Tag Archives: scifi

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."

Cover of Ellen Ullman's "Life in Code"

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."


Cover of "The Dark Forest"

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

Cover to "Wizard of Earthsea"

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?


Cover of "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou

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?

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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.

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