Author: knari

Lyudmila Petranovskaya “If It’s Difficult with a Child”

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The book If It’s Difficult with a Child by Lyudmila Petranovskaya is part of the “Close People” series. I decided to read it almost immediately after finishing the first book in the series, The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life. The first book focused on the various stages of a child’s development and how their behavior changes significantly during each stage. In this new book, the focus shifts to something else—how to deal with challenging situations when “it’s difficult with a child.” Both I and Lyudmila Petranovskaya are careful not to say “a difficult child” because it’s usually the situations that are difficult, while the child often becomes difficult due to the circumstances.

In this book, the author also addresses various situations, but one of the main messages is to try to see things from the child’s perspective and to understand why they act the way they do. Often, once you do, their behavior seems much more logical and even obvious.

This applies to many situations where something is forbidden for the child but allowed for adults. There are countless examples, starting with “you have to go to bed at 9 PM” or “you can only play on the computer for half an hour.” The child sees that their parents don’t go to bed that early, so why should they? Or if their father spends most of his time in front of a monitor (regardless of what he’s doing), why should the child be limited to just half an hour? Simple prohibitions no longer work in such cases, as the child doesn’t see any logic behind them.

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Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”

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A few months ago, I got the impression that everyone in my reading circle had gone crazy over “Sapiens” by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Nearly everyone either read the book or expressed their intent to do so.

The reviews from those who had read it were overwhelmingly positive (for example, on Goodreads, the book currently has an average rating of 4.45 out of 5, based on almost 300,000 (!) ratings). And since I love history, I couldn’t pass it by.

Jumping ahead a bit, I’ll say that my rating turned out to be significantly lower than the average. Here’s why.

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No more showing off: now there are two hamsters

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I played around with moving the blog to a separate hosting and eventually decided that there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken. So, the blog has returned to WordPress.com, along with all the posts I made since “going independent.” All subscriptions have been restored, and everything is accessible again.

However, I decided to make some changes in the process: it’s now a joint blog for my wife and me. We’ll be posting under different names. You can already see several of her posts, like A Housewife Against Society. For now, some pages still act like it’s a solo blog, but we’ll fix that soon.

Also, for old WordPress subscribers, I’d like to remind you that the blog now has its own Telegram channel, where I post links to all new entries. Feel free to subscribe: https://t.me/knari_gluk (only in Russian).

Henry Lion Oldie “A Hero Must Be Alone”

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“A Hero Must Be Alone” was the very first book I read from the works of Henry Lion Oldie. Probably because I’ve loved Greek mythology since childhood. I remember how this novel opened up a new author for me back then. Soon after, I read the next book in the “Achaean Cycle,” but I didn’t get to the third one until many years later. Although “The Grandson of Perseus” is the third book in the cycle, it’s the first one chronologically, as it tells the story of Amphitryon, the mortal father of the legendary Heracles.

After reading it, I decided it was time to go back to the beginning and reread “A Hero Must Be Alone“, the book I loved so much in my younger years. This year marks a special anniversary for the novel—25 years since its first publication. A solid milestone for a test of time. I’ll admit, I was a bit apprehensive because I’ve been burned a few times when rereading novels I had the fondest memories of, only to realize that each book has its time, and now it no longer resonates with me as it once did.

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Boris Akunin “The Life of Remarkable People and Animals”

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Boris Akunin is an extraordinary author. Whatever he writes, it always turns out to be interesting. True, some of his books may not be great overall, but they are always engaging to read. In much the same way, I used to follow his posts on LiveJournal, where Boris Akunin would share notes about people and events that piqued his interest.

The book “The Life of Remarkable People and Animals” is essentially a collection of those posts, gathered under one cover and published in book form.

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Sasha Galitsky “Mama, Don’t Worry!”

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Interestingly, the book Mama, Don’t Worry! by Sasha Galitsky was given to me by my wife. Not with any specific intent, she just liked the description, and she knows that in recent years I’ve been very interested in the topic of growing up (see my previous post, which touches on this as well—We Will Sing With the Voices).

The book has a subtitle: How to Learn to Communicate with Elderly Parents Without Losing Your Own Mind? It’s not that my parents are elderly yet (may they outlive us all), nor that I’m losing my mind when talking to them. But it’s interesting to explore why this issue might arise at all, and where I might end up in my own “development.”

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We will sing with the voices

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I write a lot about books, but I’ve decided to turn my attention to life and music videos—songs that have intertwined with my sense of self in surprising ways.

Age brings interesting changes to how we perceive the world. I’m sure I’m still far from the wisdom of the elders, but even at 42, I can see how different I am from my twenty-year-old self.

We start to enjoy books we once thought were boring, while the ones we once loved now seem odd (how could I have liked that?). The same goes for songs, even from artists I never listened to before—they suddenly feel relevant.

But deep down, you still feel like the same young guy, thinking not much has changed. Then you catch your reflection in the mirror or look at your kids and realize that others no longer see you the way you feel. And you don’t even have to look far. At work, you see all these truly young people, full of energy and just beginning their careers.

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Patrick Lencioni “Death by Meeting”

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Before diving into the book Death by Meeting, I’d like to share how I first became acquainted with the author’s work.

Patrick Lencioni is a very unconventional business writer and consultant. He is best known as the author of the bestseller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This isn’t a typical management book—many refer to it as a business novel. I’m not sure if Lencioni invented this style or if someone else had done it before him, but when I read the book, I found the approach intriguing. It’s a book about management, but written as a work of fiction about the life of a team. Essentially, he takes a business problem, “creates” a company and characters around it, and tells a story that illustrates how to solve the problem in question.

I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team about five or six years ago, and I really liked it. That’s when I realized the author had earned his own spot on my “to-read” list.

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Brandon Webb, John David Mann “Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL’s Guide”

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We all fear something—some things more, some less. And some fears begin to eat us up from the inside. The recently released book Mastering Fear tries to show how to change our attitude toward fear. Not to defeat it, because fear will remain, but to stop falling into a state of shock or paralysis because of it.

Formally, the book has two authors, but all the descriptions state that it’s a book by former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb, and the narrative itself is built as though it’s told by one person. So, let’s assume that John David Mann simply helped Webb “package” his thoughts properly.

Webb did indeed serve as a U.S. Navy SEAL, was a sniper, and later trained snipers. So, he’s immediately seen as someone who “knows no fear”—a real macho who eats fears for breakfast by the hundreds.

However, using his own past as an example, he shows that soldiers are simply trained to control their fear. He then shares his method for managing fear. He says: “You don’t need to fight fear. You need to accept it.”

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The Blog Channels

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To make it easier to follow new blog posts, I’ve created Russian channels in Telegram and Facebook, as well as an English channel on LinkedIn. I always post links to new entries there. If you’re interested, feel free to subscribe:

If you’d like to support me and my blog financially, I’d greatly appreciate it: