Batched Book Reviews #17
He Who Fights with Monsters 10, Dark Arts and a Daiquiri, Surrounded by Idiots, What the Buddha Taught, Nonviolent Communication, The Secrets of Closing the Sale, Fooled by Randomness
Published in
3 min readDec 17, 2023
Non-fiction:
- The Secrets of Closing the Sale (3+/4) — Sales are everywhere, let’s learn how salespeople think. But this book won’t teach you the art of selling or “closing the sale”. I would say it’s rather bad if treated as a manual. But it’s a great resource to learn the mindset, some of the rules, and general attitude. Even if you’re not interested in improving your sales skills, there is an additional benefit: you can build resistance through increasing awareness of when you are sold to. Sidenote: audio is utter crap, kind of by design — I think it’s composed of historical recordings and it’s not possible to make it better and keep that form.
- Fooled by Randomness (3+/4) — Help in building intuition around randomness. While it was interesting and fun to read, I have a feeling that all Taleb’s books are about the same. And among 3 or 4 I have read, I like Antifragile the most. Nevertheless, even if you’re already familiar with his other books, reading another one can help strengthen your understanding and intuition about unpredictable events. Each book offers a slightly different perspective on the matter.
- What the Buddha Taught (4-/4) — A very succinct summary of Buddha’s teaching. I’m in no position to verify the correctness and objectivity of the content, but I liked the form a lot. It’s exactly the book I was looking for — explains the philosophy, contains no preaching, is concise, packed with information, and the author doesn’t demonstrate any feeling of superiority. If anything is missing, it’s a bit of context on how Buddhism is practiced today.
- Nonviolent Communication (4/4) — How to be a kinder human and communicate better. The author looks at communication through the lens of feelings and emotions and shares a few tactics on how to do it better. E.g. avoid judgments, comparisons, demands, or refusals of responsibility. I’m not convinced about the scientific strength of this book, but it doesn’t change much. It landed on my reread list, it’s one of those books that needs to be read a few times. Luckily, it’s pretty short.
- Surrounded by Idiots (4-/4) — How our behaviors differ and what to do with it. The author explains a model dividing behaviors into four groups: dominant (red), inspiring (yellow), supportive (green), and cautious (blue) — DISC. While the model is rather simplistic and I didn’t feel a strong scientific grounding, it still seems quite accurate. It’s a great tool to improve empathy and understanding of other people and get rid of the “surrounded by idiots” feeling. I found at least one red, one blue, and a few yellows around me! Another one that landed on my re-read list.
Fiction:
- He Who Fights with Monsters 10 (4-/4) — Continuation of one of my favorite LitRPG series. It continues in the spirit of recent volumes: good humor, a lot of “psychotherapy” and internal struggles, a bit of action, and very few “game” mechanics.
- Dark Arts and a Daiquiri (2+/4) — Naive and simple but not terrible. While the first part of the series (3-/4, BBR#9) had a decent amount of world-building, this has exactly none. I still have the third one in my library, so I will give the series a final chance, but it will be the last one.
Stats:
- Books read this year: ~146 (+7)
- Books on the shelf: 23 (-4)
- Books on the wishlist: 179 (+6)
