Review: Reasons Not to Worry, by Brigid Delaney

Reasons Not to Worry is a self-help non-fiction book about stoicism, focusing specifically on quotes from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Brigid Delaney is a long-time Guardian columnist who has written on a huge variety of topics, including (somewhat relevantly to this book) her personal experiences trying weird fads.

Stoicism is having a moment among the sort of men who give people life advice in podcast form. Ryan Holiday, a former marketing executive, has made a career out of being the face of stoicism in everyone's podcast (and, of course, hosting his own). He is far from alone. If you pay attention to anyone in the male self-help space right now (Cal Newport, in my case), you have probably heard something vague about the "wisdom of the stoics."

Given that the core of stoicism is easily interpreted as a strategy for overcoming your emotions with logic, this isn't surprising. Philosophies that lean heavily on college dorm room logic, discount emotion, and argue that society is full of obvious flaws that can be analyzed and debunked by one dude with some blog software and a free afternoon have been very popular in tech circles for the past ten to fifteen years, and have spread to some extent into popular culture. Intriguingly, though, stoicism is a system of virtue ethics, which means it is historically in opposition to consequentialist philosophies like utilitarianism, the ethical philosophy behind effective altruism and other related Silicon Valley fads.

I am pretty exhausted with the whole genre of men talking to each other about how to live a better life — Cal Newport by himself more than satisfies the amount of that I want to absorb — but I was still mildly curious about stoicism. My education didn't provide me with a satisfying grounding in major historical philosophical movements, so I occasionally look around for good introductions. Stoicism also has some reputation as an anxiety-reduction technique, and I could use more of those. When I saw a Discord recommendation for Reasons Not to Worry that specifically mentioned its lack of bro perspective, I figured I'd give it a shot.

Reasons Not to Worry is indeed not a bro book, although I would have preferred fewer appearances of the author's friend Andrew, whose opinions on stoicism I could not possibly care less about. What it is, though, is a shallow and credulous book that falls squarely in the middle of the lightweight self-help genre. Delaney is here to explain why stoicism is awesome and to convince you that a school of Greek and Roman philosophers knew exactly how you should think about your life today. If this sounds quasi-religious, well, I'll get to that.

Delaney does provide a solid introduction to stoicism that I think is a bit more approachable than reading the relevant Wikipedia article. In her presentation, the core of stoicism is the practice of four virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. The modern definition of "stoic" as someone who is impassive in the presence of pleasure or pain is somewhat misleading, but Delaney does emphasize a goal of ataraxia, or tranquility of mind. By making that the goal rather than joy or pleasure, stoicism tries to avoid the trap of the hedonic treadmill in favor of a more achievable persistent contentment.

As an aside, some quick Internet research makes me doubt Delaney's summary here. Other material about stoicism I found focuses on apatheia and associates ataraxia with Epicureanism instead. But I won't start quibbling with Delaney's definitions; I'm not qualified and this review is already too long.

The key to ataraxia, in Delaney's summary of stoicism, is to focus only on those parts of life we can control. She summarizes those as our character, how we treat others, and our actions and reactions. Everything else — wealth, the esteem of our colleagues, good health, good fortune — is at least partly outside of our control, and therefore we should enjoy it when we have it but try to be indifferent to whether it will last. Attempting to control things that are outside of our control is doomed to failure and will disturb our tranquility. Essentially all of this book is elaborations and variations on this theme, specialized to some specific area of life like social media, anxiety, or grief and written in the style of a breezy memoir.

If you're familiar with modern psychological treatment frameworks like cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, this summary of stoicism may sound familiar. (Apparently this is not an accident; the predecessor to CBT used stoicism as a philosophical basis.) Stoicism, like those treatment approaches, tries to refocus your attention on the things that you can improve and de-emphasizes the things outside of your control. This is a lot of the appeal, at least to me (and I think to Delaney as well).

Hearing that definition, you may have some questions. Why those virtues specifically? They sound good, but all virtues sound good almost by definition. Is there any measure of your success in following those virtues outside your subjective feeling of ataraxia? Does the focus on only things you can control lead to ignoring problems only mostly outside of your control, where your actions would matter but only to a small degree? Doesn't this whole philosophy sound a little self-centered? What do non-stoic virtue ethics look like, and why do they differ from stoicism? What is the consequentialist critique of stoicism?

This is where the shortcomings of this book become clear: Delaney is not very interested in questions like this. There are sections on some of those topics, particularly the relationship between stoicism and social justice, but her treatment is highly unsatisfying. She raises the question, talks about her doubts about stoicism's applicability, and then says that, after further thought, she decided stoicism is entirely consistent with social justice and the stoics were right after all. There is a little bit more explanation than that, but not much. Stoicism can apparently never be wrong; it can only be incompletely understood.

Self-help books often fall short here, and I suspect this may be what the audience wants. Part of the appeal of the self-help genre is artificial certainty. Becoming a better manager, starting a business, becoming more productive, or working out an entire life philosophy are not problems amenable to a highly approachable and undemanding book. We all know that at some level, but the seductive allure of the self-help genre is the promise of simplifying complex problems down to a few approachable bullet points. Here is a life philosophy in a neatly packaged form, and if you just think deeply about its core principles, you will find they can be applied to any situation and any doubts you were harboring will turn out to be incorrect.

I am all too familiar with this pattern because it's also how fundamentalist Christianity works. The second time Delaney talked about her doubts about the applicability of stoicism and then claimed a few pages later that those doubts disappeared with additional thought and discussion, my radar went off. This book was sounding less like a thoughtful examination of one specific philosophy out of many and more like the soothing adoption of religious certainty by a convert. I was therefore entirely unsurprised when Delaney all but says outright in the epilogue that she's adopted stoicism as her religion and approaches it with the same dedicated practice that she used to bring to Catholicism. I think this is where a lot of self-help books end up, although most of them don't admit it.

There's nothing wrong with this, to be clear. It sounds like she was looking for a non-theistic religion, found one that she liked, and is excited to tell other people about it. But it's a profound mismatch with what I was looking for in an introduction to stoicism. I wanted context, history, and a frank discussion of the problems with adopting philosophy to everyday issues. I also wanted some acknowledgment that it is highly unlikely that a few men who lived 2000 years ago in a wildly different social context, and with drastically limited information about cultures other than their own, figured out a foolproof recipe for how to approach life. The subsequent two millennia of philosophical debates prove that stoicism didn't end the argument, and that a lot of other philosophers thought that stoicism got a few things wrong. You would never know that from this book.

What I wanted is outside the scope of this sort of undemanding self-help book, though, and this is the problem that I keep having with philosophy. The books I happen across are either nigh-incomprehensibly dense and academic, or they're simplified into catechism. This was the latter. That's probably more the fault of my reading selection than it is the fault of the book, but it was still annoying.

What I will say for this book, and what I suspect may be the most useful property of self-help books in general, is that it prompts you to think about basic stoic principles without getting in the way of your thoughts. It's like background music for the brain: nothing Delaney wrote was very thorny or engaging, but she kept quietly and persistently repeating the basic stoic formula and turning my thoughts back to it. Some of those thoughts may have been useful? As a source of prompts for me to ponder, Reasons Not to Worry was therefore somewhat successful. The concept of not trying to control things outside of my control is simple but valid, and it probably didn't hurt me to spend a week thinking about it.

"It kind of works as an undemanding meditation aid" is not a good enough reason for me to recommend this book, but maybe that's what someone else is looking for.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: The Shepherd's Crown, by Terry Pratchett

The Shepherd's Crown is the 41st and final Discworld novel and the 5th and final Tiffany Aching novel. You should not start here.

There is a pretty major character event in the second chapter of this book. I'm not going to say directly what it is, but you will likely be able to guess from the rest of the review. If you're particularly adverse to spoilers, you may want to skip reading this until you've read the book.

Tiffany Aching is extremely busy. Witches are responsible for all the little tasks that fall between the cracks, and there are a lot of cracks. The better she gets at her job, the more of the job there seems to be.

"Well," said Tiffany, "there's too much to be done and not enough people to do it."

The smile that the kelda gave her was a strange one. The little woman said, "Do ye let them try? Ye mustn't be afraid to ask for help. Pride is a good thing, my girl, but it will kill you in time."

And that's before an earth-shattering change in the world of witches, one that leaves Tiffany shuttling between Lancre and the Chalk trying to be too many things to too many people. Plus the kelda is worried some deeper trouble is brewing. And then Tiffany gets an exiled elven queen who has never understood the worth of other people dumped on her, and has to figure out what to do with her.

The starting idea is great. I continue to be impressed with how well Pratchett handles Tiffany's coming-of-age story. Finding one's place in the world isn't one lesson or event; it's layers of them, with each new growth in responsibility uncovering new things to learn that are often quite different from the previous problems. Tiffany has worked through child problems, adolescent problems, and new adulthood problems. Now she's on a course towards burnout, which is exactly the kind of problem Tiffany would have given her personality.

Even better, the writing at the start of The Shepherd's Crown is tight and controlled and sounds like Pratchett, which was a relief after the mess of Raising Steam. The contrast is so sharp that I found myself wondering if parts of this book had been written earlier, or if Pratchett found a new writing or editing method. The characters all sound like themselves, and although some of the turns of phrase are not quite as sharp as in earlier books, they're at least at the level of Snuff.

Unfortunately, it doesn't last. There are some great moments and some good quotes, but the writing starts to slip at about the two-thirds point, the sentences began to meander, the characters start repeating the name of the person they're talking to, and the narration becomes increasingly strained. It felt like Pratchett knew the emotional tone he wanted to evoke but couldn't find a subtle way to express it, so the story and the characters start to bludgeon the reader with Grand Statements. It's never as bad as Raising Steam, but it doesn't slip smoothly off the page to rewrite your brain the way that Pratchett could at his best.

What makes this worse is that the plot is not very interesting. I wanted to read a book about Tiffany understanding burnout, asking for help, and possibly also about mental load and how difficult delegation is. There is some movement in that direction: she takes on some apprentices, although we don't see as much of her interactions with them as I'd like, and there's an intriguing new male character who wants to be a witch. I wish Pratchett had been able to give Geoffrey his own book. He and his goat were the best part of the story, but it felt rushed and I think he would have had more impact if the reader got to see him develop his skills over time the way that we did with Tiffany.

But, alas, all of that is side story to the main plot, which is about elves.

As you may know from previous reviews, I do not get along with Pratchett's conception of elves. I find them boring and too obviously evil, and have since Lords and Ladies. Villains have never been one of Pratchett's strengths, and I think his elves are my least favorite. One of the goals of this book is to try to make them less one-note by having Tiffany try to teach one of them empathy, but I didn't find any of the queen's story arc convincing. If Pratchett had pulled those threads together with something more subtle, emotional, and subversive, I think it could have worked, but instead we got another battle royale, and Lords and Ladies did that better.

"Granny never said as she was better than others. She just got on with it and showed 'em and people worked it out for themselves."

And so we come to the end. I wish I could say that the quality held up through the whole series, and it nearly did, but alas it fell apart a bit at the end. Raising Steam I would skip entirely. The Shepherd's Crown is not that bad, but it's minor Pratchett that's worth reading mainly because it's the send-off (and there are a lot of reasons within the story to think Pratchett knew that when writing it). There are a few great lines, some catharsis, and a pretty solid ending for Tiffany, but it's probably not a book that I'll re-read.

Content warning: major character death.

Special thanks to Emmet Asher-Perrin, whose Tor.com/Reactor re-read of all of Discworld got me to pick the series up again and finally commit to reading all of it. I'm very glad I did.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher

Thornhedge is a fantasy novella by T. Kingfisher, the pen name that Ursula Vernon uses for her adult writing. It won the 2024 Hugo Award for best novella. No matter how much my brain wants to misspell the title, it is a story about a hedge, not a Neolithic earthwork.

The fairy was the greenish-tan color of mushroom stems and her skin bruised blue-black, like mushroom flesh. She had a broad, frog-like face and waterweed hair. She was neither beautiful nor made of malice, as many of the Fair Folk are said to be.

There is a princess asleep in a tower, surrounded by a wall of thorns. Toadling's job is to keep anyone from foolishly breaking in. At first, it was a constant struggle and all that she could manage, but with time, the flood of princes slowed to a trickle. A road was built and abandoned. People fled. There was a plague. With any luck, the tower was finally forgotten.

Then a knight shows up. Not a very rich knight, nor a very successful knight. Just a polite and very persistent knight who wants to get into the tower that Toadling does not want him to get into.

As you might have guessed, this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling. As you may have also guessed from the author, or from the cover text that says "not all curses should be broken," this version is a bit different. How and why it departs from the original is a surprise that slowly unfolds over the course of the story, in parallel to a delicate, cautious, and delightfully kind-hearted conversation between the knight and the fairy.

If you have read a T. Kingfisher story before, particularly one of her fractured fairy tales, you know what to expect. Toadling is one of her typical well-meaning, earnest, slightly awkward protagonists who is just trying to do the right thing in a confusing world full of problems and dangers. She's constantly overwhelmed and yet she keeps going, because what else is there to do. Like a lot of Kingfisher's writing, it's a story about quiet courage from someone who doesn't consider herself courageous. One of the twists this time is that the knight is a character from a similar vein: doggedly unwilling to leave any problem alone, but equally determined to try to be kind. The two of them together make for a story with a gentle and rather melancholy tone.

We do, eventually, learn the whole backstory of the tower, the wall of thorns, and Toadling. There is a god, a rather memorable one, who is frustratingly cryptic in the way that gods are. There are monsters who are more loving than most humans. There are humans who turn out to be surprisingly decent when it matters. And, like most of Kingfisher's writing, there is a constant awareness of how complicated the world is, how full it is of people who are just trying to get through each day, and how heavy of burdens people can shoulder when they don't see another way.

This story pulled me right in. It is not horror, although there are a few odd bits like there always are in Kingfisher stories. Your largest risk as a reader is that it might make you cry if stories about earnest people doing their best in overwhelming situations hit you that way. My primary complaint is that there was nowhere near enough ending for me. After everything I learned about the characters, I wanted to spend some time with them outside of the bounds of the story. Kingfisher points the reader in a direction and then leaves the rest to your imagination, and I can see why she chose that story construction, but I wanted more catharsis than I got.

That complaint aside, this is quintessential T. Kingfisher, and I am unsurprised that it won a Hugo. If you've read any of her other fractured fairy tales, or the 2023 Hugo winner for best novel, you know the sort of stories she tells, and you probably know whether you will like this. I am one of the people who like this.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Dark Horse, by Michelle Diener

Dark Horse is a science fiction romance novel, the first of a five book series as of this writing. It is self-published, although it is sufficiently well-edited and packaged that I had to do some searching to confirm that.

Rose was abducted by aliens. The Tecrans picked her up along with a selection of Earth animals, kept her in a cell in their starship, and experimented on her. As the book opens, she has managed to make her escape with the aid of an AI named Sazo who was also imprisoned on the Tecran ship. Sazo dealt with the Tecrans, dropped the ship in the middle of Grih territory, and then got Rose and most of the animals on shuttles to a nearby planet.

Dav Jallan is the commander of the ship the Grih sent to investigate the unexplained appearance of a Class 5 Tecran warship in the middle of their territory. The Grih and the Tecran, along with three other species, are members of the United Council, which means in theory they're all at peace. With the Tecran, that theory is often strained. Dav is not going to turn down one of their highly-advanced Class 5 warships delivered to him on a silver platter. There is only the matter of the unexpected cargo, the first orange dots (indicating unknown life forms) that most of the Grih have ever seen.

There is a romance. That romance did not work for me. I thought it was highly unprofessional on Dav's part and a bit too obviously constructed on the author's part. It also leans on the subgenre convention that aliens can be remarkably physically similar and sexually compatible, which always causes problems for my suspension of disbelief even though I know it's no less plausible than faster-than-light travel.

Despite that, I had so much fun with this book! It was absolutely delightful and weirdly grabby in a way that caught me by surprise. I was skimming some parts of it to write this review and found myself re-reading multiple pages before I dragged myself back on task.

I think the most charming part of this book is that the United Council has a law called the Sentient Beings Agreement that makes what the Tecran were doing extremely illegal, and the Grih and the other non-Tecran aliens take this very seriously and with a refreshing lack of cynicism. Rose has a typical human reaction to ending up in a place where she doesn't know the rules and isn't entirely an expected guest. She almost reflexively smoothes over miscommunications and tensions, trying to adapt to their expectations. And then, repeatedly, the Grih realize how much work she's doing to adapt to them, feel enraged at the Tecran and upset that they didn't understand or properly explain something, and find some way to make Rose feel more comfortable. It's surprisingly soothing and comforting to read.

It occurred to me in several places that Dark Horse could be read as a wish-fulfillment fantasy of what life as a woman could be like if men took their fair share of the mental load. (This concept is usually applied to housework, but I think it generalizes to other social and communication contexts.) I suspect this was not an accident.

There is a lot of wish fulfillment in this book. The Grih are very human-like but hunky, which is convenient for the romance subplot. They struggle to sing, value music exceptionally highly, and consider Rose's speaking voice beautifully musical. Her typical human habit of singing to herself is a source of immediate and almost overwhelming fascination. The supplies Rose takes from the Tecran ship when she flees just happen to be absurdly expensive scented shampoo and equally expensive luxury adaptable clothing. The world she lands on, and the Grih ship, are low-gravity compared to Earth, so Rose is unusually strong for her size. Grih military camouflage has no effect on her human vision. The book is set up to make Rose special.

If that type of wish fulfillment is going to grate, wait on this book until you're more in the mood for it. But I like wish fulfillment books when they're done well. Part of why I like to read is to imagine a better world. And Rose isn't doted on; despite their hospitality, she's constantly underestimated by the Grih. Even with their deep belief in the Sentient Beings Agreement, the they find it hard to believe that an unknown sentient, even an advanced sentient, is really their equal. Their concern at the start is somewhat patronizing, so watching Rose constantly surprise them delighted the part of my brain that likes both competence porn and deserved reversals, even though the competence here is often due to accidents of biology. It helps that Diener tells the story in alternating perspectives, so the reader first watches Rose do something practical and straightforward from her perspective and then gets to enjoy the profound surprise and chagrin of the aliens.

There is a plot beneath this first contact story, and beyond the political problem of figuring out what to do with Rose and the Tecran. Sazo, Rose's AI friend, does not want the Grih to know he exists. He has a history that Rose does not know about and may not be entirely safe. As the political situation with the Tecran escalates, Sazo is pursuing goals of his own, and Rose has a firm opinion about where her loyalties should lie. The resolution is nothing ground-breaking as far as SF goes, but I thought it was satisfyingly tense and complex. Dark Horse leaves obvious room for a sequel, but it comes to a satisfying conclusion.

The writing is serviceable, particularly once you get into the story. I would not call it great, and it's not going to win any literary awards, but it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the story.

This is not the sort of book that will make anyone's award list, but it is easily in the top five of books I had the most fun reading this year. Maybe save it for when you're looking for something light and wholesome and don't mind some rather obvious tropes, but if you're in the mood for imagining people who take laws seriously and sincerely try to help other people, I found this an utterly delightful way to pass the time. I immediately bought the sequel. Recommended.

Followed by Dark Deeds.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs

These Burning Stars is a science fiction thriller with cyberpunk vibes. It is Bethany Jacobs's first novel and the first of an expected trilogy, and won the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award for the best SF paperback original published in the US.

Generation starships brought humanity to the three star systems of the Treble, where they've built a new and thriving culture of billions. The Treble is ruled by the Kindom, a tripartite government structure built around the worship of six gods and the aristocratic power of the First Families. The Clerisy handle religion, the Secretaries run the bureaucracy, and the Cloaksaan enforce the decisions of the other branches.

The Nightfoots are one of the First Families. They control sevite, the propellant required to move between the systems of the Treble now that the moon Jeve and the sole source of natural jevite has been destroyed. Esek Nightfoot is a cleric, theoretically following the rules of the Clerisy, but she has made a career of training cloaksaan. She is is mercurial, powerful, ruthless, ambitious, politically well-connected, and greatly feared. She is also obsessed with a person named Six: an orphan she first encountered at a training school who was too young to have a gender or a name but who was already one of the best fighters in the school. In the sort of manipulative challenge typical of Esek, she dangled the offer of a place as a student and challenged the child to learn enough to do something impressive. The subsequent twenty years of elusive taunts and mysterious gifts from the impossible-to-locate Six have driven Esek wild.

Cleric Chono was beside Esek for much of that time. One of Six's classmates and another of Esek's rescues, Chono is the rare student who became a cleric rather than a cloaksaan. She is pious, cautious, and careful, the opposite of Esek's mercurial rage, but it's impossible to spend that much time around the woman and not be affected and manipulated by her. As this story opens, Chono is summoned by the First Cleric to join Esek on an assignment: recover a data coin that was stolen from a pirate raid on the Nightfoot compound. He refuses to tell them what data is on it, only saying that he believes it could be used to undermine public trust in the Nightfoot family.

Jun is a hacker with considerably fewer connections to power or government and no desire to meet any of these people. She and her partner Liis make a dubiously legal living from smaller, quieter jobs. Buying a collection of stolen data coins for an archivist consortium is riskier than she prefers, but she's been tracking down rumors of this coin for months. The deal is worth a lot of money, enough to make a huge difference for her family.

This is the second book I've read recently with strong cyberpunk vibes, although These Burning Stars mixes them with political thriller. This is a messy world with complicated political and religious systems, a lot of contentious history, and vast inequality. The story is told in two interleaved time sequences: the present-day fight over the data coin and the information that it contains, and a sequence of flashbacks telling the history of Esek's relationship with Six and Chono. Jun's story is the most cyberpunk and the one I found the most enjoyable to read, but Chono is a good viewpoint character for Esek's vicious energy and abusive charisma.

Six is not a viewpoint character. For most of the book, they're present mostly in shadows, glimpses, and consequences, but they're the strongest character of the book. Both Esek and Six are larger than life, creatures of legend stuffed into mundane politics but too full of strong emotions, both good and bad, to play by any of the rules. Esek has the power base and access to the levers of government, but Six's quiet competence and mercilessly targeted morality may make them the more dangerous of the pair.

I found the twisty political thriller part of this book engrossing and very difficult to put down, but it was also a bit too much drama for me in places. Jacobs has some surprises in store, one of which I did not expect at all, and they're set up beautifully and well-done within the story, but Esek and Six become an emotional star that the other characters orbit around and are in danger of getting pulled into. Chono is an accomplished and powerful character in her own right, but she's also an abuse victim, and while those parts are realistic, I didn't entirely enjoy reading them. There is quiet competence here alongside the drama, but I think I wanted the balance of emotion to tip a bit more towards the competence.

There is one thing that Jacobs does with the end of the book that greatly impressed me. Unfortunately I can't even hint at it for fear of spoilers, but the ending is unsettling in a way that I found surprising and thought-provoking. I think what I can say is that this book respects the intelligence and skill of secondary characters in a way that I think is rare in a story with such overwhelming protagonists. I'm still thinking about that, and it's going to pull me right into the sequel.

This is not going to be to everyone's taste. Esek is a viewpoint character and she can be very nasty. There's a lot of violence and abuse, including one rather graphic fight scene that I thought dragged on much longer than it needed to. But it's a satisfying, complex story with a true variety of characters and some real surprises. I'm glad I read it.

Followed by On Vicious Worlds, not yet published as I write this.

Content warnings: emotional and physical abuse, graphic violence, off-screen rape and sexual abuse of minors.

Rating: 7 out of 10