The 15-Minute Book Club salmaintb

This week's non-fiction book is Stolen Focus by Johan Hari. In my personal opinion, it is one of the most important books of the decade. We should all read this one.
Hari explores our collective inability to pay attention, and why this has increased over the last ten years. He interviews a number of experts to find out how and why our phones have been designed to keep us distracted. Is this something we are doing to ourselves, or is this being done to us?
 
Book mentioned in this episode: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.

This week's book is the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.
As Ireland slowly succumbs to a devastating civil war, Eilish refuses to leave. With her husband abducted by Ireland's secret police, she is on her own trying to keep her family together. As everything around her falls apart, she realises that the end of the world is not a grand world-wide finale, it's a localised event that happens over and over all the time.

This week's book is the classic science fiction novel, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.
Charlie Gordon's life is changed by a group of scientists that develop a treatment that can help increase his IQ, but what happens once Charlie becomes aware enough to see things as they are? Is ignorance truly bliss?

This week's book: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. 
Zhuang's life is forever changed after she spends a year abroad in England. She falls in love, travels around Europe, expands her cultural horizons, and learns what true loneliness means. Narrated as journal entries, we watch her struggle to navigate and make sense of a foreign language, as well as a foreign lover. 
Interview with Xiaolu Guo: https://podcasts.apple.com/jo/podcast/world-book-club/id263658343?i=1000633622386
My research paper on repeated errors in second language learning will be published in May, I'll link it here when it's out.