- Making Money Talk: How to Mediate Insured Claims and Other Monetary Disputes by Anderson J. Little. Basically a mediator’s playbook, so helpful in that regard. I hadn’t realized that giving opinions was so controversial in mediator world; I ask for opinions all the time. Little’s responses to mediation cliches were especially helpful, and the bid sheets in the appendix were interesting.
- The Plant-Based Athlete: A Game-Changing Approach to Peak Performance by Matt Frazier and Robert Cheek. The nutrition advice, recipes, and meal plans in here are good. The constant affirmations and success stories are a bit much, but I understand why books in this genre need to proselytize and those portions were clearly not aimed at me.
- Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century by Mitchell Kowalski. Fluff. There are definitely a few good ideas scattered throughout this book, but they are swamped by lots of wildly impractical ones. No useful advice about implementation, and the presentation is cloying at best.
- What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula. Decent introduction, a little dry. As a beginner I’ve found other writers to be livelier and more helpful.
- Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach. I know that this book is highly regarded but . . . I just couldn’t do it and had to quit less than halfway through. Tara Brach’s guided meditations are still the best I’ve ever heard.
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Just amazing. This book is so good–and so out there–that I’m literally afraid to say anything about it for fear of spoiling it. Loved it.
- Selected Poems by e. e. cummings edited by Richard Kennedy. I love these poems. This book arranges much of Cummings’s best work thematically and introduces each section with a short essay from Kennedy. Fun fact: George Lucas once tried to make a movie out of anyone lived in a pretty how town. So the prequel trilogy was really just his second-biggest affront to my childhood.
- Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter by John McWhorter. I read lots of books about words. They all try to be funny. This is the smartest and funniest book about words that I can remember reading. I will never look at Folger’s the same way again.
- The Complete Musashi: The Book of Five Rings and Other Works by Miyamoto Musashi. This is a book on sword fighting by Japan’s greatest swordsman. It’s strangely familiar and utterly alien at the same time: Familiar, because this is at heart an elite athlete talking about competition, and that’s exactly what it reads like–you can imagine some of this advice coming from Kobe Bryant or Phil Jackson. And alien, because Musashi was a guy who killed folks with a sword (okay, two swords), so much of this book necessarily reflects the brutality of samurai culture 500 years ago.
- The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I appreciate that this is a very imaginative book by someone who knows and loves science. I love that it’s set in China and gives a frank look at the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. But I think I liked the ideas better than the execution and may just read summaries of the next two books in the series . . .
