I just finished reading ​Baby Makes Three by John Gottman. Before I got married, I learned a lot from his other more popular book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, and after that I also enjoyed his book What Makes Love Last.

I finally got around to reading the sequel about relationships in parenthood, and I found it a good refresher of his main lessons. Overall, it had a lot of overlap with the other two books, and the examples it drew upon were all based on conflicts and difficulties caused by having a baby. A lot of that resonated with my experience. Even though the lessons were similar to other books, it was a good refresher to read over the years, and I found the points around softened startup and the research around heart rate during flooding to be interesting and useful.

My full notes on the book are below.

Prakhar Verma found my blog and book notes worthy of inclusion on this list of "The Best Book Summary Websites And Apps":
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https://designepiclife.com/book-summary-websites/

Check it out and find other avid readers who share their thoughts and see what books they recommend.

​Happy New Year!

2018 was a very busy year, as I got full force into angel investing and then into Epirus, my latest startup adventure. Nevertheless, I managed to ramp up my reading a bit, which I'm proud of. I think two factors contributed the most to that. First, I finally managed to get out of the house a bit more, which meant more driving and walking (and thus more time to listen to audiobooks). Second, I scaled down the number of podcasts I subscribe to, which allowed more room for reading.

I completed 31 books last year, which is still low for what I'm used to but 34% better than 2017. I hope in 2019 I can bring that number up again. The books I read in 2018 were still heavily concentrated in the baby/parenting arena because that's still a major focus of my life right now, though I did manage to include some other fiction, nonfiction, and magic in there. I also caught up on a lot of the "extra" Harry Potter books (like Fantastic Beasts) in anticipation of the new movie that came out. I want to also aim for more diversity of books in 2019.