Batched Book Reviews #14

Immune, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Empowered, The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound, Ritualist, Regicide, Raze, The Last Graduate

Published in

VP of Books

3 min readOct 24, 2023

Immune (4-/4) — The most picturesque popular science book I have read. Warriors attacking with their intestines, school that you either finish or they make you commit a suicide, hot dogs floating through your body. Those are all scenes describing your immune system. Great book to appreciate how complex are the mechanics that protect us every second of every minute and what is happening when we get sick.
Leadership Strategy and Tactics (3+/4) — Ground-level continuation of Extreme Ownership. You can see that the author went a long way. While the content continues in the same mindset, it’s much more thought-out, practical, and nuanced. It focuses on pretty standard leadership advices: the importance of the team, humility, lack of ego, and ownership, but delivers real practical hints in a good form. Saved for re-read, it’s one of those books that might be worth re-reading every 1–2 years as a form of hygiene.
Empowered (3+/4) — How to build a (good) product organisation. The book is clearly targeted at managers of product managers: directors, VPs, or CPOs. And for those, it seems a great resource. How about people in other roles? It’s still great and its value is in building intuition on how a good product organisation might look like, how to help build it, and when to guide fellow PMs. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on the product you might be building. Very good, but not mandatory, continuation to Inspired.

The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound (3-/4) — Good progression and writing, not much more. Pretty standard world setup, not much of a story, completely no personality in the main character. But the writing, progression, and some details of world-building were really good, and overall it was engaging and entertaining. Very similar to Primal Hunter, but more generic.
Ritualist, Regicide, Raze (3/4) — Another average LitRPG but with potential. A quite novel class, a plot in the background, an AI with personality — all of that makes it worth the time and puts it a bit above the rest of the genre. To be honest, these days I don’t hope for much more. I didn’t think “an actual game” background (and not another “earth integrated into the system”) would be interesting, but it is. I will probably be going for the rest of the series soon.
The Last Graduate (3/4) — Second part of great world-building. I’m using the term quite widely here as the book excels in describing the surroundings of the heroes, as well as extending to the politics and mechanics of the world at large. Also, there is plenty of personality in the main character. A very solid piece of fantasy with a strong “everything wants to kill you” vibe.