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snarktheater · 4 years ago

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Ready Player Two — Opening Cutscene & Chapter 0

Hello again.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been active on this blog since, fittingly enough, Ready Player One. I was going to do this sooner—even had an alarm set up and everything—but then, it turns out, I’m feeling so much negativity about the world in general that a book just pales in comparison.

Seriously, I had to scrap this post’s entire intro because it’s not even 2020 anymore as I write this. And you know, maybe that’s for the best. I’m not really in the mood for doom and gloom and bitching anymore. I uninstalled Twitter from my phone a while back, I’ve been doing good at my daily writing sprints, my biggest fanfic project concluded on a positive note from people I didn’t even realize had been following it for years.

So I don’t know what this is going to be like. My commentary, I mean; I’ve heard echoes of what the book is like, so I’m not expecting a surprise there.

The book opens right after the end of Ready Player One, in a “Cutscene” where Wade recounts to us what happened after he won Halliday’s contest. It also assumes you remember exactly who the main characters of the book are, which is a bold move for a sequel that came out almost a decade after the original.

Technically, I could just look up the details I’m fuzzy about. But also, I think it’s more authentic if I don’t. I trust my memory enough that if I’m wrong, it’ll be in subtle enough ways that it’ll almost be a private jokes between all of us. An “if you know, you know” sort of error system. And I don’t think there’s anything more true to the spirit of this book than that.

Shoto had flown back home to Japan to take over operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division.

So Wade starts his tenure with nepotism. Wasn’t Shoto really young? Why is he qualified to run anything?

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

You know what, I’m not touching “send the token black character back to Africa.” This isn’t my lane.

And Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother, Evelyn.

Why is she saying goodbye? Why, she’s moving to Columbus to be with Wade, of course! It’s not like there was anything else in her life. Was there? And why isn’t she referred to as Art3mis? I’m pretty sure Wade found out all of their offline names in the last book, and the inconsistency mildly bothers me.

These three sentences are back to back, by the way. Someone—I forget who—once described Ready Player One as a book that’s fun to write a wiki about, because it’s got fun concepts to summarize about until you realize that all the emotional connective tissue you need to turn a list of things into a story is missing, and that’s roughly how this first page feels.

Hell, the first line of the book is Wade telling us he remained offline for nine whole days after winning the contest, but by the end of the second paragraph we’re already to him logging back into the OASIS to "distract himself from [his and Samantha’s] reunion.

I’ll give Ernest Cline one thing: it feels like he wrote this opening nine days after the first book and did about as much maturing as a teenage boy would do between the two books.

Way more time is spent describing Wade’s OASIS rig, or the in-game planet where the climax of the last book happened, than anything else in this introduction. He is immediately greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who have been waiting over a week for him to come back in the game, because they’re all grateful that our protagonist and his friends restored their avatars after they were annihilated by the Sixers.

You’d think the adoring fans would serve some kind of purpose, or that something would happen, but no. Wade immediately goes “ew, people” and teleports away, since he essentially has ultimate powers within the game. With a caveat: the powers are actually coming from the Robes of Anorak he’s wearing, and I’m mentioning that in the hopes that it will pay off sometime in the book’s future, assuming Cline at least learned to do that. But still, let’s not skip too fast the fact that we introduced that crowd of adoring fans for no other purpose than to tell us they’re out there, because it fits right in with the last book’s attempts at saying as little as humanly possible in as many words as possible.

Anyway, Wade went back into Anorak’s study, where he arbitrarily checks out the Easter Egg he got at the end of the last book, and finds an inscription on it. I was dreading another riddle, but no, it’s just straight-up instructions to a vault in the GSS archives, so Wade logs off and goes to check it out.

Of course Halliday had put [the archives] [on the 13th floor]. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I’m equally shocked that it took two whole pages (on my ereader) to get to the first slew of references, and that one of these references is from 1999. I didn’t know we were allowed to think of anything that isn’t the 80s. Speaking of which, I’ll spare you the whole paragraph, but the book does feel the need to explain why it’s vault 42.

Inside the vault, there’s another egg containing a super-fancy and advanced OASIS headset. The egg also has a video monitor that plays a video message from James Halliday shortly before his death.

But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.

That oh-so-important message? An infodump about the headset’s working. He called it an OASIS Neural Interface, ONI for short. It basically lets you experience the OASIS through all your senses with sensory input just like the real thing, you know, that thing Wade had to get a fancy suit and massive rig to do in the first book. And yes, Wade does spend a paragraph or two comparing it to other works of science fiction. Of course he does.

More importantly, it also records all the sensory input into a separate file, which can then be replayed over to re-experience said sensations, or live someone else’s experiences. Halliday tries to frame it as a tool to generate communication and empathy, seemingly all without acknowledging the potential creepiness of that. But hey. Who knows. Maybe that’s because this is the setup stage, and it’ll pay off eventually.

I also wondered about the name Halliday had chosen for his invention. I’d seen enough anime to know that oni was also a Japanese word for a giant horned demon from the pits of hell.

Add “reducing Japan to anime” to the list of things the book has failed to improve upon. By the way, the narration insisted on spelling out ONI letter by letter earlier, so it’s weird to make that link now. It’s also just kind of inelegant to just tell us “this is the symbolism behind the name”, but that’s just the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from this book.

Anyway, the reason Halliday kept this for his successor to find is he wants Wade to test out the technology and decide if humanity is ready for it. Why Halliday thinks the most glorified pop culture trivia / video game competition qualifies you for such a decision should be a problem, but sadly, a lot of billionaires have said and done a lot of dumb and eerily similar things in the past few years since I read Ready Player One, so actually, I can’t fault the book for that one. Tragically, our fates really are in the hands of people who should rightfully be cartoon villains.

To his credit, Wade does question Halliday’s motives in keeping this under wraps at all rather than releasing it himself. So hey, maybe it really is setting something up.

Wade goes back to his office with the ONI, and we’re treated with this lovely piece of narration:

I was grateful that Samantha wasn’t there. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to talk me out of testing the ONI. Because I was worried she might try to, and if she did, she would’ve succeeded. (I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

There’s a lot to unpack about the implications this has for their relationship, but it’s way too early in the book for me to editorialize when one character hasn’t even been on the page yet. So I’ll just leave it here for the record. Hopefully you see the problem without me needing to point it out anyway. If not, feel free to hit my inbox.

So Wade, confident in the fact that Halliday would have warned him if there were any risks to using the ONI, decides to try it out. Even though he immediately follows up that statement with this:

According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

Wade. My dude. What the fuck is this simile. And why don’t you see that maybe a machine where you’re forcibly trapping yourself inside a virtual reality might be dangerous? Hell, when I said this was setting something up, I was expecting something vaguely interesting about the potential breach of privacy, or how you don’t need to literally walk in someone’s shoes to feel empathy for them, or anything substantial, but now I’m worried it’ll just end up as “man, sometimes science fiction machines will scramble your brain, isn’t that weird”?

Like, I don’t know, to me “it will put you in a coma” sounds like a good reason for Halliday not to release the ONI. Maybe we can still make it into a commentary on how corporations will sell stuff they know is directly harmful if it can make them a profit. Who knows.

The book waffles on about more risks, and the mechanics of how the ONI activates, and the warning disclaimer when it does turn on. Specifically, there’s a time limit of twelve consecutive hours, after which you’ll be automatically logged out, because yes, using the thing for too long can also cause brain damage.

Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

See, now there’s the sort of thing that could be a source for commentary, but no, instead it’s thrown in there like it’s nothing and Wade glosses over the entire warning, and instead keep wondering why Halliday didn’t just release the ONI if even the safety disclaimers were in place.

By the way: this whole system has apparently gone through several independent human trials already, so I’m finding it hard to imagine that it’s actually a secret Halliday took to the grave as Wade says. Unless he also had everyone involved in those trials killed afterwards. Or maybe they all ended up with brain damage which rendered them incapable of talking about it.

And before you think I’m being unfair and maybe we’re supposed to understand that ourselves even if the protagonist doesn’t, I’ll remind you that the book didn’t trust its reader to know what the number 42 is a reference to, or what an oni is, even though I don’t think anyone in the target audience wouldn’t know about these two things.

There’s also the fact that, since this book came out, a video game did release with a scene intentionally designed to cause seizures, and it had countless fans flocking to defend it over that fact. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not assuming this book’s stance on whether your video game console causes brain damage and possibly coma is actually a bad thing, or just an acceptable risk.

Wade certainly seems to think so, since he agrees to the terms of service.

As the timestamp faded away, it was replaced by a short message, just three words long—the last thing I would see before I left the real world and entered the virtual one. But they weren’t the three words I was used to seeing. I—like every other ONI user to come—was greeted by a new message Halliday had created, to welcome those visitors who had adopted his new technology: READY PLAYER TWO

Well now that’s just silly.

And that’s our opening cutscene. And while this post is already long enough, I feel like I have to go on to chapter 0, because it feels like barely anything has happened so far. We didn’t even introduce any new character motivation or conflict, or a mystery to set the plot into motion, unless I’m supposed to think “why didn’t Halliday release this?” counts.

So Wade is back into the OASIS, and tells us about how much more real it all feels thanks to the ONI. I especially have to question how he can smell or taste anything—both of which he tells us he can. Like, who coded that? Did Halliday implement every single smell and taste himself, without anyone noticing? I hope you don’t need me to tell you that’s not typically how features are added to a large-scale video game.

If it feels like I’m nitpicking at the logic of the book, even though I always say I’m not very interested in that and would rather talk themes, it’s because I am, because there isn’t much else to discuss so far. Wade is happy about tasting virtual fruit. That’s the scene.

He tests out if he can feel pain, but no, the ONI reduces pain (a gunshot is translated as “a hard pinch”). On one hand, good, it would be a nightmare otherwise. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s a setting for that in there, because otherwise, you just lost an entire clientele of kinksters.

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

Ah, now we have some juicy themes. Because if you think this is the inevitable final step in the evolution of video games, I invite you to look at literally any other art form, and what happened to them once hyperrealism became easy. Hint: they didn’t stop evolving, because it turns out realism isn’t the only goal one can achieve with art.

The realism discussion is not a new one in video games, mind you. In case you’re out of the loop: most of the big-budget blockbuster games (“AAA” as they’re known) are aiming for hyperrealism nowadays, and it results in development teams being forced to work in horrible conditions (known with the equally horrible euphemism of “crunch”). And, because it turns out that 1) humans working themselves to the bones isn’t healthy and 2) racing for realism with little to no vision besides it makes for poor creativity, a lot of these games come out as disappointments. Oh, there are hordes of Gamers™ who will defend them to the bitter end, but inevitably, in the months following release, the defense cools off while the criticism keeps on going, because the defense was a knee-jerk reaction born of a mix of people hyping themselves up for a game they hadn’t seen that much of yet, then attaching a part of their identity to liking that thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this throwaway line feels like it comes from someone who is so out of touch as to accidentally support a world view that has in fact resulted in the biggest part of the industry stagnating artistically while growing more toxic for the people working in it. All the while, more and more independent games come out every year, proving that that realism is nowhere near the most important thing to making a game good, and that you can achieve much better results with a small team.

What I’m trying to say is: watch Jim Sterling’s channel, they’ve been bleeding out subscribers since they came out as nonbinary and make much better commentary on this topic than I could, and play Hades.

Back to the book, which sadly hasn’t become any more interesting since I decided to go on a tangent. Wade tests the ONI functions some more, all the while musing on how he knows Samantha would disapprove but that he doesn’t care, because what loving relationship doesn’t consist of that?

Among the functions, he tries the ONI files, the aforementioned recordings of someone else’s experiences. Specifically, a woman, which Wade tells us by telling us he suddenly has breasts, I suppose because Ernest Cline saw that subreddit about men writing women and went “I want a piece of that”. Oh, and also, those sample files were recorded from real people, in the real world. And yes, this goes exactly where you think it does.

SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Look, I actually started writing a complaint about the boobs thing, and I deleted it, but now Cline is doing it on purpose. So, here goes: I saw a quote from this book on Twitter that looked like Cline attempting to make up for Wade’s casual transphobia in the first book. It wasn’t good, but it at least sounded like he was trying. So to immediately get this is…a lot? Let’s go for a lot.

I can almost excuse the use of “M” and “F”. You gotta name your files and you could excuse a non-exhaustive list. But…nonbinary? On one hand, I want to know what Cline means. On the other hand, I don’t think he can come up with an answer I’ll find satisfactory.

We are thankfully spared from finding out because Wade has just lost his virginity to Samantha a few days ago and he’s 1) not ready for this and 2) pretty sure this counts as cheating. You could make a case that this is more like porn, but I can see that this is more of a personal distinction anyway, and I can respect that one. Plus, you know. I don’t want to find out.

Wade logs off, and he can’t tell the difference between the OASIS with the ONI, and decides this will change the world. And then it’s back to the “how did he do it and keep it a secret”, even though Wade now finds out in the documentation that this had been in development for twenty-five years, basically since the OASIS launched. So it’s not really that it’s a secret, so much as there are a lot of people under very strict NDAs out there. Or, again, they’re all dead and/or otherwise incapacitated.

The ONI is the product of the Accessibility Research Lab, and Wade tells us about other stuff that the lab has produced using similar technology, mostly for medical purposes.

GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery.

Look, it’s nice that you want Halliday to be the good guy through and through, but it’s kind of hard to take any social commentary seriously when you think this is how a billionaire is made. Hell, even when he shut down the lab and fired its entire staff, he gave them a big enough severance package to set them for life. You know. Capitalism!

Hey, remember when Samantha said she was going to end world hunger if she won the contest, a thing billionaires right now could be doing, but aren’t, and she is now the co-owner of GSS? Yeah, I kind of hope the book remembers that too.

Speaking of the co-owners, the book just completely skips over the debate that our four main characters have over whether or not to release the ONI to the world. All we know is that they voted, and the vote goes in favor of releasing it. I mean, why have characters who could have opinions and feelings that could create a discussion? That might make us care about them! And who wants to care about characters in a story?

We put them on sale at the lowest possible price, to make sure as many people as possible could experience the OASIS Neural Interface for themselves.

What exactly is “the lowest possible price” here? Your company literally owns money. Like, OASIS money is real money. There is literally nothing stopping you from giving them away, especially because what you’re giving away is access to the platform you’re already running for a profit.

It’s almost like, even trying to make “good billionaires” out of its protagonists, the book can’t stop and actually make them significantly good.

Oh, I should mention. If you thought my Ready Player One review was angry at capitalism, wait until you see what the past couple years have done to me.

Anyway, once they his 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a new riddle shows up on Halliday’s website. Because yep: our plot is apparently not about the implications of releasing the ONI, or any of the potential ideological discussions associated with that, it’s another riddle. Oh boy, do I wish I’d known that.

Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

I cannot wait to have the book give me just not enough information to solve the riddle until it’s solved by the book itself. That was so much fun the other…what was it, five times? Six times? Something like that. Wade already tells us the Siren might be Kira Morrow, because her alias was named after one of the sirens of Greek myth, so I can’t wait for that plot point to stick around. It was so fun to hear all about this man pining for another man’s wife the first time!

So this is the “Shard Riddle”. People are apparently convinced it was made by Wade and his crew as a publicity stunt, but of course, they know that that isn’t the case, and they also don’t know what that riddle is supposed to lead to. So, that’s great. We have a puzzle, and we also don’t know what the stakes are. All we know is that Wade wants to solve the puzzle essentially because it’s a challenge.

We skip over a year, and Wade tells us about how IOI collapses and gets absorbed by GSS because of the ONI’s launch. Remember IOI? They were the bad guys, so I guess we have to cheer?

GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.

On one hand: good for the slave. On the other hand: not gonna cheer for a monopoly, you guys.

Another year’s skip, and now 99% of the OASIS users are using the ONI, and yes, that includes trading their experiences with one another too. And I guess we’re still hand-waving any possible problems associated with that technology, because the technology is made so that all recordings must be shared and played through the OASIS.

This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users.

How? Do you know any of the problems associated with content moderations on the current platforms? I don’t know if I want to point to Youtube’s extremely faulty algorithm, Twitter’s complete apathy towards its Nazis, or Facebook doing moderation by making underpaid staff watch all potentially problematic content, which resulted in serious psychological damage to said staff.

You can’t just say that as if it solved everything. The chapter later says this is handled by an AI called “CenSoft”, and as an AI engineer myself, let me tell you: this is not going to work. Again: Youtube is the way it is for a reason.

It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.

And again, monopolies are totally a good thing as long as it’s in the right hands!

When I’m implying that the book does not care for any of these potential problems, I mean it. These enormous ethical issues are sidestepped in cold narratin, and we just keep going on introducing new slang that I hate, but have to quote so help you keep up.

“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.

There. You have been infodumped.

In the midst of all this (still extremely dry) exposition about how this changed media, we also get this tidbit:

You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences.

Now, I was going to rant about this, but then, a page later, this happens and spares me the trouble:

I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin.

So, you are aware that addiction isn’t just possible, but extremely facilitated by this. But sure, no worries! It’s perfectly safe! Because our protagonists are good.

Also, remember how the last book ended on a weak attempt at having a moral that maybe the real world is good, actually? Yeah, Wade tells us the ONI helps poor people live enjoyable lives in the OASIS. So. Fuck that message, I guess. It only applies if you’re the literal wealthiest man on Earth.

And me? All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right? Not so much, as this account will show.

Aside from the aforementioned returning OASIS affiction, there’s the Shard riddle that Wade is now obsessed with, to the point of offering a billion-dollar reward to anyone with information about the riddle’s answer.

I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.

On one hand: good, Wade finally has a character flaw that the book actually acknowledges as a character flaw. I can work with that. On the other hand: this is all told to me in such a dispassionate that I am dreading how the book will handle this character flaw. Which is to say, I’m not expecting it to be very good.

(For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)

Especially when this is something the narration feels is more important to tell me about.

Anyway, skip another year, and a gunter finally leads Wade to the First Shard. Solved that riddle, I guess. And wait, wasn’t part of why IOI was ~evil~ in the first book that they were paying people to find the Easter Egg for them? How is this any different, Wade?

And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race. As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.

And that is the end of our chapter 0. And can I just say: what a mess already. I don’t think my snark can properly convey how utterly devoid of emotion this book’s writing is, and that alone is honestly more of a turn-off than anything else in the book so far. Even, knowing that I railed about it in the first book, I still feel newly unprepared for it. And it’s not like this double-prologue is making me hopeful that the book will show an ounce more critical thinking—or decent fucking humanity towards marginalized groups—as its predecessor.

So, that’s a lot to look forward to! For the sake of my sanity and schedule, don’t expect me to do such big posts every time. I’ll probably do one chapter a week from now on, if that. We’re in for a long ride, but I hope it’s worth it, at least.

#ready player two #ernest cline #st: ready player two #book reviews

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tfw-no-tennis · 4 years ago

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animorphssss.....2!

ok one L abt reading the series on my ereader is that the flipbook illustrations arent there ;_; those were my favvvvv

anyways I love animorphs still

I feel like I'll end up repeating myself a lot during these little liveblogs lmao but mannnn it’s so good. its so hardcore. like I know that that’s the whole Thing but I still get shocked by some of the stuff that happens

like a big theme in the series centers around the morality of killing your enemies - and it’s so all over the place bc in book 6 you have jake boiling a bunch of yeerks alive, which is kinda gnarly if you think abt it, but the alternative would be to leave them there and let them infest people soo...? and that’s basically the point, that there are never any easy choices in war

also I went on the animorphs wiki to look at trivia bc I love doing that and I cant BELIEVE (some of) the books were reissued in 2011 and they changed/removed some of the references to be more ‘modern’ omfg....talk about erasing 90s culture smh

likeeee I was born in 97 so I didn't exactly grow up in the 90s and therefore some of the references go over my head but its so charming and fun to have them there! and it makes sense given that the books are SET in the 90s

I don't remember ever being confused by any of the references as a kid (tho for sure a lot of them went over my head), but then again I read the books in like 2008 sooo

also some of the stuff that they change - like changing ‘recorded w/a vcr’ to ‘recorded w/the TV’ or ‘floppy disc’ to ‘flash drive’ may make more sense to modern audiences, but doesn't make sense in the context of the story still being set in the 90s

tho it is funny that the books use the phrase ‘hook up’ to mean ‘meet up’ a lot bc that is a phrase that definitely has a different meaning nowadays

alsooooo as it turns out I'm p sure I only read a couple of the spinoffs - the hork-bajir chronicles and the ellimist chronicles (which was confusing lmao), bc my library didn’t have the others :( 2007/2008 woes....

but now I get to read the spinoffs woooooooo so I read the first megamorphs and the andalite chronicles

I'm reading them in the chronological order (I think?) which is good bc part of the problem was that I read the ellimist book at a completely weird time and it confused me more lmao

megamorphs 1 basically felt like a regular animorphs book except longer, but the plot didn't feel like it needed all that extra page space tbh? even so it was an entertaining adventure

and rachel having amnesia was great, amnesia is one of my fav tropes lmao. and it was a lot of fun here, though a bit underutilized

another favorite trope of mine is time travel, so I'm gonna have a really fun time here w/that

as for the andalite chronicles, I really enjoyed that one. I thought it was a well done story about the horrors of war (which is a theme animorphs does excellently), kind of similar to the overarching story of the whole series, but fit into one book without feeling rushed

the way the story starts out with elfangor wanting to be a hero, not understanding what that entails, to the end where he IS going to be a hero, and he knows now that this is a burden rather than a reward

the horror elements are also really strong, with the taxxon morph being horrifying of course

and mannnn I loved that we got to see more of the taxxons as a species, and see that not all taxxons submitted to the yeerks - which breaks the previous theme of ‘all the taxxons are evil just because’

this book also establishes that the taxxons gave themselves over to the yeerks due to their constant hunger being unbearable, so it isn’t just that they’re evil for fun

animorphs does such an excellent job showing that each ‘side’ of a war will have good and bad (or at least sympathetic and unsympathetic) people

also loren was awesome, what a cool character. though I didn't realize she was literally like 13 until the very end of the book, holy shit. that's crazy. i thought she was 16 at the youngest....geez. her throwing a rock at visser 3 is even more iconic knowing she's a middle schooler at the time

and chapman was here! I'm assuming this must be the same chapman as the assistant principal controller... I thought it was a little strange to put chapman in that role, bc in this book he was a huge asshole basically the entire time, but in the previous (’future’) book it was revealed that he became a controller willingly only to spare his daughter, which is pretty far from this book where he’s actively trying to sell humanity out to the yeerks...people change I guess? (also he got his memory erased so I guess there's that)

alloran was a really interesting character. horrors of war again - we hear from his old buddy that he used to be a fun, witty guy, but war changed him into somebody who would do horrible things

and him becoming a controller was horrifying, obviously, but I like that alloran wasn't portrayed as some perfect, holy guy in order to make it all the more tragic when he got infested. its already fucked up enough as it is, and making him flawed was a lot more meaningful

and him wanting to flush all the yeerks out into space....oooooof the (later) parallels hurt

plus the fact that elfangor refusing to commit genocide against the helpless yeerks (even though they’re the enemy) directly contributing to alloran becoming a controller.....oof. I love that it shows that even making the morally correct decisions during war can lead to awful things happening, but not in a way that endorses evil actions - the story isn’t saying that elfangor should have killed the yeerks, it’s saying that there are no good choices in war

arbron being trapped as a taxxon was fucked up. but also really intriguing, especially how he found purpose and led a free taxxon uprising. I don't remember if we hear from him/the free taxxons again but I hope so

also the plot twist of tobias being elfangors SON...bruh. I do remember that despite not having read this book so it must come up in the main story later but my memory of that is vauge so I’m excited to see how that plays out. it’s always gonna be hilarious to me that ax is technically tobias’s uncle

and then the ellimist drops in and wacks up the time stream even more. classic. I love the crazy time travel stuff in animorphs

omfg and the bits where elfangor is a human tech guy and talked about his friends bill and steve LMAOOOOO

also the scene where elfangor drives the yellow mustang while blasting '(I cant get no) satisfaction’ by the rolling stones was one of the most iconic things I've ever read

basically I loved all the angles of war fucking people up. from loren’s dad, to alloran, to elfangor himself learning about the true horrors of war...v well done imo

ok back to the main series - so my pick for the most fucked up scene SO FAR (in my own personal opinion) - the scene where they're in the jungle and rachel passes out in bear morph and a bunch of rainforest ants start EATING HER ALIVE and like crawling into her ears and mouth and HGGGGGG that was genuinely so fucking disturbing

its a good thing that the time travel made it so rachel couldn't remember that bc that was fuuuuucked

another contender is a scene we don't actually see - erek having his capacity for violence instated and then slaughtering a ton of human and hork-bajir controllers

like damn, you know its fucked up when its too fucked up for ANIMORPHS to even ‘show.’ this is a series that doesn't pull punches but evidentially that would've been Too Much to actually portray (understandably). also i feel like seeing the aftermath/everyone’s reactions had more of an impact than describing erek killing a bunch of people would have

also I forgot that marco Literally Fucking Dies during that scene and that's why he doesn't get to see the slaughter. wow

and then in the very next book JAKE dies too. jesus

oh it was also so sad and fucked up when marco’s dad told him that he and his wife used to fight sometimes, but then all of a sudden they stopped fighting, and their relationship was basically entirely peaceful and perfect - and this is how marco knows exactly when his mom was made into a controller, bc of course a yeerk wouldn't care enough to get into petty arguments like that....ooooof

Okay and book 15 really got me...that was fucking heavy man. Geeeez. Everything w/Marco and his mom is so fucked uppppp

Like he literally has to deal with so much awful traumatizing shit. The scene where he pretends to be a controller and is face to face w/visser one and THAT HIS MOM but he can’t even do anything, and he just sees the evil in her eyes and thinks about how there’s no way she had been controlled by a yeerk that long before bc he’s never seen her look like that...that was so fucking sad.

Plus Marcos mom now thinking that Marco is a controller...aughh...and then later Marco knows he can’t even think-speak to her bc he’ll just talk about everything he’s wanted to talk about to his mom this whole time... ;_;

And the parts where Marcos humor slips and the utter rage he feels towards the situation comes through...man

Plus everything about him being understandably afraid of sharks after being nearly torn in half by one back during their first dolphin adventure

Augh oh and jake telling Marco that everyone can tell something is up bc Marco isn’t joking around and talking about how insane their plan is like usual, so Marco fakes it sand does all that even tho he’s terrified and conflicted...aughhhh

Ok and the last scene where Marco is thinking about a future where he and his parents can talk plainly about how awful and traumatizing everything is, and then eventually they’ll feel okay enough to joke about it, bc Marcos mom is the one who taught him to look at the funny side of life...Oh The Pain

There were a lot of great fucked up individual lines in this book too. I’m just so sad about these poor middle schoolers jfc

Also I do distinctly remember the scene where they collapse the shark tank at Ocean World or w/e, it was weird af reading it bc I remembered none of the rest of the book but got weird deja vu reading that scene and remembering having read it like 13+ years ago

if it’s not clear by now I have a pretty terrible memory for media which is honestly good bc then I can reread things and it’s like new

Also jake...man...I said it previously but I was kinda eh about jake when I first read these bc he’s kinda the ‘basic’ character, but now I find his story much more interesting

His conflict over being leader is really good. KAA does a fantastic job capturing the pressure he’s under bc he was chosen by his friends to be the leader, so he REALLY can’t back out, and he doesn’t necessarily feel up to it, but feels he has no choice in the matter...

And constantly having to make really difficult decisions that could get his friends killed...geez. It’s so much pressure. And he talks about wanting to go back to being a normal kid when this is all over, and it kinda strikes me as him being in denial - like, there’s no way things can ever be ‘normal’ again, but that’s his way of coping.

Especially with Tom and all that. That conflict is so compelling...jake having to play all these different roles - as leader, as a son/student, as a regular brother to Tom - he’s constantly having to act a certain way and rarely gets to be Himself

It’s actually kinda relatable in a way - that feeling of being In Charge, but in a somewhat abstract and informal way, so you feel like regular old you, but you have to carefully regulate how you act bc the people around you expect a certain standard of behavior from you...

And all the morally grey situations they’re put in are fucked up, but especially for jake who has the final say on what they do, even when knowing it could lead to his friends being killed or made into controllers

Like in the book with the cannibal yeerk guy - there’s basically no good choices there. Jake lets the cannibal live, and (at first) implies that it’s for the best that he’s cannibalizing other yeerks and therefore helping get rid of some yeerks - except that he kills their hosts too

but the alternative would be to directly kill another human being who isn't actively fighting/resisting you, which is a fucked up thing for a middle schooler to have to do

And the conflict between jake and Cassie is really excellent bc jake has to make these awful decisions, and Cassie is the type of person who can’t stand that sort of thing, so it gets left up to jake a lot, but then she’s upset with jake for doing something awful, even while knowing that there were no better options

like, her asking jake to kill the cannibal guy for her was really fucked up, but also entirely understandable for cassie as a character to ask. it was an emotionally charged situation, and cassie is an emotional person. she’s also somebody who like to Act, to do concrete good, and getting rid of an Evil Bad Guy in front of her would be a definite action

But Cassie is a great source of morality to the group - most of them are pretty jaded, but Cassie is able to hope in a way none of the rest are. It creates a really compelling dynamic between jake and Cassie that I kinda dismissed when I was like 10 or w/e

Also the scene where jake as a fly gets crushed and starts dying? Seriously fucked. And then after when he’s nearly breaking down in the airport and Cassie comforts him...that was a really good scene. Cassie is so good

And the continuity is so excellent - I love how in book 17, Cassie (and jake to an extent) doesn’t really weigh in on the moral debate abt the oatmeal bc she’s still shaken up by asking jake to murder a guy for her, and then (presumably) going ahead and lighting his house on fire when jake doesn’t kill him

And augh jake and Marco have such a good and interesting dynamic - the entire group kinda pushes each other into their respective ‘roles’ in the group, but for a few books that’s really true for jake and marco

I don't remember what book it was but at some point marco (I think) mentions that jake understands what marco is dealing with w/his mom being a controller bc of tom, but that they don’t talk about it bc they ‘don't talk about stuff like that’ or something and I'm just like noooo talk to each other :(

but at this point jake feels like he can’t really express doubt and fear and stuff like that bc he’s the Leader and they look to him to be strong (which is ironically very similar to how rachel feels), and marco feels like he can’t be serious bc he’s the funny guy.

Basically I love all the different dynamics in the group. How Cassie and Rachel are such opposites but are best friends and get along well, while Marco and Cassie are more directly opposed - as jake says, Marco is ruthless, and Cassie definitely isn’t. Rachel and Marco are also pretty different which is interesting, bc they have a lot in common, and actually agree on a lot (even if they disagree out loud) but their commonalities combined with their circumstances make them react very differently to the same situations

I also love seeing the differences between characters from each other’s POV - like, p much all the characters think that Rachel is completely fearless, but when the book is from her POV, we get to see that that isn’t true at all - she feels plenty of fear, but she recognizes that her role in the group is to be the fearless one, so she pushes aside her fear to fit into that role (which inadvertently pushes her more and more into that ‘fearless warrior’ box - something that happens to all the characters more and more as the story goes on, like jake as ‘the leader’ and Marco as ‘the jokester’).

Also I loooove the grey morality of literally everything. Like the book where ax discovers an andalite traitor - not a controller, just an andalite who betrayed them to the yeerks. This leads to the deaths of like a hundred other andalites, and that whole scene you really just feel for ax, bc he feels so awful about everyone else dying while he escapes, yet he’s also so grateful to be alive, which he in turn feels bad about...

And ax’s conflict about being torn between his home w/his fellow andalites and his new home on earth w/his friends is great

And oh man I fucking love book 19. Any of the books where it goes more into the yeerks and their side of things are so good, just like the book where jake was made into a controller.

And book 19, where we meet a sympathetic yeerk, comes right after 18, where we meet an andalite traitor - again, I love how we clearly see that no one side is completely good or completely bad

So yeah book 19 fucking slapped. That shit was so compelling. I love how Cassie made a bunch of foolish decisions based on naïve hope, but it worked out!! Things aren’t always bleak and awful!

Except there were plenty bleak and awful parts of this book. It had a great balance of moods tbh, even though a lot of the situations were extremely contrived lmao. I love the stuff that aftran says, which is basically what I was thinking when I started my reread - being a yeerk fucking sucks, you’re literally a blind slug but also completely and fully sentient, on the same level as humans and andalites - and as afran pointed out this book, the yeerks are born as parasites, just as humans are born as predators - why is it okay for the humans to kill countless animals to eat, but not for the yeerks to enslave races to act as hosts? Well, the situation isn’t totally comparable, which Cassie and Marco both point out when aftran makes that comparison - the yeerks are enslaving sentient species, and cows and chickens are not the same as the humans and hork-bajir (though the story understandably doesn’t fall too deeply into the ‘who deserves what right/animal sentience’ rabbit hole).

And I like that aftran points out that the yeerks basically have 2 options currently - stay helpless and blind in a yeerk pool, or enslave a host. It’s interesting to hear that a lot of yeerks don’t like doing this but see it as the only options, as opposed to complete sensory deprivation. It makes me wonder if there are yeerks who are so staunchly against it that they elect to stay as pool-bound slugs forever

Also maybe it’s the shounen anime fan in me but I don’t even care that much that Cassie’s entire plan was completely off the rails and hinged on only the slightest chance of success - with failure being much more likely and completely catastrophic, with the animorphs and their loved ones all being wiped out, vs success being unlikely and also achieving...a moral victory? Peace between two enemy combatants in a huge war? nothing all that concrete...anyways it was a bunch of good-faith horrible decisions on Cassie’s part, but I don’t even care? I love stories where hope and love save the day against all odds, especially when they’re wielded like weapons by a character and make everything end nicely

This is especially true here bc animorphs is generally a series that leans very far away from that type of thing, so when it does happen, it feels like a victory. Plus the David trilogy is next so we kinda need a happy ending while we can

also bc I compared animorphs to hxh last time, I now have to compare it to the other series I've (partially) liveblogged, transformers mtmte.

this is gonna be more abstract and brief but basically. mtmte is all about after the war, and everyone has so much trauma and everything just sucks, so they all go on a space cruise and work on themselves. basically.

but the series does a lot of exploration of how war fucks people up - same as animorphs, tho animorphs spans the beginning of the war (for the main characters at least) until the end, whereas mtmte starts when the war ends.

but the point is. both series do an excellent job showcasing the wide range of reactions people have to being put in unthinkable situations during wartime. all the major characters in mtmte go through arcs where they heal/change from the war, some more subtle than others

basically the animorphs needs to go on a wacky space cruise adventure with a bunch of other fucked up people and figure their shit out, mtmte style

ok this is wicked long already so I’m gonna end it here. also I feel like I should start the next liveblog w/the david triology bc I’m for sure gonna have a lot to say abt that

#i wrote like half of this in my phone notes while on vacation in the wilderness lmao #animorphs #lj reads animorphs

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justasmallbloginabigklainefandom · 8 years ago

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The Great ATOG Reread; Grey part 2

Well, this is different.

Chapter 5

She flexes her hands, and doesn't lower her head. "I just held him. Just for a second, I just used telekinesis to - he always thinks he can walk out as soon as he wan-" "You -" Oh god no. "Jesus. Jesus, don't ever do that, what the hell were you -"

I. FUCKING. HATE. HER.

I AM LITERALLY SHAKING WITH RAGE, JUST LIKE PHALANX. I KNOW HE’S AFRAID OF HIMSELF, BUT AT THIS MOMENT I WISHED HE’S BLASTED HER HEAD OFF.

I know she will redeem herself, and she will even be a great friend to both of them (fuck, even Santana will redeem herself), but I am getting so tired of her attitude. I am getting so tired that she is satisfied by watching people hurt.

Just FYI, if you’re reading this, with ATOG and the first four chapters of Grey, I read them on my eReader (going against my ‘no fic on my eReader’ rule, but then again, these two are completely different stories), and then write posts afterwards. I have the actual fic open on a different tab so that I can copy quotes and shit. Because of that, I clicked the “part 5″ link and I guess chapter 5 will be a liveblog?

Anyway, back to Quinn. I will end up loving everyone on that team, including Quinn and Satan (heh), since they will redeem theirselves and they have a valid reason for their behaviour, and I am all for character growth and giving them a chance, and they will take that chance, but that still doesn’t really excuse that these two women bullied them.

"Sidekicks should be seen and not heard."

I mean, really. As a feminist, Quinn of all people should know that this is not acceptable. Change ‘Sidekicks’ to ‘Women’ and we can talk about a shit ton of history of opression and wow, Quinn would delve on that cause she’s feminist as fuck.

The conversation/fight she has with Agent Sylvester and the Ghost is the first step to redeeming herself (and to unraveling the secret)

And she stares back at him quivering with rage, but he sees the second of something else behind her eyes, because he knows every nuance of fear, every facet of it, he is as fluent in fear as in French . . .

Quinn, I love you, but you are not stronger than him.

The evening is a bit weird after that. Quinn is reserved, and as a reader you know why. Santana is bitching, but tell me something new. Phalanx is once again asking for a ‘normal’ evening, right after he got to Blaine problem no. #1. He’s not a sidekick.

(Really, I should list these problems. OKaY. For future reference, the sidekick thing and everything involved is Blaine’s problem no. #1, the want for normal non-hero shit is no. 2#. Kurt losing grip of his powers is Kurt’s problem no. #1)

It's never been like this. He didn't know it was supposed to be like this. He wants to kiss him but he doesn't want to break the dance, he doesn't want it to end, not ever, the warmth of his breathing body in Phalanx's arm and his hand given to his. He wants to say, Do you understand how rare this is - ? but he thinks that he knows that, the Ghost who never even asked to be in love, wouldn't have thought to ask to be loved, he knows that. How many people do you meet, and how many could ever know you to dance like this, slow and trusting like there's nothing but the way they move and the way the music moves them, nothing but the safety of the other's body, and the Ghost's arm tucking him closer by the waist, the Ghost's hip against his with each step because they know.

For the first time, they dared to show a little bit of themselves and their relation in front of the team.

Chapter 6

Well, I’m on a roll now.

AND HOLY SHIT GUESS WHAT’S BACK? THE FUCKING FANDOM. I can’t tell you if I’ve missed them or not.

Well, I sure as fuck did miss Draxie, BB, and Ghostly. What a way to reintroduce them. Draxie is cheerful and bubbly, talking about drabbling. BB isn’t even online, but someone recs her fic. And Ghostly is mentioned because people are afraid of her, but shit son, she’s right with her meta about entitlement.

Blaine grunts, still scrolling. Damned fandom, it's a full-time job just to keep up with it . . .

He’s right, though. He braces himself for the meta, and oh, how I missed Ghostly.

P&G: Because they, the idiot ignorant children, fetishize homosexuality in the most contorted and disturbing way possible. Because they're fine with him being gay - happy that he's gay, since they can use his name and form for all their little m/m fantasies on a whole different level of appropriation now. But how dare he, human being in his own life, how *dare* he not conform to strict gender stereotypes at the same time. He's perfectly well allowed to be gay, as long as he does it the 'right way'. God forbid he be any kind of queer that disturbs them, though. TV: There was a lot of negativity.

P&G: They don't want to see a male hero stand in a 'feminine' pose. It demeans him. It makes him less heroic.

But wait, there’s more

P&G: I have a rant brewing, if that's what you mean. The fandom entitlement complex links into fandom sexism in a really strange and powerful way. Because fandom feels like it *owns* its figures of fetishization; they are what they are because we made them that. There is an enormous sense of ownership, like they're just the scaffolding, *we* construct who they are. And of course, they can't live up to that. They're real people, not our dolls. And when they fail to live up to our particular construction we either ignore the facts and go on as before or else we get *really fucking angry*. How *dare* they be actual human beings. They're supposed to be *my doll*, not any real person. Especially not any complicated real person! They should be as simple as possible because I can't conceptualize more than three personality traits in my head at any one time, I am *actually* that dumb! TV: Ahem. Plus we live in a patriarchal society and we construct our dolls along the strict and misogynist gender lines given to us, which oversimplifies them in very dangerous ways.

The entire ‘dolls’ thing is still a thing I use to descibe how I feel about fandom and RPF shipping. I love you, Ghostly, for that brilliant metaphor.

This is not a hero/sidekick relationship. They have strengths and weaknesses and they complement each other. They actually are, in every sense of the word, partners.

Oh boy, if only more of the fandom would get this. It would save Blaine all the shit from problem 1#.

And oh shit.

Time for a...

Blaine's hit back from the post he was on - no way in hell he'll read all that text - and while he's been asleep the fandom's . . . "Oh Jesus." he mutters, and rubs his forehead. "Blaine, what?" "There, um, I don't know, something . . ."

Wankfest.

A human being, scared for real reasons in a genuinely scary world, came to us to reach out for another human being to not feel alone. You bullied them into deleting their blog within a matter of hours. Well *done*, fandom. This really is the grossest mockery of everything that the Ghost and Phalanx, unlike you, actually bother to do. Which is to think about someone else and not just themselves for every single second of every fucking day. The _1_and_only, if you do see this, fuck all of them; they don't know what courage means, they're both too stupid and too spineless to understand the concept. Not all people are like them. When you ask people for help, sometimes they will not be ugly self-absorbed morons, sometimes they will try to *help* you. The Ghost and Phalanx taught us that if nothing else. I hope that you're well, and good luck with your life and your powers. If your power turns out to be the ability to smack people at a great distance, I advise you to not be afraid to use it as much as you fucking need. And now I'm getting a drink because fandom can, very seriously, go fuck itself.

You also get someone shitting on Draxie? I mean, people shitting on Ghostly is just, well, ‘normal’, but this is Draxie and - wow, no surprises, it’s about entitlement. Did. They. Not. Read. That. Meta?

Blaine sits in his desk chair feeling strange and sad, while Kurt takes his post-aikido nap on the bed. He'd had to lie to him, earlier, after swallowing his own shock, because he doesn't know what it would do to Kurt of all people to find out that people were being abused on the internet in some weird way on his behalf. And he'd looked really honestly scared at what Blaine might have been stunned by online, Kurt doesn't understand and isn't entirely comfortable with the Ghost's fans and he'd had no idea what they might have done, in his mind it could be anything and it's really not like Blaine could tell him the truth . . .

But really, guys, doesn’t it fuck you up?

Doesn’t it fuck you up that people fight and hurt on behalf of their idols because ‘they love them’?

I never got that. I remember when Heather Morris fans were bashing Darren, because they loved Hemo. Or when Darren fans bashed Dianna. BECAUSE THEY LOVE DARREN? And so on. We do not know anything about their off-social media relationship.

People in fandoms hurt and harrass people on behalf of their idols.

BECAUSE THEY LOVE THEM.

Jesus.

Phalanx . . . it's different in difficult ways when it's him and not Blaine. People talk about Phalanx and he mostly lets it run off his back, he knows it's nothing to do with him, really. He knows the way they talk about the Ghost is nothing to do with Kurt, after all. He lets himself keep the good things. He knows that every time they say that the Ghost is brave and strong and good and beautiful it's true, so he lets himself keep the good things they say about Phalanx, and he tries to ignore the rest. Haters gonna hate. But it must be so hard to ignore them when they're saying it right to you, safe behind a computer screen's shield. How can it be okay to say that to someone just because you don't have to look into their eyes and see the person they actually are, the person you're actually hurting . . . ?

The phandom bashes the Ghost, because they love Phalanx.

The fanghosts bash Phalanx, because they love the Ghost.

And this will all lead to the combination of Blaine problem 1# and 2#. 1#, because why can’t people see they’re equal and that this isn’t hero/sidekick and 2#, because how can he stand it that people use his hero identity to hurt others?

Kurt might feel bad for leaving New York City astray, but Blaine can’t handle leaving the fandom astray.

#lb 2017 #the great atog reread #atog grey #lb reading

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misselaineousme-blog · 7 years ago

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A little light reading ...

I have found myself thinking about the library of Alexandria lately. It’s usually when I hit the button on Amazon that says “Deliver to Elaine’s Kindle” and I marvel at the fact that the written word, which for thousands of years could only be accessed in certain places by a tiny fraction of the population, is now available on demand, anywhere, at any time.

After all, there has never been a time on our planet when so much information is literally at our fingertips. We can fact check the news and urban myths, see the weather on the other side of the globe, and access a dynamic encyclopedia on a device that weighs less than a deck of cards. Books, once written by hand, can be downloaded at the touch of a button to a laptop, mobile phone, or eReader, and reading is cheaper than therapy for stress relief and better for brain cells than television.

Although I grew up with a love of fiction, much of my current reading material has been more eclectic. Indeed, those who know me are familiar with my tendency to say “Oh, I just read this great book that says …” and then spouting off the latest factoid that caught my attention (sorry about that, I’m trying to stop). I decided to continue to publish an annual list of what I’ve been reading, in part to help me keep track, but also to share some fascinating books that may be overlooked. They’re (mostly) in no particular order, and for full disclosure Amazon Affiliate links are used ... but spare a thought for those ancient Alexandrians who could only dream of such easy access to information!

Barking up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong (Eric Barker): With its engaging writing style and sound scientific backing, I have to admit this was one of my favourite discoveries of 2017. Barker shows that there is evidence to support conflicting claims about what makes someone successful, then demonstrates to the reader how a balance can be achieved for greater happiness. If you’re looking for a book that is both interesting and uplifting, I highly recommend this one. At the very least, get on over to his website and sign up to his mailing list for a weekly dose of inspiration and information.

One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way (Robert Maurer): While I cannot say this book has changed my life, it has changed how I think about things: namely, important goals cannot be achieved overnight! If you want to make long-term, lasting changes, then small and steady really seems to be the way forward. When coupled with Stephen Guise’s Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results, this is a good foundation for making positive changes.

Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering (Stephen Guise): Amazon is a clever corporation. They saw I had purchased Better than Before, a book about habits, and recommended this one as well. And I am so glad I fell for their marketing trick as I enjoyed this one so much more than BtB. It has a kaizen-esque vibe (start small) and I really like the underlying philosophy behind it. It can basically be boiled down to choose a small goal and carry it out every day. This might be running in place for 30 seconds or doing one push up (or reading two pages of a book or writing 50 words a day if weight loss isn’t one of your goals). You can of course do more if you want, but the idea is to change your mindset and use the momentum of small wins to carry you forward. After all, a full year of running in place 30 seconds each day is better than running for 30 minutes three or four times a week if you abandon the latter after a few workouts because it doesn’t fit into your schedule.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein): Finally! This one has been on my should-read list for a while, and the authors winning the Nobel Prize for Economics finally encouraged me to take the plunge. It was an interesting look at the world of “choice architecture” and how careful design regarding defaults and decision making can be used to help people (or for evil … your choice). I still haven’t figured out a way to make not littering easier than littering, but it’s always useful to have a bit more evidence in my arsenal.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt): Improving well-being, a spot of history, and scientific backing all rolled into one book—what’s not to like? While some of the writing is slightly more academic than other books listed here, I found this one to be quite enlightening, and worth a read if you’re looking for ways of better understanding and improving your mood.

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (Laura Vanderkam): I wouldn’t exactly call this a time-management book. It’s more about being aware of your time, where it goes, and how you can use it better to achieve your goals. While I greatly enjoyed it overall and would definitely recommend it if you’re trying to figure out how to prioritise your activities, the author doesn’t really discuss the fact that time is not created equal. If you spend a day doing a mentally exhausting job, trying to complete your own project(s) in the evening is not necessarily going to yield the best results. Which brings me to …

Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done (Josh Martin): This book fills in some of the gaps of 168 Hours, and is overall a good reminder that (1) multi-tasking doesn’t exist, and (2) be aware of your peak times so you can get your most important work done then, not during the times you’d prefer to be taking a nap.

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (Daniel Pink): I love the author’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, so queued up his latest book that delves into chronotypes, the importance of harnessing the power of beginnings, middles, and ends, and basically goes beyond what to looking at when is the best time for certain activities. With its engaging writing style and useful summaries, this is a good introduction to the power of timing.

Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade (Robert Cialdini): I am a big fan of the author’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (in fact, I read it again this year), so it was great to see this new one out that also deals with the importance of timing, especially as regards influencing. If you are short on time, however, I’d recommend starting with Influence.

Miracle Morning: The 6 Habits That Will Transform Your Life Before 8AM (Hal Elrod): I’ve written about my experience with Miracle Morning before, and in general I still think highly of it. I have to admit I fell off the early-to-rise wagon with the arrival of autumn and darker mornings, but I am hoping that spring will set me back on the right path.

The Art of Thinking Clearly (Rolf Dobelli): If you liked Daniel Kahnehahn’s Thinking Fast and Slow, you should enjoy this book that collects various fallacies and biases into one place. Clear, concise writing and bitesize chapters makes this book great for dipping in and out of while commuting or on the loo.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely): I found Predictably Irrational to be a solid companion to Kahnehahn and Cialdini, and one that had me nodding along as he explained the psychology behind seemingly irrational decisions that everyone makes. If you’ve ever wanted why people tend to choose things that go against their own best interest, this is a good book to start with.

The Dip: The extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick) (Seth Godin): The problem with being in the middle of something is that you don’t often know exactly how long this phase will last. The enthusiasm of starting something has worn off, the finishing line is not in sight, and you don’t know whether you’ll soon be hitting your stride or hitting a wall. Godin’s book shows how powering through can take you to new heights … but also to be aware that sometimes it’s necessary to abandon ship to stop from going round in circles.

The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand (Chris Anderson): This is a book that is often cited as a game changer, and its title is regularly used to describe the opportunity offered by digital technology. I found it interesting to an extent, but with of an original publication date of 2006, it already felt out of date. Overall it’s a decent reference, but I would suggest looking for more recent take on the long tail phenomenon.

TED Talks: The official TED guide to public speaking: Tips and tricks for giving unforgettable speeches and presentations (Chris Anderson): This was a book that popped up on Amazon as a result of reading The Long Tail, and since I had my own forthcoming talk to give at the time, I decided to give it ago. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to give their own powerful presentations, learn what goes on behind the scenes at TED, or is just interested in what some of Anderson’s recommended TED talks are.

Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Life (Gretchen Rubin): Occasionally books just don’t work for me and this was one of them. The author’s tone comes across as holier-than-thou, and what she typically describes aren’t habits but behaviours (yes, there is a difference). She lost me with an impassioned defence of diet soda, despite current scientific studies showing that they’re equally as bad (or worse) than regular cola (carbonation alone is even shown to increase calorie consumption). This cherry picking of evidence doesn’t sit well with me, so I moved on to Mini Habits, which I would recommend instead.

Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway (Susan Jeffers): This is a classic of the self-help genre and there is a good reason for that: it is the one book that I would recommend to anyone feeling a bit stuck. It simultaneously serves as a kick up the backside and a warm hug.

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life (Susan David): Some may find Feel the Fear a tad too New Age-y. In that case, I would recommend Emotional Agility as it is an engaging, practical book grounded in psychology and academic research. If that still seems too airy-fairy for you, may I recommend …

The Chimp Paradox (Steve Peters): There’s a very good reason the author is used by a number of athletes to help improve their performance: this is another classic that will help you look at your brain and emotions in a completely different way. If neither of the previous two books worked for you with regards to reprogramming troublesome thoughts and breaking out of existing ruts, then this one should do the trick.

Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long (David Rock): I loved this book. Rock uses storytelling to get his point across about how the brain works, especially when dealing with problematic work situations. This blend of fact and fiction works incredibly well together to help the reader remember the neuroscience and lessons he is trying to impart.

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice (Matthew Syed): Both this and Gladwell’s Outliers make the point that often what we perceive as talent is in fact the result of hundreds or thousands of hours of practice. But not just any practice or rote activity: it must be deliberate, with feedback, so that improvements can be made. I enjoyed both books, so would recommend reading them back to back to aid in remembering the points made by the authors.

Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell): See above.

Smartcuts (Shane Snow): First of all, I have no idea why this book is considerably cheaper as a paperback than on Kindle, but if you’re interested in it, get the physical version instead. Second, this is a fun, fascinating read through real-life ways of skipping up the career ladder. Even if you’re happy with your current rung (and quite frankly half of the books listed here are about being happy where you are now), I strongly recommend this as it is an entertaining read.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiate As If Your Life Depended On It (Chris Voss): As a former FBI hostage negotiator, Voss has written a compelling book that makes you re-think how you interact with people. This was another favourite and one that I am already planning to read again sometime over the coming year.

Dear Fahrenheit 451 (Annie Spence): This is a bit of light reading that I absolutely loved. Quite simply it’s a librarian’s letters to her books, and if you are an avid reader or book collector then you’ll understand it perfectly.

Rivers of London series (Ben Aaronovitch): The only proper fictional entry on this list, but one which I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who is looking for a laugh (with a bit of darkness thrown in). Imagine Harry Potter crossed with Law & Order and a soupçon of the best sci-fi comedy writing and you’ll get close. Start with Rivers of London, then proceed to Moon Over Soho, Whispers Underground, Broken Homes, Foxglove Summer, and The Hanging Tree.

I also squeezed in a few old favourites:

The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg): I am a bit obsessed with how habits can be used to improve lives, and the underpinning neuroscience behind habit formation and changing habits is absolutely fascinating.

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth about Success (Matthew Syed): If you haven’t read this, you’re missing out. Both it and Syed’s Bounce work well together to underscore that perfection doesn’t exist, but that constantly striving for improvement is a better way forward.

12 Week Year (Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington): I am currently using this system to help me focus on goals I want to accomplish and prioritise activities; it uses the psychology of small wins and short time periods to motivate, and it’s one that I would recommend if you want to accomplish a lot in a limited period of time.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert Cialdini): This is a fascinating view of common compliance techniques and ways around them; very useful for the next time someone offers you a free sample.

What are some of your favourite books of the past year? Drop me a line or share them on Facebook.

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