Book List: 2018Q4
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.
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.
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.
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.
