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
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.
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?