Tyler Cipriani: Book Things
Tyler Cipriani
Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Copyright © 2018 Tyler Cipriani
https://tylercipriani.com/books/
Tyler Cipriani
ikiwiki
2024-03-25T02:44:55Z
Books Read in 2024
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2024/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2024 Tyler Cipriani
2024-03-25T02:44:55Z
2024-03-25T02:38:44Z
<table>
<colgroup>
<col />
<col />
<col />
<col />
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th>#</th>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Author</th>
<th>Recommended</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td>1</td>
<td>Shoe Dog</td>
<td>Phil Knight</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>2</td>
<td>The Comfort Crisis</td>
<td>Michael Easter</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>3</td>
<td>Several Short Sentences About Writing</td>
<td>Verlyn Klinkenborg</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>4</td>
<td>Because We Are Bad</td>
<td>Lily Bailey</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>6</td>
<td>Sisters of the Lost Nation</td>
<td>Nick Medina</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>7</td>
<td>Two Tribes</td>
<td>Chris Beckett</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>8</td>
<td>What Feasts at Night</td>
<td>T. Kingfisher</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>9</td>
<td>Uzumaki</td>
<td>Junji Ito</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>10</td>
<td>Slow Productivity</td>
<td>Cal Newport</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Books Read in 2023
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2023/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2023 Tyler Cipriani
2024-03-25T02:36:11Z
2023-01-02T21:53:48Z
<table>
<colgroup>
<col />
<col />
<col />
<col />
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th>#</th>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Author</th>
<th>Rating</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td>1</td>
<td><a href="https://bookwyrm.social/user/thcipriani/review/764278/s/least-favorite-leguin#anchor-764278">Rocannon’s
World</a></td>
<td>Ursula K. Le Guin</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>2</td>
<td><a href="https://bookwyrm.social/user/thcipriani/review/801956/s/borgovian-land-worms#anchor-801956">Redshirts</a></td>
<td>John Scalzi</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>3</td>
<td><a href="https://bookwyrm.social/user/thcipriani/review/842587/s/book-review-dear-edward#anchor-842587">Dear
Edward</a></td>
<td>Ann Napolitano</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>4</td>
<td><a href="https://bookwyrm.social/user/thcipriani/review/898908/s/good-writing-little-advice#anchor-898908">The
Psychology of Money</a></td>
<td>Morgan Housel</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>5</td>
<td><a href="https://bookwyrm.social/user/thcipriani/review/954778/s/magical-realism-meets-surveillance-capitalism#anchor-954778">The
Candy House</a></td>
<td>Jennifer Egan</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>6</td>
<td>Lonesome Dove</td>
<td>Larry McMurtry</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>7</td>
<td>Practical Doomsday</td>
<td>Michal Zalewski</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>8</td>
<td>Dinosaurs</td>
<td>Lydia Millet</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>9</td>
<td>It was he best of sentences, it was the
wrost of sentences</td>
<td>June Casagrande</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>10</td>
<td>Nettle & Bone</td>
<td>T. Kingfisher</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>11</td>
<td>Sea of Tranquility</td>
<td>Emily St. John Mandel</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>12</td>
<td>Under the Wave at Waimea</td>
<td>Paul Theroux</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>13</td>
<td>The Power of Habit</td>
<td>Charles Duhigg</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>14</td>
<td>Galatea</td>
<td>Madeline Miller</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>15</td>
<td>Station Eleven</td>
<td>Emily St. John Mandel</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>16</td>
<td>The Sisters Brothers</td>
<td>Patrick deWitt</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>17</td>
<td>Arnold: The Education of a
Bodybuilder</td>
<td>Arnold Schwarzenegger</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>18</td>
<td>The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information</td>
<td>Edward R. Tufte</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>19</td>
<td>Blue Latitudes</td>
<td>Tony Horwitz</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>20</td>
<td>Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow</td>
<td>Gabrielle Zevin</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>21</td>
<td>King Lear (New Folger Library
Shakespeare)</td>
<td>William Shakespeare</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>22</td>
<td>The Nineties</td>
<td>Chuck Klosterman</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>23</td>
<td>Second Nature</td>
<td>Michael Pollan</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>24</td>
<td>Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life
after Which Everything Was Different</td>
<td>Chuck Palahniuk</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>25</td>
<td>Demon Copperhead</td>
<td>Barbara Kingsolver</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>26</td>
<td>The Biggest Bluff</td>
<td>Maria Konnikova</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>27</td>
<td>No Country for Old Men</td>
<td>Cormac McCarthy</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>28</td>
<td>Heartburn</td>
<td>Nora Ephron</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>29</td>
<td>Lincoln Highway</td>
<td>Amor Towles</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>30</td>
<td>Apology (Harvard Classics: Vol 2)</td>
<td>Plato</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>31</td>
<td>Real Work</td>
<td>Adam Gopnik</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>32</td>
<td>The Devil’s Teeth</td>
<td>Susan Casey</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>33</td>
<td>This Is How You Lose the Time War</td>
<td>Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>34</td>
<td>The Secret History</td>
<td>Donna Tartt</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>35</td>
<td>Starter Villain</td>
<td>John Scalzi</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>36</td>
<td>How to think</td>
<td>Alan Jacobs</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>37</td>
<td>Fugitive Telemetry</td>
<td>Martha Wells</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>38</td>
<td>The Yiddish Policemen’s Union</td>
<td>Michael Chabon</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>39</td>
<td>Thornhedge</td>
<td>T. Kingfisher</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>40</td>
<td><a href="https://bookwyrm.social/user/thcipriani/review/4150580#anchor-4150580">What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love</a></td>
<td>Raymond Carver</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>41</td>
<td>Networking for Systems Administrators</td>
<td>Michael W Lucas</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>42</td>
<td>Hello Beautiful</td>
<td>Ann Napolitano</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>43</td>
<td>The Stranger in the Woods</td>
<td>Michael Finkel</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>44</td>
<td><a href="https://bookwyrm.social/user/thcipriani/review/4150614/s/exhalation-stories-by-ted-chiang#anchor-4150614">Exhalation</a></td>
<td>Ted Chiang</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>45</td>
<td>The Topeka School</td>
<td>Ben Lerner</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>46</td>
<td>Richard II, Part 1 (New Folger Library
Shakespeare)</td>
<td>William Shakespeare</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>47</td>
<td>King Henry IV, Part 1 (New Folger Library
Shakespeare)</td>
<td>William Shakespeare</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>48</td>
<td>Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore</td>
<td>Robin Sloan</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>49</td>
<td>How to Keep House While Drowning</td>
<td>KC Davis</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>50</td>
<td>System Collapse</td>
<td>Martha Wells</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Reading in 2022
https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2022/12/31/favorite-books-of-2022/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2023-01-01T03:21:40Z
2022-12-31T15:03:35Z
<blockquote>
<p>Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no
more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and
comprehension.</p>
<p>– Mortimer J Adler, <a
href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8673330M/How_to_Read_a_Book">How
to Read a Book</a></p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<img
src="https://photos.tylercipriani.com/thumbs/17/5ff7048676236f8155e2a293e44d3b/large.jpg"
alt="My trusty, hated Kindle" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">My trusty, hated Kindle</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Reading only “<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Books_You_Must_Read_Before_You_Die">1000
books before you die</a>” used to strike me as unambitious.</p>
<p>Then I started <span class="selflink">tracking my reading</span>, and
I realized it would take me <strong>40+ years to read 1000
books</strong>.</p>
<p>I needed to set goals to improve my natural average pace of 24 books
per year. And in 2022 I eked out a respectable <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/">55
books</a>.</p>
<p>This post catalogs the systems and habits I used to boost my
reading.</p>
<section id="motivation" class="level2">
<h2>Motivation</h2>
<p>I like reading.</p>
<p>When I contrast how I feel after I spend an hour doomscrolling Reddit
vs an hour spent reading, there’s no comparison—reading always wins. Too
much internet can leave me feeling desolate.</p>
<p>Nonfiction continues to be the best way to learn more about myriad
topics. And science now touts the <a
href="https://lithub.com/its-official-according-to-science-reading-fiction-makes-you-nicer/">benefits
of reading fiction</a>.</p>
<p>But there’s so much to read and so little time. Plus, I worried I was
losing what I’d already read. So I set goals and built habits to achieve
those goals.</p>
</section>
<section id="what-is-working-well" class="level2">
<h2>What is working well</h2>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>My Kindle</strong> – I wish an open device existed that
was as wonderful as my Kindle. I hate that I love it so much. But it’s a
boon to my reading, and the benefits are hard to quibble over:</p>
<ul>
<li>Front-lit, ePaper display so I can read at night without a light and
without interfering with my sleep</li>
<li>Stores 100s of books</li>
<li>Whispersync keeps it synced with audiobooks on Audible</li>
<li>Stores highlights in <code>MyClippings.txt</code>—makes it easy to
export highlights</li>
<li>Stores words you look up in the dictionary in
<code>vocab.db</code>—makes it easy to make vocabulary words into <a
href="https://github.com/psamim/kindle2anki">Anki flashcards</a></li>
<li>Light enough to drop on your face while reading in bed (this is a
big concern for me)</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p><strong>Reading notes</strong> – I highlight quotes I like and
save them in <a href="https://readwise.io/">Readwise</a>.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://photos.tylercipriani.com/2022-12-31_readwise.png"
alt="Notes in my Readwise library" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">Notes in my Readwise library</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This happens automatically for books I read on my Kindle.</p>
<p>For paper books, I stole my entire process from <a
href="https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2017/08/14/how-i-read-when-researching-a-book/">Cal
Newport</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li>Read with a <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/Zebra-Mechanical-Standard-Assorted-28-Count/dp/B001BZ4RJS/ref=sr_1_10">Zebra
#2</a> in hand</li>
<li>Highlight interesting passages—underline or bracket or make a mark
in the margins</li>
<li>For each page where I highlight a passage, <strong>I also make a
line across the corner of the page</strong></li>
<li>Later, I can flip through the book and find all the pages with lines
to find my highlights</li>
<li>Then I’ll use Readwise’s “Add via photo” feature to add the
highlights to the app</li>
</ul>
<p>Readwise can automatically export to online notetaking apps like
Evernote. But I like to export each book’s notes to markdown and save
them for quick ripgrepping and offline reading under
<code>~/Documents/notes/brain</code>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Tracking</strong> – It’s surprising how much benefit you
get from simply writing down the books your read somewhere.</p>
<p>I used to forget whole books all the time.</p>
<p>I’ve tracked every book I’ve read <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2016/">since 2016</a> on
this blog. Posting it online may give me a bit of public accountability,
but I think a plain text file would net you the same benefits.</p></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="what-still-needs-improvement" class="level2">
<h2>What still needs improvement</h2>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>Reviewing</strong> – I failed to write a review for each
book I read this year. I started strong but faltered around book 30.</p>
<p>I want to improve this next year. Maybe I should finally concede and
join a social reading forum—it might help to have some social
accountability.</p>
<p>The anti-corporate, ActivityPub-backed Goodreads alternative <a
href="https://bookwyrm.social/">BookWyrm</a> could be a cool
place.</p></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="goals-for-2023" class="level2">
<h2>Goals for 2023</h2>
<p>I’m going for fifty books again.</p>
<p>Here are a few of my vague notions for reading in 2023:</p>
<ul>
<li>Math – I want to read about math. I’ve got A.N. Whiteheads’s “<a
href="https://archive.org/details/introductiontoma00whitiala">An
Introduction to Mathematics</a>” and Mark C. Chu-Carroll’s <a
href="https://pragprog.com/titles/mcmath/good-math/">Good Math</a> on my
list.</li>
<li>Trees – I read “The Overstory” by Richard Powers in 2020. In an
interview with the Guardian in 2019, Powers said <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/11/richard-powers-interview-the-overstory-radicalised">he’d
read 120 books about trees</a> while he was writing it. I wonder which
was the best?</li>
<li>The <a
href="https://www.ursulakleguin.com/hainish-novels-and-stories">Hainish
Cycle</a> books – I’m a sucker for Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed
is one of my favorites. I’ve never read any other book in this series.
Why not try a few in 2023?</li>
<li>Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry – In 1994, David Foster Wallace
taught English 102 at Illinois State. <a
href="https://www.openculture.com/2013/02/david_foster_wallaces_1994_syllabus.html">His
syllabus survives online</a>. All the required reading is mass-market
paperbacks. Lonesome Dove is one of these cheap paperbacks that also
happens to have won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so it’s
probably an OK read.</li>
<li>Moar US President biographies – reading a biography of every
American president might be a fun project <code>¯\_(ツ)_/¯</code></li>
</ul>
</section>
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-12-05T19:54:55Z
2022-08-11T04:45:28Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<blockquote>
<p>Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results.</p>
<p>– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve always wondered if James Bond is supposed to be an idiot or if
that’s his cover. I think “shaken, not stirred” is a the give-away: who
would ever shake a martini?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a kind of stupidity among drunks, particularly when they are
sober, a kind of disconnection which the unobservant interpret as
vagueness and which Leamas seemed to acquire with unnatural speed.</p>
<p>– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John le Carré’s Alec Leamas in contrast is a drunk, but I’m still not
sure if that’s only his cover. Leamas is a journeyman’s James
Bond—smaller, realer—an everyday sort of vicious.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a
squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists,
and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their
rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the
rights and wrongs?</p>
<p>– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Leamas has one far-fetched chance at destroying Hans-Dieter Mundt the
ex-Nazi member of the Abteilung who ordered East German border guards to
gun-down Karl Riemeck, Leamas’s spy. And this single chance involves
going deep undercover.</p>
<p>The reader is left in the dark about the plan initially—we’re left to
believe Leamas has become a bitter drunk as office rumors swirl about
his pension eligibility.</p>
<p>But later we realize his contact—Control—means to use him for counter
intelligence. Feeding the enemy select disinformation under the guise of
Leamas acting as a turn-coat.</p>
<p>The layers of double-crossing only get better from there. It reminded
me a lot of Martin Scorsese’s movie <em>The Departed</em>—a contact deep
under cover, except replace Mark Wahlberg with George Smiley.</p>
<p>When le Carré died a few years back, I’d vowed to become familiar
with his work. This book was a good entrypoint.</p>
<section id="good-quotes" class="level2">
<h2>Good quotes</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because
your government’s policy is benevolent,</p>
<p>– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments
of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were
coincidental with attainment.</p>
<p>– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious
psychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not
particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional
expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire. But while a
confidence trickster, a play-actor, or a gambler can return from his
performance to the ranks of his admirers, the secret agent enjoys no
such relief.</p>
<p>– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</p>
</blockquote>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>The Spy Who Came in from the
Cold</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>John le Carré</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span></span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span></span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span></span></li>
<li>Genre: <span></span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1984803689">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1984803689">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9781984803689">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781984803689">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Ghost by Jason Reynolds
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/ghost/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-07-10T20:36:20Z
2022-07-10T19:35:47Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<figure>
<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41-a+QkxQEL.jpg" alt="Ghost by Jason Reynolds" />
<figcaption>Ghost by Jason Reynolds</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I picked up this book on a whim at a children and young adult
bookshop in Niwot, Colorado called “<a href="https://www.twjbookshop.com/">The Wandering Jellyfish</a>”—a cute
store in the old Niwot Tribune building on main street, complete with a
antique cash register like the one in F.A.O. Swartz in Home Alone
II.</p>
<p>This book is the first in a series of young adult fiction stories
focused on running—Reynolds’s <strong>Track</strong> series. This volume
follows Castle Crenshaw, the eponymous “Ghost”, as he joins the city
track team, and—in a beautiful irony—learns how to face his problems
rather than run from them.</p>
<p>This book had me from the first paragraph:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Check this out. This dude named Andrew Dahl holds the world record
for blowing up the most balloons…with his nose. Yeah. That’s true.</p>
<p>– Jason Reynolds, Ghost</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This has everything I’m looking for in young adult literature:</p>
<ul>
<li>An honest yet wondrous worldview—it has a lean that tells you who
the narrator is from the jump.</li>
<li>It’s true to how young people speak and not too “fellow kids.”</li>
<li>There’s some adolescent gross-out factor here, which I
appreciate.</li>
</ul>
<p>The Ghost character reminded me vaguely of Miles Morales from the
Marvel animated feature film <strong>SpiderMan: Into the
Multiverse</strong>. And maybe that’s no coincidence as the author also
penned the novel <strong>Miles Morales: Spider-Man</strong>.</p>
<p>This book was a <a href="https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-2016/?cat=ypl">National
Book Award Finalist</a> for young people’s literature in 2016.</p>
<p>And the writing is wonderful. I reread the scene of Ghost’s panic
attack in the storeroom of the market in his neighborhood—anticipating
typing it in this review—eager to get the feel of writing it myself.</p>
<p>The language is perfect—iambic and musical—concrete language: a long
flowing sentence, four staccato sentences—chokes of panic—and the final
metaphor that nails the gravity of the scene.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Like how when you at the swimming pool on the hottest day of summer,
and you jump in and it’s cool, and then you take one step too far and
suddenly you’re in the deep end, and things ain’t so cool no more.
Because you can’t swim. That’s how I felt. Like I was drowning. Like I
was filling up with water. Like this place, this weird little room that
had saved my life, now felt like it was gonna take it.</p>
<p>– Jason Reynolds, Ghost</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Flowing, smart, painful, playful, and laugh-out loud funny—although I
picked up this book on a whim, I had a hard time putting it down. I
finished this short read in a couple of hot afternoons on my front porch
copying the main character by eating sunflower seeds as I read.</p>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Ghost</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Jason Reynolds</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>208</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>Paperback</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy
Books</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1481450166</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Young Adult Fiction</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1481450166">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1481450166">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9781481450164">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781481450164">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/into-the-wild/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2023-01-05T19:17:46Z
2022-06-23T03:23:19Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>3.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<blockquote>
<p>If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again,
I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.</p>
<p>ALEX. (Alexander Supertramp, Chris McCandless’s alter-ego)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” chronicals the end of Chris
McCandless’s life. McCandless died from either starving to death or
poisoning himself while living alone in the Alaskan wilderness.</p>
<p>The book is an expansion of Krakaeur’s 1993 Outside magazine cover
story. “Into the Wild,” was adapted into a 2007 film by Sean Penn—which
I saw well before reading this book.</p>
<p>After watching “Into the Wild,” I’d wondered why anyone would choose
to lionize McCandless. I realized after reading this book that I’d
missed the point.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no
less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly
enough, it is your God-given right to have it.</p>
<p>– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The point of this book seems to be: we were all young and invincible,
once. And only luck separates the brave from the stupid.</p>
<p>McCandless was luckless, brave to excess, and a bit of an
asshole—unlucky and young, I guess, is another way to say that.</p>
<p>This book reads like a long article in Outside magazine (which I
should have expected, I guess). It’s morbidly fascinating, well-written,
and maybe just a tad exploitative.</p>
<p>The parts that suck about this book are when the author wildly
speculates—for example, about how (exactly) McCandless died, or about
McCandless’s sexuality—the book tries to be more interesting than
factual. It is interesting, it’s probably close to factual.</p>
<section id="asides" class="level2">
<h2>Asides</h2>
<p>I liked this note from McCandless to a friend where he tries
channeling his inner Thoreau:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for
adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new
experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly
changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”</p>
<p>– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, quoting Chris McCandless</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One of the best parts of the book was about the author’s own reckless
Alaska adventure as a young man: attempting to solo climb the Devil’s
Thumb:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you
constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a
tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an
instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your
movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you
grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with
doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and
head. You learn to trust your self-control.</p>
<p>– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, quoting Chris McCandless</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Both Annie Dillard (in “the Writing Life”) and Jon Krakauer here seem
to have a deep distain for Jack London. I’ve only ever read “Call of the
Wild”—and it was fine <code>¯\_(ツ)_/¯</code>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had
spent just a single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own
hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk,
obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant
resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.</p>
<p>– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild</p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Into the Wild</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Jon Krakauer</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>231</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Anchor</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0385486804</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>nonfiction, travel,
adventure</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0385486804">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0385486804">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780385486804">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780385486804">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-sense-of-style/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-07-18T02:50:35Z
2022-06-07T20:48:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<p>Steven Pinker is an author I’m sure I’m supposed to dislike. The term
“neoliberal apologist” gets thrown around.</p>
<p>Steven Pinker is the author of Enlightenment Now—<a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now">Bill Gates’s
“favorite book of all time”</a>. Any book which provides Bill Gates
succor about the world that made him a multi-billionare holds no
interest to me.</p>
<p>But even folks who detest his views still concede: he’s an
entertaining writer. And books about writing from good writers are
interesting to me.</p>
<section id="the-classic-style" class="level2">
<h2>The Classic Style</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s
perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera
angles and quick cuts.</p>
<p>– Steven Pinker, <strong>The Sense of Style</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The book focuses on writing classic style prose. Classic style
differs from the practical style—the style of Strunk and White and
William Zinsser—in two ways:</p>
<ul>
<li>The author engages the reader in a conversation as an equal</li>
<li>You’re moving the reader through scenes that convey your point</li>
</ul>
<p>Practical style focuses on getting information to readers, whereas
the classic style’s primary goal is saying something interesting.</p>
<p>Similar to the practical style—you’re attempting to write lean prose,
avoid abstractions, and avoid jargon. But only insofar as it furthers
the goal of the conversation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and
reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the
reader feel like a dunce.</p>
<p>– Steven Pinker, <strong>The Sense of Style</strong></p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="grammar-time" class="level2">
<h2>Grammar time</h2>
<p>This book talks about grammar at a level of detail only a linguist
could love.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Modern grammatical theories (like the one in The Cambridge Grammar of
the English Language, which I use in this book) distinguish grammatical
categories like noun and verb from grammatical functions like subject,
object, head, and modifier. And they distinguish both of these from
semantic categories and roles like action, physical object, possessor,
doer, and done-to, which refer to what the referents of the words are
doing in the world.</p>
<p>– Steven Pinker, <strong>The Sense of Style</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In honesty—I loved it, too.</p>
<p>But I still have no idea what a participle is.</p>
<p>I know that a participle is a verb. I know that it needs an auxillary
when used as a verb. I know it can be used as an adjective or a noun. Is
that all it is? No idea.</p>
<p>I’m also confused about the “irrealis mood.” And all the stuff about
Latin words and Greek words: it was too much for me in one reading. But
I’m dumb.</p>
<p>The book taught me more about grammar than I knew before. And it
provided wonderful reasoning behind the mandates of Strunk and
White:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So every time a writer adds a word to a sentence, he is imposing not
one but two cognitive demands on the reader: understanding the word, and
fitting it into the tree. This double demand is a major justification
for the prime directive “Omit needless words.”</p>
<p>– Steven Pinker, <strong>The Sense of Style</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>A small point that I’m not qualified to disagree with the author
about is the use of active voice.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Active, shmactive!</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>One hungry heron was seen, as opposed to Birdwatchers saw one hungry
heron.</p>
<p>– Steven Pinker, <strong>The Sense of Style</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I found most of his examples contrived: rewrite the damn
sentence.</p>
</section>
<section id="tils" class="level2">
<h2>TILs</h2>
<p>Outside of the idea of the classic style, the other new writing idea
I learned from the book was to put important ideas at the end of a
sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>select the construction that allows you to end a sentence with a
phrase that is heavy or informative or both.</p>
<p>– Steven Pinker, <strong>The Sense of Style</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I love dictionaries. And another new idea for me in this book was the
“prescriptivist” vs “descriptivist” dictionaries.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Descriptivists had their way with the publication of Webster’s
Third New International Dictionary in 1961, which accepted such errors
as ain’t and irregardless. This created a backlash that led to
Prescriptivist dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary of
the English Language. Ever since then, Prescriptivists and
Descriptivists have been doing battle over whether writers should care
about correctness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pinker adapted some of this from his article in Slate: <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2012/05/steven-pinker-on-the-false-fronts-in-the-language-wars.html">False
Fronts in the Language Wars</a></p>
</section>
<section id="overall" class="level2">
<h2>Overall</h2>
<p>Overall, I’m still firmly on team Strunk and White. But this was a
pretty damned entertaining grammar book.</p>
<p>I think I’d rank all the books on writing I’ve read like this:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Strunk and White</li>
<li>On Writing Well by William Zinsser</li>
<li>The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker</li>
<li>The Writing Life by Annie Dillard</li>
<li>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost</li>
<li>On Writing by Stephen King</li>
</ol>
<p>In most ways these books are incomparable. But I did it
<code>¯\_(ツ)_/¯</code>.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>The Sense of Style</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Steven Pinker</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>368</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Viking</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0670025852</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Grammar reference</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0670025852">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0670025852">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780670025855">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780670025855">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/show-your-work/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-07-02T21:31:45Z
2022-06-01T00:00:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>4.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<figure>
<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51N+Ba1mYOL.jpg" alt="Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon" />
<figcaption>Show Your Work! by Austin
Kleon</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This book was such an earnest recommendation from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv1gOEY3cs4">Ali Abdaal</a>’s
YouTube channel that I bought it.</p>
<p>This is a motivational book that you could devour in 30 minutes or
so. But it’s the kind of motivational book that you need in your life
from time-to-time.</p>
<p>The author’s goal is to amp you up about sharing things on the
internet.</p>
<p>Plus there are a scant few details about what and how to share on the
internet.</p>
<p>Most of the advice seems right, and it’s quotable and full of
quotes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect
with people who like those things, too.</p>
<p>– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably
isn’t learning enough,”</p>
<p>writes author Alain de Botton.</p>
<p>– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a line in here that reminds me of a quote from Euripides:
“For this is held as one of the wise principles of mortals: what isn’t
good goes unnoticed”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We all like to think we’re more complex than a two-sentence
explanation, but a two-sentence explanation is usually what the world
wants from us.</p>
<p>– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a list of recommendations at the back which I wish was
required of all authors forever:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Brian Eno, A year with swollen appendices</li>
<li>Steven Johnson, Where good ideas come from</li>
<li>David Byrne, How music works</li>
<li>Mike Monteiro, Design is a job</li>
<li>Kio Stark, Don’t go back to school</li>
<li>Ian Svenonius, Supernatural strategies for making a rock ‘n’ roll
group</li>
<li>Sidney Lumet, Making movies</li>
<li>P.T. Barnum, The art of money getting</li>
</ul>
<p>– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As you might imagine from a book with an exclamation mark in the
title, this book is saccharine, but saccharine is enjoyable
sometimes.</p>
<p>I enjoyed the book. I’ll probably revisit either it, or this review,
often. I saw this book was for sale at the FedEx Office store near my
house and that seemed right somehow.</p>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Show Your Work</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Austin Kleon</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>224</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Workman Publishing
Company</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>076117897X</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Personal Development</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/076117897X">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/076117897X">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780761178972">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780761178972">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/an-elegant-puzzle/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-07-02T20:09:06Z
2022-05-22T18:18:23Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<blockquote>
<p>It took me two years as a manager to reach the “leadership is lonely”
phase.</p>
<p>– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51aTO3pGp9L.jpg" alt="An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson" />
<figcaption>An Elegant Puzzle by Will
Larson</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I read this book because I read Will Larson’s <a href="https://lethain.com/">blog</a> and newsletter and they’re frequent
sources of management insight.</p>
<p>This book reads like a collection of blog posts with smooth
transitions.</p>
<section id="on-blogging" class="level2">
<h2>On blogging</h2>
<p>Since I so enjoy Larson’s blogs, I was heartened to hear about
Larson’s blogging journey:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It took 200 more posts and another decade to cobble together a
written voice and to make enough mistakes that my experience might
become worth reading.</p>
<p>– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a good reminder that most overnight success is a decade in
the making.</p>
</section>
<section id="limit-wip" class="level2">
<h2>Limit WIP</h2>
<p>I think the most applicable advice in the book was this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When the team is treading water, the system fix is to consolidate the
team’s efforts to finish more things, and to reduce concurrent work
until they’re able to begin repaying debt (e.g., limit work in
progress).</p>
<p>– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve struggled to limit work in process (WIP) both personally and
professionally over the past year.</p>
<p>This advice rang true.</p>
</section>
<section id="organizational-efficiency-is-evil" class="level2">
<h2>Organizational efficiency is evil</h2>
<p>Organizational <a href="https://fs.blog/slack">slack</a> has been
missing from every organization I’ve been a part of. The result is
predictable: if everyone is working on their own priorities, and there
are dependencies between teams, no one will ever complete anything.</p>
<p>Larson reinforces this idea:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The expected time to complete a new task approaches infinity as a
team’s utilization approaches 100 percent, and most teams have many
dependencies on other teams.</p>
<p>– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle</p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="other-valuable-ideas" class="level2">
<h2>Other valuable ideas</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Good process is as lightweight as possible, while being rigorous
enough to consistently work.</p>
<p>– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Having humans who perform gatekeeping activities creates very odd
social dynamics, and is rarely a great use of a human’s time.</p>
<p>– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>With that setup in place, create a rotation for people who are
available to answer questions, and train your team not to answer other
forms of interruptions. This is remarkably uncomfortable because we want
to be helpful humans, but it becomes necessary as the number of
interruptions climbs higher. One specific tool that I’ve found extremely
helpful here is an ownership registry, which allows you to look up who
owns what, eliminating the frequent “Who owns X?”</p>
<p>– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s also an amazing list of computer science papers that Larson
recommends: <a href="https://gist.github.com/thcipriani/5e99203fa42760e4ae034b67ce71a7d4">Papers
recommended by “An Elegant Puzzle”</a>.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>An Elegant Puzzle</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Will Larson</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>288</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Stripe Press</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1732265186</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Management</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1732265186">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1732265186">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781732265189">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fuck/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-07-02T17:28:32Z
2022-05-21T00:00:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑ <small>(<span>1</span>/<span>5</span>—because “1” is as low as I can go—see
<a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<figure>
<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51mN3bY0JjL.jpg" alt="The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" />
<figcaption>The Subtle Art of Not Giving a
F*ck</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>You should skip this book</strong> and not feel bad about it.
Despite every airport bookshop, every endcap at the big box bookseller,
and Amazon’s recommendation engine insisting you read it.</p>
<p>The world insisted I read this book and so I tried the Audible
preview. The preview tells the story of William James. Although he was
destined to be the father of American psychology, William James was by
all measures a failure early in life. He was a failed painter,
struggling in medical school, and he’d almost died on an expedition to
South America. He suffered from myriad physical ailments and was
depressed, even considering suicide.</p>
<p>Then James read the philosophical work of Charles Pierce which
insists on radical responsibility. James vowed to spend one year living
with the belief that he had the power to solve all of his life’s
problems. This year changed his life.</p>
<p>Good story, right? That’s what duped me into reading this book.</p>
<p>One point in the book I enjoyed was when the author talked about
“good problems”:</p>
<p>Everyone wants an amazing life, but in an amazing life there are
still problems. But the problems in the amazing life are better
problems. So the question is not: what do you want out of life; it’s
what problems do you want.</p>
<p>From there the author bros out on Buddhism and attempts to hide his
bad writing by sprinkling it with profanity. I relish the chance to say
the word “fuck”—I’m a big fan! But fuck was this not worth it to
read.</p>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>The Subtle Art of Not Giving a
F*ck</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Mark Manson</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>224</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>Audiobook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Harper</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0062457713</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Personal Development</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0062457713">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0062457713">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780062457714">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780062457714">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Modern Technical Writing by Andrew Etter
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/modern-technical-writing/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-06-05T22:19:45Z
2022-05-20T18:51:39Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑ <small>(<span>1</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<p>Someone on Hacker News recommended this as a good book on technical
writing. The title led me to believe the book would be
<strong>about</strong> technical writing.</p>
<p>But the book is little more than an incomplete summary of
documentation tools that exist:</p>
<ul>
<li>GitHub wikis</li>
<li>Jekyll</li>
<li>Markdown</li>
<li>reStructured Text</li>
<li>AsciiDoc</li>
</ul>
<p>The book only talks about the craft of technical writing briefly. The
most valuable quote about writing in the book is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Technical writers, first and foremost, are testers and researchers.
Your job is to know what people want to achieve and precisely how to
achieve it. Communicating that knowledge is the last step of the process
and really shouldn’t comprise more than 10% of your time.</p>
<p>– Andrew Etter, <strong>Modern Technical Writing</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>How to communicate is not addressed.</p>
<p>This un-cited and inaccurate quote cast doubt on the author’s other
sparse advice:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wikipedia ameliorates [the problem of vandalism] with a sophisticated
anti-vandalism bot that uses machine learning to improve over time.</p>
<p>– Andrew Etter, <strong>Modern Technical Writing</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is misleading for the following reasons:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Who is “Wikipedia”? English Wikipedia? The Wikimedia
Foundation?</li>
<li>There are many bots, there is no “bot”</li>
<li>Wikipedia’s accuracy relies on volunteers at least as much as any
bot</li>
<li>It sounds like this refers to <a href="https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES">ORES</a> (maybe), but this
isn’t what people “rely on” so much as it’s one tool among many.</li>
</ol>
<p>The book’s primary virtue is that it’s short.</p>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Modern Technical Writing</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Andrew Etter</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>35</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>eBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>self published
(AFAICT)</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
</div>
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/snow-crash/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-07-02T19:40:04Z
2022-05-13T22:15:34Z
<div>
<figure>
<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51fQam1TU8L.jpg" alt="Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson" />
<figcaption>Snow Crash by Neal
Stephenson</figcaption>
</figure>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>3.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<p>I could reread the first passage of this book forever and ever and be
happy.</p>
<p>The book opens on Hiro Protagonist (yes, it’s an amazing name for a
protagonist) making a pizza delivery for the mob in a hyper-capitalist
future America.</p>
<p>Pizza drivers for Uncle Enzo’s Cosa Nostra pizza are called
“deliverators,” and they are all armed for protection. Hiro, the
greatest swordfighter in the world by his own account, is armed with
dual thirty-six-inch katanas (which are not a part of Cosa Nostra
Pizza’s weapon’s protocol).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is
a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel
like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to.
And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.</p>
<p>– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hiro’s pizza career ends quickly after meeting a ’Pooner (short for
“harpooner”—someone who harpoons cars and skateboards behind them on the
highway) named Y.T. (short for “Yours Truly”).</p>
<p>Y.T. is a great character. She has one of the most profound quotes of
the whole book in her internal monologue:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just
skimming off a tiny bit of it.</p>
<p>– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The book focuses on a neural virus that is transmitted via the deep
structures of our brains. The nam-shub of Enki (the spell/hack of an
ancient Sumerian neuro-hacker) inoculated humanity against the spread of
the virus—it was also the biblical babel event that prevented humanity
from continuing to speak ancient Sumerian. Now a new cult is trying to
use this neural and biological virus to, once-again, control
humanity.</p>
<p>I started reading this book because the protagonist in
“<a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/kaiju-preservation-society/">The Kaiju Preservation
Society</a>” wrote his dissertation on it and that book was fun.</p>
<p>This book reads, in parts, like a dissertation narrated as a
conversation between Hiro and an AI Librarian written in as a plot
device.</p>
<p>This book would have been subversive when it was released in the
early 90s. It was supposed to be a “computer generated graphic novel”
which sounds like it would have been mindblowing in 1992.</p>
<p>Reading it for the first time now in 2022, it started strong, it kept
building and building and then just…ended?</p>
<p>If I were to plot my enjoyment of Snow Crash over time, it’d look
like this: <code>███▇▇▇▄▄▄▂▁</code></p>
<p>Around the time that 15-year-old Y.T. has sex with the book’s main
antagonist (a man with a tattoo that reads, “POOR IMPULSE CONTROL” on
his forehead whose main ambition is to nuke America): I’m just ready for
it to be done.</p>
<p>I stuck it out to the end for a deus ex machina and that was some
bullshit.</p>
<p>This book would have been a perfect short story about pizza
delivery.</p>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Snow Crash</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Neal Stephenson</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>576</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Del Rey</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>059359973X</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Science Fiction</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/059359973X">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/059359973X">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780593599730">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/snow-crash/9780553380958">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Looking for Alaska by John Green
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/looking-for-alaska/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-05-15T02:59:27Z
2022-04-25T04:39:41Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<p>I’m a sucker for John Green.</p>
<p>I adore his podcast—<a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed">The
Anthropocene Reviewed</a>—a collection of essays staged as
five-star-based reviews of the various outputs of humanity. Like all of
his writing, the podcast intimates so much of his experience—it’s both
raw and refreshing.</p>
<p>Also I can’t read or watch <u>The Fault in Our Stars</u> without
choking up—I’m only human after all.</p>
<p>That said, I’d never heard of Looking for Alaska, John Green’s debut
novel, until I was browsing Audible looking for more things narrated by
Wil Wheaton—another human I find delightful.</p>
<p>This reads like a debut novel, like John Green hadn’t quite found his
niche. But it features all the standard John Green themes:</p>
<ul class="task-list">
<li><input type="checkbox" disabled="" checked="" />
Quirky high school students with a vague drama-kid vibe</li>
<li><input type="checkbox" disabled="" checked="" />
A stunning lack of real authority figures</li>
<li><input type="checkbox" disabled="" checked="" />
Manic pixie dream person or persons</li>
</ul>
<p>It’s a little formulaic, but comforting—like a Disney movie or mashed
potatoes.</p>
<section id="summary" class="level2">
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>“Pudge” narrates our tale. Miles Halter, AKA “Pudge,” is a lanky
(“it’s called irony, pudge”) newcomer to Culver Creek, a boarding/prep
school in Alabama (which is a thing, I guess). Miles is obsessed with
the last words of famous people. The story focuses heavily on two
people’s last words in particular:</p>
<ul>
<li>The poet Francois Rabelais’s last words: “I go now to seek a great
perhaps,” which is the explanation Miles gives for going to boarding
school in the first place, and</li>
<li>Simón Bolívar’s last words according to Gabriel García Márquez’s
<u>The General and His Labyrinth</u>: “Damn it, how will I ever get out
of this labyrinth?”</li>
</ul>
<p>The story centers around Miles’s roommate, Chip Martin AKA “The
Colonel,” and the eponymous Alaska Young—the manic pixie dream girl with
whom Miles is infatuated throughout the story.</p>
<p>There are adolescent pranks, lots teen smoking, some drinking, and
awkward teenage attempts at sexual intimacy.</p>
</section>
<section id="spoiler" class="level2">
<h2>Spoiler</h2>
<p>It’s revealed that Alaska’s mom died when she was very young and she
didn’t call 911 and therefore blames herself for her death. Alaska dies
while drinking and driving on the anniversary of her mom’s death and no
one is quite sure if it’s suicide.</p>
<p>It’s all heartbreaking in the way everything John Green writes is
heartbreaking. I’d be tempted to call it cheap, but it’s so brutally
honest about the experience of what it’s like to be young that it
isn’t.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Looking for Alaska</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>John Green</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>227</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>ebook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Dutton books</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0525475060</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Young Adult</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0525475060">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0525475060">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780525475064">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780525475064">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Breath by James Nestor
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/breath/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-07-02T18:43:27Z
2022-04-21T20:52:15Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>3.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<figure>
<img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/413cAh3xCfL.jpg" alt="Breath by James Nestor" />
<figcaption>Breath by James Nestor</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I sleep with tape over my mouth now.</p>
<p>The idea of sleeping with tape over my mouth is to improve my nasal
breathing. The author posits that practicing nasal breathing makes you a
better nasal breather.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>These tissues and muscles get “toned” to stay in this opened and wide
position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.</p>
<p>– James Nestor, Breathe</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He also cites a dentist whom he quoted as saying:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>mouthbreathing contributes to periodontal disease and bad breath, and
was the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar
consumption, bad diet or poor hygiene.</p>
<p>– James Nestor, Breath</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And while it’s clear that the “evidence” for these claims is some
random dentist saying something offhand, I figured it’d be an easy
experiment to try on myself with very little downside risk. So I did it.
And now I do it. It’s embarrassing, but man can I breath through my nose
like a champion now.</p>
<p>And the author tells me I really really <em>should</em> breathe
through my nose:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of
the reasons we can absorb about 18% more oxygen than by just breathing
through the mouth</p>
<p>– James Nestor, Breath</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, no book on breathing would be complete without talking
about Wim Hof and he features in later chapters. And the section about
Hof is a microcosm of the bad science in the book.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 2011, researchers at Radboud University Medical Center in the
Netherlands brought Hof into a laboratory and started poking and
prodding him, trying to figure out how he did what he did. At one point,
they injected his arm with an endotoxin, a component of E. coli.
Exposure to the bacteria usually induces vomiting, headaches, fever, and
other flu-like symptoms. Hof took the E. coli into his veins and then
breathed a few dozen Tummo breaths, willing his body to fight it off. He
showed no sign of fever, no nausea. A few minutes later, he rose from
the chair and got a cup of coffee.</p>
<p>– James Nestor, Breath</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I noticed two things about the above passage in this order:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>It’s probably not legal or safe to inject humans with E. coli</li>
<li>The passage oscillates between talking about E. coli endotoxin and
E. coli</li>
</ol>
<p>Sure enough, the study, <a href="https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1097/psy.0b013e3182583c6d">The
Influence of Concentration/Meditation on Autonomic Nervous System
Activity and the Innate Immune Response: A Case Study</a> mentions
“endotoxima,” (which, I guess, is a protocol for injecting people with
endotoxin that may be excreted by E. coli bacteria), but not injecting
people with E. coli as the book would suggest.</p>
<p>Anyway, the book has compelling parts, but hurts its own arguments
with sloppy pseudo-science.</p>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Breath</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>James Nestor</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>304</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Riverhead books</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0735213615</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Pop-science</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0735213615">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0735213615">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780735213616">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780735213616">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Masters of Doom by David Kushner
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/masters-of-doom/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-06-06T20:05:53Z
2022-04-16T13:33:45Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<p>I knew John Carmack from his occasionally viral <a href="https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive"><code>.plan</code></a>
files, which recount the days when Id Software was on the bleeding edge
of PC Gaming.</p>
<p>Carmack is a legend to anyone who writes software, and the book
offers an unflinching portrait.</p>
<p>But <strong>Masters of Doom</strong> tells the story of two Johns:
John Carmack and John Romero—the co-creators of the exuberently violent
first-person shooters Doom and Quake.</p>
<p>One relatable and endearing story from Carmack’s youth: the time he
used some anarchist-cookbook-level, homemade thermite to break into his
school’s computer lab to steal some Apple II computers.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to
help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip
on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told
the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with
legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.” At one point the man
twiddled his pencil and asked Carmack, “If you hadn’t been caught, do
you think you would have done something like this again?”</p>
<p>“If I hadn’t been caught,” Carmack replied honestly, “yes, I probably
would have done that again.”</p>
<p>Later he ran into the psychiatrist, who told him, “You know, it’s not
very smart to tell someone you’re going to go do a crime again.”</p>
<p>“I said, ‘if I hadn’t been caught,’ goddamn it!” Carmack replied. He
was sentenced to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town.
Most of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.</p>
<p>– David Kushner, <strong>Masters of Doom</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The book tied together a lot of threads of 1990s geekdom: arcade
games, BBSs and the early internet, dungeons and dragons, William Gibson
novels, and software.</p>
<p>By the end of the book, I liked neither John Carmack nor John Romero.
Carmack is an unlikable neckbeard: a despotic leader of a formerly fun
software company. And Romero seems like he has more bluster than
ability.</p>
<p>Still, I enjoyed their story.</p>
<p>And I’ll never forget the hubris of teenage John Romero, who signed a
letter to Capital Ideas software:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>John Romero, Ace Programmer, Contest Winner, Future Rich Person.</p>
<p>– David Kushner, <strong>Masters of Doom</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Masters of Doom</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>David Kushner</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>368</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>eBook + Audio</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Random House</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0812972153</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>NonFiction</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0812972153">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0812972153">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780812972153">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780812972153">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/personal-kanban/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-04-29T02:40:20Z
2022-03-30T00:00:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>3</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<p>This book makes two key points:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Visualize your work</li>
<li>Limit your work-in-progress (WIP)</li>
</ol>
<p>And that’s pretty much it. A quesiton I kept coming back to in my
reading is — do online kanban systems (trello, asana, todoist, etc.)
miss the point of kanban?</p>
<p>The authors emphasize the kinesthetic aspects of using sticky notes
and a white board:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When we’re able to represent each of our tasks on individual sticky
notes our workload assumes a physical shape. It becomes tangible.</p>
<p>– Personal Kanban, Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry (Pg 22)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Each time we move a sticky note, we receive kinesthetic feedback: the
tactile action is both a data point and a reward</p>
<p>– Personal Kanban, Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry (Pg 23)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But when you move a task in trello: do you get the same cheap
dopamine? Is a trello board an information radiator? Does it provide the
same kind of value as a physical kanban board in a shared space? If you
only see how work flows through a system when you open a webpage (which
may not be that often) do you get the full value of the original agile
system?</p>
<p>Anyway, I drilled a 3’×5’ plastic panel to my wall and bought an
industrial-sized box of post-its and sharpies—I’ll report back
later!</p>
<p>The other key point—limit your WIP—didn’t get much attention. The
authors recommend setting an arbitrary limit of three tasks in your
DOING column, and crank that number up and down as it makes sense. Makes
sense, I guess.</p>
<p>This is a short book that could have been shorter. I gleaned some
value here, but it wasn’t earth shattering. If you’ve used kanban
professionally previously (i.e., you’re a software person) you probably
know most of what this book is about to tell you.</p>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Personal Kanban</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria
Barry</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>216</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>Paperback</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1453802266</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Writing</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1453802266">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1453802266">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9781453802267">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781453802267">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
100 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Gary Provost
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/100-ways-to-improve-your-writing/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-04-08T04:10:32Z
2022-03-23T18:49:57Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="summary" class="level2">
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>If <u>Elements of Style</u> were a listicle but in a good way. This
is a very short read, and I’ll probably want to refer back to it
frequently.</p>
<p>My expectations for this title were low, but good advice abounds. I
was wary of picking it up (partially because I’ve read toooooo many
writing books recently and they’re starting to get a little dull).</p>
<p>Here’s a grab bag of stuff from it.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do not try to write everything about your subject … tie yourself to
some specific idea about your subject, some aspect that is
manageable.</p>
<p>– Gary Provost, <u>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>How to write a strong beginning:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Either you give the readers information that affects them directly,
or you give them a human being with whom they can identify.</p>
<p>– Gary Provost, <u>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>How to edit your beginning (reverse for your ending):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Cross out every single sentence until you come to one you cannot do
without. That is your beginning.</p>
<p>– Gary Provost, <u>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’d never heard of <strong>pyramid style</strong> before.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Writing in the pyramid style means getting to the point at the top,
putting the “who, what, when, where, and why” in the first paragraph,
and developing the supporting information under it.</p>
<p>– Gary Provost, <u>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing</u></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>When you rewrite your early drafts, ask how each sentence in a
paragraph supports the topic sentence of the paragraph. If the answer is
“It doesn’t,” then ask what other work the sentence is doing in the
paragraph. If the answer is “None,” get rid of the sentence.</p>
<p>– Gary Provost, <u>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The author places an emphasis on the euphony of writing. He compares
words and sentences to music and rhythm.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences.
Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words.
Write music.</p>
<p>– Gary Provost, <u>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>On knowing when to use a comma:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When your ear fails you and you can’t decide whether to add that
comma, DON’T.</p>
<p>– Gary Provost, <u>100 Ways to Improve Your Writing</u></p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>100 Ways to Improve Your
Writing</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Gary Provost</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>176</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Berkley</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1984803689</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Writing</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1984803689">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1984803689">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9781984803689">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781984803689">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/kaiju-preservation-society/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-04-07T02:25:40Z
2022-03-20T06:00:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="summary" class="level2">
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>The Kaiju Preservation Society is a fantasy novel that follows Jaime
Gray who dropped out of his doctoral program (having completed a
dissertation on the novel <u>Snowcrash</u>) to work as an executive at a
food delivery startup.</p>
<p>Sometime early in the pandemic, Jaime finds himself unemployed and
delivering food for the same startup and happenstances his way into a
new gig working for KPS—which we later learn is the Kaiju Preservation
Society.</p>
<p>He travels to work in a parallel universe where he “lifts things”
while others try to save and preserve Kaiju—yes, the giant Godzilla
monsters.</p>
<p>This book was so much fun! I got the audiobook and it’s narrated by
Will Wheaton for extra geek cred.</p>
<p>I laughed out loud a lot during this read. As an attempted and lapsed
vegan, this line got me where I live:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“They have vegan cheese.” “No, they don’t. They have shredded orange
and white sadness that mocks cheese and everything it stands for.”</p>
<p>– John Scalzi, <u>The Kaiju Preservation Society</u></p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="spoilers" class="level2">
<h2>SPOILERs</h2>
<p>There’s a hamartia preventing me from giving this book the five-star
rating it otherwise completely fucking deserves. And—to make matters
worse—it’s in a scene that could have been cut.</p>
<p>The main bad guy is the dude who started füdmüd—the food delivery
startup Jaime worked for—and the bad guy is a billionare so, obviously,
he gets to come pet the kaiju: fine. THEN Jaime gets him to reveal his
big secret fucking plan AND THEN JAIME TELLS NO ONE!?!</p>
<p>If Jaime had told someone it seems clear that the main baddie would
have gone to jail and not been able to do anything worse. But he didn’t
for some reason. At the end people learn Jaime knew and no one seems to
care. The End. Boo.</p>
<p>Anyway, still had fun.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>The Kaiju Preservation
Society</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>John Scalzi</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>272</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>Audiobook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Tor</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0765389126</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Science Fiction &
Fantasy</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0765389126">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0765389126">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780765389121">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780765389121">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/moonwalking-with-einstein/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-04-14T00:37:28Z
2022-03-19T08:31:07Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>3.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<p>Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gave his threshold test for
obscenity: I’ll know it when I see it. I might reply the same if I were
pushed to explain the distinction between memorization and
knowledge.</p>
<p>The book <u>Moonwalking with Einstein</u> explores humans’
relationship to memory, our ideas of knowledge, and how that’s shifted
over time. But it begins with an exploration of competitive memorization
and the techniques used by memory champions.</p>
<section id="the-memory-palace" class="level2">
<h2>The memory palace</h2>
<p>The techniques used in memory competitions are known as the
<strong>method of loci</strong> (“loci” is Latin for “places”). The term
that permeated the zeitgeist when this book was released was: “Memory
Palace.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The idea is to create a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you
know well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined
place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as
the “method of loci” by the Romans, such a building would later come to
be called a “memory palace.”</p>
<p>– Joshua Foer, <u>Moonwalking With Einstein</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The method was invented by 4th century BCE poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simonides_of_Ceos">Simonides of
Ceos</a> and is captured in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorica_ad_Herennium">Rhetorica ad
Herennium</a>—which is referred to frequently in this book.</p>
</section>
<section id="bakerbaker-paradox" class="level2">
<h2>Baker/baker paradox</h2>
<p>The method of loci works because it ties new information to old
information. The old information can help lead us to the new
information.</p>
<p>This is similar to the Baker/baker paradox:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The paradox goes like this: A researcher shows two people the same
photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and
the other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the
researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the
accompanying word. The person who was told the man’s profession is much
more likely to remember it than the person who was given his
surname.</p>
<p>– Joshua Foer, <u>Moonwalking With Einstein</u></p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="a-long-life-is-a-memorable-life" class="level2">
<h2>A long life is a memorable life</h2>
<p>There was a cute passage in the text about how to have a long life.
The crux is really the definition of a long life. If you live 100s of
years, but you have no memories, then your life wasn’t that long.
Memories are how we measure our lives.</p>
<p>And because we know how to create memories that stick—we remember
novelty—the formula for a long life is to do novel things.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily
and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one.
If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day
is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why
it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to
exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can
serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out
psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.</p>
<p>– Joshua Foer, <u>Moonwalking With Einstein</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although, and this typifies my critiques of this book, the false
dichotomy of exercising and eating right vs. vacations to exotic locales
is silly.</p>
</section>
<section id="memory-learning-and-writing" class="level2">
<h2>Memory, learning, and writing</h2>
<p>I was beguiled by the chapter on “The End of Remembering.” I learned
so much from this chapter, but I found the author’s arguments were
distracting and sloppy.</p>
<p>I’ll try to lay out one argument that bothered me.</p>
<p>Classic Greek and Latin wrote in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua">scripta
continua</a>—writing without punctuation—which meant that reading
required some familiarity with the text to read smoothly.</p>
<p>What’s more, silent reading is a very recent phenomenon; the book
cites the “Confessions” of St. Augustine, in which St. Augustine notes
the silent reading of St. Ambrose:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart
searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.</p>
<p>– St. Augustine, Confessions</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Therefore, Foer argues, readers of scripta continua had to memorize
the text to be fluent.</p>
<p>I find this claim specious.</p>
<p>A Socrates quote about writing at the beginning of the same chapter
pushes back on the author’s claim: “What you have discovered is a recipe
not for memory, but for reminding. And it is not true wisdom that you
offer your desciples … And as men filled not with wisdom but with the
conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.”</p>
<p>If writing was contemporaneously understood to be tantamount to
memorization, then what you discovered is not much of a “recipe for
reminding,” right?</p>
<p>I both loved and hated this chapter.</p>
</section>
<section id="random" class="level2">
<h2>Random</h2>
<p>About 60% of the way through the book, one of the characters that the
book mocks ruthlessly, Tony Buzon, is revealed to be the creator of the
fucking mind map.</p>
<p>Mind maps were so ubiquitous by the time I went through school that I
assumed they had a much more storied history.</p>
<p>Anyway, Tony Buzon—an advocate of memorization and popularizer of the
mind map.</p>
</section>
<section id="the-curve-of-forgetting" class="level2">
<h2>The curve of forgetting</h2>
<p>Only briefly touched on in the book: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus">Hermann
Ebbinghaus</a> and the curve of forgetting.</p>
<p>Hermann Ebbinghaus memorized random three-letter “words” (e.g.,
“EOK”) and then measured how long it took him to forget them. This
research laid the foundation for computer-aided learning systems like
Anki. Anki is not mentioned in this book (probably because it’s not
useful for memory competitions).</p>
</section>
<section id="other" class="level2">
<h2>Other</h2>
<p>The author works with K. Anders Ericsson to train for the USA memory
championships. Ericsson is (in)famous for the misquoted 10,000 hour rule
via Malcolm Gladwell and is, at this point, required to be in every
pop-psych book.</p>
<p><strong>Spoiler</strong>: Josh Foer is 2006 memory champion,
ZOMG!</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Moonwalking with Einstein</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Joshua Foer</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>317</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Penguin</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1455509124</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Pop psychology</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/159420229X">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/159420229X">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780143120537">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781594202292">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-running/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-04-07T02:25:40Z
2022-03-18T06:00:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>2.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="summary" class="level2">
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p><u>What I Talk About When I Talk About Running</u> is a short memoir
by the famed novelist Haruki Murakami focused on his training for the
New York Marathon in 2005. The book takes its title from a collection of
short stories by Raymond Carver: “What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love.”</p>
<p>Murakami recounts his start in running and writing the early 1980s as
well as his experiences in triathlons—the first time he ran 26.2 miles
it was <strong>from Athens to Marathon</strong> the opposite of the
original marathon<a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a>.</p>
<p>A cultural idea of writing as being unhealthy pervades this book and
is totally foreign to me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So from the start, artistic activity contains elements that are
unhealthy and antisocial.</p>
<p>Haruki Mauarakami</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Murakami talks about how he struggled to control his breathing during
the swimming portion of triathlons and he later realized he was
hyperventaliting—I’m pretty sure that happens to me while running.</p>
<p>It’s a short read, but pretty meh. There’s some male gaze bits
Harvard freshmen co-ed’s “proud ponytails” that weirded me out.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>What I Talk About When I Talk About
Running</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Haruki Murakami</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>192</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>Audiobook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Vintage</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0307389839</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Memoir</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0307389839">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0307389839">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780307389831">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780307389831">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
<section class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p>Which is an idea I’d love to steal.<a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/#fnref1" class="footnote-back">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/how-to-write-a-sentence-stanley-fish/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-04-03T09:58:43Z
2022-03-10T00:00:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑ <small>(<span>2</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<p>Annie Dillard in <u>The Writing Life</u> tells the story of a
university student who asked if they could become a writer — a
well-known writer responded, “do you like sentences?”</p>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three sentence summary</h2>
<p><u>How to Write a Sentence</u> is a book about sentence appreciation.
The first part of the book contains great sentences, pulls their
components apart, and examines what makes them exceptional – it seems
like a book filled with deliberate practice exercises for the budding
writer.</p>
<p>From there, the book wears on a scattershot – hit and miss – by the
end we’re talking about famous “Last Sentences” in books and movies
(including, bizarrely, the film “Some Like It Hot”) – it turns out last
sentences have nothing in common and are not very interesting as a topic
– this book felt like a very short interesting book made into a longer
(but still short) uninteresting book.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<p>Despite the title, the book is about sentence appreciation and not
sentence writing.</p>
<p>I powered through the book, propelled by the early chapter’s
linguistic fun:</p>
<ul>
<li>Looking at anaphora in Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “<a href="https://letterfromjail.com/">Letter from Birmingham Jail</a>”</li>
<li>Exploring form independent from content in Lewis Carroll’s “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky">Jabberwocky</a>”</li>
<li>Noam Chomsky’s, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” vs
“furiously sleep ideas green colorless” as an example of grammatical vs
semantic correctness</li>
</ul>
<p>I also found some enjoyment in the chapter on first sentences – a <a href="https://lithub.com/what-makes-a-great-opening-line/">LitHub
article</a> I recently read about the same topic covers all the same
content.</p>
<p>Location 362 of the Kindle edition contains the errata:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“you have write about something” is the usual commonplace</p>
<p>– Stanley Fish, <u>How to Write a Sentence</u></p>
</blockquote>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>How to Write a Sentence</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Stanley Fish</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>176</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Harper</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>006184053X</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Writing</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/006184053X">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/006184053X">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780061840531">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780061840531">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/hatchet/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-03-22T00:30:54Z
2022-03-09T08:10:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>3.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three sentence summary</h2>
<p>Hatchet tells the story of Brian Robeson a thirteen-year old boy
going to visit his father for the summer in the oil-fields of of the
Northern-Canadian wilderness. When the pilot of his tiny plane suffers a
heart-attack enroute, Brian crash lands and spends the ensuing 54-days
learning lessons about survival and personal resilience. This book was a
Newbery medal winner from around the time I was in elementary
school.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<p>The book reminds me of Starship Troopers insofar as it preaches pull
yourself up by your bootstraps kind of self-reliance that I’m conflicted
about.</p>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Hatchet</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Gary Paulsen</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>192</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Simon &
Schuster</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1416936475</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Young Adult</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1416936475">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1416936475">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9781416936473">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781416936473">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Make Your Bed by William H. McRaven
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/make-your-bed/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-03-22T00:30:54Z
2022-03-09T08:08:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<blockquote>
<p>If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big
things right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come
home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you
encouragement that tomorrow will be better.</p>
<p>– William H. McRaven, <u>Make Your Bed</u></p>
</blockquote>
<section id="summary" class="level2">
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>Make Your Bed is a short book based on a commencement speech given by
the author at the University of Texas at Austin that convey the life
lessons of Navy SEAL training. The title takes its name from the first
chapter, “Start your day with a task completed” — on the lessons of
making your bed (which is also the reason I read the book in the first
place — I’m a big believer in making the bed every morning <img src="https://tylercipriani.com/smileys/smile3.png" alt=":))" /></p>
<p>Making the bed is a foundational task for a productive day, and no
matter how bad your day goes: at least your bed is made—you’ve
accomplished something of value, even if nothing else goes right.</p>
</section>
<section id="other-thoughts" class="level2">
<h2>Other thoughts</h2>
<p>All the other lessons are de rigueur motivational posters in a high
school guidance counselor’s office:</p>
<ul>
<li>“You can’t go it alone”: Work with others to achieve your goals</li>
<li>“The only size that matters is the size of your heart”: You can make
up for lack of physical strength with gumption</li>
<li>“Life’s not fair—Drive On!”</li>
<li>“Failure can make you stronger”: AKA Don’t be scared of the circus.
AKA hard work makes you stronger</li>
<li>The Brene Brown esque: “You must dare greatly”</li>
<li>“Stand up to bullies”</li>
<li>“Rise to the occasion”</li>
<li>Give people hope</li>
<li>Never quit</li>
</ul>
<p>On the other hand: Clichés become cliché because they’re universal
truths – this book did not run short on cliches, but that probably
indicates there’s a large amount of universal truth here.</p>
</section>
<section id="life-is-unfair" class="level2">
<h2>Life is unfair</h2>
<p>One memorable piece of this book was the chapter on life being unfair
and the story of the sugar cookie. The author was told to run down to
the ocean, jump in, then roll in the sand until he was completely
covered — every inch and every crevice — with sand — a sugar cookie!
The person who ordered him to do this asked him if he knew why he’d done
it, he didn’t. Sometimes life is unfair. What a vivid scene.</p>
</section>
<section id="failure-makes-you-stronger" class="level2">
<h2>Failure makes you stronger</h2>
<p>The story behind “failure can make you stronger” is similarly
entertaining. “The Circus” is like detention for Navy SEALs (I guess) —
more running, more swimming, more physically exhausting activity. Once
you end up in the circus it’s hard to get out since it’s a punishment
for poor performance and the extra exhaustion makes you perform worse.
Until, one day, it doesn’t.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In life you will face a lot of Circuses. You will pay for your
failures. But, if you persevere, if you let those failures teach you and
strengthen you, then you will be prepared to handle life’s toughest
moments.</p>
<p>– William H. McRaven, <u>Make Your Bed</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The stories in this book are metaphors for life, but also very
literal lessons. It was a short read, not the most amazing book I’ll
read this year, but I thought it was worthwhile.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I realized that the past failures had strengthened me, taught me that
no one is immune from mistakes. True leaders must learn from their
failures, use the lessons to motivate themselves, and not be afraid to
try again or make the next tough decision. – Failure can make you
stronger</p>
<p>– William H. McRaven, <u>Make Your Bed</u></p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="summary-in-a-quote" class="level2">
<h2>Summary in a quote</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Remember… start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help
you through life. Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that
you will fail often. But if you take some risks, step up when times are
toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden, and never,
ever give up—if you do these things, then you can change your life for
the better… and maybe the world!</p>
<p>– William H. McRaven, <u>Make Your Bed</u></p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Make Your Bed</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>William H. McRaven</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>144</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Grand Central
Publishing</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1455570249</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Personal Development</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1455570249">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1455570249">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9781455570249">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781455570249">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/rise-of-theodore-roosevelt/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-03-22T00:30:54Z
2022-03-09T07:59:00Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>4.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three sentence summary</h2>
<p>The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is a biography that spans the
formative years of Teddy Roosevelt’s life beginning with his sickly
childhood; his years at Harvard; the tragedy of his first marriage; his
election to the New York state house; his time as a cattle rancher in
the Badlands of South Dakota (including his neigh mythical capture of
cattle thieves); his appointment to the Civil Service Commission under
Harrison and Cleveland; his time as New York City police commissioner;
his service as assistant secretary of the Navy during which time he
deployed the Maine to Havana where Spain (maybe) sunk it, at which point
he assembled the fabled Rough Riders, and led them on to capture San
Juan hill — a performance which vouchsafed a brief term as New York’s
governor; and goes on to recount his reformer politics as governor that
made it expedient for machine politicians to push him out of New York
state and into the vice-presidency.</p>
<p>The hefty 900-page tome ends, ominously, with Roosevelt taking a
much-needed vacation after being assured McKinley would definitely,
totally recover from his gunshot wound — nothing to worry about 😬. It’s
a historical biography that reads like a novel, and I was equally
mesmerized and troubled by the main character’s confounding attributes —
a journeyman of unequaled intellectual capacity, yet flawed and limited
by his tendency towards jingoism and careless violence and whose
privileged upbringing limited his views on class and race.</p>
</section>
<section id="other-thoughts" class="level2">
<h2>Other thoughts</h2>
<p>I’m left with several lasting impression of Roosevelt.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>He had a strange moral code that almost no one could live up to. He
didn’t swear and he didn’t drink. He once remarked his cousin had shamed
the family by marrying an actress. His reformer politics, viewed in
this light, seem like an extension of his personal beliefs.</li>
<li>Descriptions of his physicality are mind boggling. On more than one
occasion Morris describes how he snaps words with an audible click of
his teeth: I have not as yet been able to form a serviceable mental
picture of this.</li>
<li>Roosevelt simultaneously had the easy manners of a privileged 5th
avenue Knickerbocker, and befriended cowpunchers and rough riders. A
person, it seems, strangely at home with any class of people.</li>
</ol>
<p>Coupled with his insatiable reading habit (claiming to read a book a
day for most of his life) this all paints a vivid portrait of a singular
human. A bizarre human. But a singular human.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>The Rise of Theodore
Roosevelt</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Edmund Morris</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>962</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Modern Library</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1400069651</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Biography</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/9781400069651">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9781400069651">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780375756788">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781400069651">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
So Good They Can't Ignore You
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-02-21T22:56:04Z
2022-02-20T17:40:19Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>3.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="so-good-they-cant-ignore-you" class="level1">
<h1>So Good They Can’t Ignore You</h1>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three-sentence summary</h2>
<p><em>So Good They Can’t Ignore You</em> by Cal Newport is a book about
how to build a fulfilling career and it takes its title from a 2007
Charlie Rose interview with the comedian Steve Martin in which he offers
the glib-sounding but completely earnest advice to young comedians – to
succeed you need to be “so good they can’t ignore you.”</p>
<p>The most novel insight the book offers is the observation that
following your passion isn’t what passionate people seem to do, rather
their passion builds as they build mastery in a particular field.</p>
<p>The book asserts that building rare and valuable skills through
deliberate practice generates a craftsman mindset which is key to a
fulfilling, mission-driven, passionate career.</p>
</section>
<section id="the-nice-notebook-and-deliberate-practice" class="level2">
<h2>The nice notebook and deliberate practice</h2>
<p>Anders Ericsson’s concept of deliberate practice is touted as the
means to building rare and valuable skills. This is no surprise to
anyone who’s read any professional development book written after Malcom
Gladwell’s high-fructose corn syrup version of Ericsson’s research: the
10,000 hour rule from his book <u>Outliers</u>.</p>
<p>Deliberate practice is a type of practice focused on perfecting
techniques beyond your current abilities with the goal of improving your
performance. Newport mentions that fields without strict competitive
structures are often lacking for proven deliberate practice regimens.
This includes fields like computer science, which is his primary
focus-area.</p>
<p>As a strategy to gain deliberate practice he bought the nicest lab
notebook he could find in the MIT bookstore.</p>
<p>The $45 notebook had a concentrating effect on his thinking. His
desire to preserve the integrity of his weighty notebook forced him
exert the effort required to refine his thinking.</p>
<p>The focusing effect of nice tools was a means towards gaining
deliberate practice in his field.</p>
<p>This connects with an idea from The book Getting Things Done by David
Allen:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the great secrets to getting ideas and increasing your
productivity is utilizing the function-follows-form phenomenon — Great
tools can trigger good thinking.</p>
<p>– David Allen <u>Getting Things Done</u></p>
</blockquote>
<section id="the-adjacent-possible" class="level3">
<h3>The adjacent possible</h3>
<p>Late in the book, Newport talks about a 2010 book called <u>Where
Good Ideas Come From</u> by Steven Johnson. That book explores the
phenomenon of independent discovery: where two people independently make
the same breakthrough discovery at the same time.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Consider the discovery of sunspots in 1611: As Johnson notes, four
scientists, from four different countries, all identified the phenomenon
during the same year.</p>
<p>Cal Newport, <u>So Good They Can’t Ignore You</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is explained by the concept of <strong>the adjacent
possible</strong>. Hard problems in any particular field are well known
by experts in that field. Moving past these problems is in the moment
impossible as there are key ideas missing.</p>
<p>The adjacent possible is the space beyond the cutting-edge of what’s
possible, cobbled together from the combination of ideas people stumble
across in related disciplines. As humanity progresses, new ideas can be
combined with old to breakthrough current problems.</p>
<p>This reminds me of a quote I heard recently attributed to Einstein:
“No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original
conception.”</p>
<p>World-changing breakthroughs rarely result from pushing forward on
the same tacks, rather they arise from approaching problems from new
angles. The new angles of approach, however, may not yet exist. Only
when the adjacent possible space for new ideas is open are you able to
make progress on ideas that have previously eluded you.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>So Good They Can’t Ignore
You</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Cal Newport</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>174</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Grand Central</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1455509124</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Personal Development</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1455509124">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1455509124">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9781455509126">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781455509126">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</section>
</div>
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-02-01T04:38:00Z
2022-02-01T03:32:48Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑½ <small>(<span>4.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="three-sentence-shortish-summary" class="level2">
<h2><s>Three sentence</s> Short(ish) summary</h2>
<p>I’ve opted out of my standard three-sentence book summary as I’ve
read many novels with a fraction of the plot of a single chapter of this
book.</p>
<p>The book opens on Rosemary Harper, escaping her past to work as a
clerk aboard the Wayfarer, a spacer tunneling vessel. Faster than light
travel is illegal (seemingly because it’s hard to think about), so to
move through the vastness of space, you need wormholes. A tunneling
vessel is a ship that punches wormholes through space’s sublayer.</p>
<p>Spacers/Exodans are the portion of humanity that set course for the
great unknown after we’d destroyed the planet (and after the rich people
bailed to colonize Mars).</p>
<p>Rosemary arrives on a ship peopled with myriad species:</p>
<p>Humans: Ashby Santoso, captain, all-around cool guy; Artis Corbin,
irascible algaest – the ship runs on algae; Kizzy and Jenks, best
friends and lovable mech techs (the Pippin and Mary to Ashby’s Frodo).
Jenks is in love with the ship’s AI, Lovelace, who everyone calls
Lovey.</p>
<p>The ship’s pilot’s Sissex – an andrisk woman (a feathered dinosaur
species that seems to think humanity is a bunch of squares, an opinion
possibly shared by every other species).</p>
<p>The ship’s doctor/chef, who has a name no one is physically able to
pronounce since his species, the grum, have five sets of vocal cords.
Everyone calls him Dr. Chef (this is endearing).</p>
<p>Finally, the ship’s navigator is a sianat pair – a species with a
(possibly) symbiotic relationship with a virus that gives the host the
ability to navigate in space’s “sublayer” enabling tunneling in the
first place. No other species is able to navigate in space’s sublayer –
only the sianat can do the math. The virus won’t pair with any other
species, so the sianat see it as their sacred mission to show other
species how to traverse the sublayer.</p>
<p>And that’s, like, chapter one.</p>
<p>Also noteworthy: I want to live inside this book forever.</p>
</section>
</div>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>The Long Way to a Small, Angry
Planet</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Becky Chambers</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>404</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Hodder</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1473619815</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Science Fiction</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1473619815">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1473619815">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780062444134">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781473619814">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
The Road
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-road/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-01-26T01:13:41Z
2022-01-25T18:26:30Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three sentence summary</h2>
<p>Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a story of a father and son walking on
a road amid a post-apocalyptic landscape of blackened skies raining ash
on the charred husks of the former vegetation.</p>
<p>Their walk is a pilgrimage to the coast, but you’re not sure what
they’re hoping to find — any insight you have into the character’s
motivations is found in quote-mark-less conversations between the father
and son, simple concrete conversations like the kind you’d have with an
eight-year-old.</p>
<p>The central questions are about morality and epistemology: how do you
know if people are good and is eschewing cannibalism enough to call
yourself moral in a time when hazmat-suit-clad hordes complete with
retinue of concubines and catamites are a common sight.</p>
</section>
<section id="random-thoughts" class="level2">
<h2>Random thoughts</h2>
<p>A lot of the book begs the question of how to carry on (and indeed
<em>why</em> carry on) when the future is bleak and uncertain. A few
answers are offered. A man’s love of his son may be the most
straight-forward interpretation; however, I’ll admit that that answer
hadn’t occurred to me during my reading, only while reading reviews
after.</p>
<p>I viewed the narrative as a story about our obligations to each
other. We’re obligated to “carry the fire” (the main character’s phrase
that I took to mean “carrying on humanity”).</p>
<p>One passage I liked has to do with the creation of ritual as a means
of creating meaning:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms.
Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and
breathe upon them.</p>
<p>– Cormac McCarthy, <u>The Road</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The language in <u>The Road</u> is stunning. Plain yet powerful.
McCarthy wields the word “and” with such imagination and expertise it
forced me to learn the term “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysyndeton">Polysyndeton</a>”. I
spent a few minutes reveling in the joy of reading this sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.</p>
<p>– Cormac McCarthy, <u>The Road</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>While the vocabulary is plain, the sentences McCarthy assembles from
its pieces are singular, I just loved the language in this book:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief
moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of
the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in
their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere
two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed
time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.</p>
<p>– Cormac McCarthy, <u>The Road</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although, the lack of any punctuation at all can make reading some
passages feel like reading text messages: a needless lack of
punctuation.</p>
<p>Also, there may have been some pretty heavy Christ metaphor stuff
right at the end (and probably throughout):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God
but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and
he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the
breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through
all of time</p>
<p>– Cormac McCarthy, <u>The Road</u></p>
</blockquote>
</section>
</div>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>The Road</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Cormac McCarthy</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>287</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Doubleday</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0307387895</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Literature</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0307387895">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0307387895">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780307387899">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780307387899">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/how-to-live-on-24-hours/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-01-22T18:05:58Z
2022-01-21T16:29:07Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑½ <small>(<span>3.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three sentence summary</h2>
<p>A personal development book from the turn of the century — a time,
like today, where despite meeting our societal obligations, it’s common
to feel a want of the challenge of personal development (as the author
says: a desire to “exceed one’s programme”).</p>
<p>The author argues workers (those without a private income) fritter
the time spent outside of work — treating the “day” as the hours between
10am–6pm instead of the full 24 hours.</p>
<p>The scheme the author advocates is to take 1½ hours of your evening
three nights a week for deep study of art, music, or serious reading
(not novels, he emphasizes, but nonfiction or poetry); and, instead of
reading the newspaper on the train, use your morning transit time to
meditate on Marcus Aurelius.</p>
</section>
<section id="random-thoughts" class="level2">
<h2>Random thoughts</h2>
<p>I first heard about this book from Cal Newport’s <u>Deep Work</u>,
which quotes an observation from refuting the idea that working on
personal development may leave you too mentally exhausted to fulfill
your obligations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the
mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not
tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in
sleep.</p>
<p>– Arnold Bennett, <u>How to Live on 24 Hours a Day</u></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This all seems to fit with Theodore Roosevelt’s dichotomy of the life
of “ignoble ease” versus “the doctrine of the strenuous life.”</p>
<p>Privilege makes the idea of a strenuous life novel.</p>
<p>Indeed, the notion of “spare time” feels like a modern invention —
sprung out of the age of enlightenment — it’s something most modern
knowledge workers take for granted. But the idea of “free time” was
singular as recently as 1948 when brilliant people representing the
human rights interests of the United Nations saw fit to enshrine it in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to
rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and
periodic holidays with pay.”</p>
<p>I have a luxury kept from my forebearers: an expectation of a base
level of life satisfaction.</p>
<p>Satisfaction turns to ennui without new strenuous intellectual
endeavour, which is what the author — and, later, Cal Newport — argue is
essential, now as it was then, to human happiness.</p>
</section>
</div>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>How to Live on 24 Hours a
Day</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Arnold Bennett</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span></span></li>
<li>Format: <span>AudioBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Independent</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>1500807877</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Personal Development</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/1500807877">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/1500807877">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9781500807870">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9781500807870">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
Klara and the Sun
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/klara-and-the-sun/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-01-22T18:05:58Z
2022-01-15T13:40:22Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small> <small>(<span>4.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three sentence summary</h2>
<p>Klara is an artificial friend (AF), which is a solar-powered,
blade-runner-level tween android and general-AI sold (at what I picture
as the Apple Store) to rich, non-android tweens to help build their
social skills.</p>
<p>Rich kids, like Josie, Klara’s “owner” (the dynamics of tween/AF
relations are purposefully cringy at times), undergo gene splicing
(called <em>lifting</em>) when they’re very young because of the
gattaca-esque nature of college admissions in this timeline; however,
gene splicing is very risky and can cause serious illness or death.</p>
<p><strong>Possible spoiler alerts from here forward</strong></p>
<p>In the novel they say that Klara is “special” and “observant”; Mr
Capaldi, the creepy artist rants at length about how we have so much to
learn from AFs and says Klara is remarkable; so what seems like a
naïve/make-believe bargain between Klara and the Sun for Josie’s life
may be more than it appears to dumb <a href="https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html">thinking
meat</a> like us.</p>
</section>
<section id="random-thoughts" class="level2">
<h2>Random thoughts</h2>
<p>Early in the book we meet Rosa, the same generation AF as Klara who
is displayed in the AF store along-side her. Early in the novel we see
Klara looking out for Rosa:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I was lucky enough to see [the Sun] like that, I’d lean my face
forward to take in as much of his nourishment as I could, and if Rosa
was with me, I’d tell her to do the same.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And then briefly, as an aside, in a particularly distressing
scene</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I […] saw the lonely woman sitting by herself at Mr Vance’s diner,
unnoticed even by the diner manager, pressing her forehead against the
window towards the dark street outside, and it occurred to me how very
much the woman resembled Rosa.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The end of the novel questions human’s obligations to general AI.
We’re awful in all timelines.</p>
</section>
</div>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>Klara and the Sun</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Kazuo Ishiguro</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>321</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Knopf</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>07-3528-124-6</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Science Fiction</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0735281246">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0593396561">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780593318171">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780735281240">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
How to Win Friends and Influence People
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/win-friends-and-influence-people/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-01-22T18:05:58Z
2022-01-11T23:16:53Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑⭑ <small>(<span>4</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three sentence summary</h2>
<p>A book of pragmatic advice about how to make people like you. Much of
the advice can be summarized: cultivate a genuine interest and affection
for other people, and remember people are more interested in themselves
than in you.</p>
<p>To win other people to your way of thinking remember the old saw, “a
drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall”; it’s not enough
to be right, you have to be kind, too.</p>
</section>
<section id="random-thoughts" class="level2">
<h2>Random thoughts</h2>
<p>There are some inadvertent arguments against the existence of free
will in some degree:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Take Al Capone, for example. Suppose you had inherited the same body
and temperament and mind that Al Capone had. Suppose you had had his
environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was—and
where he was.</p>
<p>– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When Mrs. Lincoln and other spoke harshly of the southern people,
Lincoln replied: “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be
under similar circumstances.”</p>
<p>– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>There’s some overlap here with the ideas in the book <em>The Scout
Mindset</em>, particularly the section where he talks about winning
others to your way of thinking:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants
more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.</p>
<p>– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.</p>
<p>– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Both books cite <em>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin</em>
referencing the part in the 2nd section where he mentions that he no
longer tells people they’re wrong directly.</p>
</section>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>How to win friends & influence
people : the only book you need to lead you to success</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Dale Carnegie</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>248</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Pharos Books</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>0671027034</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Personal Development</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0671027034">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0671027034">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780671027032">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780671027032">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
</div>
Book reviews
https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-01-08T21:06:01Z
2022-01-08T20:13:17Z
<p>My memory is finite. And I spend a lot of my finite memory cramming
in gobs of books. One of the myriad purposes of tending a digital garden
like this site is to use it to augment the limit memory capacity of my
tiny brain. So that’s what I’m doing with these reviews.</p>
<section id="rating-rubric" class="level2">
<h2>Rating Rubric</h2>
<p>These reviews are for me. All books are rated on a 5-star scale that
represents my enjoyment rather than any objective value of the writing
or the ideas in the book. The value of the writing and ideas may factor
into my enjoyment, but my rating isn’t meant to represent that.</p>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col />
<col />
</colgroup>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td>⭑–⭑⭑½</td>
<td>This book was a waste of my time in
inverse proportion to the star rating</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>⭑⭑⭑</td>
<td>I don’t know/I feel mixed</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>⭑⭑⭑½</td>
<td>I enjoyed it, but there were
problems</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
<td>I enjoyed it, but maybe not for
everyone</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑½–⭑</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑ I enjoyed it so much that I would
recommend it to others in proportion to the star rating</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>The idea to rate books and how to do it well was stolen from many
sources, but some credit is due to <a href="https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/">Russ Allbery’s phenomenal
book reviews</a> and <a href="https://macwright.com/2017/12/11/indieweb-reading.html">Tom
MacWright</a>’s blog post about owning his reading log.</p>
</section>
Books Read in 2022
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2023-01-01T03:21:40Z
2022-01-07T21:20:45Z
<p>Here were my favorite books I read this year.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-road/">The Road</a> by Cormac McCarthy – Lean,
beautiful language tells a story of a father and son “carrying the fire”
in a post-apocalyptic pilgrimage to the sea featuring retinues of
cannibals and catamites.</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL34981513M/Run_Like_a_Pro">Run Like
a Pro (Even if You’re Slow)</a> by Matt Fitzgerald – A practical book
about how to get into distance running. I went from zero to running a
marathon this year and 90% of what I learned, I learned from this
book.</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27328157M/The_Twisted_Ones">The
Twisted Ones</a> by T. Kingfisher – A great Halloween read—A young woman
named Mouse is tasked by her father with cleaning out her hoarder
grandmother’s house. While there, she stumbles upon ancient magic in the
pages of her step-grandfather’s journal. T. Kingfisher is the nom de
plume of Hugo-award-winning author Ursula Vernon who I first encountered
reading the wonderful <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220101110912/http://diggercomic.com/blog/2007/02/01/wombat1-gnorf/">Digger
webcomic</a>.</li>
<li><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-sense-of-style/">The Sense of Style</a> by
Stephen Pinker – A text that teaches you how to write classic-style
prose featuring a level of English grammar nuance that only a linguist
could love (I also loved it).</li>
</ul>
<p>I enjoyed exploring biography this year—I read biographies of both
John Adams Theodore Roosevelt.</p>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col />
<col />
<col />
<col />
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th>#</th>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Author</th>
<th>Rating</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td>1</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/great-railway-bazaar/">The
Great Railway Bazaar</a></td>
<td>Paul Theroux</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>2</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/win-friends-and-influence-people/">How
to Win Friends and Influence People</a></td>
<td>Dale Carnegie</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>3</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/klara-and-the-sun/">Klara
and the Sun</a></td>
<td>Kazuo Ishiguro</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>4</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/how-to-live-on-24-hours/">How
to Live on 24 Hours a Day</a></td>
<td>Arnold Bennett</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>5</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-road/">The
Road</a></td>
<td>Cormac McCarthy</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>6</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet/">The
Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet</a></td>
<td>Becky Chambers</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>7</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you/">So
Good They Can’t Ignore You</a></td>
<td>Cal Newport</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>8</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/rise-of-theodore-roosevelt/">The
Rise Theodore Roosevelt</a></td>
<td>Edmund Morris</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>9</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/hatchet/">Hatchet</a></td>
<td>Gary Paulsen</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>10</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/make-your-bed/">Make Your
Bed</a></td>
<td>William H. McRaven</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>11</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/how-to-write-a-sentence-stanley-fish/">How
to Write a Sentence</a></td>
<td>Stanley Fish</td>
<td>⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>12</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/what-i-talk-about-when-i-talk-about-running/">What
I Talk About When I Talk About Running</td>
<td></a> Haruki Murakami</td>
<td>⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>13</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/kaiju-preservation-society/">The
Kaiju Preservation Society</a></td>
<td>John Scalzi</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>14</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/100-ways-to-improve-your-writing/">100
Ways to Improve Your Writing</a></td>
<td>Gary Provost</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>15</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/moonwalking-with-einstein/">Moonwalking
with Einstein</a></td>
<td>Joshua Foer</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>16</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/personal-kanban/">Personal
Kanban</a></td>
<td>Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria</td>
<td>Barry ⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>17</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/masters-of-doom/">Masters
of Doom</a></td>
<td>David Kushner</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>18</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/looking-for-alaska/">Looking
for Alaska</a></td>
<td>John Green</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>19</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/modern-technical-writing/">Modern
Technical Writing</a></td>
<td>Andrew Etter</td>
<td>⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>20</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fuck/">The
Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck</a></td>
<td>Mark Manson</td>
<td>⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>21</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/breath/">Breath</a></td>
<td>James Nestor</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>22</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/snow-crash/">Snow
Crash</a></td>
<td>Neal Stephenson</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>23</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/an-elegant-puzzle/">An
Elegant Puzzle</a></td>
<td>Will Larson</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>24</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/show-your-work/">Show Your
Work!</a></td>
<td>Austin Kleon</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>25</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/ghost/">Ghost</a></td>
<td>Jason Reynolds</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>26</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-sense-of-style/">The
Sense of Style</a></td>
<td>Steven Pinker</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>27</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/into-the-wild/">Into the
Wild</a></td>
<td>Jon Krakauer</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>28</td>
<td>Ultramarathon Man</td>
<td>Dean Karnazes</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>29</td>
<td>Goosebumps: Welcome to Dead House</td>
<td>R.L. Stine</td>
<td>⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>30</td>
<td>Draft No. 4</td>
<td>John McPhee</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>31</td>
<td>Little House in the Big Woods</td>
<td>Laura Ingalls Wilder</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>32</td>
<td>Killing Floor (Jack Reacher, Book 1)</td>
<td>Lee Child</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>33</td>
<td>Run Like a Pro (Even If You’re Slow)</td>
<td>Matt Fitzgerald</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>34</td>
<td>John Adams</td>
<td>David McCullough</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>35</td>
<td>Happy-Go-Lucky</td>
<td>David Sedaris</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>36</td>
<td>Just Keep Buying</td>
<td>Nick Maggiulli</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>37</td>
<td>All Systems Red (Murderbot, Book 1)</td>
<td>Martha Wells</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>38</td>
<td>Artificial Condition (Murderbot, Book
2)</td>
<td>Martha Wells</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>39</td>
<td>Rouge Protocol (Murderbot, Book 3)</td>
<td>Martha Wells</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>40</td>
<td>Exit Strategy (Murderbot, Book 4)</td>
<td>Martha Wells</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>41</td>
<td>Network Effect (Murderbot, Book 5)</td>
<td>Martha Wells</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>42</td>
<td>Writing That Works</td>
<td>Kenneth Roman</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>43</td>
<td>Treasure Island</td>
<td>Robert Louis Stevenson</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>44</td>
<td>The Twisted Ones</td>
<td>T. Kingfisher</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>45</td>
<td>Style: The Basics of Clarity and
Grace</td>
<td>Williams and Colomb</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>46</td>
<td>Lincoln in the Bardo</td>
<td>George Saunders</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>47</td>
<td>The Obstacle Is the Way</td>
<td>Ryan Holiday</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>48</td>
<td>Congo</td>
<td>Michael Crichton</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>49</td>
<td><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold/">The
Spy Who Came in From the Cold</a></td>
<td>John le Carré</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>50</td>
<td>The Passenger</td>
<td>Cormac McCarthy</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>51</td>
<td>A Psalm for the Wild-Built</td>
<td>Becky Chambers</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>52</td>
<td>Liar’s Poker</td>
<td>Michael Lewis</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>53</td>
<td>Stella Maris</td>
<td>Cormac McCarthy</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td>54</td>
<td>The Art and Business of Writing
Online</td>
<td>Nicholas Cole</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td>55</td>
<td>The City We Became (reread)</td>
<td>N.K. Jemisin</td>
<td>⭑⭑⭑⭑<small>½</small></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
The Great Railway Bazaar
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/great-railway-bazaar/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2022 Tyler Cipriani
2022-01-22T18:05:58Z
2022-01-07T21:20:45Z
<div>
<div>
<p>⭑⭑⭑½ <small>(<span>3.5</span>/<span>5</span> see <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/reviews/">book
reviews</a>)</small></p>
</div>
<section id="three-sentence-summary" class="level2">
<h2>Three sentence summary</h2>
<p>Paul Theroux’s memoir of his travels across Europe and Asia by rail
wherein he recounts detailed conversations with people he
encounters.</p>
<p>The journey by rail takes him on the (sadly now defunct, <a href="https://www.seat61.com/history-of-the-orient-express.htm">I
checked</a>) Orient Express to Vienna, then to Istanbul, Tehran, through
Afganistan, to Peshawar, then a zig-zagging path through India<a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a>, a plane ride to Yangon (née
Rangoon) in Myanmar (née Burma), Mandalay, then on to Thailand,
Singapore, another plane ride to Vietnam, then another plane to Japan,
and finally the trip home on the famous Trans-Siberian.</p>
<p>There are enjoyable moments of glib humor, a lot of sex workers and
other unfortunate travelers where the glib humor is less enjoyable, and
a frank look at America’s influence of Vietnam as of 1975.</p>
</section>
</div>
<section id="details" class="level2">
<h2>Details</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Title: <span>The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train
Through Asia</span></li>
<li>Author: <span>Paul Theroux</span></li>
<li>Pages: <span>354</span></li>
<li>Format: <span>EBook</span></li>
<li>Publisher: <span>Mariner Books</span></li>
<li>ISBN: <span>06-1865-894-7</span></li>
<li>Genre: <span>Travel</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section id="links" class="level2">
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://worldcat.org/isbn/0618658947">Worldcat</a></li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0618658947">Open
Library</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/isbn/9780618658947">Bookshop</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/9780618658947">Goodreads</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>
<section class="footnotes footnotes-end-of-document">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1"><p>Lahore → Delhi, Delhi → Shimla,
Shimla → Mumbai (née Bombay) by way of Jaipur (this is confusing—there’s
a chapter about Jaipur after mentioning Mumbai, but it seems silly to go
Delhi→Mumbai→Jaipur→Chennai—this is a guess/it’s unclear), Mumbai →
Chennai (née Madras), Chennai → Colombo, Sri Lanka (née Ceylon) → Galle,
Sri Lanka, Galle → Chennai, Chennai→Kolkata (née Calcutta)<a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/#fnref1" class="footnote-back">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
The Oresteia by Aeschylus
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/oresteia-aeschylus/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2021 Tyler Cipriani
2021-03-05T19:24:07Z
2021-02-08T01:30:57Z
<p>The Oresteia (sometimes called <em>The House of Atreus</em>) is
kinda/sorta the story of Orestes who kills Clytemnestra, his mother, in
retribution for her murder of his father, Agamemnon. This story unfolds
in three short plays by Aeschylus and it offers a new twist on a story
that we’ve heard previously in the Odyssey – Agamemnon’s murder at the
hands of Clytemnestra upon his return from the Trojan war.</p>
<p>The only previous motivation I knew about for Agamemnon’s murder was
that Clytemnestra was having an affair with Aegisthus – Agamemnon’s
cousin. This story reveals a much more nuanced rationale for
Clytemnestra’s actions.</p>
<p>For one thing, Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, to
Artemis during the Trojan war. Maybe this is told in more detail in the
Iliad (but I haven’t read that).</p>
<p>Additionally, it seems like Aegisthus’ family was pretty abused by
Atreus. Atreus, in point of fact, tricked Thyestes (Aegisthus’ father)
into eating his own children – motivations here are not explained,
really – and then Agamemnon exiled Aegisthus and Thyestes.</p>
<p>When people talk about Agamemnon’s murder in the Odyssey everyone
seems to hate Clytemnestra for it – in fact, it’s interesting, the names
Cassandra, Electra, and Penelope are still somewhat common in modern
times but I’ve never met anyone named Clytemnestra. History judged
Clytemnestra harshly but I’ll say it: damn, did Agamemnon ever have it
coming!</p>
<p>For some reason the “<a href="https://www.bartleby.com/people/Aeschylu.html">Harvard
Classics</a>” collection calls the last play in the trio that make up
the Oresteia <em>The Furies</em> rather than <em>The Eumenidies</em>
(i.e., <em>The Kindly Ones</em> – which is also my favorite book in
<em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_The_Kindly_Ones">The
Sandman</a></em>). Just as with <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/odyssey-homer/">The
Odyssey</a> I read a more modern translation; several in fact.</p>
<p>I started reading the <a href="https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics08eliouoft/page/n11/mode/2up">translation
in the Harvard classics collection by E.D.A. Morshead</a> and the prose
is lyrical if slightly soporific. I realized I needed a new translation
when I nearly skipped over the part where Agamemnon kills his
daughter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And so he steeled his heart–ah, well-a-day– Aiding a war for one
false woman’s sake, His child to slay, And with her spilt blood make An
offering, to speed the ships upon their way!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And I thought: hold up – did Agamemnon just murder his daughter so he
could get sailing?</p>
<p>I found the book <em>An Oresteia</em> which is a collection of plays
translated by Anne Carson. This collection tells the same story as
Aeschylus’ Oresteia but using the plays <em>Agamemnon</em> by Aeschylus,
<em>Electra</em> by Sophocles, and <em>Orestes</em> by Euripides. I
really enjoyed Anne Carson’s translation. It was elegant and modern and
lyric and I wish I could have read all of the plays translated by
Carson. A couple of random quotes I enjoyed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>CHORUS: Brave Girl</p>
<p>KASSANDRA: People never say that to a lucky person do they?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And</p>
<blockquote>
<p>KLYTAIMESTRA: This man who, without a second thought, as if it were a
goat dying, sacrificed his own child, my most beloved, my birthpang, my
own</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And</p>
<blockquote>
<p>KLYTAIMESTRA: You call this deed mine? And I his wife? You’re wrong!
Some ancient bitter spirit of revenge disguised as Agamemnon’s wife
arose from Atreus’ brutal feast to sacrifice this man for those little
children.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I also think that my interpretation of the plays may have been
heavily influenced by the translation of Agamemnon. Mainly insofar as I
end up with quite a bit of pathos with Clytemnestra and Cassandra (the
oracle from Troy that Agamemnon captured and brought back to
Greece).</p>
<p>I was determined to read the 3 Aeschylus plays, so I ended up
skipping over to the translation of <em>The Libation Bearers</em> and
<em>The Eumenidies</em> by Robert Fagles.</p>
<p>Nothing really happens in <em>The Libation Bearers</em>. It’s a few
years later. Electra (Agamemnon’s non-sacrificial daughter) visits
Agamemnon’s grave and Orestes returns and they talk about how sad they
are that Agamemnon was killed. One weird piece of dialog was when
Elecrta says, “Mother’s pawned us for a husband” and I thought – does
anyone remember Iphigenia?</p>
<p>tl;dr: Orestes murders Clytemnestra and the Furies are fucking
furious about it.</p>
<p>In contrast to <em>the Libation Bearers</em> which is just soooo
boring, <em>The Eumenidies</em> is super interesting and it’s basically
Apollo, Athena, and the Furies in a Law & Order type court room
drama talking about who it’s OK to murder.</p>
<p>The Furies think it’s OK to murder people you aren’t related to;
i.e., not, say, your mom or your daughter
<strong><em>cough</em></strong>Orestes<strong><em>cough</em></strong>Agamemnon<strong><em>cough</em></strong>.
Meanwhile, Apollo thinks it’s OK to murder people the god’s ask you to
murder. I’m a <em>don’t murder anyone ever</em>-type myself, but I think
that if we’re saying murdering is OK then the Furies at least have an
ethos. Apollo’s argument seems a little capricious for a system of law.
A jury of Orestes’ peers isn’t sure, Athena is on Apollo’s side so
Orestes walks. The Furies are placated by Athena who says that they’ll
dole out justice to Athens in the future. The fact that the Athenian
idea of justice is confusing as fuck is mentioned by no one.</p>
<p>The end.</p>
The Odyssey by Homer
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/odyssey-homer/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2021 Tyler Cipriani
2021-02-06T23:03:04Z
2021-01-29T00:43:15Z
<p>I read this book as part of my 2021 goal to finish the
“<a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/#structured-reading">History of Civilization</a>”
course from the Harvard 5-foot-shelf reading guide. I’ve meant to read
this book for a few years, and started it once before. I’ve finally
finished it.</p>
<p>One problem in reading ancient Greek text is I can’t read Greek – I
have to find a translation. The translation in the H5fs is done by <a href="https://www.bartleby.com/22/">S.H. Butcher & A. Lang</a> and
it’s fine. Translation is meant to keep not only the meaning of the
text, but the feeling of reading the text in the original language.
Capturing the feeling of a text perfectly for a particular time period
may obscure the meaning in a translation in another time period. I don’t
know if <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3160/3160-h/3160-h.htm">Alexander
Pope</a>’s translation captures the feeling of reading the original
greek, but it’s about as decipherable as the original greek to me.
Blazey recommended the <a href="http://openlibrary.org/isbn/0374224382">Robert Fitzgerald
translation</a> and this seemed like a more understandable translation
than the S.H. Butcher/A.Lang translation, so that’s what I read.</p>
<p>One particular problem with all translation is that in Greek epic
poetry (evidently) there are just a million names for everything. The
Greeks themselves are alternately called the Argives (20 times), Argos
(24 times – 3 times it refers to a Dog named “Argos”), Danaans (10
times), and Akhaians (97 times). Also, translations differ on things
like spellings of names: Telemachus vs Telémakhos. Additionally, Romans
had different names for all the different names: Minerva vs Athena.
Roman translations also use Ulysses rather than Odysseus. Shit’s
confusing.</p>
<p>There are some names like “Pallas” for Athena that I just don’t know
where they came from. I’m only a little ashamed to say that the “Pallid
bust of Pallas” mentioned in Poe never <em>clicked</em> until I was
about 1/3rd of the way through this book.</p>
<p>There are so many <em>other</em> events that happen outside of this
story that this story only touches on. The entirety of the incident of
Helen in Troy, the Trojan war, Agammemnon – all of this is mentioned,
but none of it is really explored in the Odyssey. There’s a whole
underworld sequence where Odysseus rattles off names like the liner
notes to an album called, “NOW That’s What I call Mythical Greek
Mortals: Volume I”: Kastor and Pollux, Oidipus, Hercules, Orion,
Phaedra, etc, etc, etc. I guess that’s why it’s a good introduction to
mythical Greece – there’s a little bit of everything. To understand
every throw-away reference in the play would take forever.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reading a great poem is a lifetime job – Charles Van Doren</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A recurring thought I had during my reading of the Odyssey is: man,
does the Duck Tales version really nail this. There was a 1987 episode
of DuckTales entitled <a href="https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Home_Sweet_Homer">Home Sweet
Homer</a> that, while it doesn’t follow the detail, really does provide
some memorable visuals. In DuckTales Telémakhos is King Homer and
Odysseus is Ulysses. Essentially, King Homer nee Telémakhos does all the
stuff that Odysseus describes to the Scherians (AKA Phaiakians, AKA
Phaeacians, sooo many names) in The Odyssey.</p>
<p>Cerce is perhaps a bit more evil in the DuckTales version, but does
turn the crew into swine just like in the story. Aeolus is reimagined as
King Blowhard (which is waaay easier to remember) who is allergic to
persimmons (called “Umma Gumma” fruit, but just look at them, they’re
persimmons – I assumed this was a referrence to <em>something</em> from
the Odyssey, but it’s evidently just a weird detail of the DuckTales
version). There are sirens. Scylla is <a href="https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Yuckalinda">Yuckalinda</a> (which
is also a way better name). Ithica is Ithaquack.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m not saying the DuckTales version was <em>better</em>
exactly, but they did a lot right.</p>
<p>Weirdly, the DuckTales version didn’t have a cyclops. It’s especially
weird because the cyclops scene had the world’s first “Who’s on
First”-type routine in recorded history where Odysseus tells Polyphemos
the cyclops that his name is “Nohbdy”, stabs his eye out, and when
Polyphemos asks his other cyclops friends for help he says, “Nohbdy’s
tricked me, Nohbdy’s ruined me!” to which comes the sage reply: “Ah
well, if nobody’s played you foul there in your lonely bed, we are no
use in pain given by great Zeus.” Hilarious.</p>
<p>Another detail mercifully absent in the DuckTales version: the
ancient Greeks seem to kind of hate women. I think we’re supposed to
hate all women other than Penelope, Nausicaa (princess of the
Phaeacians), and Athena (who notably did not have a mother and sprang
forth from Zeus’s forehead). Circe (witch), Calypso (evil nymph),
Cletemnestra (murdered her husband to marry his cousin – the plays of
Aeschylus make this a little more complicated), Scylla (who is literally
a 3-headed serpent), the sirens (who lure men to their doom). That one
random maid – Melantho – that Odysseus calls a slut and threatens to,
“cut [her] arms and legs off”. Penelope, also, paitiently waited for
Odysseus’s return for 20 fucking years when everyone said he was dead –
and that’s the ONLY woman we’re supposed to like – that’s what it takes.
Overall, the treatment of women in the Odyssey is completely fucked and
makes for a dubious foundation for “the history of civilization”.</p>
<p>During the 20 years that Odysseus has been away – first fighting the
war in Troy and then held by the nymph Calypso – Penelope has been
warding off a bunch of suitors that are gradually consuming her estate.
Most of the story builds to a violent ending that you as a reader are
expecting from the start. While you see the eventual deaths of the
suitors at the hands of Odysseus coming what you may not see coming is
the Quentin Tarantino level of violence at the end of the story. The
climactic scene starts with Odysseus disguised as a vagabond in his own
house when Penelope announces that she will marry the suitor that can
shoot an arrow through the hole in 12 axe heads.</p>
<p>Let me pause here to say: I had a hard time visualizing what shooting
an arrow through the hole in 12 axe heads looked like so I did an <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=arrow+through+12+axes&iax=images&ia=images">image
search</a>. From this image search it’s safe to say: no one has any idea
what this looks like. My best guess is that we’re talking about the haft
hole of the axe, but, honestly, who the fuck knows.</p>
<p>Anyway, after winning the context, Odysseus and Telémakhos kill all
the suitors, hang some portion of the maids, and violently remove pieces
of the goatherd. There was enough murder that they end up lighting a
fire for it’s “cleansing fumes” to get rid of all the murder stink, I
guess. Of course then they’re briefly on the run for murder and seem
likely to murder a whole lot more people, but then Athena makes them
stop and they do for some reason and I guess no one cared about all the
murder too much, the end.</p>
<p>The Odyssey is a story in three parts: the Telemachy: Telémakhos does
some things, the Apologoi: Odysseus’s adventures post-Troy (Cyclops,
king Blowhard, crew killed for murdering the sun’s cows, etc.), and the
Mnesterophonia: all the murder. Of these parts the Telemachy may as well
have not happened. Telémakhos could just as well not exist for most of
the story overall he’s pretty useless.</p>
<p>The last thing I’ll say about this story is that there is a really
sad part about a dog that Odysseus trained as a tiny puppy who
recognizes him after 20 years away and then immediately dies. This is a
strange throw-away detail, but it also, somehow, feels like the most
modern part of the story. The relationships between men and women is
different, we’ve got different religions, we blame circumstances rather
than gods when things don’t go our way. There are fewer man eating
giants now (aside: there 2 – TWO! – islands with man-eating giants). But
<a href="https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2020/05/18/humaning-a-bowie-dog/">dogs</a> still love
their people and I like that.</p>
An Account of Egypt by Herodotus
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/egypt-by-herodotus/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2021 Tyler Cipriani
2021-01-26T02:04:45Z
2021-01-26T01:49:30Z
<p>Herodotus is known as the father of history, but could just as easily
be called the father of the travel channel. Herodotus’s account of Egypt
reads like a proto-tourist-guide created without the benefit of an
editor or fact-checker.</p>
<p>Herodotus’s account opens with a description (that is pretty much the
plot to a Paul Auster novel) of the efforts of the Egyptian king
Psammetichos to determine the first civilization by depriving newborns
of all human interaction and observing what language they naturally
speak. Having taken psychology 101 at a small university in
South-central Kansas I feel more than qualified to say that this would
not, in fact, lead to the discovery that the Phrygians were the first
people (nor a pre-Tower of Babel original language as in Auster), but
<em>is</em>, in fact, child abuse.</p>
<p>Herodotus is a complete tourist who’s thrilled to report back to you
what he’s seen. And boy howdy <em>what a whirlwind it’s been</em>. He’s
here to tell you that Egyptians are:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>opposite to other men in almost all matters: for among them the women
frequent the market and carry on trade, while the men remain at home and
weave; and whereas others weave pushing the woof upwards, the Egyptians
push it downwards: the men carry their burdens upon their heads and the
women upon their shoulders: the women make water standing up and the men
crouching down</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In addition to that bit of secondhand TMI there are other interesting
revelations about flying snakes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>its form is like that of the watersnake; and it has wings not
feathered but most nearly resembling the wings of the bat.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Birds that may or may not exist:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is also another sacred bird called the phoenix which I did not
myself see except in painting, for in truth he comes to them very
rarely, at intervals, as the people of Heliopolis say, of five hundred
years;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And an entertaining if misleading description of the Hippo:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>he is four-footed, cloven-hoofed like an ox, flat-nosed, with a mane
like a horse and showing teeth like tusks, with a tail and voice like a
horse and in size as large as the largest ox; and his hide is so
exceedingly thick that when it has been dried shafts of javelins are
made of it</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Throughout his account Herodotus evinces himself an Egypt fanboy. His
fanboyishness leads him to make some interesting claims. For example,
Herodotus supports the claim that the Greek gods’ names all came from
Egypt:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the naming of almost all the gods has come to Hellas from Egypt</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And Homer’s Odyssey wasn’t written by Homer, but he heard it from
some Egyptians who knew it from the first-hand account of Menelaos (King
of Sparta):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the “Cyprian Epic” was not written by Homer but by some other man</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oh, and also, forget Pythagoras:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>and I think that thus the art of geometry was found out and
afterwards came into Hellas also</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so on:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Egyptians were the first of men who made solemn assemblies and
processions and approaches to the temples</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so forth:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Amasis too who established the law that every year each one of the
Egyptians should declare to the ruler of his district, from what source
he got his livelihood, and if any man did not do this or did not make
declaration of an honest way of living, he should be punished with
death. Now Solon the Athenian received from Egypt this law and had it
enacted for the Athenians, and they have continued to observe it, since
it is a law with which none can find fault.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don’t get the impression that Herodotus is a fabulist. Herodotus,
being a single individual, is working from the information he’s given
and observations he can make by himself. Some of his observations are
astute. There is a particularly canny passage about the flow of the Nile
based on Herodotus’s observations of the regional topography. The
descriptions of mummification seem much the same as the descriptions
I’ve seen in modern sources. There are some good descriptions real,
actual animals: crocodiles, ibis, etc. Basically, everything Herodotus
saw seemed reasonable and sane, and everything he was told seemed like
his guides were kind of fucking with him.</p>
<p>This is the start of the history of Western civilization according to
the Harvard classics collection. It’s unique in that it was committed to
writing contemporaneously. This work was an early move away from an oral
tradition. For that reason it is uniquely rigorous – flawed, but
constrained in the flaws in makes. The first stumbling of what was to
become what we understand as history. I can conclude that the advent of
Wikipedia has been a boon in terms of knowing what hippos look like.</p>
Book of Job
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/book-of-job/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2021 Tyler Cipriani
2021-01-26T02:04:45Z
2021-01-09T22:44:00Z
<p>I am very ignorant of pretty much the entirety of bible, so this is
my first time reading the book of Job.</p>
<p>Most of the story is a dialog that attempts to address the problem of
why bad things happen to good people. The answer, it seems, is that God
just does shit sometimes and it may seem capricious (and maybe it even
is) but you can’t assume that bad things happen to bad people and good
things happen to good people.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What knowest thou, that we know not? What understandest thou, which
is not in us? – Job 15:9</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the story the reason for Job’s suffering is that Satan mentioned
to God that Job is probably only pious because he has a cushy life so
God destroys his life because reasons.</p>
<p>The majority of the reading is Job’s friends Eliphaz, Bildada, and
Zophar insufferably insisting that Job repent for his wicked ways. Job
keeps insisting that God is causing his suffering for no reason,
randomly, and he has nothing to repent for – which (from our omniscient
narrative prospective) we know is totally correct – and his friends say
things like:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, neither will he help
the evil doers – Job 8:20</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For the company of the godless shall be barren, And fire shall
consume the tents of bribery. – Job 15:34</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity
deserveth. – Job 11:6</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Which are, it occurs to me – like Polonius’s speech in Hamlet (best
embodied by Bill Murray in the 2000 movie version of Hamlet) – likely
quoted out of context all the fucking time in the misguided belief that
that they’re not meant to be banal, naive, and (in this instance)
ultimately incorrect platitudes.</p>
<p>God swoops in at the end of the narrative and restores Job at his
friend’s expense and explains basically nothing which is probably the
point.</p>
Race and Language by Augustus Freeman
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/race-and-language-freeman/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2021 Tyler Cipriani
2021-01-26T02:04:45Z
2021-01-09T21:44:00Z
<p>Freeman is famous for his history of the Norman conquest. There are a
few good quotes in the early part of this reading.</p>
<p>There is an early section where he talks about race as an artificial
construct:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A hundred years ago a man’s political likes and dislikes seldom went
beyond the range which was suggested by the place of his birth or
immediate descent. […] That feelings such as these, and the practical
consequences which have flowed from them, are distinctly due to
scientific and historical teaching there can, I think, be no doubt.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Which is a thought that I’ve never had before: that our ability to
hate our fellow human beings has in modern times has been enhanced by
science and history’s creation of the concept of race.</p>
<p>Freeman goes on to argue that while race is an artificial construct,
it’s an important construct – if only because it effects the behavior of
a large number of people:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A belief or a feeling which has a practical effect on the conduct of
great masses of men, sometimes on the conduct of whole nations, may be
very false and very mischievous; but it is in every case a great and
serious fact, to be looked gravely in the face.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This all seems fair enough.</p>
<p>After these initial insights the reading gets pretty cringy pretty
fast. I went on to read the Wikipedia page for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Augustus_Freeman">Edward
Augustus Freeman</a> and overall he seems like a racist piece of shit,
so I don’t feel too bad for abandoning the first reading of the
course.</p>
<p>This reading does make me a little anxious about the shelf’s ability
to contextualize the readings in a way that’s relevant to me.</p>
Books Read in 2021
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2021 Tyler Cipriani
2022-01-02T03:10:28Z
2021-01-09T20:44:00Z
<section id="unstructured-reading" class="level2">
<h2>Unstructured Reading</h2>
<ol type="1">
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/152475921X">Eat a Peach</a> by
David Chang</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9781795613194">VHF, Summits
and More: Having Fun With Ham Radio</a> by Robert A. Witte</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/9781942788331">Accelerate: The
Science of Lean Software and DevOps</a> by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez
Humble, Gene Kim</li>
<li><a href="https://www.qsl.net/ik0ygj/enu/ZART_r20101008m.pdf">Zen and
the Art of Radiotelegraphy</a> by Carlo Consoli</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL265465W/Longitude">Longitude:the
true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem
of his time</a> by Dava Sobel</li>
<li><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Prepper-Communications-Craig-Buck-k4ia/dp/1724218093">Prepper
Communications</a> by Craig Buck</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17431345W/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building">The
Timeless Way of Building</a> by Christopher Alexander</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17659741W/Storytelling_with_Data">Storytelling
with Data</a> by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/wild-a-journey-from-lost-to-found/oclc/885451056">Wild
: a journey from lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail</a> by Cheryl
Strayed</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19754782W/Dare_to_lead">Dare to
Lead</a> by Brené Brown</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17930368W/Atomic_Habits">Atomic
Habits</a> by James Clear</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL37636W/The_Mosquito_Coast">The
Mosquito Coast</a> by Paul Theroux</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15754034W/Tuesdays_with_Morrie">Tuesdays
with Morrie</a> by Mitch Albom (I did not like this book.)</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26832542M/Digital_Minimalism">Digital
Minimalism</a> by Cal Newport</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3430145M/On_Writing_Well">On
Writing Well</a> by William Zinsser</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL38285W/The_Elements_of_Style">The
Elements of Style</a> by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15833228W/The_Happiness_Project">The
Happiness Project</a> by Gretchen Rubin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL16287630M/The_Year_of_Magical_Thinking">The
Year of Magical Thinking</a> by Joan Didion</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL13634360M/The_writing_life">The
Writing Life</a> by Annie Dillard</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/measure-what-matters-how-google-bono-and-the-gates-foundation-rock-the-world-with-okrs/oclc/1032381475">Measure
What Matters</a> by John Doerr</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/on-writing-a-memoir-of-the-craft/oclc/43903453">On
Writing</a> by Stephen King</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/strange-last-voyage-of-donald-crowhurst/oclc/1005088741">The
Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst</a> by Nicholas Tomalin, Ron
Hall</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/wizards-guide-to-defensive-baking/oclc/1186589193">A
Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking</a> by T Kingfisher</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/midnight-library/oclc/1255441549">The
Midnight Library</a> by Matt Haig</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/circe-a-novel/oclc/1193018746">Circe</a>
by Madeline Miller</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/project-hail-mary/oclc/1280097656">Project
Hail Mary</a> by Andy Weir</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/scout-mindset-why-some-people-see-things-clearly-and-others-dont/oclc/1237149519">The
Scout Mindset</a> by Julia Galef</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/fat-loss-forever-how-to-lose-fat-and-keep-it-off/oclc/1101639135">Fat
Loss Forever</a> by Peter Baker and Dr Lane Norton</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/deep-work-rules-for-focused-success-in-a-distracted-world/oclc/986975350">Deep
Work</a> by Cal Newport</li>
<li><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/absolute-true-diary-of-a-part-time-indian/oclc/1149102106">The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian</a> by Sherman Alexie</li>
</ol>
</section>
<section id="structured-reading" class="level2">
<h2>Structured Reading</h2>
<p>At the beginning of this year, I randomly downloaded the Harvard
Classics/Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of books. This is a set of books
that contains a selection of classic readings meant to provide a full
classic liberal education in themselves.</p>
<p>My first exposure to this series was at my Granny’s house where she
owned a subset of the shelf. I’ve never had a mind to read the entirety
of the shelf.</p>
<p>Volume 50 of the 50-volume series contains several suggestions of the
ways in which a reader may choose to tackle the task of intelligently
navigating the embarrassment of material in the collection. I’ve naively
chosen to follow the first suggested course of reading: <a href="https://archive.org/details/harvardclassics50eliouoft/page/n33/mode/2up?q=Class">The
history of civilization</a>.</p>
<p>Here I’ll track my progress and notes:</p>
<ul>
<li>(❌ Not finished) <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/race-and-language-freeman/">Race
and Language by Edward Augustus Freeman</a></li>
<li><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/book-of-job/">The Book of Job</a></li>
<li><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/egypt-by-herodotus/">An Account of Egypt by
Herodotus</a></li>
<li><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/odyssey-homer/">The Odyssey by Homer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/oresteia-aeschylus/">The Oresteia by
Aeschylus</a></li>
<li>Oedipus the King & Antigone by Sophocles</li>
<li>Hippolytus by Euripides</li>
<li>The Aeneid by Virgil</li>
<li>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin</li>
</ul>
<hr />
</section>
<section id="final-thoughts-on-2021" class="level2">
<h2>Final thoughts on 2021</h2>
<p>Depending on how you count (if you count the <em>Book of Job</em> as
a “book”) I read either 37 or 38 books this year. I read more books this
year than I’ve ever read in any previous year. My Kindle tells me that I
read every single day this year (or at least I unlocked my Kindle).</p>
<p>I read every night before bed and sometimes I read a few pages as
soon as I wake up. I “read” eight of these books on audible, but I ended
up buying additional copies of <em>Deep Work</em>, <em>Atomic
Habits</em>, and <em>Measure What Matters</em> because they all had so
much good content, and it was easier to take notes using digital or
print editions.</p>
<p>I read the remainder of these books on my Kindle. I love the reading
experience of the Kindle, and I recently learned about <a href="https://readwise.io/bookcision">readwise</a> which helps me export
all my notes from my kindle to my computer. I bought a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005IV6U0U/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1">book
stand</a> at the end of 2021. My goal is to use it to read an actual
<strong>physical</strong> book and take notes on my computer. Prior to
this year (and my discovery of readwise), I most likely would have said
physical books were my preferred format. At the end of 2021, I tend to
prefer reading on the Kindle; however, there are a few books that don’t
lend themselves very well to the paperwhite (any of the Tufte books for
example).</p>
<p>Unlike in years past, I didn’t read any graphic novels this year —
this is another Kindle limitation. I think I’ll revisit that in 2022 —
I’d like to try some mangas (not that I have any idea where to
start).</p>
<p>As of today (2022-01-01), there are six books that I’m more than 30%
of the way through. I have plans to finish at least two of them, so that
should give me a headstart on my 50 book(!) goal for 2022 😅.</p>
</section>
Books Read in 2020
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2020/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2020 Tyler Cipriani
2021-01-03T23:57:01Z
2020-01-13T22:52:49Z
<ol type="1">
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17919031W/New_Dark_Age">New Dark
Age: Technology and the End of the Future</a> by James Bridle</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19718805W/Gorilla_and_the_bird">Gorilla
and the Bird</a> by Zack McDermott</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20290452W/The_Utopia_of_Rules">The
Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of
Bureaucracy</a> by David Graeber</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL74504W/White_Fang">White
Fang</a> by Jack London</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19751285W/Calypso">Calypso</a> by
David Sedaris</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27620927M/An_Everlasting_Meal">An
Everlasting Meal</a> by Tamar Adler</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL63064W/A_moveable_feast">A
Moveable Feast</a> by Ernest Hemingway</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17308089W/Defending_Jacob">Defending
Jacob</a> by William Landay</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17930369W/The_Library_Book">The
Library Book</a> by Susan Orlean</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20481160W/Drive_Your_Plow_Over_The_Bones_Of_The_Dead">Drive
Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead</a> by Olga Tokarczuk</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15845435W/The_talented_Mr._Ripley">The
Talented Mr. Ripley</a> by Patricia Highsmith</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4407310W/The_Understory">The
Understory</a> by Pamela Erens</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18635700W/How_to_Take_Smart_Notes">How
to Take Smart Notes</a> by Sönke Ahrens</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1168030W/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London">Down
and Out in Paris and London</a> by George Orwell</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19745541W/Something_old_something_new">Something
Old, Something New</a> by Tamar Adler</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1963790W/Rats_saw_God">Rats Saw
God</a> by Rob Thomas</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25438989M/The_Fault_in_Our_Stars">The
Fault in Our Stars</a> by John Greene</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18766691W/Where_the_Crawdads_Sing">Where
the Crawdads Sing</a> by Delia Owens</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2948954W/The_diary_of_a_young_girl">The
Diary of a Young Girl</a> by Anne Frank</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1840032W/The_professor_and_the_madman">The
Professor and the Madman</a> by Simon Winchester</p>
<p><strong>Marginalia</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li>pg 29: There is a “veritable academic industry” of people decrying
the OED as racist and sexist.</li>
<li>pg 45: The “madman”/W.C. Minor’s forebearers founded the state of
Connecticut</li>
<li>pg 55: Irish immigrants fought in the civil war, but were often used
as canon fodder.</li>
<li>pg 73: The phrase “Look something up” didn’t appear in English until
1692</li>
<li>pg 79: Part of the philological society’s motivation for supporting
the creation of the OED was imperialism</li>
<li>pg 84: In 1746, 5 London booksellers contracted with Samuel Johnson
to write his dictionary which he published in 1755 in an almost entirely
singular effort</li>
<li>pg 93: Richard Chenevix Trench conceived of the OED in a speech in
1857 stating the it would be “the combined action of many”
volunteers.</li>
<li>pg 119: The system of collecting quotations for the OED was to put
the “catchword” in the upper left of a half-sheet of writing paper.
Underneath you write the date, author, title, and page number followed
by the full quotation using the catchword.</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1925471W/From_Bauhaus_to_our_house">From
Bauhaus to Our House</a> by Tom Wolfe</p>
<p><strong>Marginalia</strong>:</p>
<ul>
<li>pg 14: Art became a form of clarisy in the 20th century, you had to
understand theory to understand art, “There were no manifestos in the
world of art prior to the twentieth century”</li>
<li>pg 17: International style favored labor; however, it favored
machine-made objects vs handmade artisan objects as in the Arts and
Crafts movement in England “proved” that only the rich could afford such
items.</li>
<li>pg 24: Le Corbusier called his houses “machines for living”</li>
<li>pg 26: Stalin: “Engineers of his soul”</li>
<li>pg 32: The Museum of Modern Art was founded by John D Rockefeller,
Jr.</li>
<li>pg 44: “The fundamental pedagogical mistake of the academy arose
from its preoccupation with the idea of the individual genius” - Walter
Gropius</li>
<li>pg 72: Frank Lloyd Wright, “catered to the hog-stomping Baroque
exuberance of American civilization” (this is a magical phrase)</li>
<li>pg 108: Venturi’s definition of architecture, “shelter with
decoration on it”</li>
<li>pg 109: You can’t take on a new fashion by calling it ugly; you have
to acknowledge it and create a still more avant-garde style.</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/067974195X">The Death and
Life of Great American Cities</a> by Jane Jacobs</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20163028W/The_Overstory">The
Overstory</a> by Richard Powers</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/isbn/0316509841">The City We
Became</a> by N.K. Jemisin</p></li>
</ol>
Books Read in 2019
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2019/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2019 Tyler Cipriani
2019-11-06T01:08:22Z
2019-03-06T22:33:09Z
<ol type="1">
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8673330M/How_to_Read_a_Book">How
to Read a Book</a> by Mortimer J. Adler</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7928211M/The_Big_Year">The
Big Year: A Tale of Man and Fowl Obsession</a> by Mark Obmascik</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL35623W/Parable_of_the_sower">Parable
of the Sower</a> by Octavia E. Butler</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27632834M/FOAM_Practical_Guides_for_Beer_Quality">FOAM:
Practical Guides for Beer Quality</a> by Charles W. Bamforth</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27632854M/The_Focused_Puppy">The
Focued Puppy</a> by Deborah Jones</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20199485W/Social_Civil_and_Savvy">Social,
Civil, and Savvy</a> by Laura VanArendonk Baugh</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27632844M/Fired_Up_Frantic_and_Freaked_Out">Fired
Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out</a> by Laura VanArendonk Baugh</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17797130W/A_Gentleman_in_Moscow">A
Gentleman in Moscow</a> by Amor Towles</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8926364W/Before_and_After_Getting_Your_Puppy">Before
and After Getting Your Puppy</a> by Dr. Ian Dunbar</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8822098W/On_Talking_Terms_With_Dogs">On
Talking Terms With Dogs: Calming Signals</a> by Turid Rugaas</li>
</ol>
Books Read in 2018
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2018/
Tyler Cipriani
2019-03-06T22:53:33Z
2018-01-13T19:23:38Z
<ol type="1">
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26416591M/Evicted">Evicted:
Poverty and Profit in the American City</a> by Matthew Desmond</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26418863M/Fire_And_Fury">Fire And
Fury: Inside the Trump White House</a> by Michael Wolff</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17363125W/The_Fifth_Season">The
Fifth Season</a> by N. K. Jemisin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26428727M/The_Obelisk_Gate">The
Obelisk Gate</a> by N. K. Jemisin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26461538M/The_Stone_Sky">The Stone
Sky</a> by N. K. Jemisin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26224505M/The_Underground_Railroad">The
Underground Railroad</a> by Colson Whitehead</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26461539M/Make_Mead_Like_a_Viking">Make
Mead Like A Viking</a> by Jereme Zimmerman</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2701691W/The_Making_of_a_Chef">The
Making of a Chef</a> by Michael Ruhlman</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18139176W/Educated">Educated</a>
by Tara Westover</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19089732W/The_Comic_Book_Story_of_Beer">The
Comic Book Story of Beer</a> by Jonathan Hennessey</li>
</ol>
Books Read in 2017
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2017/
Tyler Cipriani
2018-01-13T19:49:37Z
2018-01-13T19:06:31Z
<p>This is the list of “books” I read this year <img src="https://tylercipriani.com/smileys/smile.png" alt=":)" /></p>
<ol type="1">
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17360507W/White_trash">White
trash: the 400-year untold history of class in America</a> by Nancy
Isenberg</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL13716955W/Harry_Potter_and_the_Order_of_the_Phoenix">Harry
Potter and the Order of the Phoenix</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL13716954W/Harry_Potter_and_the_Half-Blood_Prince">Harry
Potter and the Half-Blood Prince</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL64468W/Brave_New_World">Brave New
World</a> by Aldous Huxley</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL82586W/Harry_Potter_and_the_Deathly_Hallows">Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL79132W/The_camera">The
Camera</a> by Ansel Adams</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8532656W/Learning_to_See_Creatively">Learning
to See Creatively</a> by Bryan Peterson</li>
<li>Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine by Kelly Sue
DeConnick</li>
<li>Black Panther .1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL675783W/The_handmaid's_tale">The
Handmaid’s Tale</a> by Margaret Atwood</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL9200964W/The_Sandman_Vol._1">The
Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes</a> by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15449786W/The_Sandman_Volume_2">The
Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House</a> by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14975232W/The_Sandman_Vol._3">The
Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country</a> by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li>The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li>The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li>The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li>The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li>Continental Pilsner by David Miller</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL679308W/The_Sandman_Vol._8">The
Sandman, Vol. 8: The World’s End</a> by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14975250W/The_Sandman_Vol._9">The
Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones</a> by Neil Gaiman</li>
<li>The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake</li>
<li>Brewing Local: American-Grown Beer by Stan Hieronymus</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59863W/The_dispossessed">The
Dispossessed</a> by Ursula K. Le Guin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17554076W/Neptunes_Brood">Neptune’s
Brood</a> by Charles Stross</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL81634W/Misery">Misery</a>
by Stephen King</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5961779W/Storm_Front_%5BThe_Dresden_Files_Book_1%5D_%5BDresden_Files%5D">Storm
Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1)</a> by Jim Butcher</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5961788W/Fool_Moon">Fool
Moon (The Dresden Files, Book 2)</a> by Jim Butcher</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL58717W/The_Postman">The
Postman</a> by David Brin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL98474W/Slaughterhouse-five">Slaughterhouse-five:
or, The children’s crusade, a duty-dance with death</a> by Kurt
Vonnegut</li>
<li>Turtles All The Way Down by John Green</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL98488W/Breakfast_of_Champions">Breakfast
of Champions: or, Goodbye blue Monday!</a> by Kurt Vonnegut</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17095216W/El_Deafo">El
Deafo</a> by Cece Bell</li>
<li><a href="http://diggercomic.com/">Digger</a> by Ursula Vernon</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15839230W/Pride_and_Prejudice">Pride
and Prejudice</a> by Jane Austen</li>
</ol>
Yearly Reading: Done and To Do
https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2017/01/26/yearly-reading-done-and-todo/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2017 Tyler Cipriani
2017-07-01T00:49:09Z
2017-01-26T00:00:00Z
<p>Reading fiction is not that dissimilar from watching a movie in your
brain. The ways in which audio-visual consumption of fiction and reading
fiction diverge is in their demand on engagement – when reading I must
learn new words, I struggle to find meaning, I use my imagination, I
slowly strengthen understanding – I meet books more than half-way in my
mind’s eye.</p>
<p>Movies and television, in contrast, demand less engagement from the
viewer – much of the vision and interpretation is handed (or forced) on
the audience. As popular movies and TV demand less, they also seem more
apt to acquiesce to popular whim – mirroring the culture that consumes
them rather than challenging it. The level of engagement demanded by
audio-visual entertainment is also subject to a shifting baseline – that
is, it’s gotten less challenging over time.</p>
<p>This is not a knock on <em>all</em> television and movies as a form
of art. Often television, movies, and documentaries are the perfect
medium to convey a particular message. Also, there are many movies and
television programs which are, in fact, very challenging to their
audience in addition to being very enjoyable.</p>
<p>Also, it is noteworthy that I tend to read mass-market crap – the
book-equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup. I’ve come to terms with
this fact. I read some crap, I read some good things, occasionally I’ll
read a few great (and nominally “great”) things. I end up with a greater
sense of accomplishment and satisfaction from reading crap rather than
watching crap – YMMV.</p>
<p>This is a long way of saying – I think that reading is a Good Thing™
and I want to do more of it. To enforce more of a habit, I set reading
goals for myself at the start of each year. In 2015 I wanted to read a
book a month. In 2016 I wanted to read 2 books a month. In both 2015 and
2016 my grasp has exceeded my reach – which is not how goals are
supposed to work.</p>
<section id="books-read-in-2016" class="level2">
<h2>Books read in 2016</h2>
<ol type="1">
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7500496M/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land">Stranger
in a Strange Land</a> by Robert A. Heinlein</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL573448W/Black_hole">Black
Hole</a> by Charles Burns</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17314347W/Fun_Home">Fun
Home</a> by Alison Bechdel</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17112428W/The_Girl_on_the_Train">The
Girl on the Train</a> by Paula Hawkins</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59740W/Starship_Troopers">Starship
Troopers</a> by Robert A. Heinlein</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15936512W/Ready_Player_One">Ready
Player One</a> by Ernest Cline</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16808654W/The_Circle">The
Circle</a> by Dave Eggers</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17318135W/Notorious_RBG">Notorious
RBG</a> by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17335914W/The_Three_Body_Problem ">The
Three-Body Problem</a> by Cixin Liu</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59852W/A_wizard_of_Earthsea">A
Wizard of Earthsea</a> by Ursula K. Le Guin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL271675W/Stoner">Stoner</a>
by John Williams</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2670584W/Prost">Prost! The
Story of German Beer</a> by Horst D. Dornbusch</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3673999W/Bock">Bock</a> by
Darryl Richman</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2172532W/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep">Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep</a> by Philip K. Dick</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15536410W/Room">Room</a> by
Emma Donoghue</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3348011W/Kitchen_Confidential">Kitchen
Confidential: adventures in the culinary underbelly</a> by Anthony
Bourdain</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17110026W/H_Is_for_Hawk">H
is for Hawk</a> by Helen Macdonald</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL497198W/Watchers">Watchers</a>
by Dean Koontz</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59862W/The_Tombs_of_Atuan_(The_Earthsea_Cycle_Book_2)">The
Tombs of Atuan</a> by Ursula K. Le Guin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3501731W/A_confederacy_of_dunces">A
Confederacy of Dunces</a> by John Kennedy Toole</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17595809W/Everything_but_Espresso">Everything
but Espresso</a> by Scott Rao</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL82592W/Harry_Potter_and_the_Sorcerer's_Stone">Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16313123W/Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets">Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL13716956W/Harry_Potter_and_the_prisoner_of_Azkaban">Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL483571W/Naked_Lunch">Naked
Lunch</a> by William S. Burroughs</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1972516W/Code">CODE: The
Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software</a> by Charles
Petzold</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2636674W/The_crying_of_lot_49">The
Crying of Lot 49</a> by Thomas Pynchon</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15434618W/The_Best_Christmas_Pageant_Ever">The
Best Christmas Pageant Ever</a> by Barbara Robinson</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL82589W/Harry_Potter_and_the_goblet_of_fire">Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
</ol>
<p>I also <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/tags/books/">reviewed</a> a couple of these books
over the course of 2016, hopefully I can continue down that path in the
year to come.</p>
</section>
<section id="goals-for-2017" class="level2">
<h2>Goals for 2017</h2>
<p>I’m going to try to read roughly a book a week in 2017 – 50 books for
the year. Hopefully 50 books is an ambitious enough goal. Additionally,
I’d like to try to do 6 book reviews on this blog as a means of:</p>
<ul>
<li>Tracking what I’ve read</li>
<li>Checking my understanding</li>
<li>Engaging and owning what I’ve read</li>
</ul>
<p>I’d also like to lay claim to my crazy ambitious plan to read 4
whole, real, grown-up (i.e., not beer- or computer-related) non-fiction
books this year.</p>
<p>As I’m proclaiming these goals publicly for the first time, I’m sure
I’ll come up woefully and shamefully short – yay blogging! <img src="https://tylercipriani.com/smileys/smile.png" alt=":)" /></p>
</section>
Books Read in 2016
https://tylercipriani.com/books/2016/
Tyler Cipriani
2018-01-13T19:49:37Z
2016-12-31T00:00:00Z
<p>The goal here is to hit 2 books a month, so 24 for the year.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7500496M/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land">Stranger
in a Strange Land</a> by Robert A. Heinlein</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL573448W/Black_hole">Black
Hole</a> by Charles Burns</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17314347W/Fun_Home">Fun
Home</a> by Alison Bechdel</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17112428W/The_Girl_on_the_Train">The
Girl on the Train</a> by Paula Hawkins</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59740W/Starship_Troopers">Starship
Troopers</a> by Robert A. Heinlein</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15936512W/Ready_Player_One">Ready
Player One</a> by Ernest Cline</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16808654W/The_Circle">The
Circle</a> by Dave Eggers</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17318135W/Notorious_RBG">Notorious
RBG</a> by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17335914W/The_Three_Body_Problem">The
Three-Body Problem</a> by Cixin Liu</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59852W/A_wizard_of_Earthsea">A
Wizard of Earthsea</a> by Ursula K. Le Guin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL271675W/Stoner">Stoner</a>
by John Williams</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2670584W/Prost">Prost! The
Story of German Beer</a> by Horst D. Dornbusch</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3673999W/Bock">Bock</a> by
Darryl Richman</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2172532W/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep">Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep</a> by Philip K. Dick</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15536410W/Room">Room</a> by
Emma Donoghue</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3348011W/Kitchen_Confidential">Kitchen
Confidential: adventures in the culinary underbelly</a> by Anthony
Bourdain</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17110026W/H_Is_for_Hawk">H
is for Hawk</a> by Helen Macdonald</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL497198W/Watchers">Watchers</a> by
Dean Koontz</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59862W/The_Tombs_of_Atuan_(The_Earthsea_Cycle_Book_2)">The
Tombs of Atuan</a> by Ursula K. Le Guin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3501731W/A_confederacy_of_dunces">A
Confederacy of Dunces</a> by John Kennedy Toole</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17595809W/Everything_but_Espresso">Everything
but Espresso</a> by Scott Rao</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL82592W/Harry_Potter_and_the_Sorcerer's_Stone">Harry
Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16313123W/Harry_Potter_and_the_Chamber_of_Secrets">Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL13716956W/Harry_Potter_and_the_prisoner_of_Azkaban">Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL483571W/Naked_Lunch">Naked
Lunch</a> by William S. Burroughs</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1972516W/Code">CODE: The
Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software</a> by Charles
Petzold</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2636674W/The_crying_of_lot_49">The
Crying of Lot 49</a> by Thomas Pynchon</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15434618W/The_Best_Christmas_Pageant_Ever">The
Best Christmas Pageant Ever</a> by Barbara Robinson</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL82589W/Harry_Potter_and_the_goblet_of_fire">Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire</a> by J.K. Rowling</li>
</ol>
Book Review: CODE by Charles Petzold
https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/12/12/book-review--code-by-charles-petzold/
Tyler Cipriani
Copyright © 2017 Tyler Cipriani
2017-02-14T15:11:05Z
2016-12-12T00:00:00Z
<p><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1972516W/Code">CODE: The
Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software</a> by Charles
Petzold</p>
<p>The language of computer hardware and software is not particularly
well hidden in my experience. The more I interact with software, the
more those interactions reflect their makers and materials. This fact is
slowly permeating the zeitgeist as we all, collectively, realize that <a
href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/facebook-explains-what-it-bans-and-why/">facebook
is not the</a> <a
href="https://act.eff.org/action/dear-facebook-authentic-names-are-authentically-dangerous-for-your-users">open</a>
<a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/technology/facebook-vietnam-war-photo-nudity.html?_r=0">internet</a>
(no matter how much it may <a
href="https://info.internet.org/en/">insist on its own benevolence</a>),
and that the current state of AI is simply one of <a
href="http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm">money laundering for
bias</a>. While it is increasingly true that our high-level interactions
with machines are <a
href="https://twitter.com/internetofshit">broken</a>, it’s important to
recall that we haven’t fixed any of the low-level problems either (tried
subtracting <code>399999999999998</code> from
<code>399999999999999</code> in Google’s calculator <a
href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-do-computers-suck-at-math/">lately</a>?).</p>
<p>These incredible Rube Goldberg, hacks-all-the-way-down, leaking piles
of abstractions that are modern computers are fascinating and powerful.
The modern computer reveals its own history – each layer of abstraction
representing a previous geologic era. The <a
href="http://www.dave.org/oldplans.html">ancient <code>.plan</code></a>
files of the Sumerians and Hittites.</p>
<p><em>CODE</em> builds forward through time. Revealing each innovation
necessary to create a fully functioning computer. It works its way
towards the modern computer starting with binary data representation
using <a href="https://www.morsecode.io/">morse code</a>. From there it
covers non-base-10 number systems, telegraphs, electromagnets and the
invention of the relay, the flip-flop switch that allows temporary
storage of a single bit. All of this background culminates in a truly
wonderful chapter in which you use this technology to build a fully
functional computer in your mind’s eye.</p>
<p>The book goes on to explain the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture">Von
Neumann architecture</a> and from there moves into topics with which I
am more familiar – high level programming languages, object-oriented
programming languages, and “The Graphical Revolution”. In these later
chapters, an evident object-oriented/graphical/IDE as the logical
end-point for computing bias rears its ugly head, but in a book
published by Microsoft Press it’s a surprisingly light touch.</p>
<p><em>CODE</em> is one of the more interesting technical books I have
ever read, and also one of the few that I read cover-to-cover over the
course of a few reading sessions. It is a story rather than a series of
ideas surrounding a theme. It is a history book, not a handbook.</p>
<p>My one critique is that the chapters after the climactic computer
construction feel a bit disjointed. There is no real conclusion to the
book – I expected a more satisfying wrap-up than I was given. Instead of
a tying-up of loose-ends we move on to topics like object-oriented
programming, and <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-1985">IEEE 754
floating-point numbers</a>. While the treatment this book provides these
topics is interesting, the organization is somewhat lacking.</p>
<p>To spite the lack of organization towards the end of the book, I
found <em>CODE</em> a wonderful read and would have no qualms
recommending it to anyone at any level of computer literacy.</p>
<p><em>Rating: 9/10</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Meta Note</em>:</p>
<p>As part of my effort to delve more deeply into reading, I will be
featuring more review-type content. I will be tagging it all with the
“books” tag. If you hate this, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for
“computing” to continue to read my insights on something I’m perhaps
even the slightest bit qualified to talk about in any sort of informed
way.</p>
</blockquote>
Book Review: The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K Le Guin
https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/10/08/book-review--the-tombs-of-atuan-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
Tyler Cipriani
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Copyright © 2017 Tyler Cipriani
2017-02-14T15:11:05Z
2016-10-08T16:36:10Z
<p>"Ahra", the Eaten One, the high priestess of the Tombs of Atuan
belongs to the Nameless Ones. She is, herself, nameless. Her name along
with her family and future were taken from her in a ceremony on which
the novel opens. At the beginning of the novel, her 6-year-old life is
spared so that she may live the remainder of her life serving the
Nameless Ones of Karg in the far East, outside of the Archipelago, in
the realm of EarthSea. So it has always been at Atuan and so it has
always been with "Ahra" – the high priestess is also The One Priestess
in that she is continually reborn as herself. Within an hour of the old
priestess's death, a new One Priestess – who is the same in essence – is
born.</p>
<p>Ahra is under the often indifferent and sometimes cruel tutelage of
Kossil – High Priestess of the GodKing – the rulers of Autan, Thar –
priestess of the Twin Gods, and (to some degree) Mannan – a eunuch and
her life-long companion. Each often conveys their understanding of the
Tombs, the Nameless ones, and the appropriate place and behavior of the
One Priestess.</p>
<p>Thar, though harsh, is often an ally to Ahra. After Thar's death,
Ahra's relationship with Kossil becomes increasingly strained. Kossil
shows Ahra the Undertomb and Labyrinth that lay under the Tombs of Atuan
– these are the dark realms of the One Priestess where the Nameless Ones
have their greatest strength. Ahra becomes increasingly obsessed with
memorizing all the twists and turns of the Undertomb and Labyrinth
spending much of her time exploring their depths and learning the
location of various spy-holes that look into the Labyrinth. Kossil makes
mention of the ring of Erreth-Akbe that is the greatest and most magical
treasure of all the many treasures kept in the Labyrinth.</p>
<p>Soon Ahra discovers Sparrowhawk, who's origin story is covered in <a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59852W/A_wizard_of_Earthsea">A
Wizard of EarthSea</a>, wandering the Labyrinth in search of the ring of
Erreth-Akbe. Although Ahra has been taught to fear magic and sorcerers
her curiosity about this intruder who has lived a life so different than
her own dull existence leads her to imprison Sparrowhawk in the
Labyrinth rather than kill him (as she told Kossil she would).</p>
<p>Eventually, Ahra grows to trust Sparrowhawk, particularly after he
returns to her her name – Tenar, and after revealing his own true name –
Ged. In EarthSea learning something's true name gives you power over
that thing. Magic is just a recitation of the original language and
magic is enacted over objects and people by calling them by their
original and true names.</p>
<p>After being won-over by Ged when Kossil's intensity and treachery
reach a fever pitch, Tenar decides to help Ged escape Autan which, along
with the her and Kossil's other indiscretions, leave the Nameless Ones a
bit miffed.</p>
<p>The Tombs of Atuan was a very readable and approachable novel,
probably owing to its young-adult target audience – it is short at only
211 pages. This is the second book of the EarthSea series and it seems
slightly more focused and, perhaps, less expansive than the first – A
Wizard of EarthSea. The themes of the power of names and places are
mentioned throughout this book. It is interesting that the things over
which no one has any control are nameless, specifically the Nameless
Ones – the dark forces mentioned throughout the novel; however, it is
only after regaining her own name that Tenar is able to exert any
control over her own life.</p>
<p>It's got a good beat and I can dance to it: 8/10.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Meta Note</strong>:</p>
<p>As part of my effort to delve more deeply into reading, I will be
featuring more review-type content. I will be tagging it all with the
"books" tag. If you hate this, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for
"computing" to continue to read my insights on something I'm perhaps
even the slightest bit qualified to talk about in any sort of informed
way.</p>
</blockquote>
Books Read (so far) in 2016
https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/08/20/2016/
Tyler Cipriani
<p><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License</a></p>
Copyright © 2017 Tyler Cipriani
2018-01-13T19:49:37Z
2016-08-20T00:00:00Z
<p>The goal here is to hit 2 books a month, so 24 for the year. I’m on
track as of now. Perilous.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7500496M/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land">Stranger
in a Strange Land</a> by Robert A. Heinlein</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL573448W/Black_hole">Black
Hole</a> by Charles Burns</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17314347W/Fun_Home">Fun
Home</a> by Alison Bechdel</li>
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17112428W/The_Girl_on_the_Train">The
Girl on the Train</a> by Paula Hawkins</li>
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59740W/Starship_Troopers">Starship
Troopers</a> by Robert A. Heinlein</li>
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15936512W/Ready_Player_One">Ready
Player One</a> by Ernest Cline</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16808654W/The_Circle">The
Circle</a> by Dave Eggers</li>
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17318135W/Notorious_RBG">Notorious
RBG</a> by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik</li>
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17335914W/The_Three_Body_Problem">The
Three-Body Problem</a> by Cixin Liu</li>
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL59852W/A_wizard_of_Earthsea">A
Wizard of Earthsea</a> by Ursula K. Le Guin</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL271675W/Stoner">Stoner</a>
by John Williams</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2670584W/Prost">Prost! The
Story of German Beer</a> by Horst D. Dornbusch</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3673999W/Bock">Bock</a> by
Darryl Richman</li>
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2172532W/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep">Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep</a> by Philip K. Dick</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15536410W/Room">Room</a> by
Emma Donoghue</li>
<li><a
href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3348011W/Kitchen_Confidential">Kitchen
Confidential: adventures in the culinary underbelly</a> by Anthony
Bourdain</li>
<li><a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17110026W/H_Is_for_Hawk">H
is for Hawk</a> by Helen Macdonald</li>
</ol>
Library Thing(s)
https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/08/20/library-thing/
Tyler Cipriani
<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
License</a>
Copyright © 2017 Tyler Cipriani
2017-02-14T15:11:05Z
2012-08-01T00:00:00Z
Earlier this year, I stumbled across <a href="https://www.librarything.com">Library
Thing</a> and almost immediately decided that
I wanted to join—which is a rare thing for me concerning online
services.
So I did what any normal person would do and I bought a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00406YZGK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1">barcode
scanner</a>
and wrote some python to build my catalog.
The <a href="https://github.com/thcipriani/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/LibraryThing">python
script</a>
is just a loop that shows a prompt and waits for an ISBN, <code>t</code> to input a
tag, <code>q</code> to quit. Meanwhile it's generating a csv file that
can be uploaded to LibraryThing.
The fruits of this labor were/are my (and Blazey's) <a href="https://www.librarything.com/catalog/thcipriani">Library Thing Catalog</a>
To Read
https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/08/20/to-read/
Tyler Cipriani
<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
License</a>
Copyright © 2017 Tyler Cipriani
2017-02-14T15:11:05Z
2012-08-01T00:00:00Z
* the green hills of earth - Heinlein
* <a href="http://encore.coalliance.org/iii/encore/record/C__Rb15258367__SPeter%20Ludlow__P0%2C9__Orightresult__U__X4?lang=eng&suite=def">Crypto anarchy, cyberstates, and pirate utopias</a> by Peter Ludlow