Category: reading

5 Interesting Reads – 9/20/2021

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Since I’ve collected another five interesting reads, I figured I might as well share them. Five at at time seems just about right: enough to warrant a post, and not too much to overwhelm. Incidentally, I’ve been categorizing these posts as “interesting-reads” and you can use that category if you want to see all of the posts.

  1. Over at Marginal Revolution, I read this short excerpt on barbarism and immediately thought of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The passage explains perfectly the development of Asimov’s Periphery and even why power seems to shift from the center of the empire to the Periphery, while wealth moves in the other direction. Of course, Asimov based is fall of the Galactic Empire on the fall of the Roman Empire, so maybe this isn’t much of a coincidence.
  2. In the Washington Post, this opinion piece by George F. Will on “The Pursuit of Happiness,” which is based on his new book American Happiness and Discontents. I’ve enjoyed Will’s baseball writing (especially his book A Nice Little Place on the North Side).
  3. This one in the New Yorker by Haruki Murakami, “An Accidental Collection,” amused me because I tend to collect t-shirts and baseball caps from various places I’ve been and products I like. Not too long ago, I read Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and it made me want to be a runner, if only I could skip all of the building-up-to-it, and you know, just run.
  4. Another one from the New Yorker, this time a long profile of Colm Tóibín, “How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann’s Head” by D. T. Max. I’ve only read one Cold Tóibín book, The Testament of Mary, but I really enjoyed it. I found this piece interesting because it delves a bit into how another writer works and I always enjoy reading that kind of stuff.
  5. Finally, courtesy of a coworker, this fascinating piece on “Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ movie on quartz glass” by Jennifer Langston. All about how Microsoft and Warner Bros. are collaborating on storing data on pieces of glass. Really, about the possibilities of long-term data storage.

If you’ve got any of your own interesting reads you want to share, drop them in the comments.

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5 Interesting Reads – 9/11/2021

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Here are some of the more interesting reads I’ve come across the the last few weeks. Let me know if any of these stand out for you. And if you have interesting reads of your own to recommend, please drop them in the comments.

  1. After “hearing” many of our kids’ classes while they were remote last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what eduction is today, and what I wish it would be. I think Seth Godin is on the right track with his “Modern Curriculum.”
  2. James Fallows has an interesting piece on presidential speeches, “Eloquence is Overrated.” In it, he writes,

effective orators sometimes succeed by making their language practically invisible. For them it serves as a pane, allowing the undistorted meaning to shine through.

This reminded me of how Isaac Asimov described his own writing style which he called his theory of “the mosaic and the plate glass”:

There is writing which resembles the mosaics of glass you see in stained-glass windows. Such windows are beautiful in themselves and let in the light in colored fragments, but you can’t expect to see through them. In the same way, there is poetic writing that is beautiful in itself and can easily affect the emotions, but such writing can be dense and can make for hard reading if you are trying to figure out what’s happening.

Plate glass, on the other hand, has no beauty of its own. Ideally, you ought not to be able to see it at all, but through it, you can see all that is happening outside. That is the equivalent of writing that is plain an unadorned. Ideally, in reading such writing, you are not even aware that you are reading. Ideas and events seem merely to flow from the mind of the writer into that of the reader without any barrier between,

I. Asimov, p.222
  1. Cal Newport recently had a great piece in the New Yorker on “Why Do We Work Too Much?” It touches on a feeling I’ve often had, what Newport describes as “a nagging sense of irresponsibility during any moment of downtime.” Also worth looking at is a follow-up he did, asking “What Would Happen If We Slowed Down?“
  2. Ryan Holiday writes about the importance of his nighttime routines as a means to set him up for success the next day. This is interesting in part because he outlines 9 things that he does that align with practices of great stoics from ancient times. It was also to read it in the context of my own evening routine.
  3. Fiction: Adam-Troy Castro has a heartbreaking story in Lightspeed Magazine, “Judi.” Adam-Troy lost his wife, Judi not long ago. It was sudden and unexpected and the story reflects that. I knew Adam-Troy casually, and had breakfast with him, and his wife, Judi at a World Fantasy Convention years ago. There are wonderful people.

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5 Interesting Reads – 8/19/2021

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Note: Because my brain is off today, this post was originally titled “5 Interesting Reads – 8/19/2019.” I have no idea where the 2019 came from, but it has since been corrected.

In addition to books, I do a lot of short reading. Here are five recent shorter reads that I found interesting. Let me know if you find these interesting and maybe I’ll start doing this weekly.

  1. From the September issue of The Atlantic, a powerful 9/11 read by Jennifer Senior, “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind.” Though it has been 20 years, it is still difficult for me to read about 9/11. What attracted me to this piece was the diary that lies at its center. It’s a long read, but worth getting through to the end.
  2. The September issue of WIRED has a great piece by Clive Thompson on the failure of to-do apps. I mentioned this piece earlier this week, but its worth repeating here since there’s a lot of good stuff in it.
  3. I found an older piece by Maria Papova on why time seems to slow down and speed up under different circumstances. I certainly notice this more and more as I get older.
  4. In the New Yorker, Cal Newport (of Deep Work fame) asked why so many knowledge workers are quitting during the pandemic.
  5. Finally, I really enjoyed Jo Marchant’s article, “Inside the Tombs of Saqqara” in the July/August Smithsonian. When I read an article like this, and try to imagine that a 4,400 year-old tomb was already over 2,000 years old at the end of the Roman Empire, it makes me think of those science fiction novels that take place thousands of years in the future. Looking back on our time is like looking back on that tomb.

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Science as an API to Nature

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In his recent column in WIRED, Paul Ford has a great metaphor for science, one that really resonates with me as a software developer. He writes,

After a while you realize that science itself is just an API to nature, a bunch of kludges and observations that work well enough to get the job done. The job being measuring reality and predicting what will come next.

The core of what I learned about science came from reading Isaac Asimov, and I always appreciated his apt metaphors that made things easier for me to understand. But I love the simple elegance of Ford’s description. It appeals to me both as a student of science and as a coder.

I’ve always enjoyed Paul Ford’s writings. His 2015 piece, “What Is Code” in Bloomberg is a must-read. I definitely encourage you to check out his column in WIRED.

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Why To-Do Apps Don’t Work (For Me)

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Back in June, I wrote about the project management paradox. In that piece, I tried to answer the question,

Why is it that I can manage large, complicated, technical projects at work, but be paralyzed with indecision when it comes to managing my own to-do list outside of work? What’s worse, I can’t even settle on a way to manage that to-do list.

Well, Clive Thompson1 may have the answer. In his recent article in the September issue of WIRED, Thompson asks the question: why don’t to-do apps help us get stuff done? It turns out, there are a lot of good reasons, and even the makers of the apps agree with them. He writes,

The creators of personal to-do apps–or task management software, as it’s sometimes called–generally agree that they haven’t cracked the nut.

The fact that to-do apps makes it easier for us to record what we have to do is part of the problem. We accumulate more stuff because it is easy to accumulate. The fact that there are market forces driving us to feel more productive also help to proliferate tasks. Then, too, we don’t often think of the accumulation of to-do items in a time-context: we only have so much time in our lives to get things done, so we need a better way of figuring out what matters and then actually doing that stuff.

It is a fascinating read, especially for someone (like me) who has tried and failed with so many to-do apps. And some of the conclusions drawn in the article vindicate my recent musings on the lure of paper. Thompson writes,

In this vein, a whole bench of task management philosophers believe that the best interface isn’t digital at all–it’s paper.

For anyone interested in the psychology of task management, to say nothing of the failure of to-do list apps to achieve their goals, this article is for you. I recommend checking it out.

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  1. If you haven’t read Thompson’s book, Coders, it too is a great read. It described the kinds of things I do in my day job more accurately than other things I’ve read about coding. ↩

Reading Drought Resolved!

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Yesterday, I made a plea for something to read. I’d been floundering and unable to figure out what I wanted to read next. Readers came to my rescue with a number of recommendations. Ultimately, I went with Drew’s suggestion of The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson.

cover of rick atkinson's book the british are coming

I read Atkinson’s books on World War II late in 2019 and really enjoyed them. I am also a fan of early American history, particularly Revolutionary times, and I’d actually had Atkinson’s new book on a to-read list for a long time, but just hadn’t taken the plunge. After Drew’s suggestion, I settled down with it before bed, and I I knew right away it was the right choice.

From here, the butterfly effect of reading should take hold. Already I’m considering Walter Isaacson’s biography of Ben Franklin next. (I read H. W. Brand’s biography of Franklin almost 20 years ago, so a refresher would be in order.)

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions! You really helped me out of a tight spot!

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Desperate for Reading Recommendations

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I am in the midst of a reading drought. Nothing I try seems to stick. I just finished reading Stephen King’s Billy Summers (more to say about that in a future post) and over the last several days have started and stalled on half a dozen books, including: The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, Red Comet by Heather Clark, Metropolis by Ben Wilson, and most recently, Everything and More by David Foster Wallace, which really pushed me to my mental limits. (No pun intended there.)

At this point, I’m begging for recommendations. I prefer nonfiction to fiction, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I’ll take any recommendations. If you are wondering about the kind of stuff I read, I read everything. More specifically, here is the list of everything I’ve read since 1996 in case that help.

If you are so inclined to help out, drop your recommendations in the comments. I’m grateful for any help you can provide to get me out of this reading drought.

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Restless Reading

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Few things are as frustrating as not being able to fall asleep when I am tired. I toss and turn. I get up and walk around. I lay down again. I drink some milk. I debate whether or not I should take a Tylenol PM. I worry over the time, 5 hours left, now 4 hours. At some point, I am certain that sleep will never come, not just tonight, but never again. I daydream about the good sleeps I recall. I marvel at how my three year-old can sleep so quickly and soundly. No, I will never sleep again. Of course, I do sleep again, but those nights when sleep won’t come seem endless. There is almost nothing as frustrating. Almost.

One thing more frustrating than sleepless nights are days when I can’t figure out what to read next. There are similarities between sleepless nights and what I call restless reading. I start a book that I think I will like. Almost at once I can tell there is a problem. One common symptom is that I am already thinking about what I want to read next. Other symptoms include browsing my bookshelf, or skimming my Audible library for alternatives. Generally speaking, what I am reading doesn’t fit the mood of what I want to be reading.

This is never so frustrating as when I manage to dig deep into a long book, hopeful for its promise, but increasingly nervous that it isn’t going to work out between us. This is what has happened today, when I made the rare decision to give up on a book that I had managed to read more than half of. I started reading Eye of the World by Robert Jordan while in New York this past weekend. The series is so big and vast, that I’ve been fascinated by what kind of story it could tell. I stuck with it, although I could feel my disappointment growing. Finally, this morning, after having made it more than halfway through the book, I set it aside and looked for something else.

I don’t track the books I don’t finish reading. To make it onto my reading list, I have to finish the book. But I do have a pretty good memory of what I have tried and failed to finish. Recently, list includes:

  • Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
  • The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert MacFarlane
  • Walt Whitman’s America by David S. Reynolds
  • The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien

Rarely do I give up because the book is bad. More often, it is a bad fit for what I am craving at the moment. Right now, I am not craving fiction, and it was silly for me to try Jordan’s series at a time when I know I am not craving fiction. While reading the book, though, I found it slow. I kept thinking to myself, I could re-read The Name of the Wind and A Wise Man’s Fear and have a better time.

Usually, I can identify the symptoms quicker than this, often within the first few pages, or maybe a chapter or two. That leads to a struggle of its own. I can spend hours, sometime days, unable to find something that clicks with me. I scour my physical bookshelves, my e-books, and my audiobooks. I browse my wishlists. Like those nights when it seems like sleep will never come, it seems like I will never find another book that wows me, pulls me in, and from which I don’t want to leave.

There is no cure for sleepless nights, and there is no cure for restless reading. Unlike sleepless nights, however, there are mildly effective measure I take when I fumble for what to read next. I return to my reliables. Right now, where my mind is at, those reliables consist of books by Andy Rooney and E. B. White. Though I’ve read them before, they calm my mind, and allow me to read without struggle.

I know I will eventually get through this period of restless reading. In the midst of it, it seems like it will never end, and I’ve learned that I just have to be patient and hang on. Fortunately, E. B. White has made this a bit easier for me, and Andy Rooney has made me smile through my despair.

100 Books in 2019!

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Last year, I read 130 books. It was the first time I had ever surpassed 100 books in a year. Indeed, it was the first time I’d read more than 60 books in a year. It seemed like an outlier. So when it came time to set a goal in Goodreads Reading Challenge, I opted for a more modest 100 books. (Originally, I was aiming for 148 books, but scaled it back after I thought about attempting some longer books.)

This morning, I finished reading Depth of Winter by Craig Johnson, and thus, finished my 100th book of 2019. It makes the 130 books of 2018 seem like less of an outlier. Indeed, given my pace this year, I’d estimate that I’ll finish between 115-120 total before the year is out.

So far, the mix is 68 nonfiction, 32 fiction. I’ve been very heavy on nonfiction these last several years, and the reason for so much fiction is due in large part to my reading the entire Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson this year. I found that to be one of the most enjoyable series I have ever read.

94 of the 100 books have been audiobooks. Audiobooks are the real reason I am able to read as much as I do, and I am grateful for them. 5 have been paper books, and 1 has been an e-book.

The total comes to 38,373 pages. That seems like a lot, but last year, my page total was 61,545 pages. I don’t think I’ll come close to surpassing that, even if I manage to read 120 books this year.

Anyway, as soon as I finished my 100th book of the year, I started right in on the 101st. It happens to be Land of Wolves by Craig Johnson, the most recent Longmire novel to be published. Once that is done, I’ll be all caught up with Walt and the gang until next year. I suspect much of the remainder of the year will be on nonfiction.

But I never really know where the butterfly effect of reading will take me

84 Charing Cross Road

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And sometimes, desperation and persistence wins the day. I have been going through an unusually dry spell in terms of what to read next. I am reading, slowly, The Great American Sportswriter edited by Schulian, but I’m taking it in bite-sized chunks. I have struggled and struggled and struggled to find something that will awaken me from this summer drowse and fill the world with color. No Cheering from the Press Box, edited by Jerome Holtzman riled me from this slumber for a moment, but that was way back in June.

Last night, out of a combinations of boredom and desperation, I flipped through every page of James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die in the hopes of finding something. As I reached the Ds, I considered re-reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which I recall loathing in junior high school when I had to read it. This is the level to which I have fallen. I told myself I was being noble by giving a second chance to a book that a teenaged version of me scorned. But I pressed on. I made it through the entire book, skimming, at least, every entry, and making note of a few: Dispatches, Notes on a Cowardly Lion, A Book of One’s Own, Ongoingness, Lonesome Dove, The Diary of Samuel Pepys.

As I drifted off to sleep, bookless, one of the titles lingered in my thoughts, more of a place than a title, really, 84 Charing Cross Road.

This morning was beautiful: sunny and clear, with the humidity blessedly vanished, and temperatures in the upper 60s. I headed outside for my morning walk, and took in the wonderful weather, and that was the last time I noticed it. Or anything else on my walk for that matter. I began listening to the audiobook version of 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, and I was lost in the delightful letters between a New York Bibliophile, and the employees of Marks & Company Antiquarian Booksellers, lead primarily by Frank Doel. Those letters were wonderful, and Hanff’s witty style put a silly grin on my face for the entire morning.

Though short, this has to be one of the best books I’ve read all year. It surprised me, caught me off guard, and quickly and dramatically transformed my desperation into gratitude. But there was also a sadness. It is unlikely that a story such as this could ever happen again. People just don’t write letters anymore, for the most part. And a correspondence such as this could not be replicated in e-mail; it is not, I have found, a medium that lends itself to a literary style.

Sometimes, a book like this is just what I need to stir things up, and before I know it, I find that there is indeed plenty out there that I am interested in reading. I am hopeful that is precisely what happened here this morning.

Prediction Algorithms: You Might Also Like…

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Amazon is a fairly poor predictor of what I might like to read next. For some reason, their algorithms just don’t work well on me. I am trying to think of a time when Amazon suggested a book, and I thought, Yes, that is exactly what I need.

I’m thinking about this today for two reasons: first, because I’m in one of those in-between states, where I can’t quite figure out what to read next; and second, because of an Amazon email that’s been sitting in my inbox since yesterday with a subject: “Discovery your next read.”

The email was well-timed, what with me at sea between books, so of course I took a look at it. The list offered ten possibilities broken into five groups. They are as follows:

Recommended for you

  • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. I suspect this is because I recently read The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life by Richard Russo. Okay, maybe this is a fair recommendation, but there is a little luck involved here, as I will explain shortly.
  • The Pioneers by David McCullough. This would be a great recommendation, right up my alley, if not for the fact that I have already read it.

Based on your reading

  • Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo. This is a better recommendation than the Anne Lamott because I just finished reading Empire Falls. See, I went from reading about Russo to wanting to read his writing, not more about writing. That’s the problem with the Lamott recommendation–well, one of them, anyway.
  • Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation by Dennis Tenen. I suspect this is because I am partway through a fantastic book called Track Changes by Matthew Kirschenbaum, a history of the word processor. The only problem is, I’ve stalled on that book, not because it is bad–it is fantastic. But I am looking for something else at the moment. That makes Plain Text interesting, but not right for the moment.

Inspired by your wishlist

  • The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math from One to Infinity by Steven Strogatz. It does sound interesting, but no, not now.
  • Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven Strogatz. Order certainly emerged from chaos here, where I got not one but two books by Strogatz, someone I’ve never heard of. What is on my wishlist that inspired these recommendations?

For you in biographies and memoirs

  • Ten Innings at Wrigley by Kevin Cook. Okay, I have this audiobook, and it is downloaded to my phone, which is what I do for books that I plan on reading in the near future. This is a good prediction and recommendation, and I’ll give Amazon credit for this one.
  • For the Good of the Game by Bud Selig. Interesting that both recommendations are related to baseball. This would be a good recommendation as well, yet once again, I have already read this book. Indeed, I enjoyed it so much I sent Selig a note, and even got a response from him!–Although it is possible the response I got was a form letter.

For you on Amazon charts

  • Where the Crawdad Sings by Delia Owens. I’m sure it’s a great book, but it’s not up there on my radar anywhere.
  • The New Girl by Daniel Silva. Not sure why Amazon would recommend the 19th book in a series when I haven’t read the first 18.

Okay, so if I were generous, I’d say that generally speaking, Amazon made 3 good recommendations: The Pioneers, Ten Innings at Wrigley, and For the Good of the Game. The problem is that I have already read two of those, so in practice, Amazon made only one good recommendation. One is better than none, I suppose, but it doesn’t encourage me to take their recommendations seriously.

There are two problems, as I see it:

First, Amazon doesn’t seem to know which books I have read and which I haven’t. I mark books “Finished” on Goodreads, which Amazon owns, so they have access to that data, and could, in theory, use that to eliminate recommendations and replace them with others. Moreover, I have finished 365 audiobooks on Audible, which Amazon also owns, and from which, they should be able to tell what I have finished and what I haven’t. That seems like a simple problem to fix.

The second problem is more complicated. Predictions work better, I suspect, for readers who read primarily within a set genre or two. But what of an eclectic reader, someone who reads, say, a classic collection of sportswriter interviews, and follows that up with a Hollywood memoir, after which he reads a book about NASA engineers, and then just for kicks, a book on the White House chiefs of staff. I suspect Amazon’s algorithms are good at saying, “If you liked the Kingkiller Chronicles, then you should try…” But how good are they at making recommendations for someone like me, whose whimsy is often guided by the butterfly effect of reading? Given that series of four books I j just listed, what direction does an algorithm take?

I empathize with Amazon’s prediction bots at times like these, when I am floating on an ocean with no interesting books in sight. Today, just to read something I started The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins. Maybe this one will take.

Halfway Through the Goodreads 2019 Challenge

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Today I finished my 50th book of 2019, a few weeks ahead of pace. The book was On Democracy by E. B. White. It is an aptly-timed collection of White’s essays and comments on democracy and freedom, put together by his granddaughter, and with an introduction by Jon Meacham.

Last year, I read 130 books. I aimed for 100 books this year because I’d planned to read a few books which I knew to be particularly long. At this point I am 5 books ahead of pace, and I plan to gain some more ground before the end of the month with several books that I mentioned the other day. That will allow me to tackle some of the longer books in the second half of the year, including over the summer.

2019 Goodreads Challenge