Pick yourself up and try again

I was recommended Bill Burnett and Dave Evans' Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life on the advice of a career coach, since we have hit a bit of a rut in the old career game. I had been sort of intending to do something about that as a goal for 2018, but then I had to move unexpectedly and that kind of threw the whole year out of whack. Anyway, I did finish reading Designing Your Life by the end of the year, so I should review it by the end of the year, even though I haven't done all the exercises. 

 

Yes, there are exercises! Thus far they seem like pretty good ones; I'm only not finished because one of the involves tracking what you do at work for two weeks, and it's been a weird two weeks with the holidays. I might need to get at least through the end of this week (which will have four whole workdays) before I can move on to the exercises based on the tracking. But the earlier exercises were definitely thought-provoking, and I think the later ones will be too once I sit down and do them. One thing I learned from the earlier exercises I did do is that I work too much, because, while my main job is good about not going over 40 hours a week, I have taken on a lot of additional work outside of that main day job, and it adds up. I kind of knew that already but it's good to have it spelled out and to take a look at all the other stuff that's getting short shrift because of it. 

 

Overall, I quite liked this book, as far as self-help books go -- it's written in a pretty breezy, low-key style, but it takes on some of the more overhyped nonsense that plagues some other sorts of career self-help books ("I can do anything at all all by myself if I have enough dedication and willpower!" No, you probably can't). The more holistic approach I think is fairly healthy and the emphasis on trying stuff and going back and learning from prototypes, etc. I am reasonably optimistic that the concepts in this book will be helpful, or at least thought-provoking, as I try in 2019 to claw back some more control over what I'm doing with my time and to try to do things on purpose rather than because I have to or because I've committed without planning. 

The title is a ginormous spoiler

I'm so glad I'm in the BSpec book club; sometimes it seems like the only thing keeping me reading any SF/F at all. This time around, we read Kristen Ciccarelli's The Last Namsara, a debut fantasy novel from last year about a teenage princess who, for her crimes, has become her country's greatest dragon-hunter in atonement. 

 

This was an excellent read for me to indulge in around Christmas, since it is the season for comfort food, and this book is very much in the mold of things that are comfort reading for me -- an action-adventurey heroine, dragons, stories being Very Important, eradicating a great social injustice (in this case, slavery, which is bad, if you didn't know), all that fun stuff. Onto this mix of Things That Are Catnip To Me When I Am Tired And Seasonally Depressive, basically the make-or-break criterion is going to be whether the plot is sufficiently complex for me not to guess the twist a hundred pages out, and in this case, I didn't (not that I was trying too hard). So, with the conspiracy sufficiently conspiratorial, I was perfectly happy to indulge some of the more common goofy fantasy tropes -- names with too many Ks in them, a heavily telegraphed romance bumping up against the heroine's obligatory emotional underdevelopment, an arranged marriage of fantastically unsubtle terribleness. Also the book uses the term "soldat" instead of "soldier" for world-buildy flavor and it threw me off because "soldat" is French and the kingdom in this book is otherwise vaguely Middle Eastern-flavored, but perhaps that's on me for being a language nerd. Or perhaps it does make sense and is actually very deep because the French colonized North Africa and the protagonist's father's regime is bent on eradicating the "old ways" and subjugating the populace in the surrounding countryside. I don't know. 

 

Overall, I think we'll find stuff to discuss even if right now all I've got is "I liked it, it has dragons and stories." 

Everybody loves Rosa

My tendency to only read things for book clubs is beginning to negatively impact my desire to write thorough reviews of the books.

 

In January, my DSA chapter is having a discussion group for Kate Evans' acclaimed graphic novel biography, Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, about the Polish-German revolutionary feminist who also had a doctorate in economics, something which nobody had bothered to tell me. So I certainly learned a lot of cool stuff about Rosa Luxemburg, which is a plus. The book quotes extensively from her writings, as well as going over some rudimentary Marxist theory, like when teenage Rosa explains bits of Capital Volume I to her brothers. 

 

I have somewhat mixed feelings about the art style -- it's got a sort of loose-drawn quality that I'm not always the hugest fan of and that combines very interestingly with the general expressionist vibe that makes me not like it quite as much as I want to, because I want it to be more German Expressionist-y than it actually is. I don't know. I feel bad saying that because it's certainly well done and very expressive, but... I don't know. I am not great at appreciating graphic novels, frankly. Although I do appreciate that you can read them real fast, so this was a nice break between reading actual text-only theory and reading more actual text-only theory. 

 

One of my favorite bits was the note at the end about how Luxemburg's legacy has been constructed and reconstructed, and the way she's been claimed and disavowed and then claimed again by all the various sects of the Left. It is certainly illustrative of why we'll never win, at any rate. One of my other favorite bits was when she got a cat -- there are a number of moments like that included, that make her more relatable than such a superhumanly driven character might otherwise be. I think it'll prove to be a fun discussion -- and it'll be interesting to see who shows up, as there seems to be a good deal of interest in the event!