Ben Landrum > Recent Status Updates

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Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 52% done with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
I’ve never been a Yud fan but I get it.
Jan 03, 2026 07:12PM Add a comment
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 28% done with Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1)
“In gym we had a lecture on the rules of badminton […] the best part was the coach didn’t finish”

How could explaining badminton possibly take so long? Is this some kind of Theory of Racket Sports class?
Nov 17, 2025 06:39AM Add a comment
Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1)

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 19% done with Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1)
Olive theory but for blood
Nov 17, 2025 05:29AM Add a comment
Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1)

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum added a status update
Just read this on substack:
https://residualthoughts.substack.com...
and I have to say I'm intrigued. I think I might start working through some of these just to broaden my horizons (?) be obnoxious about them (?). The feng shui one sounds especially fun.
Nov 07, 2025 03:38PM 2 comments

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 40% done with Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience – Strategies for Breaking Free from Sameness and Selling Ideas with Conviction
He says this book was almost titled “putting on the rizz”, which sounds like a book of techniques for pickup artists. Even entertaining such a title raises serious questions about both his judgement and communication skills.
Nov 03, 2025 07:34AM Add a comment
Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience – Strategies for Breaking Free from Sameness and Selling Ideas with Conviction

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 35% done with Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience – Strategies for Breaking Free from Sameness and Selling Ideas with Conviction
Only a person who has never seen a presentation written with Beamer could say mathematical equations make a presentation more memorable and easier to understand
Nov 03, 2025 06:48AM Add a comment
Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience – Strategies for Breaking Free from Sameness and Selling Ideas with Conviction

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 20% done with A Naked Singularity
A lot of discussion of 24 being old here. Concerning…
Oct 10, 2025 03:20PM Add a comment
A Naked Singularity

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 43% done with Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
Greatly moved by the image of the little French children spinning around singing about the windmill that’s too fast. This, Frere Jacques, how are they so good at nursery rhymes?
Aug 02, 2025 06:07PM 2 comments
Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 6% done with Eat What You Kill: Becoming a Sales Carnivore
“My next birthday cake will still have fewer than 35 candles, but I’ve done and seen a lot”
Fascinating prose. Like a personal statement written by a 34 year old.
Feb 12, 2025 06:25PM Add a comment
Eat What You Kill: Becoming a Sales Carnivore

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 5% done with Eat What You Kill: Becoming a Sales Carnivore
Recommended by my dad. So far seems to be about how to become the sigma male of door to door sales.
Feb 12, 2025 06:21PM Add a comment
Eat What You Kill: Becoming a Sales Carnivore

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 72% done with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
“10,000 birds die every year from smashing into windows”
Outlandishly implausible number. 27 per day? There are individual buildings that kill more birds than that.
To get something closer to the actual number, square that and multiply it by 10. In the US alone!
Dec 11, 2024 02:28PM Add a comment
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 84% done with The Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #4)
What could it possibly mean for something to be “glowing vaguely orange”
Aug 31, 2024 07:35AM Add a comment
The Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #4)

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 31% done with The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War, #1)
A character tells an anecdote about a professor ritually sacrificing the class pet to make a point about anthropomorphizing insects at the end of the semester. The IACUC probably hates this guy!
Aug 15, 2024 06:54AM Add a comment
The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War, #1)

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 92% done with The Overstory
Guy who’s going to prison and is unbothered by missing his 5 year old’s childhood bc he’s unusually fastidious:
https://x.com/sadiqojn/status/1070995...
Feb 15, 2024 05:12AM Add a comment
The Overstory

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is on page 21 of 502 of The Overstory
*Throwing darts at the list of C keywords*

“lift up their heads from their ‘do’ loops long enough to dole out the liter soda bottles and break pizza crusts together”
Feb 12, 2024 04:20AM Add a comment
The Overstory

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 53% done with Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
It had never occurred to me that the Cherokee syllabary would have had to be post-Columbian if nobody on the East Coast had writing when the Europeans showed up. Thought provoking stuff.
Jan 28, 2024 09:04AM 1 comment
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 39% done with A Tale of Two Cities
“One who would give his life to keep what life you live beside you” ok maybe not much of a spoiler in the intro
Nov 27, 2023 06:26PM Add a comment
A Tale of Two Cities

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 30% done with A Tale of Two Cities
Very strange that the introduction to this book was a synopsis with the notable quotes and ending. I had some idea how the story went just from osmosis, but I feel like knowing the context of the second good quote (“it is a far, far better thing that I do[…]”) from the jump might limit its emotional impact.
Nov 27, 2023 06:07AM Add a comment
A Tale of Two Cities

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 70% done with Pride and Prejudice
If Mr. Darcy had mentioned earlier he’s got a good creek for fishin’ she probably would’ve said yes the first time he proposed😏
Nov 17, 2023 05:09AM Add a comment
Pride and Prejudice

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 47% done with The Forever War (The Forever War, #1)
A little surreal to hear a dystopian description of Hyattsville, MD when I’m about a 10 minute walk away. Hyattsville specifically is much sleepier than he predicts. Greenbelt is a better match.
Oct 04, 2023 03:20AM Add a comment
The Forever War (The Forever War, #1)

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 34% done with The Stand
If guns exploded half as often as Stephen King thinks they do, there would be parts of the US with 1.5 hands for every head
Sep 29, 2023 07:31AM Add a comment
The Stand

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum added a status update
Just rewatched Young Frankenstein, which as a big Mel Brooks guy I've always loved, and it reminded me of Frankenstein the book, which I remember loving in 8th grade.

I think I'll definitely revisit it, if you're interested in book club-ing it lmk and we can time our reads similarly.
Aug 24, 2023 07:45PM Add a comment

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 16% done with Diaspora
The unnatural inflection of the guy who reads the Greg Egan audiobooks is annoying, but much more annoying is hearing him butcher the name of every mathematician. So far he’s gotten to ‘Yooler’, ‘Rye-mann’, and ‘Fermit’s last theorem’. I don’t know why audiobook readers are so unwilling to google pronunciations for this kind of thing.
Aug 21, 2023 12:08PM Add a comment
Diaspora

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 61% done with The Summer I Turned Pretty (Summer, #1)
The other family who abandons the dad to work every summer while they all live at the beach are getting divorced… wonder what sources of conflict could exist in that relationship…
Aug 11, 2023 06:46PM Add a comment
The Summer I Turned Pretty (Summer, #1)

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 51% done with The Summer I Turned Pretty (Summer, #1)
“[…] like one of those samurais [sic]”
“How do you know about samurais?[sic]”

Literally find me a 17 year old who doesn’t know what a samurai is. That’s like the third most conspicuous Japanese idea in popular culture behind ramen and ninjas.
Aug 11, 2023 06:32PM Add a comment
The Summer I Turned Pretty (Summer, #1)

Ben Landrum
Ben Landrum is 34% done with The Summer I Turned Pretty (Summer, #1)
Who are these people that they can go to the beach for a quarter of every year? The intersection between people who make enough for two homes (one of which is presumably on at least moderately prime land within walking distance of the beach) and people who take summers off seems exceedingly small.
Aug 11, 2023 05:02PM Add a comment
The Summer I Turned Pretty (Summer, #1)

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