Elaine – Page 3 – elaine nelson, aka epersonae

1/29/2019

e galactic mu

author: Sunday Williams
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2013/09/01
date added: 2019/01/29
shelves: ebook, fiction, sci-fi, didnt-finish
review:

1/12/2019

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

author: Merve Emre
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/01/12
date added: 2019/01/12
shelves: history, non-fiction, psychology
review:
There was a very good article going around about the history of the MBTI: this is the book-length version, after the author got so intrigued that she had to keep going. And it’s a fascinating story, all tied up in the birth of both modern psychology and the white-collar workplace, a story of two women who married ideas that wouldn’t seem to go together at all, and yet by the time I was a babby professional, were EVERYWHERE.

I really wish she’d had access to the official archives of the organization that owns MBTI, because I think the last third of the book could have been so much richer for it. My other wish is that she’d covered more about where other personality testing went in the 60s and later; it seems like the MBTI is in dialogue with so many other personality testing systems and I would have liked to have known more.

(But honestly, the entirety of this book was made by two extremely weird facts: Briggs having written Reader/Jung fanfic, and type testing having been carried out on an entire high school without the parents’ knowledge or permission.)

11/23/2018

The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins

author: Clint McElroy
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2018/11/23
shelves: d-and-d, fantasy, favorites, fiction, graphic-novel, own
review:
Just happened to see this while scrolling through my “to-read” list — and apparently I’m so bad at keeping up my goodreads reviews that I never posted that I did in fact get, read, and love the TAZ graphic novel. (the first TAZ graphic novel, what?!)

It’s a delightful adaptation that keeps the meta-fictional qualities that I love about this show and the personalities of the characters as well, while streamlining what is arguably the roughest and most awkward of the arcs. Carey Pietch’s art is charming and expressive, and her Madame Director is the [static noise] of my heart. The little details from later in the show are a real treat, too. (Miller Enterprises! Brad Bradson! Carey Fangbattle!)

As a mega-fan, it’s strange and somewhat disappointing to run across all the IP-based name changes, but such is life under capitalism.

And honestly, writing this makes me want to read it again (and to finally get around to putting up the B&N special edition poster).

9/22/2018

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

author: Erik Larson
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2018/09/22
shelves: history, non-fiction, ebook
review:
Covered the first year of their lives in Berlin in great detail, but felt odd how quickly he glossed over the rest of their time (3 more years?).

5/7/20185/7/2018

Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery

author: Cathryn Jakobson Ramin
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2018/05/07
shelves: health, non-fiction, science, self-help
review:
A fairly thorough look at issues around back pain, mostly through the lens of the author’s experience. I do have something of a class critique, that I’m not quite sure how to formulate? It feels judgy when she moves outside of her own sphere of upper-middle-class professionals. But there are some specific things in part two that I might actually look into myself. (I’ve had pretty good results with the McKenzie method, FWIW.)