Posts in: books

📚 Finished reading: Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. The only thing I have to add to my initial impressions is that I have promptly picked up the third Terra Ignota book. If you don’t think you like sci-fi but have interest in history, philosophy or religion, these may be the sci-fi books for you.

📚 Currently reading: Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer and holy smokes is this good. After only a day of reading I am half-way in, and even the most macabre plot points from Part 1 have been paying off handsomely. I can’t wait to see what miracles the rest of the book brings.

📚 Finished reading: Toxic Exposure by Chadi Nabhan, in record time. The prose may have been clunky but the drama of the Monsanto Rondup trials was real and the book was a page-turner, so it took me less than 48 hours to zip through cover to cover.

The court transcripts make the story, especially when Chadi was cross-examined about the nuances of probability, causality and informed risk. If those topics sounds appealing, I recommend you listen to Chadi’s one-hour conversation with Nassim Taleb about the book. If only Taleb could have been there as an expert witness…

📚 Finished reading: Writing to Learn by William Zinsser, which was less an instruction manual and more of an overview of the best of non-fiction from the mid 1800s until the 1980s. Interestingly, the person who first comes to my mind as the proponent of the writing-is-thinking school, Richard Feynman, got a negative mention for his irreverent memoir. So it goes…

📚 Currently reading: Writing to Learn by William Zinsser and only a few pages in I have found the quote that speaks to me:

I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written.

Which goes along with what I’ve heard from colleagues about scientific writing: your manuscript isn’t ready to be published until you hate it.

Speaking of Sivers, his book on How to Live is my go-to gift for people who read. A step-up from that — and it is a yuuuge step — is Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, but I have to know someone really well because a five-book set is a bit of an obligation.

And speaking of Taleb, it looks like we were in the same building yesterday. Small world.

A short list of authors and books that by all accounts I should have found wonderful, or at least interesting, but ended up with a feeling of — meh — at best and often genuine dislike

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Joseph Campbell
  • Catch-22

That’s it! I tend not to abandon books half-way through, but I just couldn’t swallow these three.

Should I revisit? Emerson had some good quotes, apparently, and Campbell (seems to have) inspired many good stories although his own did not persuade me.

But Catch-22, dear oh dear. You could not pay me to start reading that piece of work again.

The Beatles wanted to do a LotR movie, starring:

McCartney as Frodo, Starr as Sam, Lennon as Gollum and Harrison as Gandalf. The Beatles' choice of director? Stanley Kubrick, fresh from making 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But Tolkien didn’t like the idea of a pop group being associated with his books. I am not sure about that cast either, but just imagine Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings. In the style of Barry Lyndon, perhaps? (ᔥMarginal Revolution)

Some of the books I’ve added to the pile since January:

And more! How many days in a year again?

📚 Finished reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt while trying to avoid confirmation bias since we are of the same mind on phones in schools and I was very much on his side during on of the most interesting and least civil Conversations with Tyler (Cowen).

The last third of the book — calls to action — was too much of a laundry list for my taste, but I was pleasantly surprised by Haidt’s take on spirituality with which he concluded the middle section.

Apparently, this book was supposed to be only the first chapter of Haidt’s next one, about the influence of smartphones and social media on everyone’s lives. I suspect that here, too, we will agree, though I had only written about the destruction wrought upon the older generations (present company included) in Serbian.