Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts (by Oliver Burkeman)

Four weeks of meditations (aka short essays) about the transience of life, embracing limitation, embracing imperfection, and learning to live in the now.

I think I discovered this book while browsing a bookstore next door to a movie theater where I was meeting friends, and added it to my library holds. Then a friend said "oh yes this author also wrote 4000 Hours and I loved that."  So lo and behold, it ended up in my Libby app and I read one meditation per day or so for a month, 

Absolutely loved this book. So many tidbits I highlighted and sent to my friends, and I had some liberating moments along the way.  For example, I've had "try meditation" on my to-do list forever. Because I feel like I "should" be a person who meditates. But at the same time I've been able to improve my mental health a lot without it, and also, I have been diagnosed with ADHD and so meditation is hard. I can just walk in nature or do jigsaw puzzles and listen to music and make art and other things that I find relaxing and meditative. I never have to become a person who meditates! So damn it, I'm not going to1  See? LIBERATION!

I think everyone can get something out of this book and highly recommend it to nonfiction readers. 

No Crying in Baseball (by Erin Carlson)

The actual title of this book is No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of A League of Their Own: Big Stars, Dugout Drama, and a Home Run for Hollywood. Snappy! 

I feel like I say the exact same thing every time I read a book like this - it should have been an oral history! Instead we get an extensive biography of the life of Penny Marshall (really the book goes into incredible depth) and then some fun anecdotes from the film.  I knew some of them (Jimmy and Dottie kiss in one version, and Marla gets pregnant) and I didn't know others (Betty Spaghetti is played by Penny Marshall's daughter, the thigh bruise in that one scene is real and the actress lost feeling in her leg for fifteen years.) Also Madonna was a diva.

The author also takes a moment to point out the things that have aged poorly - like the lack of queer representation and the whole "Marla is ugly" plotline - which I appreciated. Overall it was a fun if somewhat oddly edited read for movie fans.  It would have made an amazing oral history though. 

I Am Not A Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything (by Joanna Stern)

The RHC category this time was "a nonfiction book about AI or social media" and I chose this one because I deal with AI too much at work (I am in tech) and at least this one seemed fun.  Stern used to be a technical writer for the Wall Street Journal (remember the vending machine that gave away free Playstations? That was her piece). 

To me this book feels very choppy, full of extremely short vignettes and experiments that Stern basically gives up on before they get interesting. (I feel like if you handed this assignment to AJ Jacobs, by god, he would commit to it. I missed his level of commitment and depth here.)

There are insightful tidbits throughout - for example, how AI diagnostics can be used to save lives when it comes to mammography, but it can be used to push unnecessary procedures and make dentists richer in dentistry.   But overall it just skims the surface of a complex topic and left me shrugging a bit.

Cassandra in Reverse (by Holly Smale)

This book is often recommended on Reddit for having a good autistic main character, similar to The Rosie Project or Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, both of which I loved. So I put this on hold at the library. And then it came up and I checked it out. And then it expired. And then I put it on hold again. And then I checked it out. But I didn't read it. And then it expired. And then I put it on hold again... I don't even want to look and see how many times. 

This book was my Libby nemesis - normally I will just tag with "Want to read" and then move on with my life but I was constantly almost starting this book and then not actually starting it. And in the end it was as  enjoyable as I'd hoped and also frankly a pretty breezy read, so I'm not sure what the mental block was there! It's about a woman named Cassandra who gets dumped and fired and asked to move out of her flat on the same day and then gets the ability to rewind time - and tries to fix her life with her newfound power. 

As per usual I popped onto Goodreads to see what The People* thought, and didn't agree with criticisms about the ending, which I thought was very touching. I enjoyed the main character and although her autism was very obvious and it was slightly weird that it was treated as a twist of sorts, it was still really good representation of a great character and I loved her growth throughout the book.  

*A funny sidenote is that one of The People gave the book a low rating because they thought the book was set in Cambridge, Massachusetts and not Cambridge, England.  The very first page mentions "a flat-share in Wathamstow" so I think this person just has major reading comprehension issues. Not all the reviews are winners.