toggle_fow's reviews
1008 reviews

• The elephant in every room, the single point upon which this whole book turns, is what will happen to Vanja and Emeric? After Vanja's awful second-book betrayal, and all the growing they did in The Fallow Year, CAN there be a future for them?

• I am happy to report that I thought this was handled extremely well. They meet again right away, without too much faffing about, and of course it isn't pleasant. They both have a well-practiced abrasive dynamic, like a poisoned, bitter version of their more playful antagonism from book 1. The way that they struggle and stumble their way back around to forgiveness, understanding, and love is something that's not necessarily easy to write, but Margaret Owen pulled it off neatly. 

• The tongue-in-cheek, snide narrative tone. I missed Vanja's signature first-person narration in The Fallow Year, and am glad to have it back! In general, the humor was a win for me. (Even the lowkey meme references.) I also thought the way the cat's meows were transliterated was SO funny.
• I like Lilje a lot. I don't like Benno as much, but he plays a much smaller role than Lilje, who in general was a joy to have around.

• Death and Fortune were around a lot more! I also loved evolving lore of the Pfennigeist, and the double-sided sword of the people's belief. The bits of power Vanja got to use were great, but the unreliability and heavy downside of it made it seem like more than just a "get out of jail free" card.

• Ozkar is extremely noxious and I'm glad he got to come back as an antagonist. He deserves it.

• There are repeated tiny excerpts exploring Vanja's choices by showing all the lives she might have led, if she had done something different at various points in the past. These eventually get tied into the main narrative, but for me, even more important that this motif's relevance to the later story, was how it nearly convinced me that Vanja had really, truly done her best. These vignettes almost seemed to be saying that if Vanja had tried to make it work with Emeric earlier on in the story, they would have been doomed to failure. I'm not sure I believe that, but they certainly made me think about her seeming self-destructiveness in a different way.

• The pearls. Control and freedom to choose have always been huge themes in this series, and I thought the pearls were a great mechanism to continue to explore this, as well as being a scary, high-stakes problem to overcome.

• Info dumps and flashbacks. At the beginning especially there are a lot of long sections where the POV character will interrupt their own thoughts to explain some point of worldbuilding, or jump back to an extended long-ago memory. This is quite common, but the extent to which it was happening annoyed me at first.

• LONG PROLOGUE. I went into this book relatively blind, and the prologue was so long (though high-stakes and interesting) that I genuinely didn't even realize it was a prologue. Then we finally met Neema (at the 7% mark - I went back to check) and I was kind of miffed and taken aback. What about the people I had already spent 7% of the book getting invested in?!?

• Wishy-washy point of view. There are several POVs in the book, which is not unusual. However, the way that the POV slides back and forth nebulously, sometimes more than once in a single scene, is usually either a) a facet of third person omniscient perspective OR b) the habit of an amateur, novice writer. This book is neither. It struck me as strange at first, but wasn't jarring or distracting the way it is when it's done due to inexperience. Then, midway through the book, it starts to make sense as the in-world REASON for this semi-omniscience begins to show itself...

•  Similar to the previous point, sprinkled generously through the book are some rhetorical flourishes that address the reader. "Let us wing our way to the Raven Palace" type of fourth-wall breaking narration that would be much more common in literature from the 1800s. At first this struck me as odd and not particularly welcome, but again, like the POV-shifting, it becomes much more natural and even necessary as you continue reading.

This book was okay, but very brief and cursory. It's written for every possible audience, so a lot of its very few pages are taken up with Biblical explanation and backstory that most practicing Christians and Jews probably already know.

It seemed like it didn't trust you to be interested or continue reading unless it tried to make every stage of the Bible's history into some Indiana Jones adventure and threw in a lot of references and "but you WONT BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED THEN" and "but that's NOTHING compared to WHAT'S NEXT" clickbait-style teasers at the end of every chapter.

Honestly, it reminded me of those books people re-write for teenagers that are exactly like the adult version except trying way too hard because teenagers' brains can only read 140 characters at a time, right? It also seemed to be not-so-subtly name-dropping the museum that published it a lot.

I wanted:

• More about the apocrypha!!!!!!!!!!! This ranks among a lot of people's, even Christians', top questions! The book explained about the different Bible compilations different denominations and church fathers have approved of, and listed five tests the early church used to evaluate supposedly-divine manuscripts, but that was about it.

What I want to know is: WHY. Why, using these five tests, did different early churches come up with different lists of divine books? What was their reasoning? What is the content of the book that is debated over? The World's Greatest Book talked about some Gnostic gospels, and other letters that claim to be of inspired origin, but "scholars believe were authored in the 3rd century."

Like, okay, but... why? Why do scholars believe that? Why did the early church not credit these books? Why did the early church dispute over whether 1, 2, 3 John were inspired? You can't just say "scholars believe" without saying why! You can't just tell me an apocryphal book's origins are shady and not tell me why.

• More about the "oral Torah" compiled in the Mishnah. This I had never heard of before, and I needed way more information about it than I received. Where did the idea of Moses's "oral law" alongside the written Law come from? What are these oral laws? How do they make it possible for Judaism to be practiced "more flexibly" in different circumstances? GIVE ME THE DETAILS YOU COWARDS.

If you already know the top three Wikipedia facts about Moses, Martin Luther, the Vulgate, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Council of Nicaea, and Henry VIII, I would advise skipping this book and going for something a little more in-depth.

As a twenty-something who is trying her best but increasingly freaking out about how quickly life is passing me by, I expected this book to give me an ulcer and a stress hangover. And yeah, it was kind of stressful, in the way that facing the undefined vastness of your future life always is, but it didn't honestly pressure me any more than I am already pressuring myself.

This isn't a book that tells an already-hustling twentysomething the secret key to landing their dream job in the midst of an unfriendly economy. It's not a book that tells an already-hustling twentysomething from an underprivileged background and with no support network how to jump start their dream career in a field that requires a graduate degree for an even entry-level position without burying themselves in $200k of debt or health problems from lack of sleep.

The Defining Decade is a book that tells stagnating twentysomethings who are just ignoring their opportunities that the good life they want comes from being intentional, not just letting life happen to you accidentally day by day. INTENTIONALITY is definitely the underlying basis of the book's thesis. Plan for things. Go after goals. Hustle. This is, I'm sure, good advice, but I wonder whether the kind of twentysomethings Jay is writing to typically read self-help books about improving their lives.

The advice about intentionality wasn't overly impactful to me, since I stress myself out about that kind of thing on the regular. Intentionality is my middle name. What I found most valuable was the middle part of the book, the chapter about "calming yourself down."

You can't help but feel like a freak when you're crying every day at work, when you hate waking up alive every morning because it means going to work again, when you develop a weird PTSD-like reaction to your boss's voice. I don't know about you, but my thoughts tend to loop around like this: This isn't how life was meant to be, right? Am I doing this all wrong? This stage can't last forever, can it? Please tell me it ends. Did everyone else go through this stage? How can everyone else be so calm and happy and assured when I constantly feel like I'm just five seconds away from losing it?

This section on calming down described my own feelings in more accuracy than I would have thought possible, and helped me feel not alone. Jay's philosophy of focusing on day-by-day small accomplishments, working 10,000 hours to confidence, gave me hope that the terror does have an end.

I'm not sure who this book is for, exactly, because it seems like there are more people who will fall outside its realm of influence, either by circumstance or by self-selection, than people who it will apply to. But even though it seemed like only parts of it were useful, I came away feeling encouraged rather than torn down, which was more than I hoped for.

This book was SO annoying.

He presents pages and pages of other people's research into scattered aspects of how brains work through four pretend people whose lives he's made up to illustrate his points. Harold and Erica are the main ones, but we also spend a ton of time having to hang out with Harold's parents. "This is the happiest story you've ever read!" the book claims, for some reason. In reality, the events of Harold's and Erica's lives range from stressful and frustrating to downright tragic. How the heck does Brooks claim any of this counts as happy at all, much less the HAPPIEST STORY EVER?

Maybe Brooks has never read any fiction books, because wow. This "story" such as it is -- in no way qualifies as "happy."

As you can see, I am overly concerned with Harold and Erica. What does it matter if their lives were happy, given that the point of this book was just to convey to me facts about neuroscience research?
It matters because Harold and Erica were horrible distractions.

I'm not against conveying scientific findings by means of story. Deborah Tannen basically does that through 100% of her books, and it works for me. It's a lubricating vehicle, the spoonful of sugar to help the otherwise dry science and statistics go down. My problem with Harold and Erica is that they did not lubricate anything, and instead threw up barriers to accessing what would have otherwise been interesting science.

Stories and anecdotes work to convey abstract, complicated ideas by encapsulating them in situations we all can instinctively understand, and by catching and holding your interest easier than a detailed page of statistical analysis could. Harold and Erica failed at being effective lubrication first because they were boring. Their "story" did not hold my interest any better than if Brooks had simply presented his information in organized chapters and argued transparently for his conclusions. In fact, it actively disengaged my interest by annoying the hell out of me.

I picked up this book because I wanted to learn about sociology and the brain -- not because I just really wanted to read about two flat caricatures falling in temporary love and living implausible, unsatisfying lives. If I wanted that, I could have read one of those classics, like Mrs. Dalloway, and gotten way more street cred -- the ones that make you existentially uncomfortable and seem like they're about nothing while actually being a deep examination of the human condition.

Second, the disjointed treatment of Harold and Erica's stories dragged The Social Animal down by constantly distracting from the point of the book. Harold and Erica are paper-mache intellectual models, not real characters from a novel, so of course they aren't treated like novel characters, nor should they be. Brooks didn't need to spend every moment of every day with them, so in my opinion the time jumps he did were fine and necessary. What wasn't fine was the way some massive, life-altering conflict between them would be introduced... and never resolved.

Harold desperately wants kids, and Erica screams at him when he brings it up. Why? We don't know. The book never mentions this conflict again. Harold and Erica go through a horrible period where they resent each other for years and barely speak, living together as strangers in the same house. Erica cheats on Harold, then regrets it and thinks about how she needs to "repair her marriage." Next chapter, years have gone by and they're all good again.

At this point, I've had to emotionally invest in Harold and Erica a little just to get through the book without ripping out all my hair -- and I'm PREOCCUPIED by this. They hated each other last chapter! What happened? I can't just let that go -- no explanation, not even a throwaway line to handwave it. Did Brooks not need to do any chapters on the neuroscience of resolving conflict or anything? Same with the kids/no kids fight. I can't concentrate on the statistics Brooks is flinging at me when I'm wondering WTH is up with Erica's aversion to children, why they never hashed this out, and how Harold doesn't spend the rest of his life resenting Erica!

Even though straw men like Harold and Erica don't deserve the detail and focus a novel would lavish on them, these kind of holes are too careless, too choppy, when they're glaring enough to actually distract from the information Brooks is trying to convey. They leave me confused. The book claims to show "how success is achieved," but I've read the whole thing and still have no idea how success is achieved. Is it achieved by faffing about until you meet a hot girl and then marry her and then spend the rest of your life as her mildly dissatisfied but passive kept husband? Is it achieved by striving so constantly and working so feverishly every day that all enriching relationships fall by the wayside, including your marriage? Because those are the only two options I see presented here.

In addition, I believe Harold and Erica made the book worse by acting as crutches. The infinite variation of having their whole lives as a canvas, from the cradle to the grave, allowed Brooks to unleash a monologue on any topic of interest even vaguely related to the science of the unconscious mind. In chapter after chapter, he jumped from topic to topic, giving brief insights about each, but not following any overarching theme for the whole book except "the unconscious mind." He makes some point that the influence of the unconscious mind is underestimated in today's rationalist society, but that's as close as I can come to "the Big Point" to take away from The Social Animal.

The information I learned is fragmented and scattered. If someone said, "So tell me some cool insights you learned from that book!" I would be at a loss. When the topic of babies' development comes up in conversation in the future, I will remember some tidbits about how they cry in sympathy with recordings of other babies crying, and not with a recording of their own cries! But I wouldn't be able to summarize anything for you. It's all disorganized, isolated facts, because disorganized, isolated facts were nearly all the book offered.

Finally, I think the device of Harold and Erica weakened the book by forcing/allowing Brooks to not really delve into any detail with or have to really prove his research. Using Deborah Tannen as a counterexample again - her use of anecdotes to support her theories comes off as weighty and valid because they are the stories of REAL people that she knows and has surveyed. Their single experience, while possibly not the best evidence, is at least EVIDENCE to support or detract from Tannen's findings.

Harold and Erica are not evidence. They are straw men, and their story affirms none of Brooks' conclusions or arguments. Their story allows you to understand his views better, perhaps, but it is HUGE and time-consuming. It is literally the whole book. Using all that page space and effort on a mere illustrative parable means that Brooks has very little room to go into specifics on the actual research he cites, or expand on how such-and-such a study actually supports his opinion that systematic societal ills are only treatable through cultural initiatives, or whatever.

This is supposed to be a book providing insights on neuroscience and sociology, not Animal Farm.