Good pacing, loved the beginning and it never felt slow. Nice mix of different storylines. Overall very action packed compared to some of the other books & it set the stage for the final book really well in my opinion. Really excited to finish WoT now.

Haven’t written any book reviews in more than a year so my memories aren’t fresh anymore when it comes to how I felt about this book when I finished it so this review will be a short one.

Overall I remember that I thought that the fifth book in the series was really solid. We see Rand getting more independent, Mat takes over more responsibility with the “Band of the Red Hand”, not a whole lot of Perrin chapters (which I’m okay with) and to be honest I don’t really remember a lot of what the other characters did in detail.

I really need to write these reviews immediately after finishing the book.

It took me a bit more than 4 months to finish the fourth book of the Wheel Of Time series. However I have been reading some other books on the side too. I have now decided to fully focus on the Wheel Of Time because I’m actually just a third of the way done with the whole series :D

According to Wikipedia, it is the longest book of The Wheel Of Time series even though it has fewer pages than Lord of Chaos (393 823 words).

In this book the main characters are (once again) split up. Rand goes to the Aiel Waste to learn more about the Aiel and get accepted by them as the Dragon Reborn, Egwene and Moirane/Lan also join them because Egwene is trying to improve her abilities of Dreamwalking. Perrin returns to the Two Rivers to deal with the Whitecloaks & the Trollocs (with Faile & Loial) and Nynaeve & Elayne are dealing with the Black Ajah in Tear.

Overall I really enjoyed most of the storylines and felt that the pacing was better compared to the previous books. I still really like the relationships between Faile & Perrin and Nynaeve and Elayne & co, there was also a pretty wild storyline with Tar Valon & Siuan Sanche that is now continued in book 5 as I’m reading it.

To summarise: really solid, I liked it & I’m curious to see where to story will go next (Still haven’t read any major spoilers so far :D)

I’ve been trying to get my phone usage down & just be more mindful about my technology usage in general so I decided to read this book by Cal Newport.

Overall I liked it, at first he gave examples about other people who we commited to Digital Minimalism and talked about how, for example, social media companies are trying to gain & keep our attention for as long as possible.

The book also showed how several historical figures used their times alone to deal with the issues in their lives, such as Abraham Lincoln or Henry David Thoreau who decided to live alone in the woods for a while.

The main idea was that technology should:

1. Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough)
2. Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better)
3. Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

In the last part Cal Newport tries to give some advice on how to actually start living in a way that mirrors this mindset. I talked more about how I personally am going to try to achieve this in my blog post.

All in all, I liked the book but it also didn’t contain some crazy life changing advice. I’ll have to see how well I’ll be able to embrace this mindset.

It took me quite a while to finish this book even though it’s only around 300 pages long. I started it once early last year but actually gave up on it because the story just didn’t click with me. Gave it another shot this year but I still struggled with it in the beginning. I tried listening to the audiobook for a bit (narrated by Carey Mulligan, loved her narration) which helped to at least get far enough into the story to keep going & finish it.

The book tells the story of Nora Seed who, after a suicide attempt, ends up in “The Midnight Library”, a place between life and death. There she meets Mrs. Elm, a librarian that cared for her during her childhood. She gets to experience all the lives she could have lived if she took different decisions throughout her life by picking a book from the shelves of this library. We see how her decisions shaped the lives of the people around her in all those parralell lives & how experiencing all those lives shaped her attitude towards life in general.

Overall it was nice, not blown away by it but I did enjoy the ending & the writing style was also enjoyable. Definitely a bit predictable at times though, but all in all I enjoyed it.