Joshua R. Taylor > Recent Status Updates

No judging.

Since my interests seem to consistently dart all over the place, I am now reading five books in parallel. I don't expect to stop here! It's so exhilarating to have more options to pick from!

If we had a 'shortest average chapter award', this would be the winner.

Studying doesn't always have to be dry.

Massive thumbs down to any expository kindle book that does this:

Table of Contents
1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
...

Time to read this again, to see if I can find some satisfaction in Ayn Rand's style and applying more reasoned criticism to the political philosophy.

This book is fantastic. Its contents are extremely valuable to anybody interested in improving their problem-solving abilities in general. It's the kind of book that require more than just reading, but studying. So I shall stop 'reading' now and study it more in depth at a later date.

Wow, this book is incredibly well-structured and terse. This is going to be another long read I think. Much of this would also be great to incrementally read.

I'm trying to limit myself to three books at a time. Each has a category:
* Work Life
* Personal Life (easy)
* Personal Life (hard)

This is the easy personal life book. For starving away the temptation to watch TV or youtube.

I'm trying to limit myself to three books at a time. Each has a category:
* Work Life
* Personal Life (easy)
* Personal Life (hard)

Recommended and lent to me by my good friend: Amy Knowles

This book is demanding that I go out and buy sandwich ingredients. I have followed its instructions. Today I learned that mustard goes really well with rye bread. Also how to define +, -, /, ^ and more in recursive functions.

I'm re-reading this as my work study item to brush up on my lisp skills before moving onto the sequels.

I am 99.999.... % sure that the film 'Gravity' (2013) was inspired by the short story in this book called 'Kaleidoscope'.

Revisiting this to study it in more depth and do some thinking about career trajectory (so I don't have to do it later).

Interesting allusion to issues on Earth such as colonialism and conservation.

Guy Montag lives in a society of continuous distraction and pleasure. It has to be heavily maintained by: televisions that span all four walls of rooms, houses removed of front porches to discourage ‘dangerous’ contemplation about life and stomach pumping paramedics that work around the clock to prevent suicides.

And now for something completely different... I am going to try re-reading books that I've previously rated as 5 star and see if my opinion of them has changed. If they are still excellent, I'm going to try and read more of the works by that author or any works that inspired the author.

Makes a change from going off recommendations or reading (literally) random books off my to-read list.

On recommendation from Bill Gates and Tim Harford, let’s see what the hugely inspiring data wizard Hans Rosling had to say about the world.

This far in I've decided to ditch since I need to study this more in detail. It's only worth reading if I can reflect on it for a long time. Might be a future study project.

Figured I better re-evaluate stoicism.

This book is really heavy stuff all the way through.

I've once again skipped a few chapters that appeared drawn out and irrelevant to me, the chapters on love addiction and being a workaholic.

Hmm, maybe I'll pick this up at a later date. This is quite snooze worthy for me. Might be interesting if you're into shopping and metropolitan glamour. (Maybe I might be one day)

Skipped the chapter on anger, since I scored pretty low on its ‘irritability quotient’ Test.

Skipped most of Chapter 5, because it was lots of practical activities which I think I already practice.

Wow, really eye-opening so far. Even within the first day of reading I noticed one of the 'mental distortions' Burns lists.

I think I'm going to shelve this for a while since my studying priorities have changed.

Urgh I hate how books like these always use sports analogies to describe things. I cannot relate to how the NBA coach picked his team, I never will. Using sports analogies seems like a scapegoat by Grant to make the book more accessible.