10 Rules for Resilience, Law School for Everyone, Oh, Great! I Was Reincarnated as a Farmer, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, The Left Hand of Darkness

Voytek Pituła

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VP of Books

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3 min read

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Sep 17, 2023

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Non-fiction:

• 10 Rules for Resilience (3+/4) — How to incorporate endurance sports into family life. Joe explains how to avoid teaching kids learned helplessness, how to stop avoiding discomfort and risk, and how to train patience and delaying gratification. He also explains why all of these are important for children and their parents. A very good book, especially for those with tendencies to overparenting.
• Law School for Everyone (4-/4) — I never thought the law could be so interesting. This is not a short book (25 hours of content), but I finished it in just a few days, putting aside all the other books on my shelf, including some really good fiction. On the surface, it explains the basics of the US judiciary system in a very approachable way. This is valuable on its own, but it’s also just the beginning. It gives a glimpse into how this system is architected — how multiple parties are set up at odds with each other to control and oppose so that neither takes control of the system: defense vs. prosecution (adversarial model of justice), state governments vs. federal government, governments vs. judges, governments vs. constitution, present judges vs. historical ones, and so on. It’s also a great source of various considerations about morality — to ask yourself what is the just and right thing to do. And if that is not enough, then you also get practical benefits like a better understanding of law-based TV series or learning phrases like “offensive non-mutual issue preclusion” that you can throw into the conversation and sound smart. One of the best books I have read this year.

Fiction:

• Oh, Great! I Was Reincarnated as a Farmer (3/4) — I expected another hope punk LitRPG and got nothing such. Yes, the main character is a farmer in a LitRPG setting, but he hates farming and will do anything to avoid it. However, the system won’t let him. It’s a well-written and entertaining book, and its twist is that the main character tries to avoid farming as much as he can and instead exploits and bypasses the world’s rules.
• The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (3/4) — Good continuation of a great series. Dungeon Crawler Carl is one of my favorite series and it remains superb entertainment. It’s as full as ever (or even fuller?) of teenage humor that is the hallmark of the series. But I realized something else: it has something that most LitRPG lacks — a plot. There is intrigue and a higher goal, and I’m genuinely curious about how this story is going to end.
• The Left Hand of Darkness (3/4) — Great book that I didn’t like. It was refreshing to read some “intellectual fiction” again, but I was once more convinced that I don’t enjoy this particular style of writing. It gave me the feeling of a fairy tale or fable, similar to other fiction from the previous millennium, such as Elric of Melniboné, Thomas Covenant, or The Book of the New Sun… It resembles a painting — beautiful and thought-inspiring, but lacking in depth and details. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. Quite the opposite, it’s good enough to make me want to read more of the same. However, I will still not like it.

Stats:

• Books read this year: ~113(+5)
• Books on the shelf: 15 (-1)
• Books on the wishlist: 180 (+4)