Coming to think of it, I've read quite a lot since the last thread. I first read David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand, which I found interesting but not enough to make a lot of notes.
I then burned through Essentialism in less than 24 hours. While not much in it was entirely new to me, it's crystallized a lot of ideas in my mind about what really matters in life, which is to discern the vital few from the trivial many and to be deliberate in what you do.
Then I tackled something that's been on my list since 2014:
I read When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, which I mentioned a Pubski a while ago, Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, and more recently Almost Everything: On Hope by Anne Lamott. While I don't regret reading them, I'm not sure if I can recommend them as they're of the kind of books that have a few shining gems hidden amongst pages and pages of meh or okay. I can't say about others whether it'll resonate or simply rub you the wrong way. Anne Lamott's was probably the least of those three - I'd summarize it as someone with a much more pessimistic worldview than I have trying to embrace a much too optimistic worldview, neither resonating well with me.
On kb's suggestion I read Our Robots, Ourselves, Cadillac Desert and George Gilder's Life after Google. The first two were interesting, although a bit on the long side. Especially Cadillac Desert was 27+ hours of "here's why this whole water ordeal in the Pacific SW is fucked up" and even though it is, it's a bit grating. I have been thinking of writing (but not really getting around) a review of GIlder. He makes a very interesting case that the current version of the internet and tech industry is fundamentally broken in terms of privacy, security and economy, and succesfully links our modern obsession with AI to it. And then he spouts some bullcrap about Blockstream. There are not many books I know that start out so strong and nosedive so deep.
At the end of the summer I read a trifecta of procutivity books, namely Adam Grant's Originals, Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You, and Scott Adams's How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I'd put them in that order from great to not so great. Adam Grant's book is a great read on what makes authenticity and original ideas actually flourish, despite its hypocritical foreword by Sheryl fuckin' Sandberg and that it peters out near the end. I would suggest Cal's book (especially in combination with his later book Deep Work) to anyone in college worrying about what to do and pondering if they should follow their 'passion'. (Spoilers: no.) Scott Adam's book is funny but he basically suggests The Secret as his solution for a better life.
Read Ha-Joon Chang's 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which I loved for its clarity and informative value. Finally, for fun I read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, Machiavelli's The Prince (my new D&D character is a Machiavellian manipulator, so it seemed fitting to do the research), and while on holiday I burned through two Dutch nonfics.
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Currently I'm reading Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep. I'm about halfway through but it's making me much more aware of how important and valuable sleep is to our general well-being and longevity. Glad that I'm reading it now, hoping to put his tips into practice.
I'm reading Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, and can't get into it at all. I've been trying to finish editing my own book on flights lately, and am just about there. I've kind of decided not to pick anything up until I am done with it, so I don't mess with my current headspace.
I have found that the more I study writing and the more I focus on classics, the less patience I have for "classic" sci fi. Asimov, in particular, irritates me. Philip K. Dick for the same reason. They're hailed as gods but the fact of the matter is, 98% of their output is dreck. Foundation is among Asimov's best but that fundamentally means that it's the only stuff that's about as good as the conventional prose of the era, most of which has been forgotten. Peak Asimov, as far as I'm concerned, is Nightfall and Bicentennial Man.
I've been reading electrician books. I've been reading Thoreau. I've been reading spellbooks. I've been reading Tsutsui Yasutaka, who wrote Paprika.
With time to spare, I am in sight of ten thousand pages for the year, a goal I don't often achieve. E-books made it possible, contributing about two-thirds of the total. A lot of these were free downloads, starting with a bootleg copy of Orwell's amazing The Road to Wigan Pier, which paired well with The People of the Abyss, but mostly Gutenberg classics. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were good reading; the first made me wonder what all the fuss over content was about, the second relieved my confusion. Additional hits were The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. William Clark Russell was a great discovery. I much enjoyed The Wreck of the Grosvenor, The Death Ship, and The Frozen Pirate (though this last title had some passages that made Mark Twain's racial insensitivity seem mild). Reamde was a $3 selection on Bookperk, and with a November repeat of Quicksilver gave me nearly 2000 pages from the author who dominates a word cloud based on my reading records. Most of my more serious reading is still on paper, where I can scribble notes. The News: A User’s Manual was a reminder to focus on things of lasting importance, mostly unheeded, with some memorable exceptions. And one more Alain de Botton title, thanks to a Hubski tip. Vaclav Smil's Making the Modern World was relatively small and densely-packed, like the landfills he says are the endpoint for much of Europe's recycling.Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea-stories...
Collection rates of post-consumer plastic waste are impressive, more than 90% in eight EU countries and in Switzerland, and an average of 43% (25.1 Mt) in 2011 for the EU-27; but more than 40% (10.3 Mt) of collected plastics were then landfilled and of the 14.9 Mt (60%) that were recovered nearly 9 Mt were incinerated (energy recovery) and only about 6 Mt (or close to 10% of annual production) were recycled (Plastics Europe, 2019).
Ok,ok, ok, my turn :D I finished: "You are not so smart" by David McRaney. This is a life changer book! I can't recommend it more. It has a second part - "You are now less dumb". I already read half of it. Biases, fallacies, entertaining illumination of the stupid beliefs that make us feel wise. Do yourself a gift and read these books. You'll be learning so many great life lessons and how your brain works, not always in your favor.
I feel like an old fart now - I remember reading his blog back when blogs were still the shit. Pretty sure it got linked in a Cracked article or something. I'd add Dan Ariely to your reading list, specifically Predictably Irrational and The Honest Truth About (Dis)Honesty. After that, maybe also Daniel Kahneman if you're still hungry for more!
I read a book called "The Compound Effect," by Darren Hardy. It was particularly helpful in changing some bad habits I had around diet and sleep. I'm now drinking a TON of water and sleeping more each night. I haven't read any fiction in a long time. I'm saving it all up for retirement :)The Compound Effect is a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond. This easy-to-use, step-by-step operating system allows you to multiply your success, chart your progress, and achieve any desire. If you're serious about living an extraordinary life, use the power of The Compound Effect to create the success you want.
That book might pair well with the key advice I took away from that Scott Adams book: I've grown very fond of the idea that small changes held onto for a long time are the key to systemic changes in life. It has something zen to me; it's okay to not be at your goal yet if you're doing something to actually get there. Speaking of sleep, I think you might enjoy the Matthew Walker book I'm reading now. He basically argues that sleep is a panacea of health benefits and the key to a longer, happier, smarter, more productive life. (And if it seems like too large a book, you can read the chapters in any order you like, although I do recommend reading the first three chapters as they cover the basics.)
Remembering is hard, so let's do the ones currently on my desk and in my backpack. I went through a bit of a Baseball Books phase: The Only Rule is It Has to Work is about two statisticians who basically take over the front office of an independent baseball team and try to make a ridiculous, rule-breaking, experimental but stats-driven success story. It mostly works, but the stories and the humanity that come along were the real championship all along. Fun stuff. I re-read The Art of Fielding. This was my 5th time through. It's so good. Bang the Drum Slowly is coming along... slowly. It's entertaining, but I'm not sure how much is there. It's also a bit difficult (gross?) sometimes to read about professional jock culture in the 1950s. Especially when it comes to race and gender. Oh well. School and school-related books: Reading Hartmann von Aue's Iwein for a class in literature of the middle ages. We're also translating parts out of the Middle High German ourselves, so that's fun. I love Arthurian novels. I've been marching through William Carlos Williams' Paterson since seeing the film Paterson and then seeing some of his poetry on my syllabus for American Pragmatism. It's alright. Not a huge fan of modernist poetry but oh well. The film was good. And finally, I made it through a book I've been meaning to read for the past 230 days: Gerald Murnane's The Plains. Hard to describe, harder to understand, but an absolute joy to read. Honestly, read the Times article from that old post. They describe Murnane way better than I could. All I can add: his work stands up to their praise. I started on Inland last week.
Three events of cataclysmic import happened: 1) I decided to burn through my Audible backlist, which means I haven't added anything lately 2) I discovered that I can check-out audiobooks from my library more easily than buying them on Audible 3) I did not turn on my account history at said-same library ...which means I really have no idea how many books I've burned through since June. Figure between 1 and 2 a week. Honestly. Highlights I can remember: - Lords of Finance - The Goblin Emperor - Collapse - The Life and Death of Great American Cities - Evicted - A Generation of Sociopaths - The Square and the Tower - A Deepness In The Sky - Hell's Angels Currently reading Bad Blood which is pretty great in an unfiltered hatorade sort of way.
Also Billion Dollar Whale. Bad Blood is about what dishonest shysters will do for money; Billion Dollar Whale is about what dishonest shysters will do with money. On that note,
This past week I read 'Earth Unaware' 'Earth Afire' and 'Earth Awakens' by Orson Scott Card and really enjoyed them. An honest critique would be that Card's characters are most definitely not people, they are characters. I really don't begrudge him that, in the same way that I don't begrudge Ayn Rand's writing because really both her and Card are writing about ideas, not people, and their characters are vehicles for ideas, not people. The 'Earth' series is co-written by Aaron Johnston who was one of the producers of the Ender's Game movie (Trash. So close, but utter trash) so the books are written more for the movie audience than for the loyal fans of the Enderverse and it shows. It's not that they are BAD so much as transparent. Fun, easy reads that I'd recommend to anyone who wants the skinny on human's first contact with the Formics. I was first given a copy of Ender's Game in 5th grade (Probably should have found it sooner but oh well) and as a child there were few books that held my attention more than that one. It's not uncommon for kids to feel like they and their possible contributions to their family/society are undervalued. Ender's Game (And all prequels/sequels) really bash you over the head with strong, smart, capable children who made a difference. I also think that despite everything else wrong with the guy, Card's philosophy on violence is coherent and perfectly moral in my book. My quick summary would be 'Pursue peace for as long as possible, and when no other options exist, defeat your enemy so thoroughly and violently that they are incapable of prosecuting further violence.' and I think that's just lovely. Starting on Volume 2 of Durant by audio today.
In the last 194 days, let me think. I've read a couple of books by Jo Nesbø, in the Harry Hole series. Phantom was pretty good, a bit more like a pulp detective novel than the noir detective novels most of the previous books in the series would probably be considered as. Hole no longer works for the police department at this point, so he takes the law into his own hands to get to the bottom of a murder in Oslo's drug scene. After finishing that one, I started reading Police, the next in the series, but I kinda lost interest partway through. It's a bit slower than most of the books in the series, and I guess I'm starting to tire of the characters. Instead I read a book in the Discworld series: The Wee Free Men. The story is about a girl who wants to become a witch, who has to rescue her younger brother from a dream world that is colliding with the real world, assisted by a clan of tiny Scottish pixies (pictsies). Like most of Pratchett's work it's quite delightful, even though I'm not really the target audience for this particular book, which is apparently meant to be an introduction to the Discworld universe for younger readers. Also; comics! Does that count? Does it count if they're hardcover? There's a small Danish publishers that does reprints of older mostly Franco-Belgian comics in hardcover format, so I've been reading a lot of Spirou and The Bluecoats. Comics I enjoyed very much when I was young, and it turns out as an adult as well. The quality of Spirou has varied a lot over the years, as different writers and artists have been at the helm. The Bluecoats on the other hand has been consistently good, with the same writer/artist duo making the comic since 1972 (and making it still). If you don't have much experience with European comics; The Bluecoats might be a good place to start. British publisher Cinebook is doing English translations.