.
I mentioned this to the guy who had recommended the series to me, and he said that it got better. Did it?
Specific thoughts- Book 9: A tiny bit less sanctimony, and far too much Jason Asano
I’m going to say that my friend was right, but the difference is pretty slight. Unfortunately it was somewhere in the course of reading this book that I came across this comment from someone, and I couldn’t get it out of my head:
It’s like Shirtaloon is writing an alternate universe where the Bechdel Test got renamed the Asano test. The only time any two characters have a conversation with each other and don’t discuss Jason Asano is when they don’t know him yet and even then they’re usually discussing the impact of something he’s done.
The Bechdel Test is something feminist cartoonist Alison Bechdel came up with. Something passes the test if at least two female characters ever have a conversation about something not involving men. If we were to create an Asano test where passing it meant talking about some subject not involving Jason Asano, then no chapters in book 9 or really any chapters in any of the books in this series pass the Asano test.
Specific thoughts- Book 10: I’ve finally had enough.
You cannot have a ten book series without some repetition. Most of the time if you’ve made it all the way to book ten, the parts that get repeated are the parts you enjoy, otherwise you wouldn’t still be reading. Of course, as they get repeated you enjoy them less, but you still enjoy them somewhat, and you want to hear how it ends, so you keep going.
One of the things that this series had going for it, is that on most fronts it wasn’t particularly repetitive at first. That’s probably the advantage of an RPG-esque novel. People gain levels, abilities, dangers evolve, and there’s a change of setting. In this case that last one ended up being particularly dramatic: Jason traveled back to Earth which introduced all kinds of novelty. Unfortunately repetition is inevitable, and more unfortunate: the stuff that got repeated was the stuff that drove me nuts.
So there I was midway through book 10 when Jason started once again whining about how he couldn’t possibly trust any form of authority because he’d been so poorly treated, but that everyone needed to absolutely trust him and allow him to do whatever he wanted that I turned off the audiobook and vowed to not listen to another word.
Should anyone have started this series on my recommendation, my apologies. I still think you’ll enjoy the first half dozen or so books. But I think my friend was wrong. I don’t think it got better, or if it did, it didn’t get enough better.
After ending with a negative review like that, you start to wonder what your book review ledger looks like, how many positive hours of reading enjoyment have I directed people towards? How many negative hours have I spared people from? But the inverse is also true. How many books have I recommended that people ended up hating, and how many have I steered people clear of which they would have enjoyed? Taking all of that together, is my overall impact actually positive? It’s a heavy responsibility.
You can of course argue that children are just as tough and resilient as always, but then you’re basically arguing that it doesn’t matter what we do, since we have clearly made massive changes to the way we deal with childhood. Also the data don’t support the idea that they’re just as resilient, and it’s very rare to find someone arguing that they’re more resilient.