Actually Finishing

This one was a friend recommendation, and is another Audible listen. It’s also my first real dip into the realm of LitRPG, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect but what I got was an easy and fun listen.

It’s also really hard for me to describe because it’s kinda out there, so I’m gonna cheat a little and steal the blurb:

You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic, intergalactic game show. That’s what.

Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world—or just get to the next level—in a video game-like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that’s actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain’t your ordinary game show.

See what I mean?

A bit like with Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci, I do think this benefitted greatly from me listening to it vs how it would have been to read. Jeff Hays did an outstanding job on the voice acting, really nailing the voices for Carl and Donut, and really elevating the story from ‘meh, ok?’ to ‘solid and steady’. Dungeons and Dragons but for realisies and for the entertainment of aliens like it’s the Hunger Games isn’t particularly complicated, and unless you’re super into RPGs could be a bit of a slog.

The voice acting also lifted the more gamey aspects, like the achievement notification voice overs Carl would get after killing a boss for the first time, or when he’s being trolled by the AI running the dungeon for heading into it without any weapons or suppliers (or trousers). Plus, with the book being in first person, there was that extra dimension to it; being told it by the ‘character’, getting a voice to the story.

If it had been paperback, I could see myself getting a little too eye roley at the memes. There’s the AI’s foot fetish, for example, or the neighbourhood boss, the KraKaren: part Kraken, part Karen. The llama like creatures being meth addicts, is another. I just don’t think it’d play as well without the VA also playing the exasperated human to it.

That said, there’s still a lot to like. I got sucked in pretty hard to the journey, to Carl and Donut’s relationship growing (thanks to a transformation biscuit giving Donut the ability to talk very early on) and to the minor twist at the end. I won’t be rushing into book 2 any time soon (I’ve already started book 3 of the Ciaphas Cain series) but I’ll definitely be returning next year, or whenever I next get a discount to sign up for Audible again.

Or who knows? Maybe I’ll give the paper book a go, especially now I have a voice for the characters in my head.

7/10

This is one that took a while for me to be convinced by. For the better part of 80 pages I was telling others that it was reading like Mr Carson from Downton Abbey was taking a road trip across 1950s Britain with the Lord’s car to meet up with Mrs Hughes. Pleasant and easy reading, but not exactly enthralling.

Then the hints of a plot start dripping through. Flashbacks to conversations, arguments, a budding romantic connection between Carson and Hughes (well, actually Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton, but once the reference point came to mind in the first few pages I never shook it), and of course the attempts to rationalise and excuse the growing Nazi sympathies of the employer, Lord Darlington. If When We Were Orphans, another lauded work of Ishiguro’s I read this year, was eccentric and alive, The Remains of the Day was exploration of British restraint and dignity.

And what an exploration it was. Told entirely in first person, we see the conflicts in Stevens’ mind, with his quest to embody the sense of dignity he so admires and emulate the highly regarded butlers of his time constantly at odds with his humanity and his employer. It does the job of both showing and telling perfectly, giving his blinded perspective of highly charged emotional events, displaying the physical effects and the lack of understanding. In particular, his manner around his dying elderly father, slowly passing away whilst Stevens has tasks to do and the drip feeding of the emotional effects on the body.

But self-awareness and self-doubt does start to creep in. In the latter half of the book, having spent a few days travelling and reflecting, he starts to re-read the letter from Miss Kenton that started the whole trip off in the first place, considering whether she was quite so keen to move back to work and away from her husband after all. He starts to reflect on his playing the part of Peter to Lord Darlington’s Jesus, denying his existence to guests of his new employer and new owner of the mansion, or the severity of his Nazi ideology and associations with Herr Ribbentrop.

The scene that epitomises this is the flashback of a conversation between Stevens and Lord Darlington’s godson, who turned up during a pivotal meeting between Lord Darlington, the British PM, and Ribbentrop. The godson almost pleadingly trying to get Stevens to admit he’s on his side, that he can see Darlington be misled, played with as a useful pawn in British society, and Stevens feeling the tinge of regret at playing the loyally blind servant to his faithful and beyond reproach employer.

When We Were Orphans got a 7.5 from me in my reading log. It was an enthralling read, again exploring the theme of a blinded man pursuing his ideals, but whiffed the ending in my mind. This wasn’t that; it didn’t capture your mind through action and adventure, but through quiet reflection and exploration of duty and dignity, in a similar sense to the theme of what it means to be a gentleman in Great Expectation. Not my favourite book of the year, but still good enough to get an 8/10 for me.

Note: this review is for the Audible version read by Alfred Molina. While that doesn’t necessarily affect the content, there is obviously a different experience between listening to a wonderful voice through your headphones and reading 624 pages. Long either way, but still a different experience.

I’ve mentioned before that this one has been on my read list for about 8 years now. I got it after listening to the Steve Jobs biography, also by Isaacson, having been taken with the writing style and thinking that biographies might be for me after all. I think I lasted about half an hour before realising that it probably wasn’t smart to follow a 27 hour audiobook with a 17 hour one; burn out is real.

I’m glad I didn’t return it though, because it’s easily one of the best books I’ve read for a while. It’s by no means an academic level historical review of his life; at several points Isaacson will discuss various theories about a painting or a relationship before offering his own non-expert opinion, so if you’re looking for a definitive article, this ain’t it.

What it is though is a fascinating view of the life and work of one of history’s most famous polymaths. It follows his life from being raised as an illegitimate son of a notary and his apprenticeship under Verrocchio, to his various times spent in Florence, Milan, Rome, and ultimately France. Along the way, Isaacson covers notes and background on his most prominent works, culminating in the seminal Mona Lisa, but also the various works and commissions he started but failed to complete.

The latter point if part of what really interested me along the way though: the way Da Vinci worked. Isaacson regularly reviews and quotes from the many, many notebooks Da Vinci left behind, covering his famous to-do lists, to observations he made of nature and anatomy and how he applied them to his art (like noting how the muscles of the face worked and applied to facial expressions), to the personal notes he left, including arguments with his young apprentice/partner, Salai.

He doesn’t just talk about genius, but of Da Vinci’s inherent curiosity he held towards all things and his pursuit of that knowledge, however controversial or heretical it may have been at the time. Rather than being fully irreverent to his legendary status, Isaacson humanises Da Vinci, pointing out his distracted nature, more inclined to procrastination and flights of fancy than intense focus. From dropped projects, to enquiries leading to nowhere, to even his eventual disinterest in the thing he’s most famous for, his paintings, compared to his quest for the answers to the universe, all in the aim of slaking his curiosity.

Again, if you want an academic text on the life and work of Leonardo Da Vinci, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that a New York Times bestseller isn’t for you. As a pop-history book though, I highly recommend it. For me personally, it’s really helped reinforce something I’ve been trying to convince myself of for some time: to actually engage in my curiosity, to try and learn and widen the scope of my knowledge, rather than convince myself that it’s pointless, or I won’t have time.

So on a personal level, 10/10.

ChatGPT nailed this one on the head when I asked it to review and make it’s recommendation to me on a buy/not buy decision. I won’t copy/paste the whole response, but it can be summarised as ‘very good at explaining the why, decent beginners output, but for the more experienced lifters it contains information you can find elsewhere.’

That last point I think is the key problem for fitness books everywhere. They seem to either pedal a ‘novel’ approach with limited research, or jazz up the existing information in their own style, obscuring the science stuff with buzzwords and phrases. Plus in 2025, it’s so, so easy to find all the information you need for free online, especially in the age of AI when you can just ask ChatGPT to assess your diet and exercise routine, or recommend a whole new thing for you.

With that being said, why would you then spend money on a book for info you can gain for free?

One reason would be the author, which in this case is science based weightlifter and YouTuber Jeff Nippard. He’s one of the few fitness YouTubers I follow and enjoy; his explanations go into just enough detail to explain the concept without getting too bogged down in the jargon. Plus he has a way of suggesting tweaks to exercises that just work, like switching your dumbbell curls to incline curls or even better, preacher curls, to maximise effectiveness.

Another would be how the information is presented, which is what became the killer aspect for me. As fitness books go, The Muscle Ladder hits the perfect balance of detail and readability. The title of the book is the one and only buzzword for the book; a series of steps towards a leaner, bigger, better physique that, like a ladder, relies on the rungs before your current step being set up just right (alongside the two rails). It also cites its sources, which alone takes up 30 pages of the ebook.

All of that adds up to a book that’s probably helped the way I think about fitness more than any doctor, blog, youtuber, or scheme before hand. In particular, it goes into great detail how to structure a routine: exercises to pick per muscle group, worked sets needed per muscle per week across the various difficulty levels, effective rep ranges and rest periods, the lot.

The main detractor against it is its price. The hardcover RRP is £56.99, although it’s often on offer. That’s a pretty hefty price, and if I had pain that, I might have been a bit more critical. Happily, the ebook was a tenner, and I feel like I’ve more than got my money’s worth.

Like How To Take Smart Notes, its true worth is going to be measured down the line, after I’ve had time to implement its recommendations. It doesn’t provide a nutrition plan but does give recommendations for working out your calorie and macro requirements. It also comes with a range of exercise plans and routines for different abilities or goals, although I’ll be going with my own to test out the rest of the theory.

For now though, I’d give the ebook a solid 8 out of 10, would recommend to anyone looking to take their fitness seriously. The last 2 points will come if I actually get results through it…

Initially after finishing this one, I was expecting to be pretty harsh.

Reading the middle third and parts of the last one was an absolute slog. I had to check where I was multiple times to make sure I wasn’t re-reading passages over and over, such was the repetitive feel of it. Constant iterations of the idea that the slip box was more than the sum of its parts, that using it was more akin to a conversation between participants than searching an encyclopaedia. Analogy after analogy of repeating the same idea, slightly differently. At one point I nearly gave up.

But then I reviewed my notes and highlights, started following the ideas a little, and began to think differently.

How To Take Smart Notes feels less like an instruction manual and more like a manifesto; a Why To rather than of a How To. It introduces you to the concept of Zettelkasten (literally “note-box” in German), which the book calls a slip box, the note-taking and personal knowledge management system used by Niklas Luhmann, a hugely influential and prolific sociologist who used it to publish 50 books and over 600 articles. What its real and oft-repeated message is, however, is to treat everything as though writing is the end goal.

The art of Zettelkasten is based around its simplicity: take fleeting (temporary) notes throughout your day, collect them in an inbox (either real or digital), then review regularly. Translate the notes that are relevant to your interests into permanent notes for your slip box, reviewing your slip box for connections to existing notes or ideas. If there are connections, you’d place your note directly behind the note it connects to and include a link on each note. Else, put the note at the back of the slip box. Similarly, when reading texts and articles, take notes as you go for a separate bibliography, and translate takeaway notes into the slip box.

The idea here is to remove responsibility for this from your brain and into a trusted system. It’s far from a unique idea; Tiago Forte has his own version in Building a Second Brain, and the book itself makes multiple references to David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. But the other aim is to do as Luhmann did - build a system of connected notes, regularly engage them with new ideas, new connections, and new questions to be answered off the back of them, and build a critical mass of notes with a view to ultimately write your own text off the back of them, fully sourced and detailed in your slip box and bibliography.

It’s at this point you might ask yourself why would this be relevant to you, especially if you’re not in the academic writing world. The author answers this in the later chapters by pointing out the headfake - it’s not a requirement to use it to become a published academic or novelist, but when writing and taking notes with the aim of creating a written work in mind, you naturally build a working network of ideas and thoughts, carefully crafted and challenged over time, developing a much more effective method of thinking and learning than, as they write, ‘hammering facts into the brain as if they were carvings on an ancient stone tablet’.

It’s perhaps fitting then that I got more out of reading my highlights and notes on the text than I did through my initial read through. Zettelkasten wasn’t a new idea to me going into it, and I think there are perhaps better resources for the method than this book (the introduction at zettelkasten.de, for example). Luhmann’s actual linking method of using numbers and letter to identifies chains and branches isn’t really explored until the appendix, for example, a choice I assume is related to their approach of trying to keep the method as system agnostic as possible. They make no recommendation or preference for whether you use pen and paper, or digital tools; letter and numbers, or markdown hyperlinks. Their goal is simply to get you taking smart notes and to give you the tools and ideas to help your own thoughts and ideas grow.

It’s definitely not a book for everyone, maybe not even everyone deeply interested in PKM. Even for a relatively short book, it wasn’t quick to get through, or consistently enjoyable. Yet I’ve gotten a lot from it, including inspiration for my own way forward, and it’s a book I’ll likely revisit in later months or years to refresh my mind and top up my notes on it. Maybe the rating will change with revisits, but for now?

6/10

So I usually have between one and three books on the go at one time, depending on my emotional and mental bandwidth, and the time of year.

Mostly I can juggle a fiction and non-fiction book either digitally or paper, reading the fiction during the day and the non-fiction in the evening. But over the past few months I’ve been able to start enjoying audiobooks again. I struggle with them over the darker months; SAD really hits my concentration during the day, ruling out listening at work, and with the darker evenings I need my concentration to be on my surroundings when walking the dog, and not whatever story I’m listening too.

At the minute, I’ve got three on the go right now:

1. What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama
2. How To Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
3. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Da Vinci has been a bear on my list for about eight years. I got it after listening to the Steve Jobs biography by the same author, thinking I could get on a biography kick, which turned out to be a lie. It didn’t help that it was another 17 hour read after listening to the 25 hour Jobs biography, nor the fact that while Da Vinci is an interesting topic, Jobs is both more recent and more scandalous.

Yet there it sat in my Audible library, taunting me, goading me.

I’d finally got back into audiobooks while walking the dog this Summer, mostly Warhammer 40k novels, Ciaphas Cain in particular, but thought it might be worth giving another go. I’m a few hours in so far, and it’s okay but I’m hitting a familiar road block of wanting to take notes but being stuck at the pace I’m given. I’ve started using the built-in clips function; we’ll see how that goes.

How To Take Smart Notes has been on my radar for a while now. I’m about 40% through it already on my Kindle, and it’s a real ebb-and-flow kind of book; easy to get through in parts, and then it seems I’m reading pages upon pages of the same point for 20 minutes. Zettelkasten is a system I’ve been interested in for a while, but always struggle to implement, although I’m getting the impression that’s more because of a distinct lack of filter between me and my zettel, and less to do with the system.

What you are looking for is in the library though is probably the one I’m enjoying the most. This one’s from my wife’s Did Not Finish pile; an adventurous one for her, as she’s much more into Kate Morton and books that go back and forth in a time line. It’s definitely not her style of writing; very manner of fact and almost plain, as opposed to descriptive and compelling dialogue.

To me though, it’s a book you don’t have to think about at all while reading. There’s next to no mental load, no call for you to really stretch your imagination. It’s a collection of short stories around the same theme - person is unhappy with an aspect in their life, they go to a community library, and the Librarian recommends a bunch of books including something that’s totally left field but also unlocks their answer for them. It’s sweet, it’s simple, and it’s uplifting. Perfect after a long day, or in today’s case, when I’m full of a summer cold.

If I had to put money on it, I’d say I’d finish Smart Notes and Library this month pretty comfortably, and maybe get Da Vinci done just in time for my next credit to turn up. Then I’m turning right back to 40k. I’ve forgotten how much my brain needs sci-fi, and it feels like it could use a reward.

‘A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone, if it’s to keep its edge. That is why I read so much.’ - George R R Martin, Game of Thrones

Reading is one of the earliest hobbies I can remember. Our local library had a mobile van that would park at our local park every Thursday, and I would get through whatever I could.

I started with the usual kid’s books, following on to my early forays into comic books - Tintin, and Asterix and Obelix. At some point, the nice lady behind the desk suggested to my mum that I might want to give this new book series a go that had been getting quite popular, which is how I started reading Harry Potter.

I was hooked. Reading became a salvation, even back then when the most I had to worry about was school. Goosebumps, Animorphs, Darren Shan, wider and wider my net grew. It took a few years, though, before I found something else that captured my mind quite as much as Potter. That was at a random books fair at school when I was about 13 or 14, where I found The Fifth Elephant by Sir Terry Pratchett, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

Nowadays, my tastes range from sci-fi to romance, hard non-fiction to high fantasy. My bookshelf hosts everything from Bill Bryson, Oliver Burkeman, Tolkien, and Stephen King, to John Green (both fiction and non-fiction), and Graham Norton. There’s also One Hundred Years of Solitude, but that has a rare spot on my Did Not Finish list.

But as my days grew harder and longer, it became far quicker to get sucked into Reddit than it did actual books or even blogs. Where once I was able to devour Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in three days after its release, now I’m lucky to manage 20 pages an hour, and even then that’s assuming I can read for an hour without interruption from work, sleep, or Priorities.

The way out? Read wider, read better, and sharpen that mind. Replace that instinct to fire up social media and pick up a book, find a new and engaging blog, read an essay in the Atlantic. Actually stretch my mind rather than let it rot. Go back to that salvation, and sharpen my sword.