Florian florian

I'm some months late to the hype around this book, but who cares. Many thoughts that resonated with me. Some ideas on what to implement in my personal relationship with technology. Also want to read "Deep work" as soon as possible.

Not a "one story in one book" kind of book. Rather, the chronological collection of various versions of the tale of Beren and Lúthien (first published in the Silmarillion, I think). Some chapters are prose, some in form of poems.

Brief versions: The mortal man Beren and the immortal elf-maid Lúthien cannot "just be together" (because her father does not approve) so they go on a quest to collect a Silmaril, the most precious gem in existence which just so happens to be in the possession of Morgoth, the most evil creature in existence. Drama ensues.

There are some parts which are dry. Christopher Tolkien goes into detail on the single fragments that he pieced together from his father's unpublished material, which is interesting in a way, but also sometimes it's not.

But then there are parts where I myself was surprised at how captivating a poem spanning 20+ pages can be. The tale itself is beautiful and dragged me into the realm of middle-earth again.

Impulse purchase when in Prague, the place of the assassination. Bought it despite its unfriendly cover (Nazi guy raising his right arm in the air...) and its old publish date (1989!). I'm really glad I did buy it, though.

The writing is far from being as shallow as the dramatic cover suggests. In fact, Callum MacDonald was a British professor of history who has sadly died from cancer in the 90s. While being well researched and reflective on many actors during the war, his writing is so clear and concise that it was hard to put this book down.

A large part of the book is dedicated to telling the story of the fate of Czechoslovakia, a country which enjoyed a brief time of independence before basically being handed over to Nazi Germany in 1938 after France and England co-signed the Munich agreement. The Czech president Beneš went into exile in London, where he tried to support the Czech underground while lobbying with the Allies for more support of the Czech cause. Eventually, he was involved in sending "Operation Anthropoid" to Prague. Their mission: Kill Reinhard Heydrich, the "butcher of Prague" and highest ranking nazi who has ever been assassinated during WWII.

We also learn about the background of Heydrich, his early and quickly progressing career and his eventual posting to Prague.

The actual story of the assassination is told just as interestingly as the rest. If you are interested in that part of the story alone, go and watch "Anthropoid", a recent Hollywood movie which depicts the dramatic events very well, I think.

Overall, one of my better impulse purchases.

The story of three women throughout the 1930s and later. One is American, one Polish and one German. Mostly based on actual characters, this books is another good read of the tragedies of WW2, in this cased based around the women concentration camp of Ravensbrück.

I've learned a lot, because I wasn't aware of the Ravensbrück camp before and the unique stories that took place there.

I only subtract one star because the motivation of the German doctor during WW2 wasn't told as convincingly as the other characters' motivations, in my mind. I understand this is the most challenging to get across, but it would also have been the most interesting one, I think.

How many more personal finance books will I read? I don't know. But this one, I did have to read. I am an avid fan of the budgeting software YNAB (You Need a Budget) and this book by their founder highlights the 4 principle of how he recommends you should organize your money.

1. "Give every dollar a job". Explicitly put your money in categories. Food, gadgets, travel, what have you. These categories reflect your personal values. It's not about money, really. It's about what's important to you, now and for the future.
2. "Embrace your true expenses". Larger, less frequent expenses like yearly insurance fees are often overlooked. Make them part of your "jobs" from rule no 1 so that no expense will ever surprise you. Instead, slowly save up to when that bill hits.
3. "Roll with the punches". A good budget is designed to be changed, not to force you into a fixed set of rules. If your priorities change, be honest to yourself, and re-assign the jobs from rule no 1.
4. "Age your money". When you're living paycheck to paycheck, money leaves your account soon after having arrived. This is a stress factor and not sustainable. Aim to extend that "age" of your money, at least for 30 days, preferably longer.

I liked the content and also the tone of the book. Jesse is a friendly and humorous advisor, but also a good storyteller who shares the experience of managing a household with 6 kids and his family's approach to having healthy finances.

Personally, I have been working with the YNAB software for a year and they do have a lot of educational content online, so actually I didn't learn a lot that was new. Still, having everything told in this format felt nice and worth my time.

Unclear to me still: How exactly would one implement this budgeting principle without YNAB or similar software? At the very least, probably you'd have an elaborate spreadsheet. I don't know.

Good book as a general overview of how to sort out your finances, no matter if you just want to be prepared for retirement in your 60s, or move up that date of not-having-to-work to some time earlier than that.

Basically, JL Collins just says:

1. Spend less than you earn. Invest the rest. Ideally, you save and invest 50% or more of your income.
2. Simply pour your savings in the cheapest and broadest stock market product there is. In the US, it's Vanguard's Total stock market index.

Things that were not "perfect":

• Very US-centric. A handful of chapters do not apply to people outside of the US, because he talks about tax-efficient retirement plans which we do not have in Germany.
• Most reported yields used numbers that were taken from the optimistic end of the range of historic market returns. I wonder why. This strategy does not require any magic sauce to make the maths work. 5-8% of stock market returns are perfectly fine if you have your savings rate and spending habits in check.

Why I think this was great:

• Target audience was JL Collins' daughter who does not care for finances. His language was clear, to the point and had a friendly tone.
• A significant part of the book was supposed to teach you to "not panic". Stocks are risky only in the sense that they are volatile. Understand that crashes are part of the deal, and just invest calmly.
• One chapter talked about the "safe widthdrawel rate": You can withdraw 4% per year from a stock portfolio and can (pretty much) live on it forever. I only knew this blog-compressed version of the rule, when in reality the original study goes in depth a lot more. The book even sported 4 full pages of numerical calculations. Loved it! And it helped my understanding of how this works.

If you don't want to read the book, you can find a lot of overlap in his free blog series: https://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/ -- OR, for an overview, simply watch this talk that he gave when invited to speak at Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T71ibcZAX3I

The deeply reflective thought process of a young neurosurgeon who is faced with his own diagnosis of terminal lung cancer when his life was supposed to be just taking off.

This book really touched my. I could only read it in segments, to have some of the chapters sink in and also let my emotions come and go.

The writing itself was simply beautiful. Serious and thought-provoking, yet life-affirming and also happy in places where death usually overshadows everything else. Probably one out of every three paragraphs could simply be printed, framed and read over and over again.

Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die -- but I'd known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell.

If I am being totally honest with myself, I think I have mostly avoided really thinking about death up to this point in my life. Maybe this book has not changed that completely, but it has definitely shone a light on a topic I have conveniently glanced over most of the time.

A book that, put simply, describes in many ways how randomness plays a large role in the world around us, even though it might often look like skill (no, it was luck) or determination (no, it was luck) or causality (no, randomness).

Pro:

It made me think about concepts that sounded trivial at first, but when connected to something I know, I had some revelations.

Taleb connects a lot of different disciplines (philosophy, mathematics, economics and, I guess, some more).

In many places, I really like his writing and way of expressing things.

Con:

This was written as a stream of thoughts (Taleb views himself as an essayist). What might be meant to appear deep and clever was just lacking structure and clarity in places.

I am sometimes bugged by the extreme examples he chooses, where a trader loses everything not only because randomness hits, but because in their private life they have also invested everything in high-risk products. Reality is more nuanced than that, but I guess it's enough to make his point.

Often 'his point' simply appears to be to rant about all traders (except himself) or all holders of an MBA (except for himself) or all people who have succeeded by chance (except, maybe, for himself?). Taleb tries really hard to sound like someone you wouldn't want to be around for too long. Not sure if that's actually true, or just a character he plays.

To finish positively, however, I like many of his conclusions. We might not be able to control and even understand randomness around us, but we are able to control our attitude, and just make the best out of every situation.

I have been following the FIRE movement online for a while now. FIRE stands for "Financial Independence; Retire Early" and is the concept of spending less than you earn, putting the difference in simple investment products until you reach a point in life where your expenses are completely covered by the income from your investments. As a rule of thumb, this amount is about 25 times the total number of your annual expenses. When you reach this point is a simple calculation based only on your savings rate: How many percent of your income are you able to stash away instead of spending. So if you save 16%, you can retire in 34 years. At a savings rate of 58%, the time shrinks to only 11 years.

Based on these concepts, the author and his girlfriend take us on their 1-year journey from learning about FIRE to completely changing their lifestyle. They reference many of the central figures in this movement, be it by personal conversation or a link to their blog or podcast.

I found this book very captivating. Most of the central concepts were not new to me, but following someone on their actual path felt very authentic.

I have learned even more that FIRE can take many forms. Yes, you can be frugal as hell and only eat rice and noodles, but there are a lot of alternative and effective ways of decreasing expenses. The central idea is often summed up as 'optimising for happiness' with the optimisation considering of short- and long-term effects. Overall, it also means a more sustainable and environment-friendly way of consuming resources.

Also, the term 'retirement' is clearly not meant in the traditional way of simply not working. Instead, it means the general independence of a paycheque-based employment, offering freedom to work on passion projects without financial worries, traveling or in general just doing what makes you happy.

Now, will I go FIRE? I don't know. Some of the steps, I am actually already doing 'right', but I am not on a full-steam path in any means. Most of the concepts are not binary though, and do not only have positive effects in the distant future. Instead, getting rid of debt and other liabilities in your life will lead to an immediate increase in personal independence and freedom.

The pure fact that working till you are in your 60s is not a given is deeply fascinating, I think.

The book is a prelude to a documentary that's coming out this year -- which I can't wait to watch.

An old couple leads a kind of miserable life and starts on a journey to find their long-lost son. It's England, a few hundred years back, and it's a kind of fantasy-ish version of England.

Well, what can I say. This was an odd read. I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

The writing was calm and slow, yet somehow with a depressing undertone. The dialogs sometimes intrigued me, sometimes annoyed me - there was a lot of back and forth. I did not understand all of the characters' development and changes.

The book left me with more questions than answers, yet somehow it felt I read something of value (sips at teacup). It made me think about peace and war, in personal manners and on the large scale. Are some things in life only good because conflicts have been forgotten or ignored? Should they be left forgotten? And more generally: Does this draw a parallel to our world? I don't know.

Spent a few weeks listening to the audio book. In one way to prepare for the upcoming season of the TV show, in the second way to finally continue with the original work. I had read book 1 and 4, but somehow left some gaps in between.

So, this was really good! Great characters, amazing dialog, well-crafted universe. Learned some new details here and there; the true and tragic story of Ser Jorah Mormont's lost love, just to name one.

Good to see that after years I can still get more and more invested in the story. To be honest though, I will probably never be able to remember the Targaryen family tree. Well, maybe after the next book.

Verdict: 37 hours well spent.

A very good book about sleep. I have learned some shocking facts (basically, not getting enough sleeps makes you stupid, sick and die earlier) and some encouraging facts. I am always a person seeking the short-term motivation in things, so I am taking from this book that I want to take better care of my sleep -- not for some vague advantage in the distant future, but for the fact that I am more physically fit and mentally capable when I've had enough sleep. I now know about REM vs NREM sleep, a huge amount of studies that Walker has cited and some practical tips on how to improve sleeping habits. Good night.

(Read as part of our company's book club.)

For months I have wanted to read this book and in January I finally got around to it. Hans Rosling and his co-authors present an intriguing guideline to form a fact-based worldview. In their book, they educate about the actual state the world is in -- and it's dramatically better than what most people think. In addition, they teach about the instincts we use to wrongly think about the world.

In a world where news, social media, others around us (myself included) talk about anecdotal evidence most of the time rather than always knowing the actual proportions of current problems, this book is an amazing guideline. It might become my new go-to reference that I think I will re-read every once in a while. I can whole heartedly recommend this book to everyone.

I do have one nit-pick, though: At one point, they report the fact that tigers, giant pandas and black rhinos are now not more endangered than they were in the 1990s. While this is an encouraging anecdote, here they make the same mistake they want to teach the reader not to make. Why pick 3 examples from the whole data, while the overall state of wild life seems to be getting worse and worse? According to a WWF report, for a lot of species, the populations have drastically decreased in the last 40 years. Maybe the book has already taught me how to questions these factoids before judging the whole, but they could have also picked a more representative data set, I think.

Nonetheless, wow, what a great view of the world. Realistic, yet optimistic (he calls himself a "possibilist", I like that).

Having seen some of Hans Rosling's talks online years ago, then learning about his death after that, and now seeing this book as a summary of his life's work really moved me. I think this is a must read.

Another one by Jonathan Safran Foer -- who writes in such a unique way, it is both a pleasure to read, but sometimes also challenging to stay fully engaged.

We follow two narrators, the young Ukrainian Alex, and our hero, the fictional (?) Jonathan Safran Foer himself, on a journey through Ukraine's countryside, trying to track down pieces from the past, from the 1940s, when terrible things happened here. Both their families somehow survived the war, and their paths seem very much entangled. The story is told by telling multiple stories at ones. From the early jewish Shtetl in the 18th century, over multiple generations of ancestors with their loves, affairs and other secrets.

The writing seems to follow a branched network of thoughts, a depth-first search through a mind map gathered over generations. Sometimes, it was hard to follow for me, but then we backtracked to a level where I could fully enjoy the story again.

Overall, I think this is another great book of his. Personally though, I would place it 3rd, after "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and "Eating Animals".

What and odd and eerie story. Reminded me of Lovecraft in so many ways. As a typical (?) reader, I would have loved to learn about what's actually going on, but I think these kind of stories exist for the implicit rather than the explicit.