Category Archives: Book List

Book List: 2019Q2

I'll call this the Wizards & Cryptarchs, Frauds & Revolutions Edition —or— "What I've been reading when I'm not prepping for lectures and wrestling with toddlers."

Life in Code, Ellen Ullman

When Ullman sticks to psychology, writing about what's like to be dealing with code, she is brilliant. No one communicates what it feels like to code as well as she does. When she expands the scope to sociology, she is mediocre. I can get that brand of techno-cynical, socialist dirigisme in any magazine on the newsstand. ((Here I'm not using "socialist" as the generic critique of any left-leaning idea that it is sometimes sloppily deployed as. Ullman is a former member of the Communist party; she has self-identified as a socialist.))

This is a collection of previously published essays. The good ones are great, the others are worth reading but not special. They were published over the last several decades, so merely seeing which themes and topics aren't addressed — social media is conspicuously absent from earlier discussion of the internet — is interesting in itself.

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Dan Harris and Jeffrey Warren with Carlye Adler

I found this a little too squishy for my tastes, with its "everything can be meditation if you do it right" thesis. I'm saying this as someone who struggles in my meditation practice, so I completely get the strategy here. They want to provide a gentle on-ramp to get non-meditators to give it a shot. I've got nothing against that as a goal or a strategy, but I'd still like a little more discipline from meditation instruction. Meditation isn't supposed to be (too) easy. (What worth doing is?)

Nevertheless, this was pretty good. I've recommended it to my wife, because I think she's a good target audience, much like Dan Harris' own wife. I think she'll appreciate the way different chapters cover various objections to starting a meditation practice (I can't find the time; it's self-indulgent; etc.).

I especially liked the way the authors framed how you should respond when you notice you're "doing it wrong" while sitting: not "shame on me; you're doing a bad job meditating" but "good job for having the self-awareness to notice you're getting distracted."

The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu

This is the sequel to Three Body Problem. The first 40% or so of this volume was very slow, but the remainder picked up speed. My chief complaint is that there were no new ideas introduced in the first portion. The translator has changed between the first volume and this one, which may have also contributed to the torpid pacing. (I read TBP some months back, so I can't remember the specifics of what might be different in the translation.)

I'm not sure exactly how to say this, but Dark Forest struck me as being very "Chinese" — the focus on ideological purity and morale in the population, the interest in political affiliations amongst industry and the military, etc. It was interesting to read for that perspective alone.

Dark Forest revolves around what I think of as a Hari Seldon-esque view of social science that I always find off-putting. I'm tempted to say this is another element that is a result of Liu's Chinese heritage, but it crops up so often in SciFi that I can't do that. (I think the actual cause is that many SciFi authors who like physics want history & sociology to be as rigorous and reductionist as physics is.)

A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton

Every chapter of this brief book is about one important philosopher from history. Warburton does a good job of tying them all together into a single thread. It's nothing ground breaking, but makes for a pretty good introduction/refresher. I enjoyed listening to it on dog walks/commutes, because the structure was very digestible: I could listen to one chapter (ten or twelve minutes?), do some learning, and then move on to a different book on a different topic. I don't think I would have been in the mood currently to plow through four hours of Intro Philosophy lessons if I couldn't chunk it up like that.

I first heard of Warburton as the host of the Philosophy Bites podcast, in which he interviews other philosophy professors about their work. I haven't listened in a long time, but I still recommend it. The serious-but-approachable style he uses in that podcast carries through to this book.

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Daniel J. Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson

I had the same reaction to this that I have to most of the business books I've read: there's a kernel of good information here, but the authors spend twice as long convincing me of how relevant and useful the advice is as they do just giving me the advice. I think they also play a little fast-and-loose with neuroscience for my taste. I didn't notice anything egregiously wrong — and I think they do know what they're talking about — but it felt like they were trying a little too hard to layer on scientific respectability by giving folksy descriptions of brain science.

Nevertheless, there's some pretty good advice here. I think it's difficult to write a book about discipling all kids between the ages of 2 and 18. Maybe my opinion on that will change once mine get out of the toddler stage.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away, Bill Bryson

This is a collection of newspaper columns that Bryson wrote for an English paper after he moved back to America in the 90s. It's about what you would expect from a newspaper humorist. It's never as good as Bryson can really be, but it's pleasing in a homey, comforting way.

It was also nice to have an audiobook I could listen to where each chapter was only several hundred words. I could listen to one of these while knocking out a chore when a more complicated piece of narrative or non-fiction would be difficult to digest in four or five minute chunks.

The comparison of dealing with the Social Security Administration compared to the British immigration authority was the highlight for me.

Grave Peril, Jim Butcher

This is the fourth of Butcher's "Harry Dresden" novels. If you liked the first three, you'll probably like this. You'll probably like it more actually; Butcher seems to be getting better as a writer at this point in his publication history. Honestly I wasn't really paying enough attention to this book to be able to put my finger on why or how.

The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

This is the first in a trilogy about posthuman gentleman-thief Jean le Flambeur. I first read it years back (October 2014), and decided to re-read it before picking up volumes two and three since it was dense with weird concepts and novel vocabulary and allusions. (Cryptarchs! Exomemory! The Engineer-of-Souls! The Dilemma Prison! The All-Defector!) Even the second time through, I found it difficult to keep up with what was happening, since Rajaniemi gives little to no exposition to introduce you to all of the wonderful concepts and terms. Still, this is recommended for its creativity.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

I first read this when I was probably 10, and again in college, and now again when I'm 35. It not only holds up, I think I like it more.

It's extremely refreshing to read some fantasy that doesn't feel the need to bulk up to 800 pages with descriptions of the dishes at every feast and the heraldry of every noble family.

This is one of the books that I'm really looking forward to reading as a bed time story when the wee ones are old enough for "real" stories. ((By "real" I mean "not finished in a single sitting."))

I can not recommend this enough if you haven't read it before.

Here's some of the Daoist-flavored aphorisms from Wizard of Earthsea that I wrote down this time around:

Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.

The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.

For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

I've been leaning on that first one really hard with the two previously-mentioned toddlers in the house right now.

Pushing Ice, Alastair Reynolds

This is the second Reynolds books I've read in as many months, and I am a full-on convert now. So much fun.

The preface is set several tens of millennia in the future, and seems to give away what is going to go wrong for our protagonists in the present. The adventure comes from figuring how exactly things go wrong and how they deal with it. Then as you reach about the mid-point of the book or slightly after you realize that that disaster was only the first part of the challenge and things get much weirder than you imagined.

Like House of Suns, Reynolds captures the immensity of space and its psychological impact in a way that few other scifi authors have.

My only complaint is that most of the story takes place in a society of a couple of hundred people, but it seems to have the economic and social structure of a much, much larger population. Would a couple of Dunbars worth of people really be able to support restaurant entrepreneurship, as Reynolds mentions off-hand?

Bad Blood, John Carreyrou

I devoured this over the course of a couple of plane rides. It has gotten tons of praise, all of it deserved. I'm not sure what to add.

I have no earthly idea how so many investors and partners would not demand to see a working demo of Theranos' capabilities. I really cannot conceive of agreeing to back a system without being able to compare it to a baseline. "Sounds great. Here's two blood draws from twenty people. You take half of each pair and I'll send the other to a conventional lab. I'm so excited to see how well they match up!" Is that so hard? I don't think I would even take a second meeting — to say nothing of investing nine figures — without seeing the results from that.

Maybe I'm an outlier since so much of what I do day-to-day is about replication? Maybe this is hindsight bias on my part? Maybe I would be just as hoodwinked by Elizabeth Holmes' reported charisma?

A lot of Theranos' success is keeping the scam going was because so many of the insiders who saw through things were bullied into remaining quiet. Many of those who did want to blow the whistle were unable to exfil evidence. Would society be better or worse off if more people had the tradecraft to get the relevant documents out of places like Theranos? I'm guessing this would be a net negative since it would also allow more industrial espionage, more insider trading, etc., but the people who are motivated to do such things also have the motivation to learn how to get away with them, whereas it's the innocent potential whistleblowers who have never thought of a more advanced way to smuggle/maintain data besides "forward it to my personal email account" who are left without tools.

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, David Gilmour

Cover of "The Pursuit of Italy" by David Gilmour

This was a history of Italy-as-a-concept rather than Italy-as-a-geographic-region or Italy-as-a-nation-state. As Massimo d'Azeglio said after the Risorgimento: "We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians." The existence of a single country called "Italy" is highly historically contingent, and The Pursuit of Italy explores that contingency.

I had thought this was primarily going to be about the unification process of the Risorgimento, since I had heard it quoted so heavily in a podcast on that topic. ((Talking History: The Italian Unification.)) Gilmour actually covers much more ground, both before and afterwards. The book continues all the way up to discussions of contemporary politics, including Berlusconi, the Northern League, etc. I think I actually found the period preceding and following unification to be more interesting, as those chapters were more about culture than politics.

One take-away is that almost every Italian political leader since unification seems like a fool, including those with massive public monuments scattered across the country. (Exceptions: Garibaldi seems like a tactical dunce but strategically sharp and extremely charismatic, as well as principled. Mazzini also seems intelligent and principled, but he spent most of his life in exile as persona non grata and has not been fully retconned into the pantheon of Italian founding fathers.) Other than those two, the rest — Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, almost every minister in the 20th Century — look like fools. Even Mussolini seems to have bumbled his way into dictatorship.

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

This is another book that I've read multiple times before, but probably not since I was twelve or so. I listened to big parts of it while dealing with some severe jet lag, waking up at 3am or so and then drifting back to sleep to the rhythms of narration about herding goats and defending against cannibals.

I was expecting this to be, shall we say... "un-modern" in its philosophy and tone seeing as how it's now exactly three centuries old. And while Friday's eager subservience no doubt puts this on many campus' Index Librorum Prohibitorum, I was actually surprised by the proto-moral-relativism and non-interference that Crusoe adopts toward the natives. There's also a ton of good lessons in here about the nature of wealth, desire, satisfaction, deserts, etc.

Cover of "The Book of Kells" by Bernhard Meehan

The Book of Kells, Bernard Meehan

I didn't read the Book of Kells itself since it's (a) in Latin and (b) so ornate it is nearly unreadable, but Meehan's book about that Book. It has wonderful illustrations throughout, and they are cross-referenced throughout the text in a very clever and unobtrusive way. The Book of Kells is one of the pinnacles of the early Western manuscript tradition, and I love it as much for its numerous imperfections as its elaborate decoration. As a calligrapher I do wish that Meehan talked a bit more about the letterforms as opposed to the illustrations, but I understand that's not something most people would be interested in.

I read this in advance of a trip to Ireland, where I went to see the exhibit of the original manuscript at Trinity College Dublin. I didn't pick this out for any particular reason, Meehan's book just happened to be the one book at my local library on the subject. It also happened to be the one book that the gift shop at Trinity was selling about The Book of Kells, so I suppose that means it's pretty authoritative?

by jsylvest Posted on 12 July 2019

Posted in Book List, Reviews | Tagged books, business, calligraphy, children, computer science, fantasy, history, law, meditation, philosophy, scifi | Leave a comment

Book List: 2019Q1

I think I did less reading this quarter than at any point since I beat dyslexia. Certainly less than any point since I started keeping track in 2011, and that includes the period when I finished my dissertation and had two kids. I'm teaching a course at a local college this semester, and lesson prep and grading has not left a lot of time for reading. But enough complaining...

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, Nancy Duarte

Despite giving a fairly large number of presentations, I'm definitely not the audience for this. It's not really about presentations, but about sales presentations. If, like me, you have mostly factual & technical information to impart, I'm not sure how much this will help. There's a decent amount of advice in here if you're a complete graphic design novice, but there are probably better places to get that knowledge.

Cover of "The Relaxed Mind" by Dza Kilung — "The Relaxed Mind," Dza Kilung

The Relaxed Mind, Dza Kilung Rinpoche

There is perhaps a bit too much "woo" in the later chapters of this meditation manual, but it is still a good book for practice. If nothing else, I like having some meditation-related book on my bedstand/ipod: even if that book itself is not the best, it serves as an encouragement to keep practicing. The earlier two or three of the seven practices described here seem concretely useful. Maybe the latter practices will have more appeal to me as I become a "better" meditator?

Cover of "The Most Human Human," by Brian Christian — "The Most Human Human," Brian Christian

The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, Brian Christian

I loved this. Christian has a degree in computer science and an MFA in poetry. I can't think of a better background to write about what the Turing Test tells us about talking with (and being) human. There's good history of AI, exploration of psychology and epistemology, and tips for what makes a conversation interesting.

I'm recommending this as a great book for other technologists to learn something about "soft skills" and for non-technologists to learn about AI. I can't think of another book that comes close to providing both benefits.

Lies Sleeping, Ben Aaronovitch

This is the latest in Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" series, which I still love. I should really write these recaps as soon as I finish reading, because it's been long enough now that I don't have anything specific to say about it. But this is the ninth volume in the series, so if you don't already have an opinion about the prior eight, there's really no need for you to have one about this.

My wife, who reads mysteries almost exclusively, has recently started this series after hearing me talk about it since 2014. It's one of the few book series we both equally enjoy.

The Labyrinth Index, Charles Stross

(1) Copy-and-paste what I said above about not waiting to write these comments. (2) Copy-and-paste what I said about already having opinions about the series since it's long running, but replace "ninth" with "twelfth."

Cover of "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon — "Gravity's Rainbow," Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

I'll be honest: I did not understand this book. I enjoyed it a great deal, but I did not understand it.

I like Pynchon as a stylist even when the narrative has me completely befuddled. As a result, even the confusing passages make for very good audiobook listening because I can let the language just wash over me.

Cover of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki. — "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," Shunryu Suzuki.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki

I also didn't fully understand this book, but I feel like I wasn't really meant to. ((Actually, now that I think about it, maybe Pynchon didn't really want people to understand him either.)) I'm not sure "understanding" is even a thing you're supposed to be able to do to Zen. I think I got a lot out of it regardless. It's definitely something I'm going to revisit in the future.

Cover of "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds — "House of Suns," Alastair Reynolds

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds

This is another winner. I haven't had this much fun reading a sci-fi book in years. It has that wide-screen baroque space opera feel that I used to get from Iain Banks books. I can't think of another story that engages so well with the sheer scope — in time and distance — of the galaxy. Before I was half way through I was already putting all of the library's other Reynolds books on my list.

The Sky-Blue Wolves, S. M. Stirling

I keep saying I'm going to stop reading this series, but then a new volume comes out just when I want a junk-food book and I read it anyway. Then I feel about as satisfied as I do after eating actual junk food. This is a fun world to mentally play around in, but Stirling is really phoning it in at this point. The Big Bad Guy that was supposed to require a world war to defeat just got knocked off in about a chapter of Dreamtime Ninja Shenanigans, and meanwhile two of our Intrepid Heroes (who happen to both be rightful heirs to continent-spanning empires) decided to have a love-child. Nice neat bow; everyone rides into the sunset.

by jsylvest Posted on 25 April 2019

Posted in Book List, Reviews | Tagged AI, books, computer science, design, meditation, reading, scifi, technology | Leave a comment

Book List: 2018Q4

Cover of Colin Tudge's, "The Tree" — Colin Tudge, "The Tree"

The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter, Colin Tudge

Exactly what it says on the cover: all about trees. This was exceptionally well organized. As an amateur woodworker, the first few chapters were particularly helpful to sort out all of the different common and trade names and how they relate to actual species. (Short version: it's a total ontological train wreck.) This book felt exceptionally well outlined; the organization of such a broad topic was very easy to follow. My primary complaint is that I listened to this as an audiobook, which made it difficult to stop and do image searches on some of the weirder species that were lovingly described.

The last 10% or so shifts from positive to normative, which is considerably weaker. For example, Tudge advocates that more buildings should be built of timber rather than steel and concrete and also that the price of timber ought to rise. These may both be desirable, but he gives absolutely no acknowledgement that these goals are in conflict. He also sets up urbanization/industrialization as being in opposition to growth of forests, without addressing the Kuznets curve phenomenon of reforestation.

Overall, highly recommended.

Pyramids, Terry Pratchett

I've never not loved one of Pratchett's Discworld novels. This is no exception. It's not one of the best, but even mediocre Pratchett is wonderful.

How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie

You already know about this book. I put off reading it for years, figuring that it was all common sense that I already knew. And frankly, it kind of is. But there can be tremendous utility to being told things you already know. It might not teach you something profoundly novel, but it will likely help you realize when and how to put into practice the things you know.

It's been re-edited several times over its eight decades, and the result seems a little mixed up. Most especially, some of the examples seem drawn from very different points in time, which would be a positive if they were more clearly tagged. As is, it was difficult to get the right context for the interactions being described.

There was also plenty of horn-tooting about how useful different people have found Carnegie's instruction, but the amount of self-back-atting was actually less than I've found in the few other business/self-help books I've read.

Overall I think this book has become under-rated by virtue of being too often over-rated, if that makes sense. Read it.

Cover of Travis Corcoran's "Causes of Separation" — Travis Corcoran, "Causes of Separation"

Causes of Separation, Travis Corcoran

This is a sequel to Corcoran's Powers of the Earth, which I recommended last quarter. If you are interested in moon bases, AI, uplifted dogs, anti-gravity, augmented reality, anarcho-capitalism, etc. then you will probably like this. The psychological profile of the protagonist continues to be well done, but the antagonists are still a bit of a travesty.

Robopocalypse, Daniel Wilson

Hard to recommend. A co-worker tells me there is a very interesting twist in the sequel, which I will not reveal. It was a decent enough action book with killer robots, but since becoming a parent I have a much harder time being excited about dystopic fiction in which bad things happen to children. Wilson leans on that heavily to create drama, which ends up feeling artificial.

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami

I don't even know what to say about this. It's a very, very weird and discomforting magical realism story. It reminded me mostly of the sort of proto-horror folk tale that the Grimm Brothers would have been told.

Cover of Bill Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country" — Bill Bryson, "In a Sunburned Country"

In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson

Bryson is always delightful. This is a travelogue of a couple of trips to Australia. As usualy, Bryson uses this frame as a jumping off point for whatever weird bits of history he finds interesting. Perhaps because Australia doesn't yet have that much known history ((No offense to the aboriginal population. Obviously there's been people in Australia for a long time, but they haven't left behind much historical record. Australia probably has the highest ratio of "weird pre-historic forests and strange rock formations" to "palaces, art museums, and other structures in guidebooks" of anywhere.)) he also includes a lot of natural history, with a particular emphasis on all of the weird and deadly fauna to be found. (Six foot long earth worms! Jellyfish with enough neurotoxin to kill an ox! ((Which is a total mystery, because they eat krill. What do they need with that much chemical warfare firepower?)) )

One take-away was just how inept the British colonization and exploration was. I'd give you more colorful examples, but the one that comes to mind is establishing the first colony (incidentally a penal colony) with exactly zero people who had ever farmed before. I think they had one guy that was briefly an assistant to a gardener and put him in charge of food production.I was expecting violent-but-hyper-competant Victorians but Bryson's telling is a lot more clueless-and-bumbling. It left me honestly shocked that such doofuses built an empire upon which the sun never set.

You Suck: A Love Story, Christopher Moore

This is a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story. It was a fine distraction, but I don't have strong feelings about it.

The Hard Thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

Recommended for people interested in the software business.

This was suggested to me as a general purpose business advice book. It's fairly good along that dimension, but Horowitz is really only talking about software start-ups. For instance, he discusses the problem to scaling at one point, and explicitly states that the only thing holding you back is hiring more developers and sales people. He is (rightly) unconcerned with the factors that influence growing other businesses, like suppliers, real estate, distribution channels, etc.

More people should write books like this though. I want less memoirs about how brilliant the author is, and more advice based on the challenges that people have survived.

As an aside, this exchange between Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen that was quoted in the book stood out:

Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke:
Marc: "Do you know the best thing about startups?"
Ben: "What?"
Marc: "You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find the lack of sleep enhances them both."

As I commented on twitter, this makes the rise of interest in Stoicism in Silicon Valley either intensely ironic or completely inevitable, but I can't decide which. It's also a good encapsulation of why I haven't been interested in doing the start-up thing in California: no terror or ataraxia for me please; give me some nice even ataraxia.

Cover of Marc Levinson's "The Box" — Marc Levinson, "The Box"

The Box, Marc Levinson

This is an excellent history of the shipping container. This seems like too humble of an object to need it's own history, but that is very far from correct.

The most striking thing to me was the shocking speed with which containerization swept the industry. We like to think things like smartphones or social media are unique for their incredibly rapid uptake, but their spread is hardly unparalleled. Levinson details multiple ports where containers went from essentially zero traffic to a majority in a year or two. Competitors, regulators and trade unions were caught completely unprepared for the pace of change over and over.

The other take-away was the ineptitude of almost everyone involved in post-War shipping: the Interstate Commerce Commission, trade unions, shipping lines, the railroads, the Pentagon, standards bodies — not a single one of them acquits themselves well. To take just one example, ISO set out to establish standards for shipping containers, and invited every interest group they could think of except the only two companies in the world that were already using shipping containers. Because who needs actual experience, right?

Malcolm Maclean — the originator of containerization — is as close as this story comes to having a hero, and even he seems more like someone who took lots of crazy risks that just happened to pay off rather than someone who really knew what he was doing. (After selling off SeaLand, his legitimately world-changing shipping business, to R.J.Reynolds, ((Because a cigarette company owning a shipping line is totally something that makes sense in the world of mid-century corporate conglomerates.)) he experienced a string of business failures, which cements my opinion that he was luckier than he was wise.)

Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

Assassin's Quest, Robin Hobb

These are the second and third books in Hobb's "Farseer Trilogy." I think both are better than the initial title, Assassin's Apprentice, as they have more psychological depth. What I appreciate is that the main characters face actual moral conundrums. Most fiction, are perhaps especially more fantasy, presents the protagonist with a clear choice between doing what is difficult-but-right and what is easy-but-wrong; Hobb's characters have to juggle competing imperatives and make for difficult decisions with no right answers.

My only complaint is that Assassin's Quest is as long as the first two books together. It should probably be two separate volumes. There is actually a pretty natural breakpoint in the story line about half-way through, so it would not surprise me if this was initially planned as a quartet and the final two installments were smashed together.

How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers, Sarah Bakewell

This is part biography, and part work of philosophy. It's an excellent combination. I was struck by how much 16th century France seemed like 21st century America in many respects. Definitely recommended.

There was a tiredness and a sourness in Montaigne's generation, along with a rebellious new form of creativity. If they were cynical, it is easy to see why: they had to watch the ideals that had guided their upbringing turn into a grim joke. The Reformation, hailed by some earlier thinkers as a blast of fresh air beneficial to the Church itself, became a war and threatened to ruin civilized society. Renaissance principles of beauty, poise, clarity, and intelligence dissolved in violence, cruelty, and extremist theology. Montaigne's half-century was so disastrous for France that it took another half-century to recover from it—and in some ways recovery never came, for the turmoil of the late 1500s stopped France from building a major New World empire like those of England and Spain, and kept it inward-looking. By the time of Montaigne's death, France was economically feeble, and ravaged by disease, famine and public disorder. No wonder young nobles of his generation ended up as exquisitely educated misanthropes.

The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce reminded me of a theological version of Games People Play. It was interesting enough, but not that impactful.

The Abolition of Man, on the other hand, was excellent. This is also a book that feels like required reading for the beginning of the 21st century, despite being several decades old. I listened to an audio version of this, and will probably need to read a physical copy before I could offer any detailed analysis.

by jsylvest Posted on 24 January 2019

Posted in Book List, Reviews | Tagged books, business, reviews | Leave a comment

Book List: 2018Q3

We Are Legion (We Are Bob), Dennis Taylor

For We Are Many, Dennis Taylor

All These Worlds, Dennis Taylor

A sci-fi series about a cryogenically frozen software engineer thawed out several centuries in the future by a theocratic state and uploaded against his will into a von Neumann probe. I think there was a lot of potential here, but it never lived up to it. The potential comes from having multiple nearly-identical copies of the same character, which gives you the option of playing with themes about identity and cognition and narratively the ability to interleave lots of different stories together. The latter of these was accomplished. To me, one of the defining characteristics of a von Neumann probe is exponential growth, and the character(s) decide for unclear reasons not bother growing much. They remain production/population constrained throughout the decades of the narrative. This rubs me the wrong way, perhaps because whenever I play Civilization or any other 4X game I go hard for industrial base every time.

For what it's worth, I believe this was semi-self-published — the publisher on Amazon is listed as a literary agency — and probably as a result the design of these books was not pleasing. I know I care more than most about books as physical objects than most readers do, but I'm mentioning it anyway. The title and author were printed in the footer of each page rather than the header, which was disorienting but not objectively wrong. All three volumes I got from the library were set in Lucida Bright, which is an idiosyncratic choice, but more importantly the text of all three were blurry/rasterized. It was not a good reading experience, and these books deserved better.

Powers of the Earth, Travis Corcoran

Another sci-fi adventure, this time with a very strong anarcho-capitalist/libertarian bent. Quite good, if the politics doesn't turn you off. It's got moon bases, AI, uplifted dogs, and more. Also features a real-world economy complete with reasons for being in space in the first place, which very few other books bother with. (One exception is Andy Weir's Artemis.) I will give Corcoran credit for writing a protagonist with character flaws that actually matter for the story. On the other hand, the antagonists are farcically inept. It is difficult to take them too seriously, and the drama suffers as a result.

Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu

I think enough has been said about this one already, the majority of it positive. I'd agree.

Best Served Cold, Joe Abercrombie

The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie

Red Country, Joe Abercrombie

A follow-on trilogy to Abercrombie's "First Law" series. These three books are only loosely connected, taking place a few years after that in the same world, with some minor characters re-appearing. If you like George RR Martin but find his worldview too cheery and optimistic, this may be the book series for you. (Indeed, I read it partially because GRRM recommended it.) I particularly like the glimpse you get of the cosmic struggle going on just below the surface of the story, hidden from almost all the characters, and the depth of the world out on the fringes of the map. You get comparatively less of both of these in The Heroes and perhaps a little too much in Red Country. All three are recommended, especially because it's nice to have a fantasy series that offers some self-contained stories instead of having to chew through ten thousand pages before you get a conclusion.

Milk, Mark Kurlansky

Kurlansky's Salt and Paper are two of my favorites. I'm a sucker for non-fiction about common commodities. Milk was good, but not as good as those. It's less well organized, bouncing back and forth between passages on nutrition, health, history, culinary uses, etc. A better road-map would have been appreciated. It was peppered with historic recipes, which was at turns amusing and annoying.

I often complain that the books I read are good, but the economics in them is below part. This is another example of that. Kurlansky offers this assessment for example: "An oddity of the milk business in America and in Europe was that its growth was not determined by demand." How is that supposed to work? How were people being induced to buy something they didn't demand? I understand rhetorically what's he's attempting to convey, but logically what does this mean? A case could be made for increased supply being the principle factor at work, but he doesn't make that case. He just leaves this sentence there as if it explains everything.

In a similar vein, his treatment of regulation, etc. on consolidation, farm size, profitability etc. is confused. He almost acknowledges that regulatory compliance is a fixed cost that is easier for larger producers to bear, but then it slips past in favor of explaining consolidation as the outcome of some sort of capitalist conspiracy.

Good enough, but definitely not the first Kurlansky book I would recommend.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara W. Tuchman

This is a history of the late middle ages, centering on France and the Hundred Years' War. The format is interesting: it traces the life of a particular nobleman — Enguerrand VII de Coucy — from northern France with ties to both the English and French thrones. The result limits the book in geographic scope, but this is more than made up for in thematic scope, resulting in a good trade-off. Like much of the medieval history I've been reading lately, it also seems oddly appropriate for helping to understand the world right now.

[Eustache Deschamps'] complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.

Definitely recommended.

The Art of Language Invention, David Peterson

Also highly recommended. Peterson is a creator of constructed languages (conlangs), with credits including both Dothrakai and Valyrian for the "Game of Thrones" TV series. This book is partially about the process of language creation, but also serves as a general introduction to linguistics. Foreign language classes were always my worst subjects in school by a mile. I loved being able to learn about what's going on under the hood rather than merely being given tables of conjugations and common phrases to memorize. I had a few minor complaints with the orthography chapter, which is a subject I know a small bit about through my interest in calligraphy and typography, but otherwise this book was excellent.

1632, Eric Flint

A small town in West Virginia is somehow transported back to Bavaria in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. I'm a sucker for this subgenre, but did not care for this at all. All of the characters are Lake Wobegonian, i.e. everyone is above average in all ways. I lost track of the number of perfect couples who fell in love at first site. The worst flaw is that there is no real challenge to the West Virginians: they are in complete command of the situation at all times, and never face a real threat, either from actual enemies or from the sorts of logistical disruptions you would imagine trying to keep a modern town running in a pre-modern world. There is apparently a whole universe of sequels that have been developed with what sounds like an innovative, open-source scheme, but the first book was not good enough to justify reading the sequels.

Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

More computer scientists in particular should read Borges. This volume has a mix of short stores, non-fiction essays and "parables." I had read many of the stories, but they are always worth reading again. The non-fiction was harder to follow, but it has inspired me to move Don Quixote further up my reading list. The parables were delightful but weird enough that I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from them.

I was told to get this particular edition because of the foreword by William Gibson. I like Gibson, but I didn't find anything particularly insightful or interesting in his introduction here. Don't avoid it, but don't go out of your way for it either.

On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, William Irvine

Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy is one of my all-time favorite books. On Desire is good, but not nearly as good. That aside, I can give it a strong recommendation as a form of bibliotherapy and a round-about way of meditating on the Second Noble Truth. It will not provide you with many answers with respect to desire — and I don't think Irvine would claim that it does offer answers — but it will help you ask good questions, which is a necessary step.

Chuck Klosterman X, Chuck Klosterman

I don't want every other review here to degenerate into "good, but the author's other books are better" but... this is good but Klosterman's other books are better. This is a recycled collection of essays, articles, reviews, etc. that Klosterman has published in other venues previously. Some are good, some are indifferent, some will depend for you on how interested you are in the subject, which tends to cover his typical range of popular music and sports.

by jsylvest Posted on 18 October 2018

Posted in Book List | Tagged books, design, entertainment, reviews | 1 Comment

Book List: 2018Q2

Here are the books I read in April, May and June. Since it's already August, I'm going to forego commentary on some of these and just hit publish.

Cover of "The Professor and the Madman," Simon Winchester — "The Professor and the Madman," Simon Winchester

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester

This was far more interesting than a book about lexicographical history has any right to be. James Murray ("the Professor") is a fascinating Victorian autodidact. IIRC he dropped out of school at age 16 (the age at which schooling was no longer free in Scotland) by age 19 he was the headmaster of a school. William Chester Minor ("the Madman") is the sort of charming — albeit homicidal — lunatic that I didn't think existed outside of movies. Plus you get to learn about the OED!

The Truth, Terry Pratchett

This is Pratchett's "Discworld" story about the invention of movable type and newspapers. I've yet to read a Discworld book I didn't enjoy, and this is no exception.

The main character, and inventor of newspapers, is named "William de Worde." I thought the surname was a little on the nose even for Pratchett. It turns out that William Caxton's partner and co-introducer of movable type to England was named Wynkyn de Worde, so in reality truth is stranger — or at least as strange as — fiction.

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Kory Stamper

This was a great read. I loved both the behind the scenes info on what it's like to be a lexicographer working at Mirriam-Webster, the history of dictionaries, and the general discussion of language. The chapters about what their role in society is, as contrasted with what people think it is or want it to be, were especially good.

This is yet another book that I can file away under "the more I learn about language the less of a prescriptivist I become."

Cover of "The Popes," J.J. Norwich — "The Popes," J.J. Norwich

The Popes: A History, John Julius Norwich

This was good but not great. I like the overall organization, which is important in such a wide-reaching history. As such, I recommend this if you're interested. I have three complaints though.

(1) The coverage was very uneven. I recognize this was a history of the papacy specifically rather than the Catholic church more broadly, but some capital-B Big events are fairly glossed over, like the English Reformation or the spread of Catholicism to the New World.

(2) Norwich had a habit of mentioning that such and such institution was reformed to do things in a new way without ever explaining what the old way was. It's tough to appreciate why something changing is important if you don't know what the status quo ante was.

(3) When we get to the modern period (say, post 1848), Norwich makes a very common mistake by assuming that theological positions are just like political positions. When the R.C.Ch. is at its best, it is not deciding its "policy" about, e.g. married priests, on the basis of what is popular or expedient or diplomatic or modern. (When it is at its worst and it fails to do this, you get the Reichskonkordat.) Norwich treats the church like a political party choosing a platform. By that standard, it has done a remarkably bad job in the last century and a half.

The R.C.Ch. is not choosing its position on the basis of "what will attract ~~voters~~ parishioners" but instead based on what it believes God thinks is correct. You might think that's silly, or that it makes that determination incorrectly — which as an agnostic non-Catholic, I typically do — but don't make the mistake of thinking it's solving the same problem that a politician is solving when deciding whether to support some new legislative reform. Personally, I think too many of the powerful people in the world — politicians, businesspeople, celebrities — are making decisions based on what is popular, and I'm content with at least some institutions in a poly-centric order not doing that. ((See also: reasons to not want the US Supreme Court to become a democracy of 9 voters.))

Two other less contentious takes:

(a) A shocking number of these stories had a coda along the lines of "but he didn't live to enjoy his triumph; he was dead within k weeks" for very small values of k. Princes and prelates were dropping dead all the time. I wonder what modern politics would be like if people were dying at the same rates.

(b) Rome's weather is the under-rated player in this drama. Seemingly every chapter included either a noble entourage or an entire army fleeing the miserable summer heat. Yes, it's very nice that you brought your overwhelming French and/or German army down to smack some sense into the Curia at swordpoint, but then *boom* malaria. The Holy Roman Emperor was constantly racing down the peninsula in the spring, only to spend about three weeks in the muggy summer sun glaring impotently at Rome's walls, before racing back north to get to the Alps before the passes closed for the winter. If the Popes followed Diocletian just 300 miles up to Mediolanum/Milan a lot of things would have gone very differently.

It wasn't just armies either. I lost count of how many Cardinals and Princes just high-tailed it out of town because of bad weather. ("Yes, yes, I know the fate of Europe hangs in the balance of this election... but the humidity is murder on my hair." ((Actually, I'm doing them a disservice. The humidity was actually, literally killing people. See the point about malaria above. But still, many of them seem to have fled just because the weather was interfering with their lifestyle.)) ). Not that I really blame them. I've been to Rome in August, and I wouldn't stick around either if there weren't some frosty Peronis to help me through it all.

Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory

Super powers plus grifters plus organized crime plus family drama. It was unclear until pretty far into the book how much of the fantastical elements were real and how much they were part of a con job. I liked that dynamic.

Every Anxious Wave, Mo Daviau

The recipe for this is about six parts toxic nostalgia as filtered through rock music, four parts fat acceptance, and one part appreciation of hunter gatherers. It's a weird combination that didn't really hold together for me, but I'm probably not the target audience, so your mileage may vary.

The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings, Lars Brownworth

Pretty much what it says on the tin. Thorough and accessible.

Scourged, Kevin Hearne

This is conclusion to Hearne's "Iron Druid" series. I loved the series as a whole, but this was a little flat. It felt, especially in the first half, like he was trying very hard to tie up lose ends that weren't actually that loose and didn't need to be addressed. The final resolution was good, but it felt like he was trying too hard to avoid "... and everyone walked away happily into the sunset" and so there is some element of a "unhappy ending" that feels a bit forced.

I'm not sure how the writing schedule worked out, but in terms of publishing dates, the first volume (A Plague of Giants) of Hearne's next series ("The Seven Kennings") was released before this was. I can't help but wonder if his interest had already shifted to that work and his heart wasn't really in wrapping up "Iron Druid."

(These paragraphs make me seem much more negative about Scourged than I actually am. It was overall still a fine book.)

Dark Run, Mike Brooks

A good space adventure with a bit of a Firefly vibe. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the next two volumes. This is only one of two sci-fi books I can think of in which software engineering is treated as an indispensable part of spaceflight in general and combat in particular. (The other being Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, with the "programmer-at-arms" role.)

Bone, Volume Seven: Ghost Circles, Jeff Smith

Bone, Volume Eight: Treasure Hunters, Jeff Smith

River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay

This is set in the same universe as Under Heaven, but is almost entirely unrelated. I need a genre descriptor for books like this that are not really fantasy, but do have more than zero unrealistic elements. (In this case, one of the main characters is given a tattoo by a spirit. There is also discussion of ghosts, but these seem to be in the imaginations of the characters rather than "real" in the world of the story.) Regardless, how can I not like a book which revolves so heavily around calligraphy?

Cover of "The Book" by Keith Houston — "The Book," Keith Houston

The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, Keith Houston

Recommended. The design is excellent, as is befitting for the subject. You can see on the cover that various features are labeled. This device is re-used to good effect throughout. (So rather than having a little image of a page, with an arrows pointing out where the footer, gutter, etc. are, those arrows are just printed right onto the actual text of the book. This turns the book into a self-illustrating example.)

The book is divided into four sections, about paper, printing presses and movable type, printed images, and book binding. For the first section, there was little I didn't already know from Mark Kurlansky's excellent Paper. There were also some bits left out that I have thought were quite important, such as the Hollander beater. The other three sections were quite good though.

A theme running through this books is "someone thought of this invention a long time ago, but couldn't make it practical, then someone else re-invented it years/decades/centuries later (and got the credit)." Honestly, I'm okay with this state of affairs. We lionize that spark of genius inspiration, but the getting-it-to-be-useful phase of technological innovation deserves way more credit.

Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation, Ammon Shea

Allow me to copy-and-paste the following line from my review of Word by Word, above:

This is yet another book that I can file away under "the more I learn about language the less of a prescriptivist I become."

Every chapter of this book is about a thing that pedants have told you not to do, followed by lengthy evidence that their rule is spurious and ahistorical.

One tidbit I did not realize but should have: Latin was "native" to England before English was. If you had asked me when the Romans got to Britain and when the Angles got their, I would have given you the correct centures, and this would have become obvious but it was still a (minor) shock to me. It points out the futility of returning English to some prelapsarian state when it was free of xenolinguistic influences.

Time Travel: A History, James Gleick

Gleick addresses both the science surrounding time travel and the way it has been treated in literature. Well done to him for so seamlessly bridging the STEM/Arts-and-Letters divide. You get Wells, of course, and Einstein, but also Borges and Heraclitus and Proust and Bohr. (And David Foster Wallace, but only to discuss his philosophy thesis paper on fatalism, not any of his fiction.) There is a strong feedback loop between the Two Cultures on this subject, and any treatment of it that didn't address this would have been severely lacking.

Cover of "Gnomon" by Nick Harkaway — "Gnomon," Nick Harkaway

Gnomon, Nick Harkaway

I tweeted back over the winter that this was the perfect book to be reading during the first annual Conference on AI, Ethics & Society, which was true. Unfortunately I had to return my library copy shortly thereafter, and only got around to finishing it a couple of months later. This made it difficult to appreciate such a dense book, so probably don't trust my judgment on this one.

Nevertheless, I think this was good, but inferior to Anglemaker and The Gone-Away World (I have not yet read his fourth novel, Tigerman but very much want to). I suspect the problem may be that Harkaway started Gnomon with the themes he wanted to cover and wrote a story to match, rather than writing a story and letting themes emerge. I have no idea though; I don't want to engage in too much armchair-analysis-from-a-distant, especially since I'm basing this off of a short preface and sporadic reading of his Twitter feed. And regardless of whether this analysis is true, these are themes I'm interested in: technology, surveillance, experimental polities & "choosing in groups", altered mental states that aren't drug related, non-monocentric selfhood, cognitive monitoring, etc. So: good, but not his best.

Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer

I very much enjoyed this. It's got a wild post-Nation State, poly-centric socio-political system that I loved. It reminded me of how exciting it was reading Diamond Age back in the day.

The downside to this thrillingly exotic setting is that it took several hundred pages before things started to make sense. On top of the setting there's also a self-conscious 18th-Century style combined with 21st Century gender neutral language, and other stylistic choices that made it difficult to get my narrative footing. Even at the end I'm still not sure where the dividing line is between high technology and magic. It was all still very much worth it.

One complaint about the poly-centric, distributed nations: I find it a little implausible that there would be so much concentration, with only seven tribes. Why wouldn't they fracture further? What's holding the Cousins or Gordians together? I would enjoy a long discussion between Palmer and David Friedman on the political economy of this world.

by jsylvest Posted on 7 August 2018

Posted in Book List, Reviews | Tagged books, history, language, reviews | Leave a comment

Some brief book reviews to close 2017

A Wild Swan, Michael Cunningham

I would think we've saturated the "modern re-tellings of fairytales, but for adults" genre, but this was supremely good. They reminded me of Garrison Keillor in the way that some sadness or loss was mixed in to the stories without them being outright tragic.

(I've had this post sitting in my drafts for a very long time. How long? Since well before we all found out Keillor was a creep. So... I guess I'll amend the above to "it reminds me pre-2017 Garrison Keillor"? It's been about 15 years since I read any of his stories, so maybe I should just scrap this reference all together? Screw it.)

The View from the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman

A collection of non-fiction pieces: essays, transcripts of awards speeches, introductions, forwards, etc. Some felt dated, but most I can safely call "timeless." Many of them did make me want to go read the various books or authors that he was commenting on (e.g. Jeff Smith, Samuel R Delaney, Fritz Leiber, Dunsany) which seems like as good a thing as can be said about an introduction to a book. The final piece is a memorial to his friend and collaborator, Terry Pratchett, titled "A Slip of the Keyboard." It is definitely worth reading especially for Pratchett fans.

The Liberation, Ian Tregillis

This is the conclusion to Tregillis' "Mechanicals" trilogy. I found the whole series good, but not nearly as good as his "Bitter Seeds" series. "Bitter Seeds" had plot points and story lines that were woven complexly, foreshadowed with subtlety, and epic emotional highs and lows. The Mechanicals was good, but had little of that finesse.

"Mechanicals" is focused on free will and robots. It's an interesting concept, and a good way of using sci-fi to explore ideas. (Which, I suppose, is why it's been done plenty of times.) If I was a writer, I would like to do a similar story about robots, but instead of free will it would be about depression. Inside Out had one of the better depictions of depressions I've seen on screen. Depression — in my experience — isn't just regular sadness turned up to eleven. It's feeling nothing at all. Mechanical androids seem like a perfect vehicle to explore that. Instead of robots fighting to be able to act on their own preferences or desires or motivation, they would be fighting to be able to have preferences or desires or motivations in the first place.

The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee

Also not as good as his previous work, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, but still very, very good. As in Emperor of All Maladies, Mukherjee does a great job of blending history, science, and his own personal experiences.

I did not appreciate before reading this exactly how quickly the concept of genetics has grown. The hundred years following Darwin's work in the 1850s and Mendel in the 1850s and 1860s was head-spinningly prolific. I had also not considered that eugenics was at the very forefront of applied genetics. I had thought of eugenics as a weird sideline (indeed, I wish it had been) but according to Mukherjee's telling it was at the very center of genetics from its infancy. ((Mukherjee also does good work in not letting us get away with thinking eugenics was something unique to the Nazis; Brits and Americans were leading members of the eugenics travesty. We should confront the ugly parts of our history, where "we" is both national groups as well as ideological ones like, in this case, progressives and High Rationalists.))

Mukherjee's discussion of penetrance (the way specific genes only affect people in probabilistic ways) was very good. I wish this concept was more widely appreciated, as compared to the binary "you have a mutation or you don't" level of understanding that is common.

Mukherjee also hammers home the idea that a mutation can not be judged to be good or bad by itself, but must be evaluated in the context of a given organism in a given environment. This is important for genetics, but important much more broadly. In my own work I've had to explain many times that certain behaviors of a neural network can not be judged in isolation. They can only be evaluated in the context of the data sets they're operating on and the tasks they're being asked to do.

I found Mukherjee to be on weakest footing when discussing the ethical implications. He seems to be engaging in too much mood affiliation.

Medieval Europe, Chris Wickham

I was looking for a good overview of medieval history. I've learned isolated pieces here and there, but my secondary education covered exactly zero European history, so I'm lacking a broad outline. This wasn't that really that book. It did a good job of describing major political themes but didn't mention any specific events. It's a valuable approach, but not the one I expected. The focus was mainly on state capacity of the different regions. (Which I actually think is a very valuable approach, just not what I was looking for.)

One take-away: France is very fortunate to have inherited Roman roads. That gave them a big leg-up in state capacity compared to their central and eastern rivals.

The Aeronaut's Windlass, Jim Butcher

This is the first in a new series in a victorian, pseudo-steampunk setting. Butcher is generally a fun read, and this is no exception. It's nice to see some fantasy novels that aren't in either a modern time period or a Tolkinesque medieval era.

I don't have a ton to say except that there were Aeronauts but there was no windlass. Is the title a metaphor that is going over my head, or is it just a catchy phrase without relation to the story?

Oh, also one thing in the world building got under my skin. Everyone in the story lives in these towers constructed by "the ancients" or some such, because the surface of the planet is poisonous and/or infested with ravenous hellbeasts. Each tower is a city-state, and people fly between them on airships. As a result, Butcher mentions over and over how much of a luxury resource wood is, because it's risky to go to the surface for timber. But what about all the other raw materials?? Where are they getting metal? Cotton? Wool? A huge library plays a role in the story; what are they making paper out of? Ships are described with complicated rigging; what is rope made from?He mentions that meat is vat-grown and therefor rare, but what about all the other food? Why is wood singled out as the one luxury?

Waking Gods, Sylvain Neuvel

This is the sequel to Neuvel's Sleeping Giants. Very good. Told in the same style, i.e. each chapter is a diary entry, interview transcript, communication intercept, news report, etc. which reveals the story to you little by little. Points for a good story, and double points for non-standard narrative form.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland

This had much of Stephenson's cleverness without his extremely lengthy didactic digressions. I'm not sure how much of the book was Stephenson and how much was Galland, but the combination worked very well. Recommended. I'm very much hoping there will be a sequel, but it's not clear. Parts of it relating to academia and the defense/IC sectors did not quite square with what I've observed, but it's a novel about magic and supercomputers and time travel and parallel universes, so I think I can let that slide.

The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, William Goldman

I love the movie, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading the book. As everyone knows, the book is almost always better than the book. This may be an exception. Either way, they are very close in quality, perhaps because Goldman also wrote the screenplay. (He also wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and I never would have guessed that both of those were written by the same person.) The only obvious parts left out of the movie were some longer character back stories, which were helpful but not necessary.

The conceit of the book is that Goldman is merely the translator/editor of a story written by the fictitious S. Morgenstern. Goldman never lets this illusion slip. The forward, introduction, introduction to the anniversary edition, epilogue, footnotes and asides: the whole time he sticks to the notion that he's merely editing an existing book. He even weaves in true stories from his life as a screenwriter to further blur the lines. I love unreliable narrators, but this is my first experience with an unreliable author.

The Blade Itself,
Before They Are Hanged, and
Last Right of Kings, Joe Abercrombie

I plowed through all of the "First Law" trilogy almost back-to-back-to-back. Definitely recommended.

Usually when an author has multiple point-of-view characters and rotates chapters between them there are some story lines that are exciting and I want to get back to, and some I have to wade through to get back to the good bits. Not so here, especially in Before They Are Hanged. I also appreciated that there was not an obvious quest or goal that everyone was seeking. It was somewhat difficult to tell what the challenge for the various characters actually was. It all comes together in the end in a very satisfying way, but it was nice not having the constant score-keeping in the back of my head about "are we closer or farther from the Ultimate Goal of destroying the mcguffin/overthrowing the tyrant/winning the throne/whatever?"

Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word, Matthew Battles

Low on factual density. Highly stylized writing. I do give it points because the final and longest chapter, titled "Logos ex Machina," considers computer programs as a type of writing. Anything that is willing to give 10 Print a place in the history of writing is okay with me. Overall, there are better books on the history of book and language.

Crucial Conversations, Kerry Patterson, et al.

I read this as part of a quasi-book club at work. Some of the people at dinner said that it was difficult practice having these crucial conversations (i.e. high stakes, emotionally laden). I suggested that there is one easy way to get lots of experience with these conversations under your belt: get married.

I'd put this in to the better class of management book, in that it's worth reading but still spins twenty pages of valuable advice up to several hundred pages of content. The world would be a more efficient place if business people were willing to spend money at Hudson Books on management pamphlets instead of books.

Olympos and Illium, Dan Simmons

Just as grand in scope and ambition as Simmons' Hyperion series, but utlimately not as good. It took well into the second book for the pieces to start to fit together, and as a result of remaining in the dark I had a hard time carrying about what was going to happen next.

Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton

This was written in 2007, and revolves a lot &emdash; by necessity &emdash; around the intersection of art and money. I would love to see what would have changed if there was a post-crash follow up from 2009.

One chapter was a studio visit to Haruki Murakami's studio. This was an odd choice, since as the book makes clear he's a singularly weird artist since he spends so much of his time running a sort of branding agency. That made for interesting but unrepresentative material. I'd read a whole book composed of Thornton visiting different studios.

The Sea Peoples, S. M. Stirling

This was a let down compared to the dozen or so volumes in the series prior. The series started out with a classic speculative fiction approach: change one thing about the world and see what happens. (Modern technology stops working; neo-feudalism rises from the ashes.) Then in later volumes more mysticism was introduced to explain why the change happened, and to give some narrative structure and reason why the Baddies were so Bad. (Chaotic gods are using them as puppets to take over the world in a proxy fight against their Good God rivals.) But this latest installment is four fifths weird mystical fever dreams (literally) mixed up with homages to the King in Yellow (again, literally). It's off the rails. I'll still read the next volume, because I like my junkfood books and I enthusiastically commit the sunk costs fallacy when it comes to finishing book series. But still: off the rails.

To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman

This was a very fun history. There's plenty of fact, but Herman does a good job of writing the "action scenes" of various engagements, for lack of a better word. His style is a little too Great Man-ish for me, but nonetheless this was a good read. There's also a non-zero chance he's overselling how important his subject matter is, but I could day that about 90% of non-fiction writers, and 99% of non-fiction writers who write about rather more obscure topics.

I would read an entire book about common English idioms with nautical origins. For example, lowering the sails on a ship is "striking sail." Sailors, who were paid chronically late by the Royal Navy, would refuse to let their ships leave harbor until they were paid back wages. To disable the ships, they would strike sail. Now a mass refusal to work is a strike.

The British Navy: Guard the Freedom of us All — I used to have this on my bedroom wall when I was a kid. That is a fact I bet you are happy that you now know.

It's a credit to Herman that I was a little emotional by the time I got to the end of the book. The Royal Navy keeps winning and winning, often against the odds, survives WWII and comes out victorious, and then is just... dismantled. It's probably the correct strategic/economic move, but that sort of unforced abdication is somewhat sad.

Of course I did grow up with a reproduction WWII-era Royal Navy morale poster on my bedroom wall, because my friend Eli brought it back from London for me, so I might be subconsciously nostalgic for the Royal Navy in a way most Americans are not.

Artemis, Andy Weir

Good, but not as good as The Martian. ((I feel like a lot of my reviews are "good, but not as good as their last book" (e.g. my reviews of Tregillis & Mukherjee, supra). This is probably not a terribly fair way to assess authors, but... eh. That's one way I judge books, and I think I'm not alone.)) I give Weir a huge amount of credit for writing a book that grapples with why people would want to live in space in the first place. A space colony is not an economically reasonable thing to do, and I don't like it when people hand-wave that problem away.

From here down, I'm just going to list some of the books I read in the last quarter or so of 2017 that I thought were vaguely interesting. They aren't any worse than the ones above, I just don't have time to write them up and I'm sick of this post sitting in my drafts folder.

Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, Tim Whitmarsh

Afterlife, Marcus Sakey

How to be a Stoic, Massimo Pigliucci

Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent, John Reader

Golden Age and Other Stories, Naomi Novik

Within the Sanctuary of Wings, Marie Brennan

Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story, Michael Rosen

Besieged, Kevin Hearne

Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb

Stoicism Today (Volume One), Patrick Ussher et al.

Paradox Bound, Peter Clines

Dead Men Can't Complain, Peter Clines

by jsylvest Posted on 4 January 2018

Posted in Book List, Reviews | Tagged books, science | Leave a comment

What I've Been Reading

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, Dan Koeppel

Not bad. I'm a sucker for this type of history of a single commodity or common household object. It did make we want to try to get my hands on one of the few non-Cavendish cultivars of bananas that ever make their way to America.

Very short summary/background info: all of the bananas at American grocery stores are genetic clones. This leaves them very susceptible to disease. This is not a theoretical concern: the variety which was previously ubiquitous was wiped out in the middle of the 20th century, and the current variety is being decimated in many growing regions. The fact that they're sterile fruits propagated clonally also makes it extremely difficult to breed other, more resistant varieties the way we do with the majority of our produce. Also important to the story is that banana production for the US and European markets has historically been very oligopolistic, leading to some … unsavory … business practices.

(Digression: The artificial banana flavor used in candies tastes nothing like our modern Cavendish bananas but I have heard that it is a very good match for the flavor of the Gros Michel that the Cavendish replaced. I've never been able to find definitive confirmation of that though, and I wish it was mentioned in this book. This a minor was disappointment. On the other hand, I was unreasonably amused by Koeppel's tongue-in-cheek translation of the "Gros Michel" as "The Big Mike".)

There is a temptation when people right books about subjects that have been overlooked to try to swing the pendulum too hard the other way to make the audience realize how important the subject is. Koeppel mostly avoids that trap, but falls in to it somewhat when discussing more current history. There's a lot more to Latin American politics and the rise of Bolivarian Socialism than the treatment of workers on banana plantations, which Koeppel asserted as a primary cause. Similarly he drew an analogy between the Clinton administration filing a complaint with the WTO about EU banana import duties and the active role that United Fruit played in shaping US foreign policy in Latin America between the beginning of the century and the middle of the Cold War. Both have fruit companies involved in international relations, that's where the similarities end. One of those is egregious cronyism, and one is a rules-based order in action.

Koeppel was on the shakiest ground towards the end of the book, when he was discussing the future of the banana market. His discussion of Fair Trade could benefit from reading Amrita Narlikar and similar critiques. I do give Koeppel much credit for his recognition of Consumer Sovereignty. If the conditions of banana growers are going to improve it won't be because Chiquita/Dole/etc. become kinder and gentler, it must be because consumers decide to spend more money buying bananas. Our stated preferences for better conditions for poor agricultural workers do not match our revealed preferences as consumers.

I also commend Koeppel for admitting that researching this book caused him to change his mind about transgenic food. He had previously been anti-GMO but became convinced genetic manipulation is the only way to save the banana crop. I do wish he had extended more of the same enthusiastic acceptance of transgenics to other crops, which he only went halfway to doing. Yes, bananas sterility makes them somewhat of a special case, but only somewhat.

A couple of months back I read Dan Reader's Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. If you're going to pick up one book about a non-cereal staple crop (and why wouldn't you?), I liked Potato much better.

Pilot X, Tom Merritt

This is a time-travel adventure story. It seemed like it could have been a Doctor Who episode. Merritt handles the oddities that result from time travel with deftness and wit. (A couple of examples that make you stop and think. 1: "This will be the last time I meet you, but not the last time you meet me." 2: The main character spends twelve years in training for a job, but it takes only four years, because when he gets to the end of the four year period he goes back in time and starts again twice, so that there are three of him all operating in parallel.) Amusing, but not great.

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu

I had previous read Liu's short story collection The Paper Menagerie and loved it. Grace of Kings didn't disappoint. Highly recommended. One of the blurbs on the back cover described it as "the Wuxia version of Game of the Thrones" and that pretty much covers it.

One downside to the book is that characters experience rapid changes in fortune within the span of several pages. It's a nice, fast pace — most contemporary fantasy authors would lumberingly stretch out plot points like this for scores (hundreds?) of pages — but it does rob the story of some of the potential dramatic tension. One minute I've never even considered the possibility of a character rebelling against their overlord, and then within ten minutes they've plotted their rebellion, rebelled, been suppressed, and then punished. That doesn't give me much chance to savor the possibilities of what might happen. All in all though, I prefer this pace to the prolix plodding common to so many contemporary fantasy authors. I appreciate GRRM-style world building as much as the next reader, but not every fantasy novel needs every minor character to have their entire dynastic history spelled out, complete with descriptions of their heraldry, the architecture of their family seat, their favorite meals, and their sexual peccadilloes.

I'm not actually sure 'fantasy' is the correct term for Grace of Kings, come to think of it. There's some minor divine intervention and a couple of fantastic beasts, but no outright magic. I suppose it's fantasy in a sort of Homeric way, rather than a 20th century way.

Anyway, I've got my hands on the sequel, The Wall of Storms, and will be starting it as soon as possible. Hopefully we don't have to wait too long before the third and final volume is published.

The Art of War, Sun Tzu, translated by the Denma Translation Group

I listened to this audio edition from Shambhala Press. I don't pay much attention to which publishers produce which books, but I've been quite happy with several volumes of theirs that I've bought.

I hadn't read Art of the War in probably 20 years, so this was a good refresh. The way they structured this was to first have a recording of the text being read, and then start at the beginning with another reading but this time with interspersed commentary. That was a very good way to do it.

The text itself is short, and the commentary in this edition is good, so I'd recommend this even if you have read Art of War before.

The Map Thief, Michael Blanding

This is the story of an antiquities dealer specializing in rare maps, E. Forbes Smiley III, who turned to theft to build his inventory. I don't usually go for true crime stories, and indeed that was the least interesting aspect of this book. However, it was an interesting look at a little corner of the art/antiques market that I did not know about. There is also good information about the history of cartography, exploration and printing.((Everyone loves to hate on the Mercator projection, but this book does a good job of explaining how revolutionarily useful Mercator's cartography was in the 16th century. His projection is a tool that is remarkably good for its intended purpose, i.e. helping navigate over long sea voyages. It shouldn't be used the way it has been (hung on every classroom wall, making choropleth infographics, etc.) but that doesn't make it a bad tool per se, just one that is misused. The fitness of a technology, just like that of a biological organism, can only be usefully evaluated in the environment it is adapted for.))

Perhaps the most interesting part of the case for me came after Smiley confessed and the various libraries he stole from had to go about figuring out what was missing and from whom. In the case of normal thefts, or even art thefts, this is pretty straight forward, but the nature of the material — rare, poorly or partially catalogued, incompletely and idiosyncraticly described, existing in various editions with only marginal differences, etc. — make it quite a puzzle. Coming up with a good cataloging system for oddities like antique maps would make a good exercise for a library science/information systems/database project. (Indeed it was only thanks to the work of a former Army intelligence analyst that things got sorted out as well as they did.) Even something superficially simple like figuring out which copy of a printed map is which makes for a good computer vision challenge.

There are also Game Theoretic concerns at work: libraries would benefit if they all operated together to publicize thefts in order to track down stolen materials, but it is in every individual library's interest to cover up thefts so as not to besmirch their reputation and alienate donors, who expect that materials they contribute will be kept safe. The equilibrium is not straightforward, nor is it likely to be optimal.

by jsylvest Posted on 25 July 2017

Posted in Book List, Reviews | Tagged books, computer science, econ | Leave a comment

Category Archives: Book List

Life in Code, Ellen Ullman

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Dan Harris and Jeffrey Warren with Carlye Adler

The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu

A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Daniel J. Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away, Bill Bryson

Grave Peril, Jim Butcher

The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Pushing Ice, Alastair Reynolds

Bad Blood, John Carreyrou

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, David Gilmour

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

The Book of Kells, Bernard Meehan

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slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, Nancy Duarte

The Relaxed Mind, Dza Kilung Rinpoche

The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, Brian Christian

Lies Sleeping, Ben Aaronovitch

The Labyrinth Index, Charles Stross

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds

The Sky-Blue Wolves, S. M. Stirling

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The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter, Colin Tudge

Pyramids, Terry Pratchett

How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie

Causes of Separation, Travis Corcoran

Robopocalypse, Daniel Wilson

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami

In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson

You Suck: A Love Story, Christopher Moore

The Hard Thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

The Box, Marc Levinson

Royal Assassin, Robin Hobb

Assassin's Quest, Robin Hobb

How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers, Sarah Bakewell

The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

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We Are Legion (We Are Bob), Dennis Taylor

For We Are Many, Dennis Taylor

All These Worlds, Dennis Taylor

Powers of the Earth, Travis Corcoran

Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu

Best Served Cold, Joe Abercrombie

The Heroes, Joe Abercrombie

Red Country, Joe Abercrombie

Milk, Mark Kurlansky

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara W. Tuchman

The Art of Language Invention, David Peterson

1632, Eric Flint

Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, William Irvine

Chuck Klosterman X, Chuck Klosterman

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The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester

The Truth, Terry Pratchett

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Kory Stamper

The Popes: A History, John Julius Norwich

Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory

Every Anxious Wave, Mo Daviau

The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings, Lars Brownworth

Scourged, Kevin Hearne

Dark Run, Mike Brooks

Bone, Volume Seven: Ghost Circles, Jeff Smith

Bone, Volume Eight: Treasure Hunters, Jeff Smith

River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay

The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, Keith Houston

Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation, Ammon Shea

Time Travel: A History, James Gleick

Gnomon, Nick Harkaway

Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer

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A Wild Swan, Michael Cunningham

The View from the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman

The Liberation, Ian Tregillis

The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee

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Before They Are Hanged, and
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