Stephanie Plum – books 4 to 6

I keep reading the Stephanie Plum series. My original plan was to get to book 5 but I’m going to extend that to book 10. The series keeps being cool and I consistently award high scores.

Stephanie Plum is a headhunter who does more and more PI work and less and less headhunting. She somehow manages to trigger events that lead to flying dead bodies and crashing criminal enterprises. She’s far too lucky though, the cars would always explode when she wasn’t inside and the bullets would miss. I think this is turning into a main positive feature of the series – you can rely on her having some Ring World-style extreme luck and that it will all be okay.

There’s a lingering love story between her and a few gigachads. Janet Evanovich doesn’t let that stand in the way of a good thriller. It’s more of a reminder that Stephanie Plum is a human and has feelings than an actual love story. Both men I’ve previously described as translucent – they are like imaginary resource-rich and powerful genies, essences of some dominant male-ness, and are almost as good as ghosts. Unlike these two, all the other characters, new and recurring, keep being fresh and vivid.

Thanks to this series (and blogging about it), I’m on track to have my best month for reading in years.

Another reason to be kind

In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

I found this nice 2012 article on r/psychology about how our experience and intuition fool us into making wrong predictions. The emphasis in the article is on underestimating others and overestimating ourselves. It says that there’s no amount of knowledge about the thinking errors and biases that will make our thinking quality better but it can make us slow down and invest more effort when we recognize that we would like good results.

Not sure if the article is worth a $6 subscription but is definitely worth the read, and so is the main source for it – the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.