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.