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Short, easy, and sweet. At some points, it feels a bit melodramatic, but I liked it as a whole. Great for learning French or re-picking it up again after not having read anything literary in some time. I'm looking forward to reading more of Manai's work.

Basically, a crazy guy writing paragraphs.

Still, I found it helpful--I could relate a lot to Pressfield, and I do think it's worth visiting.

Such a beautiful, outstanding collection of short stories. Chiang has an eye for the human experience, and his stories reflect that.

Really horribly written, but there are some valuable insights here about the trouble with abstracting the world based on limited experiences. I gained something from it, and that's all I can ask for.

This is exactly what I needed to read at this point in my life. It's so beautiful, and I cried my way through the entire second half. Perhaps it isn't anything groundbreaking, but it has the same "vibes" as a Studio Ghibli film or the video game, Celeste. It's no wonder that this book is so loved.

Reading this is like attending therapy sessions with a decent, although not excellent, therapist. A lot of what's in here is essentially repeated everywhere: sleep enough, eat good food, exercise, build solid friendships, etc. What I found most meaningful was her distinction between "false anxiety," which is just your body telling you to fulfill an immediate need (e.g. "Feed me!" "I'm so tired I need to sleep!") and "true anxiety," which becomes apparent once all everyday needs are filled. True anxiety is essentially the "north star" that tells you what you should be doing with your life, and if it's ignored it'll show up physiologically.

I think my "true anxiety" is telling me to run away from human society, hole out in a forest, and simply read and write about whatever I want. Unfortunately, I have bills to pay.

Ted Chiang is the best, and I think he needs no explanation. The best-known story in here is "Story of Your Life" (better know as the film Arrival). But, I think the best story in here is "Hell is the Absence of God." All of the stories left me thinking a bit after, and I'm continuing to do so now. The last set of stories in my version were also in Exhalation, so I skipped over them.

It took me some time to get into this book, but I found it really rewarding. The book almost feels too easy and a little bit boring at the beginning with his discussion of the moon and Mars. You wonder, for a moment, if the book will only cover the color of the sky and differences in gravity. However, Plait gradually steps up the game, offering more detail and illuminating aspects about the universe. His discussion of binary systems (especially "P-Type Systems") was especially challenging for me, and his writing about nebulae wasn't the easiest either, although I was able to make sense of it.

(As an aside, what really stands apart in this book are the footnotes--they're great!)

I have to say, I wasn't profoundly impressed by this collection. My favorites were "Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt," "Ode to the Puritan in Me," "To My Big Friend's Sister," and "Weeping."

On the whole, it was rather forgettable. But, figs appear often enough, and How to Read Literature Like a Professor tells me that it probably means something. I suspect a lost of innocence or something along those lines.

Foster's book is a classic. I remember chapters of it being assigned in high school, but I never made my way through the entire thing. He has an excellent sense of humor and makes understanding symbols comprehensible. I love that he never once imposes a reading of a text; instead, he opts to suggest possibilities about what things may mean given their prior use in the human Ur-story. Intertextuality gets plenty of coverage here as well.

A lot of stories mentioned here were familiar to me, and a lot were not, which allowed me to fill out my "to-read" list a bit more, while thinking about some stories that I want to go back to.

Nothing here should be too ground-breaking to heavy readers, but Foster's book is worth going back to from time to time.

This is a fun, easy-to-read book on Rubin's experiences focusing on living more through the five major senses. The sections on touch left a lot to be desired, but her experience reflects some of my own. As a little thing that I took, I now keep all of my technology on grayscale mode and it has gone a long way to stop me from focusing too much on it.

I don't love contemporary poetry, but Sin here does a decent job. In fact, I liked it and found it relatable. It definitely fits better into the category of "Instagram poetry," but if you're into that kind of thing, this is worth the read.

A good collection of Seneca's letters, which were more likely meant as publicly-read essays than letters themselves. Not all of them can be found here; this collection has approximately forty of them. Yet, for a sense of Stoic philosophy, it's well-worth the read.

This is a cool, experimental work trying to describe the state of the art about what we know about the universe. The twist is that Trotta relies on only the 1,000 (or "ten hundred") most common words in the English language. I think that this book is about the best you can ask for under those parameters, but the vagueness of the language here means that there isn't much to be remembered. It lacks the emotional punch of other popular astronomical/cosmological books.