Good enough is perfect.

A lot of this was not novel to me (it’s not like I have not read advice for people with ADHD before) but it gives clear, concise and useful advice, some tips that I had not seen elsewhere before and was just overall quite motivating for me to make another round of adjustments to help get me through everything.

There is nothing more intimate than letting another person get into your subconscious.

Interesting guide that I am looking forward to putting to more use (or being used on me). There’s a lot of fun ideas in here, though I think that the author is coming at it from an angle of having so much experience, and having had much of that with experienced participants, that he takes a lot for granted of how easily things will come. I am also a little doubtful of some of the psychological framework he uses for understanding things, the “hidden observer” and such. But it’s not a psychology book, it’s a guide to things that can be fun to try out, and it does give a lot of ideas and approaches. Though, while I am nitpicking, it could really have done with an editor and a once-over on the formatting.

Every city implies the crimes that will someday take place there.

I was not expecting this to teach me how to rob a bank, but I was hoping it would have more in the way of discussions of how buildings and cities are constructed rather than just talking about very broad strokes concepts. Maybe a diagram or two, y’know? I believe I first heard about this from reading a game developer talk about how it changed how they thing of spaces and construction of locations and of game levels. I think it might have been Heather Flowers? It is not quite what I expected from that half-remembered description of it that I read a few years ago, but that’s hardly the fault of the book.

I do think the text is a bit myopic, focusing on architecture and dismissal of all else. That is, somewhat, the point of the book: To take an architectural view on criminality, but it leads it to things like raise concerns with the creep in what is seen to legally define burglary in the United States primarily in terms of some abstract slippery slope magical thinking defining what constitutes architecture and not of it as ever-increasing criminalisation and abuse of state power, and seems far worried about this than of the surveillance state, which is dismissed as not that big of a deal.

It wants to, and acknowledges that it wants to, focus on interesting, sexy, capers and sophisticated career criminals—an architect turned bank robber of course gets a large part of a chapter dedicated to him—but the vast majority of property crimes are committed by the poor and desperate, who are only fit to be included as humorous aside so we can laugh at how hapless they are.

It is very funny that one of the first things in this book is a chapter on mythbusting misconceptions around meditation which boldly states that the point of meditation is not to get psychic powers and, in fact, developing psychic powers is only something that should happen well down and the line and manifesting them as someone who is new to meditation can be dangerous!

It does, in spite of itself, give some pretty straightforward and (to me, being very new to this and so not having much real room to judge) seemingly effective guide on vipassanā meditation, though also draped in a lot of attempts at explaining the author’s understanding of Buddhist philosophy in self-help language and lofty descriptions of the supposed life-altering benefits of mindfulness that I don’t really care about.

I suppose that I will only be able to judge the real value of this book to me down the line but at the moment I think it has given me a solid start on practising shutting my brain off and not being overwhelmed by my thoughts, something I have been needing to learn.

I put a reservation in for this book in the library a few months ago and then got an email that it was ready to be collected on the same day I really hit a breaking point with my burnout. There are a lot of things in here that I need to remind myself of and internalise.

I don’t want to nitpick the book too much but I do think the way that various overlapping societal pressures are lumped into the book’s monolithic “Laziness Lie” is reductive and just kind of annoying. It awkwardly straddles the line between systematic criticism and general self-help advice book and falls into the pitfalls of the latter of flattening, sanitising and universalising struggles to make them easily digestible. There are still a lot of unexamined assumptions baked into the writing of the kind of life the reader has and the kind of life they aspire to and I was a little aghast at a few of the accounts given and the way that they were framed as positive.

I have never been fat enough to warrant comment from anyone outside of doctors and family but I do struggle a lot with self-image around my weight. I don’t have the same experiences as the author but the stories she relates throughout this book are nothing short of appalling. The casual disregard people can have for the humanity or autonomy of fat people is shocking and the books demands to be heard and treated as a person are important.

I do think it’s not a fantastic book, though. It’s fairly repetitive and could do with more structure to it and I would have appreciated diving into a bit more detail of the studies citied throughout the book, but this is not an academic literature review and to its credit it does provide citations to go look yourself. That I have not done so is perhaps hypocritical of me but I do not have the spoons for that right now.

I think that the author does have blind spots and makes some sometimes galling statements around her perception of how the world treats other people. One that stuck in my mind was a comment about how common refrains about queer people preying on children being a thing of the past. In 2020 it should have been clear to anyone just reading news headlines that this was wishful thinking.

The books is also very American, frequently referencing the particulars and policies as U.S. institutions and companies as well as popular culture. That’s not really a mark against it, the author is American and she is writing about her own life (and I at least am passingly familiar with these things through American culture hegemony), but it did make me feel that much more separated from the perspective of the book.

An interesting book that I read for normal reasons.

An extremely engaging and sometimes moving history of the Russian revolutions of 1917, woven into a story, almost a novel, while staying out of the realm of fiction.