Justin Harter

Don't let the copyright date of this book fool you, there's plenty of pertinent information in here even for 2017. There's plenty to laugh at too, like remembering to send faxes to people. But the concepts are here. Weiss also comes across a little...high falutin' sometimes for my taste, but this is book held my attention for its contrarian and supported positions against common beliefs.

I tried really hard to not just type, “Ok, boomer” and hit post.

Maybe it's just the age of the book showing a smidge, but the things this guy bemoans hardly seem catastrophic. Kindles come with the Internet built into the price! The Indianapolis Symphony lets people vote by text for the encore song! There are children who use laptops instead of books!

I am far from a tech-only booster. I think plenty of people would do well to thoughtfully reconsider the value of technology to the extent devices should be a tool. What this author misses is what I was after: reasonable arguments to analyze whether reading that book on your iPad is actually more distracting. Do you sit down to read the “newspaper” only to get sucked into Twitter? That stuff is problematic.

I'm sure many of us could remember our parents complaining we “always had our nose in a book”, as if it was a bad thing. But unlike reading, which the author tries to hold up as far back as Gutenberg, people didn't walk around incapable of working because they were reading. People didn't have “reading addictions”.

Tech like our phones should be tools, but the apps on them are increasingly engineered to be addictive and sociologically sticky.

This book doesn't get very deep into that.

I ended up with a library book I wanted to finish and spin around. And at about 250 pages it was a quick read: Happier at Home, by Gretchen Rubin.

Sadly, I found it lacking. It's not written for me. It's about precisely what it sounds like: how to be happier in your home. Useful for those of us in places melting down with infections right now.

But I don't like the tone. She's a rich white woman who went to Yale and lives in New York with two kids and a husband. She gets to write books all day after having a successful law career at the top levels of the Supreme Court.

She basically puts all her eggs in family, kids, having the “right amount” of no doubt expensive possessions and making time for things like acupuncture.

I'm a gay man in Indiana who can't have kids, makes nowhere near that kind of money, has no family, and hates spending money.

Like I said, this book just wasn't written for me.