Emma Goto

Basically like a Greek mythology version of Wicked.

Rex is a Bioform, a dog-like killing machine sent out to obey his master's orders because he is a Good Boy. But when he is freed from the innate need to listen to a master, he must decide on his own who is the enemy, and who must be killed.

Another excellent sci-fi from Tchaikovsky that's quite “out there” in terms of its concept. Also very cute because there are dogs involved (albeit murderous ones).

I enjoyed how both the characters were kind of evil and willing to kill, although the ending turned into a sappy cringefest.

A very tragic but real ww2 story. I'll admit it took me 3 months to get around to finishing it though.

Ex-doctor's flippant and fairly crude diary of what it's like working for the NHS. It takes a depressing turn in in the last 5 pages as he explains how he left the job after the (unavoidable) death of a patient.

I understand he's probably used humour to deal with what is a very shitty job, but I wasn't really vibing with it.

Not sure how I feel about this one. The protagonist ends the book by committing a genocide which yeah she eventually feels guilty for but what even???? I guess it's written decently. You get some romance vibes from two dudes and one is dead so I guess she has one option left. That guy bullied her and tried to kill her on more than one occasion so I dunno how reasonable it seems that they're suddenly buddies

Quite pleasant to listen to as a free audiobook on Audible. Nothing amazing though. Detective/murder mystery-type book. You could see some of the twists coming.

Cool concept but I was expecting a proper sci-fi novel, instead it was more of an action novel.

I recently read the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. It explores the note-taking method of a famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who published a *huge* amount of work in his lifetime (70 books and 400+ articles) - and it was quite possibly due to the efficient way he took notes.

Although the book was primarily aimed at students and academics who have to write papers, I still gleaned some really good lessons from it that I think are applicable to developers, especially those who write blog posts about what they learn.

Write notes in your own words

When studying and making notes, a common approach is to copy down definitions of things straight from the textbook or learning resource that you are using. If you’re attending a lecture or listening to a course online, and are a super-fast typist, you might even be able to directly quote what your instructor is saying straight into your notes.

The problem that comes with writing notes this way is that you’ve been able to skip the work of actually understanding the content. If you go back and re-read your notes a couple of times, this will create the illusion of understanding (as you will be able to recall bits of it in your memory) but saying it in your own words takes a bit more thought and brainpower to do.

When writing your notes, it is important that you do the work upfront of understanding the meaning, by making sure they’re written in your own words. This will save you the hassle of trying to understand it later.

Where writing notes can turn into a problem

You probably will have some sort of notebook (whether it’s paper-based or digital) where you jot down all your notes. If you’re organised, you may even have some sort of tagging system too! Keeping notes is good practice, but problems can arise depending on what you do with the notes after you’ve written them.

Over time as you learn and note down new things, your collection of notes will grow bigger and bigger. It can start to be a bit overwhelming, especially if your notes are disjointed and all over the place without much clear organisation. If you’re looking through your notes for a new topic to blog about, it may be hard to find something worth blogging about.

Even worse - you may have documented the solution to a particularly gnarly problem you solved at work (which would make for some great blog content!) but after coming back to it later you’re finding it hard to turn it into a blog. What made solving this problem so difficult, exactly? Why did we need to solve it in the first place?

When you quickly jot down notes, you’ll probably skip writing down all of the details, because in that moment, you can remember all of it just fine. But when you come back to these notes later, you may have completely forgotten the context in which they were written, and thus these notes will lose some of their value.

Understanding and writing down your notes gets you two thirds of the way there. But there's a third thing you need to do to write truly effective notes. Step three involves something called a **slip-box**.

What is the slip-box (or Zettelkasten) method?

Soon after you’ve jotted down your notes you need to rewrite your notes into “permanent notes” that will live in your slip-box.

A slip-box, also known as a “card index” or “zettelkasten” in German, is where Niklas Luhmann would store all of his permanent notes on index cards. Today, you can also accomplish the same sort of thing thanks to using various software, some even specifically made for Zettelkasten.

Each of these notes shouldn’t be excessively long - Luhmann kept things succinct by only using one side of each index card. But at the same time, he made sure that the notes themselves were written properly with full sentences, and were able to be understood without any additional context.

As he created more notes, he would find links to other notes he had created, and with a numbering/lettering system would denote certain notes as “sub notes” of other notes. If a note was related to two separate notes, it might be made a sub note of one, and the linkage to the other note would be noted on the index card itself.

The act of writing these notes (properly) and finding the connections between them and other notes isn’t easy. It’s a lot harder than just jotting down notes in a notebook and calling it a day. But by doing this expensive brainpower up front, you’re essentially building up a library of interconnected knowledge from the ground-up.

As you build up your knowledge library and find the relations between bits of knowledge, the real beauty of this system is that it will organically let you find topics to write about - they essentially will have written themselves because you will have done the work upfront of explaining it in your own words, and connecting it to other notes in your slip-box.

Implementing the slip-box method as a developer

Prior to reading this book, my collection of notes was messily stored in Dropbox Paper without much categorisation, and missing lots of context. In some cases, it was just a link to an article or some documentation with a "TIL" written underneath it.

I've taken a little look around at what's available to store and write my notes in, and for now I've settled on Notion. I've started to make the effort to convert some of my "messy" notes into "proper" ones, and I'm finding that I'm actually skipping the act of putting the permanent notes into a slip-box and going straight to creating blog draft out of this content. So I can't yet comment on the effectiveness of properly using a slip-box but for me at least it is providing some results!

If I do find this approach useful in the long term, I'll be sure to write up a post detailing my experiences. In the meantime, I'd love to hear about your note-taking experiences - what does and doesn't work for you?

Thanks for reading!

3.5 stars - I wouldn't recommend you go out and read it, but it's not complete trash either.

The book covers the concept of nudges - how small changes to the way people are presented choices will change their decisions. The key point being you aren't removing the ability to choose or removing certain choices, just the way they are presented.

E.g. adding health warnings to cigarette packs or making organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in.

However the book also does a lot of pondering on the way American society could be improved by these nudges (e.g. healthcare) and even gets side tracked onto the topic of changing how marriage works.

As a non-American and non-politician, a lot of this felt irrelevant to me. The authors made good suggestions but at the same time they're just telling me things that I'm not going to be able to do anything about anyway.

It's also a bit dated. At one point the authors make a joke that women in Sweden were more likely to choose a portfolio because the authors' wives are organised (idk, some sort of stereotype about women? Felt weird to read).

Really liked the contrast between Bebe - a Chinese immigrant who wants her biological child back from her new adoptive (white) parents, and Mia, who has essentially stolen and raised a child that she gave birth to, but was not biologically hers.

I was rooting for both of these mothers, and they both come out on top - but who should a child belong to? The parents most equipped to care for them? The biological mother? The woman that physically gives birth to the child? I wanted Bebe to get her child back but at the same time I didn't see Mia as a “bad” character even though she's stolen a child from her biological parents.

The fact that the author grew up where the novel was set, Shaker Heights, makes the subtle racism you encounter throughout the book even more impactful since it probably comes from direct experience.

The book starts off quite strong. We're in New York, and a plague has broken out. Either you're immune to the plague, or you catch it and die. The plague somehow strengthens the ability for a small percentage of the population to use magic. Society collapses, and people flee the city.

However once the book moves onto the bit where you travel the countryside, foraging for supplies, finding shelter and more travel companions (or losing them) it kind of loses steam a bit.

Especially when you get to the too good to be true 300+ person community of New Hope. Which obviously is going to have a conflict of some kind (you let those bad guys leave, who have intimate knowledge of the town, and you don't think they're going to come back and bring more bad guys with them? Really?)

The author builds up a lot of different characters, and so when Lana abruptly leaves them all behind, I don't think that really helps the book either. Especially considering Lana by herself isn't that compelling of a character.

A glimpse of the struggles and discrimination Koreans faced living in Japan, as well their struggle of trying to find an identity - never being accepted as Japanese, but not quite Korean either.

Dialog felt clunky towards the end, and the characters introduced in the last section felt more shallow and one dimensional.

I don't know if I want to give this a 4, it's not bad but it also took me over a month to finish reading it, so I kept forgetting the plot and what was happening so it was all a mess in my mind each time I picked the book back up!

Plot tl;dr - the main character, Genly, is on a planet where everyone is is neither male or female. It reminds me of the Ancillary Justice series where everyone is referred to as a “she” (although this book came 40 years earlier!)

The book defaults to “he” pronouns for everyone. I wish it used “she” instead, since it becomes very easy when reading to just imagine all the genderless people as men, since Genly does a lot of interacting with people in power who are traditionally men e.g. a prime minister and a king. However this can be explained away by Genly being a male and being biased towards choosing “he”.

A couple of times Genly gender stereotypes (“he was graceful as a girl”) and even right at the end of the book he mentions that a child must be a boy because “no girl could keep a grim a silence as he did”. I guess the author was trying to prove a point by being overtly obvious with the stereotyping but at the same time it's kind of frustrating to read since Genly is a likeable main character otherwise and it's not really pointed out that he's doing it.

I wish we could have seen some more growth from Genly and for him to move away from gender stereotyping as the book progressed.

Still it's a 50 year old book so considering its age, it's pretty good!

Pretty spicy for an 1850s novel - involves a married woman with a child, mysteriously living without her husband, before her backstory is revealed through a series of her diary entries.

Not gonna lie though I didn't find it super gripping so it took me a long time to come back and actually finish it off.

The author acknowledges that Atomic Habits builds upon some of the content laid out in The Power of Habit, and so if you had to pick one of the two to read, this one is not it!

The one benefit this book provides is that James Clear provides more practical advice on how to build your habits (which The Power of Habit doesn't do).

However Charles Duhigg does a better job of mixing science, facts and small stories about habits to prove his point - you can tell he's the better writer.

I thought this book started off quite strong with an alternative history plot line, where a meteorite hitting earth and the threat of an extinction event kickstarts the space program in the 1950s.

However I felt it went a little downhill a bit from there as we got stuck into the plot line of the discrimination women faced in the 1960s in the workplace (and their lack of place within it as equals). Which yes, is real and happened and it sucks but I guess it didn't feel quite uplifting to read at times..

Nonetheless an interesting book though.

Pity it's only a novella. I think the most interesting part about this book was that the murderbot doesn't have a gender yet for the first half I was completely convinced it was a female - and if you go and read other reviews there's a good mix of referring to it as he or she.

A magazine writer is given the chance to have an exclusive interview with reclusive Hollywood star Evelyn Hugo. The question she sets out to answer - of her 7 husbands, which one did she love the most?

Don't be fooled by the Marilyn Monroe-esque cover or the story premise though - this book goes somewhere completely different.

For a book published in 1891 I actually found it to be quite spicy (compared to something like Pride and Prejudice). It makes commentary on the double standard when it comes to a woman having to be “pure” while men get to go and sow their wild oats, which I was surprised by and thought was quite progressive (for its time) especially considering the book was written by a man. Unfortunately a lot of misfortune befalls the main character Tess so don't go into this if you want a wholesome read.

Read this one because I enjoyed the Netflix adaption (which was sort of Pride and Prejudice vibes but more horny). But in the book version, the male lead definitely isn't a Mr Darcy :( definitely very explicit for a 100 year old book, I can see why it was banned!

DNF at 50%. Basically this girl is leading on / getting involved with 3 different men (well, as much as you can get “involved” when you are in the 19th century lol). It's kind of annoying since she doesn't come across as a very good person, and wasn't too fun to read either so I had to give up on it!

At the old age of 24, Frederica Merriville has no plans on marriage of her own, and is instead keen to see her younger sister Charis matched with a husband worthy of her beauty. She enlists the help of a distant cousin, Alverstoke, to hold a ball to debut Charis into London society.

Alverstoke is a lazy and never one to help out anyone, let alone a bunch of distant cousins. But somehow he finds himself involved in the Merrivilles' lives, even taking on a fatherly (or big brother) role to Frederica's younger brothers, Felix and Jessamy.

The romance itself wasn't bad, but the relationships Alverstoke builds, especially with the brothers, was the most heartwarming part of the story to me.

Pretty intense book, composed entirely of people's accounts of living in the USSR during its collapse. It took me a while to get into it, and I felt it got better / more interesting / easier to read about a third or a half of the way in.

I think this book is best paired with some prior reading or knowledge on this period in history (unfortunately I lacked that) since the context is useful when reading this book.