Rob Phippen > Recent Status Updates

Loving it so far! By concentrating purely on ‘form’, and giving delightfully ‘normal life’ examples of his own, Stephen Fry makes it really easy to enjoy writing a bit of correctly structured, but in my case almost certainly ‘dreadful’ poetry a breeze. It’s fun.

A superb introduction. I had ignored poetry for decades, and had an impulse to look into it. This book takes you all the way from knowing nothing at all, to having a very decent grounding in how to approach reading poetry to get maximum enjoyment, a tour of traditional poetry, and a good, long section on how to go about writing poetry.

I’m very impressed with this book, and would recommend to anyone.

So far, so excellent! I'm especially enjoying watching the Stanford U lectures on youtube - delivered by Leonard Susskind - that mirror the chapters of this book. The two go together perfectly.

Not even half way through, and this book is already easily the most useful discussion I have come across on various aspects of mindfulness and Buddhist thinking, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.

It is notably excellent on the Buddhist notion of ‘not self’, which I have variously found either incomprehensible or alarming, giving it a scientific grounding.

Loving this book, such an original setting, and happy to be at the start of a long series of books. Let’s hope they are all as good as this one.

This book ‘clicked’ with me early on. This phrase “Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits” compresses the central idea down nicely.

I like the shift ... a focus on habits that support your goals, rather than the goals themselves.

I already think that this is the best book I have yet read this year. More when I’m done...

Very unusually giving up now. I'm afraid that this book is just too trite and juvenile for me.

Only a quarter of the way through this book, and loving it. It's a curious mixture: the writing style, even allowing for the translation, reminds me more of detective fiction than science fiction, but with a lovely lyrical tone. The subject matter is the hardest of hard sci fi - questions about the nature of physics. It's so good that - to quote an inverted ad campaign - 'I forbid you to try it' :-)