March and April Books
May. 11th, 2018 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
next_to_normalThis was a slow two months for reading, partly because I got bogged down in a couple that weren't good and I didn't want to finish, and partly because I was busy with other things. I am now FOUR books behind schedule on my Goodreads goal. *sigh*
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol S. Dweck: So this is all about how a growth mindset (i.e. if you continue to learn things and work hard for the sake of learning and not because you want to be the best, you will achieve more than you expected to, and we should reward effort rather than success because there is value in failure because you still learned something) is better and makes you happier and more successful than having a fixed mindset (i.e. your intelligence/ability is fixed so when you learn/try something new, you will either get it immediately or you will fail and never get it, which leads to never trying things that are hard because you're afraid of failure). And all of that seems... obvious? Like, I get that people (including me) sometimes find themselves in a fixed mindset about something without realizing it and maybe reading this book would help them to change their thinking habits, but it was not especially groundbreaking research to me. Also, I felt like a lot of the examples the author uses, especially the corporate ones (growth-minded CEOs who turned around struggling companies or fixed-mindset leaders who drove successful ventures into the ground), to be somewhat specious. In too many cases, there's not a whole lot of actual evidence provided that the mindset is what caused the successful outcome, but the author keeps trying to shoehorn every success or failure into her worldview.
The People We Hate at the Wedding, Grant Ginder: I probably should have figured this out from the title, but I hated EVERYONE at this wedding. This is a book about insufferable people being assholes to each other, but it's all okay at the end because faaaaamily. I don't know, I guess I thought it would be funnier?
The Country of Ice Cream Star, Sandra Newman: This one took me a long time to get through, not because it wasn't good, but because the dialect forced me to slow down and sometimes reread a sentence before I understood it. The post-apocalyptic worldbuilding is impressive, but you do have to work for it, and to be honest even after I finished it, there was a lot that I'm still not sure if it's supposed to be unexplained or if I just missed the explanation. I guess you'd call it a YA dystopia, although it's only really YA because all the characters are children (the plague that wiped out civilization kills once a person reaches about 19 or 20). So the children are all far more grown-up than their ages suggest, but there's a lot of raping and murdering and warring between factions and the fact that it's children doing it is pretty dark.
Amanda Wakes Up, Alisyn Camerota: This book reads like Camerota processing her own Stockholm syndrome from working at FOX News, lol. It's about a news reporter who gets a big break as an anchor on a FOX-esque cable news network (it's literally called FAIR News, lol) where their supposed goal is to give the audience "both sides" - which generally means letting lies and inaccuracies go unchallenged in the interest of appearing impartial. Somewhat to the consternation of our middle-of-the-road main character, her show becomes a platform for a Trump-like presidential candidate and she's told she's not allowed to say anything that will piss him off because he's great for ratings. If you can stand the PTSD from basically reliving the 2016 election, it's a fairly light read, and has some interesting things to say about journalistic integrity and responsibility. The most shocking part is that Camerota is apparently psychic, because she started writing this before Trump was even a candidate, and the parallels to real life are uncanny, to say the least.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol S. Dweck: So this is all about how a growth mindset (i.e. if you continue to learn things and work hard for the sake of learning and not because you want to be the best, you will achieve more than you expected to, and we should reward effort rather than success because there is value in failure because you still learned something) is better and makes you happier and more successful than having a fixed mindset (i.e. your intelligence/ability is fixed so when you learn/try something new, you will either get it immediately or you will fail and never get it, which leads to never trying things that are hard because you're afraid of failure). And all of that seems... obvious? Like, I get that people (including me) sometimes find themselves in a fixed mindset about something without realizing it and maybe reading this book would help them to change their thinking habits, but it was not especially groundbreaking research to me. Also, I felt like a lot of the examples the author uses, especially the corporate ones (growth-minded CEOs who turned around struggling companies or fixed-mindset leaders who drove successful ventures into the ground), to be somewhat specious. In too many cases, there's not a whole lot of actual evidence provided that the mindset is what caused the successful outcome, but the author keeps trying to shoehorn every success or failure into her worldview.
The People We Hate at the Wedding, Grant Ginder: I probably should have figured this out from the title, but I hated EVERYONE at this wedding. This is a book about insufferable people being assholes to each other, but it's all okay at the end because faaaaamily. I don't know, I guess I thought it would be funnier?
The Country of Ice Cream Star, Sandra Newman: This one took me a long time to get through, not because it wasn't good, but because the dialect forced me to slow down and sometimes reread a sentence before I understood it. The post-apocalyptic worldbuilding is impressive, but you do have to work for it, and to be honest even after I finished it, there was a lot that I'm still not sure if it's supposed to be unexplained or if I just missed the explanation. I guess you'd call it a YA dystopia, although it's only really YA because all the characters are children (the plague that wiped out civilization kills once a person reaches about 19 or 20). So the children are all far more grown-up than their ages suggest, but there's a lot of raping and murdering and warring between factions and the fact that it's children doing it is pretty dark.
Amanda Wakes Up, Alisyn Camerota: This book reads like Camerota processing her own Stockholm syndrome from working at FOX News, lol. It's about a news reporter who gets a big break as an anchor on a FOX-esque cable news network (it's literally called FAIR News, lol) where their supposed goal is to give the audience "both sides" - which generally means letting lies and inaccuracies go unchallenged in the interest of appearing impartial. Somewhat to the consternation of our middle-of-the-road main character, her show becomes a platform for a Trump-like presidential candidate and she's told she's not allowed to say anything that will piss him off because he's great for ratings. If you can stand the PTSD from basically reliving the 2016 election, it's a fairly light read, and has some interesting things to say about journalistic integrity and responsibility. The most shocking part is that Camerota is apparently psychic, because she started writing this before Trump was even a candidate, and the parallels to real life are uncanny, to say the least.
