Reviews and Comments

It's hard to review this book without addressing the core impediment to my enjoyment: the author is defined by being annoyed and being annoying, one of those who really owns it, it's their whole personality portrayal in this book. Constantly disgusted, hateful of almost everything and everyone to some degree, it's no wonder that the core message of the book is that being married is 50% curse, 50% blessing - not only that, but that's how it's supposed to be. Maybe it's a burden of being a hetero cis woman, which I'll never truly experience, and the almost inevitable woes of marrying a regular dude. Maybe it's a Gen X thing, still not able to shake off the chains of old. Maybe it's an American thing, lots of its culture feel alien to me.

It took the author more than a decade of marriage to grow some maturity and empathy, barely enough to stop seeing their partner as a nuisance, and the book tries to end on a positive tone. And still, in my view it fails to do so when the author even then circles back to this idea that it's just how it is: a mix of paradise and hell for decades before such enlightenment is possible. I congratulate the couple for plowing through the chaos and turbulence, but for the sake of humankind I hope the author is wrong when they say that this is the prevalent and expected experience of marriage - that is just too bleak, no dose of sarcasm and snarky humor should be enough to pose this cynical and dated view of human relationships as a "hard truth". This is bitterness well dressed with wit, some do enjoy this sort of thing.

I give the book some extra stars for being well written and captivatingly sincere enough to keep me with it until the end. What gives me hope is that the toxicity was exaggerated for the sake of entertainment. I think a lot of people are going to resonate with a lot of the book, because the author collects a catalogue of character faults - anyone will definitely find theirs represented in here and possibly relate.

Like any 21st century pop science author, the premise of a long book about sleep couldn't be a down-to-earth argument of marginal health improvements. Instead, it doubles down multiple times on how this has to be, "undeniably", the most important yet neglected health knowledge ever - a common recipe for best sellers, promising immense rewards for memorizing a few key concepts.

Stripped down of the obvious marketing strategy, the over-the-top framing and all the speculative fluff mixed in with the actual research data, the book does a good work on hammering the need of caring for our sleep. And like any book of its kind, in the end the advice is as predictable and close to common knowledge as one would guess:

1) Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day; 2) Exercise at least 30 minutes, not too close to bed time; 3) Avoid caffeine and nicotine after noon; 4) Avoid alcohol before going to bed; 5) Avoid large portions before going to bed; 6) Avoid medicines that delay or disrupt sleep; 7) Don't take naps after 3PM; 8) Relax before bed; 9) Hot bath/shower before bed; 10) Dark & cool bedroom, no screen devices; 11) Get morning sunlight every day; 12) Don't lie in bed awake;

Most annoying of all, no concrete answers on "why we sleep". Walker presents some speculative argumentation regarding what fits an evolutionary and utilitarian viewpoint, but very little evidence is available anyway and, most worryingly, zero counter-evidence or opposing research viewpoints are discussed. In the end, the answer currently available is as obvious as the 12 advices above: because it's good for us.

Probably not the book for me because I was already in agreement with pretty much the whole thesis, so revisiting arguments and anecdotes on "How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited" wasn't super engaging or entertaining. The book contains a lot more testimonials and personal accounts than I expected, which might make sense for a target audience but it's not my jam. For someone not so into history, sociology, anthropology etc this might be a heavy read, it really goes from ground up on many intersectional topics.

I think this book is a great introduction to the issue and I recommend a read to help recent startup/corporate survivors to process their grief. I did find the ending a bit watery; the author had hundreds of pages to deconstruct the employee identity but gave themselves a few paragraphs to try to end on a positive note. Not very successful to my eyes, and I think it would have been best to not try. Embrace the depressive nature of being exploited by unfettered capitalism, no sugarcoating.

Every time I re-read this book a new golden nugget appears, which is incredible considering how succinct the fable is. This time I found specially amusing the cat's engagement on the re-education committee and found myself laughing at the clever writing multiple times, like remembering old morbid humour jokes that still warrant a nose exhale.

Orwell's goal of putting to pen in simple terms a trajectory from democracy to authoritarianism through revolution is achieved with flying colours, but it is also quite tragically amusing how his work is mostly interpreted nowadays as a critique of anything anti-capitalist as a whole - despite Orwell himself being a democratic socialist. Given how far we are in the current globalized economy from the possibility of further communist revolutions and how close we became with strongmen nationalism, I'd say reading modern takes on authoritarianism like "How Democracies Die" by Ziblatt & Levitsky is more useful. Still, Animal Farm holds to its title of the most ludic take.

The blurb was very promising, some of which I was interested in - " this book shows how to enjoy the inescapable solitude that is at the heart of human life" - and a bunch of which I'm not very enthusiastic about - "spending time in remote places, appreciating and making art, practicing meditation and participating in retreats, drinking peyote and ayahuasca."

I understand that when Huxley published his accounts of psychedelics, Bachelor's generation ate that like hot cake because it was a brave new world to behold. We're just in a different zeitgeist now, and I could not be less interested in personal accounts of someone experimenting psychedelic rituals. I admire his secular buddhism, but that admiration wasn't enough to color this reading with anything of interest to me.

Another big chunk of the book is dedicated to indirectly reading Montaigne, which is not something object because I do enjoy "reading" all sorts of buddhist teachings via Batchelor's lenses, but it was not as engaging as I hoped. We know a lot more about Montaigne than we know about masters of the distant past, and the fallibility of a real person does a real number on how impactful their teaching is. I cannot reconcile with a man who alleges radical agnosticism a la Socrates and uses that as a basis to defend social norm conservatism, the cognitive dissonance is too violent. I don't know why Batchelor would include such a section in the book if not to undermine the virtues of Montaigne. Was it just the fruit of collage randomness?

I wanted to love this book but unfortunately the way I read and think is completely dissonant from it. Probably one of those books that I should not have picked up as an Audiobook, because I also did not particularly enjoy the narration style.

It's hard to put into words something so subjective, but I think I grew weary of the fairy-tale tone - which I'm sure comes naturally to the author. My skeptic and perhaps unfortunately cynic world view made it hard to go through a whole chapter without discomfort whenever the author speaks of "plants come when they're necessary" and other traditional ways of thinking about the ecosystem. I appreciate very much getting more contact with the thought process of different cultures, but I was incapable of enjoying this particular opportunity. Maybe I was just too eager to learn the science on mosses and subconsciously grew impatient any time I got anything different; I had the wrong expectations about what this read was going to be.

I'm deliberately speaking of me in this review because I don't think these are problems that lie in the book. We are simply not meant for each other, at least not as I am today. Maybe books are like mosses and this one will show up again whey it's necessary and I'm ready for it.

I picked up this book because I wanted to know "What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence". What I got was Michael Pollan's diary as he travels around meeting interesting people that have experience with or knowledge of psychedelics.

The few tidbits of science that we get are tainted by the authors lack of self control in spiralling from interesting findings into wildly imaginative speculation. Scientist finds that psychedelics interact with the default mode network; Pollan's takeaway is that so far science hasn't ruled out that consciousness could be something our bodies pick up from the universe like antennas do for radio. Scientist explains that taking measurements causes state superposition collapse in quantum mechanics; Pollan's conclusion is that perhaps consciousness is "out there" dissociated from brains.

So many words are dedicated to describing the quaint off-grid cabins, their owners using round glasses, describing their childhoods in Kentucky or wherever and what these people think of spirituality. The book could have been 1/10th as long and kept pretty much all the facts and relevant findings. Not too unlike many pop non-fiction bestsellers, but still disappointing.

The book is successfully tailored to a male audience. It invests way more than I expected in explaining why feminism is for men and why misandrist feminism isn't the only feminism that exists. It didn't bother me and I do think it helps setting up for success the most skeptic reader for the rest of the book. Bell Hooks also puts quite a limelight on female-on-male violence/neglect that arises from patriarchy, which was I also didn't expect but I've come to understand.

The later half of the book is increasingly repetitive and raises a few hypothesis that are food for thought but are really not factual (yet, maybe). Still, considering the lofty goal of disinfecting the male brain of dominance masculinity and everything else patriarchy related, I think the book is appropriately repetitive. Each iteration has a slight different seasoning to it anyway, so if the reader has the patience for it there's still value on revisiting topics from a different angle.

I do feel like I came out of this book a bit more aware of the traits of patriarchal masculinity and got some insight on why there are certain "instincts" or "reflexes" that I have to work so hard on deconstructing.