Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no\nmore quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and\ncomprehension.
\n
– Mortimer J Adler, How\nto Read a Book
\n
\n\n\nMy trusty, hated Kindle\n\n
Reading only “1000\nbooks before you die” used to strike me as unambitious.
\n
Then I started tracking my reading, and\nI realized it would take me 40+ years to read 1000\nbooks.
\n
I needed to set goals to improve my natural average pace of 24 books\nper year. And in 2022 I eked out a respectable 55\nbooks.
\n
This post catalogs the systems and habits I used to boost my\nreading.
\n\n
Motivation
\n
I like reading.
\n
When I contrast how I feel after I spend an hour doomscrolling Reddit\nvs an hour spent reading, there’s no comparison—reading always wins. Too\nmuch internet can leave me feeling desolate.
\n
Nonfiction continues to be the best way to learn more about myriad\ntopics. And science now touts the benefits\nof reading fiction.
\n
But there’s so much to read and so little time. Plus, I worried I was\nlosing what I’d already read. So I set goals and built habits to achieve\nthose goals.
\n\n\n
What is working well
\n
\n
My Kindle – I wish an open device existed that\nwas as wonderful as my Kindle. I hate that I love it so much. But it’s a\nboon to my reading, and the benefits are hard to quibble over:
\n
\n
Front-lit, ePaper display so I can read at night without a light and\nwithout interfering with my sleep
\n
Stores 100s of books
\n
Whispersync keeps it synced with audiobooks on Audible
\n
Stores highlights in MyClippings.txt—makes it easy to\nexport highlights
\n
Stores words you look up in the dictionary in\nvocab.db—makes it easy to make vocabulary words into Anki flashcards
\n
Light enough to drop on your face while reading in bed (this is a\nbig concern for me)
\n
\n
Reading notes – I highlight quotes I like and\nsave them in Readwise.
\n\n\nNotes in my Readwise library\n\n
This happens automatically for books I read on my Kindle.
\n
For paper books, I stole my entire process from Cal\nNewport:
\n
\n
Read with a Zebra\n#2 in hand
\n
Highlight interesting passages—underline or bracket or make a mark\nin the margins
\n
For each page where I highlight a passage, I also make a\nline across the corner of the page
\n
Later, I can flip through the book and find all the pages with lines\nto find my highlights
\n
Then I’ll use Readwise’s “Add via photo” feature to add the\nhighlights to the app
\n
\n
Readwise can automatically export to online notetaking apps like\nEvernote. But I like to export each book’s notes to markdown and save\nthem for quick ripgrepping and offline reading under\n~/Documents/notes/brain.
\n
Tracking – It’s surprising how much benefit you\nget from simply writing down the books your read somewhere.
\n
I used to forget whole books all the time.
\n
I’ve tracked every book I’ve read since 2016 on\nthis blog. Posting it online may give me a bit of public accountability,\nbut I think a plain text file would net you the same benefits.
\n
\n\n\n
What still needs improvement
\n
\n
Reviewing – I failed to write a review for each\nbook I read this year. I started strong but faltered around book 30.
\n
I want to improve this next year. Maybe I should finally concede and\njoin a social reading forum—it might help to have some social\naccountability.
\n
The anti-corporate, ActivityPub-backed Goodreads alternative BookWyrm could be a cool\nplace.
\n
\n\n\n
Goals for 2023
\n
I’m going for fifty books again.
\n
Here are a few of my vague notions for reading in 2023:
\n
\n
Math – I want to read about math. I’ve got A.N. Whiteheads’s “An\nIntroduction to Mathematics” and Mark C. Chu-Carroll’s Good Math on my\nlist.
\n
Trees – I read “The Overstory” by Richard Powers in 2020. In an\ninterview with the Guardian in 2019, Powers said he’d\nread 120 books about trees while he was writing it. I wonder which\nwas the best?
\n
The Hainish\nCycle books – I’m a sucker for Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed\nis one of my favorites. I’ve never read any other book in this series.\nWhy not try a few in 2023?
\n
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry – In 1994, David Foster Wallace\ntaught English 102 at Illinois State. His\nsyllabus survives online. All the required reading is mass-market\npaperbacks. Lonesome Dove is one of these cheap paperbacks that also\nhappens to have won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so it’s\nprobably an OK read.
\n
Moar US President biographies – reading a biography of every\nAmerican president might be a fun project ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
\n
\n\n"
},
{
"id": "https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold/",
"title": "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré",
"url": "https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold/",
"author": {
"name": "Tyler Cipriani"
},
"tags": [
"books"
],
"date_published": "2022-08-11T04:45:28Z",
"date_modified": "2022-12-05T19:54:55Z",
"content_html": "
Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results.
\n
– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
\n
\n
I’ve always wondered if James Bond is supposed to be an idiot or if\nthat’s his cover. I think “shaken, not stirred” is a the give-away: who\nwould ever shake a martini?
\n
\n
There is a kind of stupidity among drunks, particularly when they are\nsober, a kind of disconnection which the unobservant interpret as\nvagueness and which Leamas seemed to acquire with unnatural speed.
\n
– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
\n
\n
John le Carré’s Alec Leamas in contrast is a drunk, but I’m still not\nsure if that’s only his cover. Leamas is a journeyman’s James\nBond—smaller, realer—an everyday sort of vicious.
\n
\n
What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a\nsqualid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists,\nand drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their\nrotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the\nrights and wrongs?
\n
– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
\n
\n
Leamas has one far-fetched chance at destroying Hans-Dieter Mundt the\nex-Nazi member of the Abteilung who ordered East German border guards to\ngun-down Karl Riemeck, Leamas’s spy. And this single chance involves\ngoing deep undercover.
\n
The reader is left in the dark about the plan initially—we’re left to\nbelieve Leamas has become a bitter drunk as office rumors swirl about\nhis pension eligibility.
\n
But later we realize his contact—Control—means to use him for counter\nintelligence. Feeding the enemy select disinformation under the guise of\nLeamas acting as a turn-coat.
\n
The layers of double-crossing only get better from there. It reminded\nme a lot of Martin Scorsese’s movie The Departed—a contact deep\nunder cover, except replace Mark Wahlberg with George Smiley.
\n
When le Carré died a few years back, I’d vowed to become familiar\nwith his work. This book was a good entrypoint.
\n\n
Good quotes
\n
\n
I mean you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because\nyour government’s policy is benevolent,
\n
– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
\n
\n
\n
It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments\nof elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were\ncoincidental with attainment.
\n
– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
\n
\n
\n
A man who lives apart, not to others but alone, is exposed to obvious\npsychological dangers. In itself, the practice of deception is not\nparticularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional\nexpertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire. But while a\nconfidence trickster, a play-actor, or a gambler can return from his\nperformance to the ranks of his admirers, the secret agent enjoys no\nsuch relief.
\n
– John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
I picked up this book on a whim at a children and young adult\nbookshop in Niwot, Colorado called “The Wandering Jellyfish”—a cute\nstore in the old Niwot Tribune building on main street, complete with a\nantique cash register like the one in F.A.O. Swartz in Home Alone\nII.
\n
This book is the first in a series of young adult fiction stories\nfocused on running—Reynolds’s Track series. This volume\nfollows Castle Crenshaw, the eponymous “Ghost”, as he joins the city\ntrack team, and—in a beautiful irony—learns how to face his problems\nrather than run from them.
\n
This book had me from the first paragraph:
\n
\n
Check this out. This dude named Andrew Dahl holds the world record\nfor blowing up the most balloons…with his nose. Yeah. That’s true.
\n
– Jason Reynolds, Ghost
\n
\n
This has everything I’m looking for in young adult literature:
\n
\n
An honest yet wondrous worldview—it has a lean that tells you who\nthe narrator is from the jump.
\n
It’s true to how young people speak and not too “fellow kids.”
\n
There’s some adolescent gross-out factor here, which I\nappreciate.
\n
\n
The Ghost character reminded me vaguely of Miles Morales from the\nMarvel animated feature film SpiderMan: Into the\nMultiverse. And maybe that’s no coincidence as the author also\npenned the novel Miles Morales: Spider-Man.
And the writing is wonderful. I reread the scene of Ghost’s panic\nattack in the storeroom of the market in his neighborhood—anticipating\ntyping it in this review—eager to get the feel of writing it myself.
\n
The language is perfect—iambic and musical—concrete language: a long\nflowing sentence, four staccato sentences—chokes of panic—and the final\nmetaphor that nails the gravity of the scene.
\n
\n
Like how when you at the swimming pool on the hottest day of summer,\nand you jump in and it’s cool, and then you take one step too far and\nsuddenly you’re in the deep end, and things ain’t so cool no more.\nBecause you can’t swim. That’s how I felt. Like I was drowning. Like I\nwas filling up with water. Like this place, this weird little room that\nhad saved my life, now felt like it was gonna take it.
\n
– Jason Reynolds, Ghost
\n
\n
Flowing, smart, painful, playful, and laugh-out loud funny—although I\npicked up this book on a whim, I had a hard time putting it down. I\nfinished this short read in a couple of hot afternoons on my front porch\ncopying the main character by eating sunflower seeds as I read.
If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again,\nI want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild.
\n
ALEX. (Alexander Supertramp, Chris McCandless’s alter-ego)
\n
\n
Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” chronicals the end of Chris\nMcCandless’s life. McCandless died from either starving to death or\npoisoning himself while living alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
\n
The book is an expansion of Krakaeur’s 1993 Outside magazine cover\nstory. “Into the Wild,” was adapted into a 2007 film by Sean Penn—which\nI saw well before reading this book.
\n
After watching “Into the Wild,” I’d wondered why anyone would choose\nto lionize McCandless. I realized after reading this book that I’d\nmissed the point.
\n
\n
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no\nless than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly\nenough, it is your God-given right to have it.
\n
– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
\n
\n
The point of this book seems to be: we were all young and invincible,\nonce. And only luck separates the brave from the stupid.
\n
McCandless was luckless, brave to excess, and a bit of an\nasshole—unlucky and young, I guess, is another way to say that.
\n
This book reads like a long article in Outside magazine (which I\nshould have expected, I guess). It’s morbidly fascinating, well-written,\nand maybe just a tad exploitative.
\n
The parts that suck about this book are when the author wildly\nspeculates—for example, about how (exactly) McCandless died, or about\nMcCandless’s sexuality—the book tries to be more interesting than\nfactual. It is interesting, it’s probably close to factual.
\n\n
Asides
\n
I liked this note from McCandless to a friend where he tries\nchanneling his inner Thoreau:
\n
\n
“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for\nadventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new\nexperiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly\nchanging horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
\n
– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, quoting Chris McCandless
\n
\n
One of the best parts of the book was about the author’s own reckless\nAlaska adventure as a young man: attempting to solo climb the Devil’s\nThumb:
\n
\n
Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you\nconstantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a\ntremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an\ninstant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your\nmovements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you\ngrow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with\ndoom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and\nhead. You learn to trust your self-control.
\n
– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, quoting Chris McCandless
\n
\n
Both Annie Dillard (in “the Writing Life”) and Jon Krakauer here seem\nto have a deep distain for Jack London. I’ve only ever read “Call of the\nWild”—and it was fine ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.
\n
\n
McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had\nspent just a single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own\nhand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk,\nobese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant\nresemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.
Steven Pinker is an author I’m sure I’m supposed to dislike. The term\n“neoliberal apologist” gets thrown around.
\n
Steven Pinker is the author of Enlightenment Now—Bill Gates’s\n“favorite book of all time”. Any book which provides Bill Gates\nsuccor about the world that made him a multi-billionare holds no\ninterest to me.
\n
But even folks who detest his views still concede: he’s an\nentertaining writer. And books about writing from good writers are\ninteresting to me.
\n\n
The Classic Style
\n
\n
A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s\nperspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera\nangles and quick cuts.
\n
– Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
\n
\n
The book focuses on writing classic style prose. Classic style\ndiffers from the practical style—the style of Strunk and White and\nWilliam Zinsser—in two ways:
\n
\n
The author engages the reader in a conversation as an equal
\n
You’re moving the reader through scenes that convey your point
\n
\n
Practical style focuses on getting information to readers, whereas\nthe classic style’s primary goal is saying something interesting.
\n
Similar to the practical style—you’re attempting to write lean prose,\navoid abstractions, and avoid jargon. But only insofar as it furthers\nthe goal of the conversation:
\n
\n
Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and\nreader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the\nreader feel like a dunce.
\n
– Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
\n
\n\n\n
Grammar time
\n
This book talks about grammar at a level of detail only a linguist\ncould love.
\n
\n
Modern grammatical theories (like the one in The Cambridge Grammar of\nthe English Language, which I use in this book) distinguish grammatical\ncategories like noun and verb from grammatical functions like subject,\nobject, head, and modifier. And they distinguish both of these from\nsemantic categories and roles like action, physical object, possessor,\ndoer, and done-to, which refer to what the referents of the words are\ndoing in the world.
\n
– Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
\n
\n
In honesty—I loved it, too.
\n
But I still have no idea what a participle is.
\n
I know that a participle is a verb. I know that it needs an auxillary\nwhen used as a verb. I know it can be used as an adjective or a noun. Is\nthat all it is? No idea.
\n
I’m also confused about the “irrealis mood.” And all the stuff about\nLatin words and Greek words: it was too much for me in one reading. But\nI’m dumb.
\n
The book taught me more about grammar than I knew before. And it\nprovided wonderful reasoning behind the mandates of Strunk and\nWhite:
\n
\n
So every time a writer adds a word to a sentence, he is imposing not\none but two cognitive demands on the reader: understanding the word, and\nfitting it into the tree. This double demand is a major justification\nfor the prime directive “Omit needless words.”
\n
– Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
\n
\n
A small point that I’m not qualified to disagree with the author\nabout is the use of active voice.
\n
\n
Active, shmactive!
\n
[…]
\n
One hungry heron was seen, as opposed to Birdwatchers saw one hungry\nheron.
\n
– Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
\n
\n
I found most of his examples contrived: rewrite the damn\nsentence.
\n\n\n
TILs
\n
Outside of the idea of the classic style, the other new writing idea\nI learned from the book was to put important ideas at the end of a\nsentence:
\n
\n
select the construction that allows you to end a sentence with a\nphrase that is heavy or informative or both.
\n
– Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
\n
\n
I love dictionaries. And another new idea for me in this book was the\n“prescriptivist” vs “descriptivist” dictionaries.
\n
\n
The Descriptivists had their way with the publication of Webster’s\nThird New International Dictionary in 1961, which accepted such errors\nas ain’t and irregardless. This created a backlash that led to\nPrescriptivist dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary of\nthe English Language. Ever since then, Prescriptivists and\nDescriptivists have been doing battle over whether writers should care\nabout correctness.
This book was such an earnest recommendation from Ali Abdaal’s\nYouTube channel that I bought it.
\n
This is a motivational book that you could devour in 30 minutes or\nso. But it’s the kind of motivational book that you need in your life\nfrom time-to-time.
\n
The author’s goal is to amp you up about sharing things on the\ninternet.
\n
Plus there are a scant few details about what and how to share on the\ninternet.
\n
Most of the advice seems right, and it’s quotable and full of\nquotes:
\n
\n
Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect\nwith people who like those things, too.
\n
– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!
\n
\n
\n
“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably\nisn’t learning enough,”
\n
writes author Alain de Botton.
\n
– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!
\n
\n
There’s a line in here that reminds me of a quote from Euripides:\n“For this is held as one of the wise principles of mortals: what isn’t\ngood goes unnoticed”
\n
\n
We all like to think we’re more complex than a two-sentence\nexplanation, but a two-sentence explanation is usually what the world\nwants from us.
\n
– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!
\n
\n
There’s a list of recommendations at the back which I wish was\nrequired of all authors forever:
\n
\n
\n
Brian Eno, A year with swollen appendices
\n
Steven Johnson, Where good ideas come from
\n
David Byrne, How music works
\n
Mike Monteiro, Design is a job
\n
Kio Stark, Don’t go back to school
\n
Ian Svenonius, Supernatural strategies for making a rock ‘n’ roll\ngroup
\n
Sidney Lumet, Making movies
\n
P.T. Barnum, The art of money getting
\n
\n
– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!
\n
\n
As you might imagine from a book with an exclamation mark in the\ntitle, this book is saccharine, but saccharine is enjoyable\nsometimes.
\n
I enjoyed the book. I’ll probably revisit either it, or this review,\noften. I saw this book was for sale at the FedEx Office store near my\nhouse and that seemed right somehow.
It took me two years as a manager to reach the “leadership is lonely”\nphase.
\n
– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle
\n
\n\n\nAn Elegant Puzzle by Will\nLarson\n\n
I read this book because I read Will Larson’s blog and newsletter and they’re frequent\nsources of management insight.
\n
This book reads like a collection of blog posts with smooth\ntransitions.
\n\n
On blogging
\n
Since I so enjoy Larson’s blogs, I was heartened to hear about\nLarson’s blogging journey:
\n
\n
It took 200 more posts and another decade to cobble together a\nwritten voice and to make enough mistakes that my experience might\nbecome worth reading.
\n
– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle
\n
\n
This is a good reminder that most overnight success is a decade in\nthe making.
\n\n\n
Limit WIP
\n
I think the most applicable advice in the book was this:
\n
\n
When the team is treading water, the system fix is to consolidate the\nteam’s efforts to finish more things, and to reduce concurrent work\nuntil they’re able to begin repaying debt (e.g., limit work in\nprogress).
\n
– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle
\n
\n
I’ve struggled to limit work in process (WIP) both personally and\nprofessionally over the past year.
\n
This advice rang true.
\n\n\n
Organizational efficiency is evil
\n
Organizational slack has been\nmissing from every organization I’ve been a part of. The result is\npredictable: if everyone is working on their own priorities, and there\nare dependencies between teams, no one will ever complete anything.
\n
Larson reinforces this idea:
\n
\n
The expected time to complete a new task approaches infinity as a\nteam’s utilization approaches 100 percent, and most teams have many\ndependencies on other teams.
\n
– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle
\n
\n\n\n
Other valuable ideas
\n
\n
Good process is as lightweight as possible, while being rigorous\nenough to consistently work.
\n
– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle
\n
\n
\n
Having humans who perform gatekeeping activities creates very odd\nsocial dynamics, and is rarely a great use of a human’s time.
\n
– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle
\n
\n
\n
With that setup in place, create a rotation for people who are\navailable to answer questions, and train your team not to answer other\nforms of interruptions. This is remarkably uncomfortable because we want\nto be helpful humans, but it becomes necessary as the number of\ninterruptions climbs higher. One specific tool that I’ve found extremely\nhelpful here is an ownership registry, which allows you to look up who\nowns what, eliminating the frequent “Who owns X?”
\n\n"
},
{
"id": "https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fuck/",
"title": "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson",
"url": "https://tylercipriani.com/books/2022/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fuck/",
"author": {
"name": "Tyler Cipriani"
},
"tags": [
"books"
],
"date_published": "2022-05-21T00:00:00Z",
"date_modified": "2022-07-02T17:28:32Z",
"content_html": "
\n
\n
⭑ (1/5—because “1” is as low as I can go—see\nbook reviews)
\n
\n\n\nThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a\nF*ck\n\n
You should skip this book and not feel bad about it.\nDespite every airport bookshop, every endcap at the big box bookseller,\nand Amazon’s recommendation engine insisting you read it.
\n
The world insisted I read this book and so I tried the Audible\npreview. The preview tells the story of William James. Although he was\ndestined to be the father of American psychology, William James was by\nall measures a failure early in life. He was a failed painter,\nstruggling in medical school, and he’d almost died on an expedition to\nSouth America. He suffered from myriad physical ailments and was\ndepressed, even considering suicide.
\n
Then James read the philosophical work of Charles Pierce which\ninsists on radical responsibility. James vowed to spend one year living\nwith the belief that he had the power to solve all of his life’s\nproblems. This year changed his life.
\n
Good story, right? That’s what duped me into reading this book.
\n
One point in the book I enjoyed was when the author talked about\n“good problems”:
\n
Everyone wants an amazing life, but in an amazing life there are\nstill problems. But the problems in the amazing life are better\nproblems. So the question is not: what do you want out of life; it’s\nwhat problems do you want.
\n
From there the author bros out on Buddhism and attempts to hide his\nbad writing by sprinkling it with profanity. I relish the chance to say\nthe word “fuck”—I’m a big fan! But fuck was this not worth it to\nread.
Someone on Hacker News recommended this as a good book on technical\nwriting. The title led me to believe the book would be\nabout technical writing.
\n
But the book is little more than an incomplete summary of\ndocumentation tools that exist:
\n
\n
GitHub wikis
\n
Jekyll
\n
Markdown
\n
reStructured Text
\n
AsciiDoc
\n
\n
The book only talks about the craft of technical writing briefly. The\nmost valuable quote about writing in the book is:
\n
\n
Technical writers, first and foremost, are testers and researchers.\nYour job is to know what people want to achieve and precisely how to\nachieve it. Communicating that knowledge is the last step of the process\nand really shouldn’t comprise more than 10% of your time.
\n
– Andrew Etter, Modern Technical Writing
\n
\n
How to communicate is not addressed.
\n
This un-cited and inaccurate quote cast doubt on the author’s other\nsparse advice:
\n
\n
Wikipedia ameliorates [the problem of vandalism] with a sophisticated\nanti-vandalism bot that uses machine learning to improve over time.
\n
– Andrew Etter, Modern Technical Writing
\n
\n
This is misleading for the following reasons:
\n\n
Who is “Wikipedia”? English Wikipedia? The Wikimedia\nFoundation?
\n
There are many bots, there is no “bot”
\n
Wikipedia’s accuracy relies on volunteers at least as much as any\nbot
\n
It sounds like this refers to ORES (maybe), but this\nisn’t what people “rely on” so much as it’s one tool among many.
I could reread the first passage of this book forever and ever and be\nhappy.
\n
The book opens on Hiro Protagonist (yes, it’s an amazing name for a\nprotagonist) making a pizza delivery for the mob in a hyper-capitalist\nfuture America.
\n
Pizza drivers for Uncle Enzo’s Cosa Nostra pizza are called\n“deliverators,” and they are all armed for protection. Hiro, the\ngreatest swordfighter in the world by his own account, is armed with\ndual thirty-six-inch katanas (which are not a part of Cosa Nostra\nPizza’s weapon’s protocol).
\n
\n
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is\na role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel\nlike doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to.\nAnd because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.
\n
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
\n
\n
Hiro’s pizza career ends quickly after meeting a ’Pooner (short for\n“harpooner”—someone who harpoons cars and skateboards behind them on the\nhighway) named Y.T. (short for “Yours Truly”).
\n
Y.T. is a great character. She has one of the most profound quotes of\nthe whole book in her internal monologue:
\n
\n
The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just\nskimming off a tiny bit of it.
\n
– Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
\n
\n
The book focuses on a neural virus that is transmitted via the deep\nstructures of our brains. The nam-shub of Enki (the spell/hack of an\nancient Sumerian neuro-hacker) inoculated humanity against the spread of\nthe virus—it was also the biblical babel event that prevented humanity\nfrom continuing to speak ancient Sumerian. Now a new cult is trying to\nuse this neural and biological virus to, once-again, control\nhumanity.
\n
I started reading this book because the protagonist in\n“The Kaiju Preservation\nSociety” wrote his dissertation on it and that book was fun.
\n
This book reads, in parts, like a dissertation narrated as a\nconversation between Hiro and an AI Librarian written in as a plot\ndevice.
\n
This book would have been subversive when it was released in the\nearly 90s. It was supposed to be a “computer generated graphic novel”\nwhich sounds like it would have been mindblowing in 1992.
\n
Reading it for the first time now in 2022, it started strong, it kept\nbuilding and building and then just…ended?
\n
If I were to plot my enjoyment of Snow Crash over time, it’d look\nlike this: ███▇▇▇▄▄▄▂▁
\n
Around the time that 15-year-old Y.T. has sex with the book’s main\nantagonist (a man with a tattoo that reads, “POOR IMPULSE CONTROL” on\nhis forehead whose main ambition is to nuke America): I’m just ready for\nit to be done.
\n
I stuck it out to the end for a deus ex machina and that was some\nbullshit.
\n
This book would have been a perfect short story about pizza\ndelivery.
I adore his podcast—The\nAnthropocene Reviewed—a collection of essays staged as\nfive-star-based reviews of the various outputs of humanity. Like all of\nhis writing, the podcast intimates so much of his experience—it’s both\nraw and refreshing.
\n
Also I can’t read or watch The Fault in Our Stars without\nchoking up—I’m only human after all.
\n
That said, I’d never heard of Looking for Alaska, John Green’s debut\nnovel, until I was browsing Audible looking for more things narrated by\nWil Wheaton—another human I find delightful.
\n
This reads like a debut novel, like John Green hadn’t quite found his\nniche. But it features all the standard John Green themes:
\n
\n
\nQuirky high school students with a vague drama-kid vibe
\n
\nA stunning lack of real authority figures
\n
\nManic pixie dream person or persons
\n
\n
It’s a little formulaic, but comforting—like a Disney movie or mashed\npotatoes.
\n\n
Summary
\n
“Pudge” narrates our tale. Miles Halter, AKA “Pudge,” is a lanky\n(“it’s called irony, pudge”) newcomer to Culver Creek, a boarding/prep\nschool in Alabama (which is a thing, I guess). Miles is obsessed with\nthe last words of famous people. The story focuses heavily on two\npeople’s last words in particular:
\n
\n
The poet Francois Rabelais’s last words: “I go now to seek a great\nperhaps,” which is the explanation Miles gives for going to boarding\nschool in the first place, and
\n
Simón Bolívar’s last words according to Gabriel García Márquez’s\nThe General and His Labyrinth: “Damn it, how will I ever get out\nof this labyrinth?”
\n
\n
The story centers around Miles’s roommate, Chip Martin AKA “The\nColonel,” and the eponymous Alaska Young—the manic pixie dream girl with\nwhom Miles is infatuated throughout the story.
\n
There are adolescent pranks, lots teen smoking, some drinking, and\nawkward teenage attempts at sexual intimacy.
\n\n\n
Spoiler
\n
It’s revealed that Alaska’s mom died when she was very young and she\ndidn’t call 911 and therefore blames herself for her death. Alaska dies\nwhile drinking and driving on the anniversary of her mom’s death and no\none is quite sure if it’s suicide.
\n
It’s all heartbreaking in the way everything John Green writes is\nheartbreaking. I’d be tempted to call it cheap, but it’s so brutally\nhonest about the experience of what it’s like to be young that it\nisn’t.
The idea of sleeping with tape over my mouth is to improve my nasal\nbreathing. The author posits that practicing nasal breathing makes you a\nbetter nasal breather.
\n
\n
These tissues and muscles get “toned” to stay in this opened and wide\nposition. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.
\n
– James Nestor, Breathe
\n
\n
He also cites a dentist whom he quoted as saying:
\n
\n
mouthbreathing contributes to periodontal disease and bad breath, and\nwas the number one cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar\nconsumption, bad diet or poor hygiene.
\n
– James Nestor, Breath
\n
\n
And while it’s clear that the “evidence” for these claims is some\nrandom dentist saying something offhand, I figured it’d be an easy\nexperiment to try on myself with very little downside risk. So I did it.\nAnd now I do it. It’s embarrassing, but man can I breath through my nose\nlike a champion now.
\n
And the author tells me I really really should breathe\nthrough my nose:
\n
\n
Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of\nthe reasons we can absorb about 18% more oxygen than by just breathing\nthrough the mouth
\n
– James Nestor, Breath
\n
\n
Of course, no book on breathing would be complete without talking\nabout Wim Hof and he features in later chapters. And the section about\nHof is a microcosm of the bad science in the book.
\n
\n
In 2011, researchers at Radboud University Medical Center in the\nNetherlands brought Hof into a laboratory and started poking and\nprodding him, trying to figure out how he did what he did. At one point,\nthey injected his arm with an endotoxin, a component of E. coli.\nExposure to the bacteria usually induces vomiting, headaches, fever, and\nother flu-like symptoms. Hof took the E. coli into his veins and then\nbreathed a few dozen Tummo breaths, willing his body to fight it off. He\nshowed no sign of fever, no nausea. A few minutes later, he rose from\nthe chair and got a cup of coffee.
\n
– James Nestor, Breath
\n
\n
I noticed two things about the above passage in this order:
\n\n
It’s probably not legal or safe to inject humans with E. coli
\n
The passage oscillates between talking about E. coli endotoxin and\nE. coli
I knew John Carmack from his occasionally viral .plan\nfiles, which recount the days when Id Software was on the bleeding edge\nof PC Gaming.
\n
Carmack is a legend to anyone who writes software, and the book\noffers an unflinching portrait.
\n
But Masters of Doom tells the story of two Johns:\nJohn Carmack and John Romero—the co-creators of the exuberently violent\nfirst-person shooters Doom and Quake.
\n
One relatable and endearing story from Carmack’s youth: the time he\nused some anarchist-cookbook-level, homemade thermite to break into his\nschool’s computer lab to steal some Apple II computers.
\n
\n
The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to\nhelp determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip\non his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told\nthe contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with\nlegs . . . no empathy for other human beings.” At one point the man\ntwiddled his pencil and asked Carmack, “If you hadn’t been caught, do\nyou think you would have done something like this again?”
\n
“If I hadn’t been caught,” Carmack replied honestly, “yes, I probably\nwould have done that again.”
\n
Later he ran into the psychiatrist, who told him, “You know, it’s not\nvery smart to tell someone you’re going to go do a crime again.”
\n
“I said, ‘if I hadn’t been caught,’ goddamn it!” Carmack replied. He\nwas sentenced to one year in a small juvenile detention home in town.\nMost of the kids were in for drugs. Carmack was in for an Apple II.
\n
– David Kushner, Masters of Doom
\n
\n
The book tied together a lot of threads of 1990s geekdom: arcade\ngames, BBSs and the early internet, dungeons and dragons, William Gibson\nnovels, and software.
\n
By the end of the book, I liked neither John Carmack nor John Romero.\nCarmack is an unlikable neckbeard: a despotic leader of a formerly fun\nsoftware company. And Romero seems like he has more bluster than\nability.
\n
Still, I enjoyed their story.
\n
And I’ll never forget the hubris of teenage John Romero, who signed a\nletter to Capital Ideas software:
\n
\n
John Romero, Ace Programmer, Contest Winner, Future Rich Person.
And that’s pretty much it. A quesiton I kept coming back to in my\nreading is — do online kanban systems (trello, asana, todoist, etc.)\nmiss the point of kanban?
\n
The authors emphasize the kinesthetic aspects of using sticky notes\nand a white board:
\n
\n
When we’re able to represent each of our tasks on individual sticky\nnotes our workload assumes a physical shape. It becomes tangible.
\n
– Personal Kanban, Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry (Pg 22)
\n
\n
And
\n
\n
Each time we move a sticky note, we receive kinesthetic feedback: the\ntactile action is both a data point and a reward
\n
– Personal Kanban, Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry (Pg 23)
\n
\n
But when you move a task in trello: do you get the same cheap\ndopamine? Is a trello board an information radiator? Does it provide the\nsame kind of value as a physical kanban board in a shared space? If you\nonly see how work flows through a system when you open a webpage (which\nmay not be that often) do you get the full value of the original agile\nsystem?
\n
Anyway, I drilled a 3’×5’ plastic panel to my wall and bought an\nindustrial-sized box of post-its and sharpies—I’ll report back\nlater!
\n
The other key point—limit your WIP—didn’t get much attention. The\nauthors recommend setting an arbitrary limit of three tasks in your\nDOING column, and crank that number up and down as it makes sense. Makes\nsense, I guess.
\n
This is a short book that could have been shorter. I gleaned some\nvalue here, but it wasn’t earth shattering. If you’ve used kanban\nprofessionally previously (i.e., you’re a software person) you probably\nknow most of what this book is about to tell you.
If Elements of Style were a listicle but in a good way. This\nis a very short read, and I’ll probably want to refer back to it\nfrequently.
\n
My expectations for this title were low, but good advice abounds. I\nwas wary of picking it up (partially because I’ve read toooooo many\nwriting books recently and they’re starting to get a little dull).
\n
Here’s a grab bag of stuff from it.
\n
\n
Do not try to write everything about your subject … tie yourself to\nsome specific idea about your subject, some aspect that is\nmanageable.
\n
– Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
\n
\n
How to write a strong beginning:
\n
\n
Either you give the readers information that affects them directly,\nor you give them a human being with whom they can identify.
\n
– Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
\n
\n
How to edit your beginning (reverse for your ending):
\n
\n
Cross out every single sentence until you come to one you cannot do\nwithout. That is your beginning.
\n
– Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
\n
\n
I’d never heard of pyramid style before.
\n
\n
Writing in the pyramid style means getting to the point at the top,\nputting the “who, what, when, where, and why” in the first paragraph,\nand developing the supporting information under it.
\n
– Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
\n
\n
\n
When you rewrite your early drafts, ask how each sentence in a\nparagraph supports the topic sentence of the paragraph. If the answer is\n“It doesn’t,” then ask what other work the sentence is doing in the\nparagraph. If the answer is “None,” get rid of the sentence.
\n
– Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
\n
\n
The author places an emphasis on the euphony of writing. He compares\nwords and sentences to music and rhythm.
\n
\n
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences.\nCreate a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words.\nWrite music.
\n
– Gary Provost, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
\n
\n
On knowing when to use a comma:
\n
\n
When your ear fails you and you can’t decide whether to add that\ncomma, DON’T.
The Kaiju Preservation Society is a fantasy novel that follows Jaime\nGray who dropped out of his doctoral program (having completed a\ndissertation on the novel Snowcrash) to work as an executive at a\nfood delivery startup.
\n
Sometime early in the pandemic, Jaime finds himself unemployed and\ndelivering food for the same startup and happenstances his way into a\nnew gig working for KPS—which we later learn is the Kaiju Preservation\nSociety.
\n
He travels to work in a parallel universe where he “lifts things”\nwhile others try to save and preserve Kaiju—yes, the giant Godzilla\nmonsters.
\n
This book was so much fun! I got the audiobook and it’s narrated by\nWill Wheaton for extra geek cred.
\n
I laughed out loud a lot during this read. As an attempted and lapsed\nvegan, this line got me where I live:
\n
\n
“They have vegan cheese.” “No, they don’t. They have shredded orange\nand white sadness that mocks cheese and everything it stands for.”
\n
– John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society
\n
\n\n\n
SPOILERs
\n
There’s a hamartia preventing me from giving this book the five-star\nrating it otherwise completely fucking deserves. And—to make matters\nworse—it’s in a scene that could have been cut.
\n
The main bad guy is the dude who started füdmüd—the food delivery\nstartup Jaime worked for—and the bad guy is a billionare so, obviously,\nhe gets to come pet the kaiju: fine. THEN Jaime gets him to reveal his\nbig secret fucking plan AND THEN JAIME TELLS NO ONE!?!
\n
If Jaime had told someone it seems clear that the main baddie would\nhave gone to jail and not been able to do anything worse. But he didn’t\nfor some reason. At the end people learn Jaime knew and no one seems to\ncare. The End. Boo.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gave his threshold test for\nobscenity: I’ll know it when I see it. I might reply the same if I were\npushed to explain the distinction between memorization and\nknowledge.
\n
The book Moonwalking with Einstein explores humans’\nrelationship to memory, our ideas of knowledge, and how that’s shifted\nover time. But it begins with an exploration of competitive memorization\nand the techniques used by memory champions.
\n\n
The memory palace
\n
The techniques used in memory competitions are known as the\nmethod of loci (“loci” is Latin for “places”). The term\nthat permeated the zeitgeist when this book was released was: “Memory\nPalace.”
\n
\n
The idea is to create a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you\nknow well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined\nplace with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as\nthe “method of loci” by the Romans, such a building would later come to\nbe called a “memory palace.”
The method of loci works because it ties new information to old\ninformation. The old information can help lead us to the new\ninformation.
\n
This is similar to the Baker/baker paradox:
\n
\n
The paradox goes like this: A researcher shows two people the same\nphotograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and\nthe other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the\nresearcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the\naccompanying word. The person who was told the man’s profession is much\nmore likely to remember it than the person who was given his\nsurname.
\n
– Joshua Foer, Moonwalking With Einstein
\n
\n\n\n
A long life is a memorable life
\n
There was a cute passage in the text about how to have a long life.\nThe crux is really the definition of a long life. If you live 100s of\nyears, but you have no memories, then your life wasn’t that long.\nMemories are how we measure our lives.
\n
And because we know how to create memories that stick—we remember\nnovelty—the formula for a long life is to do novel things.
\n
\n
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily\nand eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one.\nIf you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day\nis bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why\nit’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to\nexotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can\nserve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out\npsychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
\n
– Joshua Foer, Moonwalking With Einstein
\n
\n
Although, and this typifies my critiques of this book, the false\ndichotomy of exercising and eating right vs. vacations to exotic locales\nis silly.
\n\n\n
Memory, learning, and writing
\n
I was beguiled by the chapter on “The End of Remembering.” I learned\nso much from this chapter, but I found the author’s arguments were\ndistracting and sloppy.
\n
I’ll try to lay out one argument that bothered me.
\n
Classic Greek and Latin wrote in scripta\ncontinua—writing without punctuation—which meant that reading\nrequired some familiarity with the text to read smoothly.
\n
What’s more, silent reading is a very recent phenomenon; the book\ncites the “Confessions” of St. Augustine, in which St. Augustine notes\nthe silent reading of St. Ambrose:
\n
\n
Now, as he read, his eyes glanced over the pages and his heart\nsearched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.
\n
– St. Augustine, Confessions
\n
\n
Therefore, Foer argues, readers of scripta continua had to memorize\nthe text to be fluent.
\n
I find this claim specious.
\n
A Socrates quote about writing at the beginning of the same chapter\npushes back on the author’s claim: “What you have discovered is a recipe\nnot for memory, but for reminding. And it is not true wisdom that you\noffer your desciples … And as men filled not with wisdom but with the\nconceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.”
\n
If writing was contemporaneously understood to be tantamount to\nmemorization, then what you discovered is not much of a “recipe for\nreminding,” right?
\n
I both loved and hated this chapter.
\n\n\n
Random
\n
About 60% of the way through the book, one of the characters that the\nbook mocks ruthlessly, Tony Buzon, is revealed to be the creator of the\nfucking mind map.
\n
Mind maps were so ubiquitous by the time I went through school that I\nassumed they had a much more storied history.
\n
Anyway, Tony Buzon—an advocate of memorization and popularizer of the\nmind map.
\n\n\n
The curve of forgetting
\n
Only briefly touched on in the book: Hermann\nEbbinghaus and the curve of forgetting.
\n
Hermann Ebbinghaus memorized random three-letter “words” (e.g.,\n“EOK”) and then measured how long it took him to forget them. This\nresearch laid the foundation for computer-aided learning systems like\nAnki. Anki is not mentioned in this book (probably because it’s not\nuseful for memory competitions).
\n\n\n
Other
\n
The author works with K. Anders Ericsson to train for the USA memory\nchampionships. Ericsson is (in)famous for the misquoted 10,000 hour rule\nvia Malcolm Gladwell and is, at this point, required to be in every\npop-psych book.
\n
Spoiler: Josh Foer is 2006 memory champion,\nZOMG!
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a short memoir\nby the famed novelist Haruki Murakami focused on his training for the\nNew York Marathon in 2005. The book takes its title from a collection of\nshort stories by Raymond Carver: “What We Talk About When We Talk About\nLove.”
\n
Murakami recounts his start in running and writing the early 1980s as\nwell as his experiences in triathlons—the first time he ran 26.2 miles\nit was from Athens to Marathon the opposite of the\noriginal marathon1.
\n
A cultural idea of writing as being unhealthy pervades this book and\nis totally foreign to me:
\n
\n
So from the start, artistic activity contains elements that are\nunhealthy and antisocial.
\n
Haruki Mauarakami
\n
\n
Murakami talks about how he struggled to control his breathing during\nthe swimming portion of triathlons and he later realized he was\nhyperventaliting—I’m pretty sure that happens to me while running.
\n
It’s a short read, but pretty meh. There’s some male gaze bits\nHarvard freshmen co-ed’s “proud ponytails” that weirded me out.
\n\n\n
Details
\n
\n
\n
Title: What I Talk About When I Talk About\nRunning
Annie Dillard in The Writing Life tells the story of a\nuniversity student who asked if they could become a writer — a\nwell-known writer responded, “do you like sentences?”
\n\n
Three sentence summary
\n
How to Write a Sentence is a book about sentence appreciation.\nThe first part of the book contains great sentences, pulls their\ncomponents apart, and examines what makes them exceptional – it seems\nlike a book filled with deliberate practice exercises for the budding\nwriter.
\n
From there, the book wears on a scattershot – hit and miss – by the\nend we’re talking about famous “Last Sentences” in books and movies\n(including, bizarrely, the film “Some Like It Hot”) – it turns out last\nsentences have nothing in common and are not very interesting as a topic\n– this book felt like a very short interesting book made into a longer\n(but still short) uninteresting book.
\n\n\n
Details
\n
Despite the title, the book is about sentence appreciation and not\nsentence writing.
\n
I powered through the book, propelled by the early chapter’s\nlinguistic fun:
Exploring form independent from content in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”
\n
Noam Chomsky’s, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” vs\n“furiously sleep ideas green colorless” as an example of grammatical vs\nsemantic correctness
\n
\n
I also found some enjoyment in the chapter on first sentences – a LitHub\narticle I recently read about the same topic covers all the same\ncontent.
\n
Location 362 of the Kindle edition contains the errata:
\n
\n
“you have write about something” is the usual commonplace
Hatchet tells the story of Brian Robeson a thirteen-year old boy\ngoing to visit his father for the summer in the oil-fields of of the\nNorthern-Canadian wilderness. When the pilot of his tiny plane suffers a\nheart-attack enroute, Brian crash lands and spends the ensuing 54-days\nlearning lessons about survival and personal resilience. This book was a\nNewbery medal winner from around the time I was in elementary\nschool.
\n\n\n
Details
\n
The book reminds me of Starship Troopers insofar as it preaches pull\nyourself up by your bootstraps kind of self-reliance that I’m conflicted\nabout.
If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big\nthings right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come\nhome to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you\nencouragement that tomorrow will be better.
\n
– William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed
\n
\n\n
Summary
\n
Make Your Bed is a short book based on a commencement speech given by\nthe author at the University of Texas at Austin that convey the life\nlessons of Navy SEAL training. The title takes its name from the first\nchapter, “Start your day with a task completed” — on the lessons of\nmaking your bed (which is also the reason I read the book in the first\nplace — I’m a big believer in making the bed every morning
\n
Making the bed is a foundational task for a productive day, and no\nmatter how bad your day goes: at least your bed is made—you’ve\naccomplished something of value, even if nothing else goes right.
\n\n\n
Other thoughts
\n
All the other lessons are de rigueur motivational posters in a high\nschool guidance counselor’s office:
\n
\n
“You can’t go it alone”: Work with others to achieve your goals
\n
“The only size that matters is the size of your heart”: You can make\nup for lack of physical strength with gumption
\n
“Life’s not fair—Drive On!”
\n
“Failure can make you stronger”: AKA Don’t be scared of the circus.\nAKA hard work makes you stronger
\n
The Brene Brown esque: “You must dare greatly”
\n
“Stand up to bullies”
\n
“Rise to the occasion”
\n
Give people hope
\n
Never quit
\n
\n
On the other hand: Clichés become cliché because they’re universal\ntruths – this book did not run short on cliches, but that probably\nindicates there’s a large amount of universal truth here.
\n\n\n
Life is unfair
\n
One memorable piece of this book was the chapter on life being unfair\nand the story of the sugar cookie. The author was told to run down to\nthe ocean, jump in, then roll in the sand until he was completely\ncovered — every inch and every crevice — with sand — a sugar cookie!\nThe person who ordered him to do this asked him if he knew why he’d done\nit, he didn’t. Sometimes life is unfair. What a vivid scene.
\n\n\n
Failure makes you stronger
\n
The story behind “failure can make you stronger” is similarly\nentertaining. “The Circus” is like detention for Navy SEALs (I guess) —\nmore running, more swimming, more physically exhausting activity. Once\nyou end up in the circus it’s hard to get out since it’s a punishment\nfor poor performance and the extra exhaustion makes you perform worse.\nUntil, one day, it doesn’t.
\n
\n
In life you will face a lot of Circuses. You will pay for your\nfailures. But, if you persevere, if you let those failures teach you and\nstrengthen you, then you will be prepared to handle life’s toughest\nmoments.
\n
– William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed
\n
\n
The stories in this book are metaphors for life, but also very\nliteral lessons. It was a short read, not the most amazing book I’ll\nread this year, but I thought it was worthwhile.
\n
\n
I realized that the past failures had strengthened me, taught me that\nno one is immune from mistakes. True leaders must learn from their\nfailures, use the lessons to motivate themselves, and not be afraid to\ntry again or make the next tough decision. – Failure can make you\nstronger
\n
– William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed
\n
\n\n\n
Summary in a quote
\n
\n
Remember… start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help\nyou through life. Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that\nyou will fail often. But if you take some risks, step up when times are\ntoughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden, and never,\never give up—if you do these things, then you can change your life for\nthe better… and maybe the world!
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is a biography that spans the\nformative years of Teddy Roosevelt’s life beginning with his sickly\nchildhood; his years at Harvard; the tragedy of his first marriage; his\nelection to the New York state house; his time as a cattle rancher in\nthe Badlands of South Dakota (including his neigh mythical capture of\ncattle thieves); his appointment to the Civil Service Commission under\nHarrison and Cleveland; his time as New York City police commissioner;\nhis service as assistant secretary of the Navy during which time he\ndeployed the Maine to Havana where Spain (maybe) sunk it, at which point\nhe assembled the fabled Rough Riders, and led them on to capture San\nJuan hill — a performance which vouchsafed a brief term as New York’s\ngovernor; and goes on to recount his reformer politics as governor that\nmade it expedient for machine politicians to push him out of New York\nstate and into the vice-presidency.
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The hefty 900-page tome ends, ominously, with Roosevelt taking a\nmuch-needed vacation after being assured McKinley would definitely,\ntotally recover from his gunshot wound — nothing to worry about 😬. It’s\na historical biography that reads like a novel, and I was equally\nmesmerized and troubled by the main character’s confounding attributes —\na journeyman of unequaled intellectual capacity, yet flawed and limited\nby his tendency towards jingoism and careless violence and whose\nprivileged upbringing limited his views on class and race.
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Other thoughts
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I’m left with several lasting impression of Roosevelt.
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He had a strange moral code that almost no one could live up to. He\ndidn’t swear and he didn’t drink. He once remarked his cousin had shamed\nthe family by marrying an actress. His reformer politics, viewed in\nthis light, seem like an extension of his personal beliefs.
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Descriptions of his physicality are mind boggling. On more than one\noccasion Morris describes how he snaps words with an audible click of\nhis teeth: I have not as yet been able to form a serviceable mental\npicture of this.
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Roosevelt simultaneously had the easy manners of a privileged 5th\navenue Knickerbocker, and befriended cowpunchers and rough riders. A\nperson, it seems, strangely at home with any class of people.
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Coupled with his insatiable reading habit (claiming to read a book a\nday for most of his life) this all paints a vivid portrait of a singular\nhuman. A bizarre human. But a singular human.
So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport is a book about\nhow to build a fulfilling career and it takes its title from a 2007\nCharlie Rose interview with the comedian Steve Martin in which he offers\nthe glib-sounding but completely earnest advice to young comedians – to\nsucceed you need to be “so good they can’t ignore you.”
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The most novel insight the book offers is the observation that\nfollowing your passion isn’t what passionate people seem to do, rather\ntheir passion builds as they build mastery in a particular field.
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The book asserts that building rare and valuable skills through\ndeliberate practice generates a craftsman mindset which is key to a\nfulfilling, mission-driven, passionate career.
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The nice notebook and deliberate practice
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Anders Ericsson’s concept of deliberate practice is touted as the\nmeans to building rare and valuable skills. This is no surprise to\nanyone who’s read any professional development book written after Malcom\nGladwell’s high-fructose corn syrup version of Ericsson’s research: the\n10,000 hour rule from his book Outliers.
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Deliberate practice is a type of practice focused on perfecting\ntechniques beyond your current abilities with the goal of improving your\nperformance. Newport mentions that fields without strict competitive\nstructures are often lacking for proven deliberate practice regimens.\nThis includes fields like computer science, which is his primary\nfocus-area.
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As a strategy to gain deliberate practice he bought the nicest lab\nnotebook he could find in the MIT bookstore.
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The $45 notebook had a concentrating effect on his thinking. His\ndesire to preserve the integrity of his weighty notebook forced him\nexert the effort required to refine his thinking.
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The focusing effect of nice tools was a means towards gaining\ndeliberate practice in his field.
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This connects with an idea from The book Getting Things Done by David\nAllen:
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One of the great secrets to getting ideas and increasing your\nproductivity is utilizing the function-follows-form phenomenon — Great\ntools can trigger good thinking.
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– David Allen Getting Things Done
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The adjacent possible
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Late in the book, Newport talks about a 2010 book called Where\nGood Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. That book explores the\nphenomenon of independent discovery: where two people independently make\nthe same breakthrough discovery at the same time.
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Consider the discovery of sunspots in 1611: As Johnson notes, four\nscientists, from four different countries, all identified the phenomenon\nduring the same year.
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Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You
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This is explained by the concept of the adjacent\npossible. Hard problems in any particular field are well known\nby experts in that field. Moving past these problems is in the moment\nimpossible as there are key ideas missing.
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The adjacent possible is the space beyond the cutting-edge of what’s\npossible, cobbled together from the combination of ideas people stumble\nacross in related disciplines. As humanity progresses, new ideas can be\ncombined with old to breakthrough current problems.
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This reminds me of a quote I heard recently attributed to Einstein:\n“No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original\nconception.”
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World-changing breakthroughs rarely result from pushing forward on\nthe same tacks, rather they arise from approaching problems from new\nangles. The new angles of approach, however, may not yet exist. Only\nwhen the adjacent possible space for new ideas is open are you able to\nmake progress on ideas that have previously eluded you.
I’ve opted out of my standard three-sentence book summary as I’ve\nread many novels with a fraction of the plot of a single chapter of this\nbook.
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The book opens on Rosemary Harper, escaping her past to work as a\nclerk aboard the Wayfarer, a spacer tunneling vessel. Faster than light\ntravel is illegal (seemingly because it’s hard to think about), so to\nmove through the vastness of space, you need wormholes. A tunneling\nvessel is a ship that punches wormholes through space’s sublayer.
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Spacers/Exodans are the portion of humanity that set course for the\ngreat unknown after we’d destroyed the planet (and after the rich people\nbailed to colonize Mars).
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Rosemary arrives on a ship peopled with myriad species:
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Humans: Ashby Santoso, captain, all-around cool guy; Artis Corbin,\nirascible algaest – the ship runs on algae; Kizzy and Jenks, best\nfriends and lovable mech techs (the Pippin and Mary to Ashby’s Frodo).\nJenks is in love with the ship’s AI, Lovelace, who everyone calls\nLovey.
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The ship’s pilot’s Sissex – an andrisk woman (a feathered dinosaur\nspecies that seems to think humanity is a bunch of squares, an opinion\npossibly shared by every other species).
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The ship’s doctor/chef, who has a name no one is physically able to\npronounce since his species, the grum, have five sets of vocal cords.\nEveryone calls him Dr. Chef (this is endearing).
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Finally, the ship’s navigator is a sianat pair – a species with a\n(possibly) symbiotic relationship with a virus that gives the host the\nability to navigate in space’s “sublayer” enabling tunneling in the\nfirst place. No other species is able to navigate in space’s sublayer –\nonly the sianat can do the math. The virus won’t pair with any other\nspecies, so the sianat see it as their sacred mission to show other\nspecies how to traverse the sublayer.
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And that’s, like, chapter one.
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Also noteworthy: I want to live inside this book forever.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a story of a father and son walking on\na road amid a post-apocalyptic landscape of blackened skies raining ash\non the charred husks of the former vegetation.
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Their walk is a pilgrimage to the coast, but you’re not sure what\nthey’re hoping to find — any insight you have into the character’s\nmotivations is found in quote-mark-less conversations between the father\nand son, simple concrete conversations like the kind you’d have with an\neight-year-old.
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The central questions are about morality and epistemology: how do you\nknow if people are good and is eschewing cannibalism enough to call\nyourself moral in a time when hazmat-suit-clad hordes complete with\nretinue of concubines and catamites are a common sight.
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Random thoughts
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A lot of the book begs the question of how to carry on (and indeed\nwhy carry on) when the future is bleak and uncertain. A few\nanswers are offered. A man’s love of his son may be the most\nstraight-forward interpretation; however, I’ll admit that that answer\nhadn’t occurred to me during my reading, only while reading reviews\nafter.
\n
I viewed the narrative as a story about our obligations to each\nother. We’re obligated to “carry the fire” (the main character’s phrase\nthat I took to mean “carrying on humanity”).
\n
One passage I liked has to do with the creation of ritual as a means\nof creating meaning:
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All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms.\nWhere you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and\nbreathe upon them.
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– Cormac McCarthy, The Road
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The language in The Road is stunning. Plain yet powerful.\nMcCarthy wields the word “and” with such imagination and expertise it\nforced me to learn the term “Polysyndeton”. I\nspent a few minutes reveling in the joy of reading this sentence:
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The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.
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– Cormac McCarthy, The Road
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While the vocabulary is plain, the sentences McCarthy assembles from\nits pieces are singular, I just loved the language in this book:
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He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief\nmoment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of\nthe intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in\ntheir running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere\ntwo hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed\ntime and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
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– Cormac McCarthy, The Road
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Although, the lack of any punctuation at all can make reading some\npassages feel like reading text messages: a needless lack of\npunctuation.
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Also, there may have been some pretty heavy Christ metaphor stuff\nright at the end (and probably throughout):
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She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God\nbut the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and\nhe didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the\nbreath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through\nall of time
A personal development book from the turn of the century — a time,\nlike today, where despite meeting our societal obligations, it’s common\nto feel a want of the challenge of personal development (as the author\nsays: a desire to “exceed one’s programme”).
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The author argues workers (those without a private income) fritter\nthe time spent outside of work — treating the “day” as the hours between\n10am–6pm instead of the full 24 hours.
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The scheme the author advocates is to take 1½ hours of your evening\nthree nights a week for deep study of art, music, or serious reading\n(not novels, he emphasizes, but nonfiction or poetry); and, instead of\nreading the newspaper on the train, use your morning transit time to\nmeditate on Marcus Aurelius.
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Random thoughts
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I first heard about this book from Cal Newport’s Deep Work,\nwhich quotes an observation from refuting the idea that working on\npersonal development may leave you too mentally exhausted to fulfill\nyour obligations:
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One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the\nmental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not\ntire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change—not rest, except in\nsleep.
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– Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
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This all seems to fit with Theodore Roosevelt’s dichotomy of the life\nof “ignoble ease” versus “the doctrine of the strenuous life.”
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Privilege makes the idea of a strenuous life novel.
\n
Indeed, the notion of “spare time” feels like a modern invention —\nsprung out of the age of enlightenment — it’s something most modern\nknowledge workers take for granted. But the idea of “free time” was\nsingular as recently as 1948 when brilliant people representing the\nhuman rights interests of the United Nations saw fit to enshrine it in\nthe Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to\nrest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and\nperiodic holidays with pay.”
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I have a luxury kept from my forebearers: an expectation of a base\nlevel of life satisfaction.
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Satisfaction turns to ennui without new strenuous intellectual\nendeavour, which is what the author — and, later, Cal Newport — argue is\nessential, now as it was then, to human happiness.
Klara is an artificial friend (AF), which is a solar-powered,\nblade-runner-level tween android and general-AI sold (at what I picture\nas the Apple Store) to rich, non-android tweens to help build their\nsocial skills.
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Rich kids, like Josie, Klara’s “owner” (the dynamics of tween/AF\nrelations are purposefully cringy at times), undergo gene splicing\n(called lifting) when they’re very young because of the\ngattaca-esque nature of college admissions in this timeline; however,\ngene splicing is very risky and can cause serious illness or death.
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Possible spoiler alerts from here forward
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In the novel they say that Klara is “special” and “observant”; Mr\nCapaldi, the creepy artist rants at length about how we have so much to\nlearn from AFs and says Klara is remarkable; so what seems like a\nnaïve/make-believe bargain between Klara and the Sun for Josie’s life\nmay be more than it appears to dumb thinking\nmeat like us.
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Random thoughts
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Early in the book we meet Rosa, the same generation AF as Klara who\nis displayed in the AF store along-side her. Early in the novel we see\nKlara looking out for Rosa:
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When I was lucky enough to see [the Sun] like that, I’d lean my face\nforward to take in as much of his nourishment as I could, and if Rosa\nwas with me, I’d tell her to do the same.
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And then briefly, as an aside, in a particularly distressing\nscene
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I […] saw the lonely woman sitting by herself at Mr Vance’s diner,\nunnoticed even by the diner manager, pressing her forehead against the\nwindow towards the dark street outside, and it occurred to me how very\nmuch the woman resembled Rosa.
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The end of the novel questions human’s obligations to general AI.\nWe’re awful in all timelines.
A book of pragmatic advice about how to make people like you. Much of\nthe advice can be summarized: cultivate a genuine interest and affection\nfor other people, and remember people are more interested in themselves\nthan in you.
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To win other people to your way of thinking remember the old saw, “a\ndrop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall”; it’s not enough\nto be right, you have to be kind, too.
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Random thoughts
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There are some inadvertent arguments against the existence of free\nwill in some degree:
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Take Al Capone, for example. Suppose you had inherited the same body\nand temperament and mind that Al Capone had. Suppose you had had his\nenvironment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was—and\nwhere he was.
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– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People
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And
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When Mrs. Lincoln and other spoke harshly of the southern people,\nLincoln replied: “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be\nunder similar circumstances.”
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– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People
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There’s some overlap here with the ideas in the book The Scout\nMindset, particularly the section where he talks about winning\nothers to your way of thinking:
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Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants\nmore firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.
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– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People
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And
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A man convinced against his will Is of the same opinion still.
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– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People
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Both books cite The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin\nreferencing the part in the 2nd section where he mentions that he no\nlonger tells people they’re wrong directly.
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Details
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Title: How to win friends & influence\npeople : the only book you need to lead you to success
My memory is finite. And I spend a lot of my finite memory cramming\nin gobs of books. One of the myriad purposes of tending a digital garden\nlike this site is to use it to augment the limit memory capacity of my\ntiny brain. So that’s what I’m doing with these reviews.
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Rating Rubric
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These reviews are for me. All books are rated on a 5-star scale that\nrepresents my enjoyment rather than any objective value of the writing\nor the ideas in the book. The value of the writing and ideas may factor\ninto my enjoyment, but my rating isn’t meant to represent that.
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⭑–⭑⭑½
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This book was a waste of my time in\ninverse proportion to the star rating
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⭑⭑⭑
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I don’t know/I feel mixed
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⭑⭑⭑½
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I enjoyed it, but there were\nproblems
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⭑⭑⭑⭑
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I enjoyed it, but maybe not for\neveryone
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⭑⭑⭑⭑½–⭑
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⭑⭑⭑⭑ I enjoyed it so much that I would\nrecommend it to others in proportion to the star rating
The Road by Cormac McCarthy – Lean,\nbeautiful language tells a story of a father and son “carrying the fire”\nin a post-apocalyptic pilgrimage to the sea featuring retinues of\ncannibals and catamites.
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Run Like\na Pro (Even if You’re Slow) by Matt Fitzgerald – A practical book\nabout how to get into distance running. I went from zero to running a\nmarathon this year and 90% of what I learned, I learned from this\nbook.
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The\nTwisted Ones by T. Kingfisher – A great Halloween read—A young woman\nnamed Mouse is tasked by her father with cleaning out her hoarder\ngrandmother’s house. While there, she stumbles upon ancient magic in the\npages of her step-grandfather’s journal. T. Kingfisher is the nom de\nplume of Hugo-award-winning author Ursula Vernon who I first encountered\nreading the wonderful Digger\nwebcomic.
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The Sense of Style by\nStephen Pinker – A text that teaches you how to write classic-style\nprose featuring a level of English grammar nuance that only a linguist\ncould love (I also loved it).
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I enjoyed exploring biography this year—I read biographies of both\nJohn Adams Theodore Roosevelt.
Paul Theroux’s memoir of his travels across Europe and Asia by rail\nwherein he recounts detailed conversations with people he\nencounters.
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The journey by rail takes him on the (sadly now defunct, I\nchecked) Orient Express to Vienna, then to Istanbul, Tehran, through\nAfganistan, to Peshawar, then a zig-zagging path through India1, a plane ride to Yangon (née\nRangoon) in Myanmar (née Burma), Mandalay, then on to Thailand,\nSingapore, another plane ride to Vietnam, then another plane to Japan,\nand finally the trip home on the famous Trans-Siberian.
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There are enjoyable moments of glib humor, a lot of sex workers and\nother unfortunate travelers where the glib humor is less enjoyable, and\na frank look at America’s influence of Vietnam as of 1975.
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Details
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Title: The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train\nThrough Asia
Lahore → Delhi, Delhi → Shimla,\nShimla → Mumbai (née Bombay) by way of Jaipur (this is confusing—there’s\na chapter about Jaipur after mentioning Mumbai, but it seems silly to go\nDelhi→Mumbai→Jaipur→Chennai—this is a guess/it’s unclear), Mumbai →\nChennai (née Madras), Chennai → Colombo, Sri Lanka (née Ceylon) → Galle,\nSri Lanka, Galle → Chennai, Chennai→Kolkata (née Calcutta)↩︎
The Oresteia (sometimes called The House of Atreus) is\nkinda/sorta the story of Orestes who kills Clytemnestra, his mother, in\nretribution for her murder of his father, Agamemnon. This story unfolds\nin three short plays by Aeschylus and it offers a new twist on a story\nthat we’ve heard previously in the Odyssey – Agamemnon’s murder at the\nhands of Clytemnestra upon his return from the Trojan war.
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The only previous motivation I knew about for Agamemnon’s murder was\nthat Clytemnestra was having an affair with Aegisthus – Agamemnon’s\ncousin. This story reveals a much more nuanced rationale for\nClytemnestra’s actions.
\n
For one thing, Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, to\nArtemis during the Trojan war. Maybe this is told in more detail in the\nIliad (but I haven’t read that).
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Additionally, it seems like Aegisthus’ family was pretty abused by\nAtreus. Atreus, in point of fact, tricked Thyestes (Aegisthus’ father)\ninto eating his own children – motivations here are not explained,\nreally – and then Agamemnon exiled Aegisthus and Thyestes.
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When people talk about Agamemnon’s murder in the Odyssey everyone\nseems to hate Clytemnestra for it – in fact, it’s interesting, the names\nCassandra, Electra, and Penelope are still somewhat common in modern\ntimes but I’ve never met anyone named Clytemnestra. History judged\nClytemnestra harshly but I’ll say it: damn, did Agamemnon ever have it\ncoming!
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For some reason the “Harvard\nClassics” collection calls the last play in the trio that make up\nthe Oresteia The Furies rather than The Eumenidies\n(i.e., The Kindly Ones – which is also my favorite book in\nThe\nSandman). Just as with The\nOdyssey I read a more modern translation; several in fact.
And so he steeled his heart–ah, well-a-day– Aiding a war for one\nfalse woman’s sake, His child to slay, And with her spilt blood make An\noffering, to speed the ships upon their way!
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And I thought: hold up – did Agamemnon just murder his daughter so he\ncould get sailing?
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I found the book An Oresteia which is a collection of plays\ntranslated by Anne Carson. This collection tells the same story as\nAeschylus’ Oresteia but using the plays Agamemnon by Aeschylus,\nElectra by Sophocles, and Orestes by Euripides. I\nreally enjoyed Anne Carson’s translation. It was elegant and modern and\nlyric and I wish I could have read all of the plays translated by\nCarson. A couple of random quotes I enjoyed:
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CHORUS: Brave Girl
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KASSANDRA: People never say that to a lucky person do they?
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And
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KLYTAIMESTRA: This man who, without a second thought, as if it were a\ngoat dying, sacrificed his own child, my most beloved, my birthpang, my\nown
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And
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KLYTAIMESTRA: You call this deed mine? And I his wife? You’re wrong!\nSome ancient bitter spirit of revenge disguised as Agamemnon’s wife\narose from Atreus’ brutal feast to sacrifice this man for those little\nchildren.
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I also think that my interpretation of the plays may have been\nheavily influenced by the translation of Agamemnon. Mainly insofar as I\nend up with quite a bit of pathos with Clytemnestra and Cassandra (the\noracle from Troy that Agamemnon captured and brought back to\nGreece).
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I was determined to read the 3 Aeschylus plays, so I ended up\nskipping over to the translation of The Libation Bearers and\nThe Eumenidies by Robert Fagles.
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Nothing really happens in The Libation Bearers. It’s a few\nyears later. Electra (Agamemnon’s non-sacrificial daughter) visits\nAgamemnon’s grave and Orestes returns and they talk about how sad they\nare that Agamemnon was killed. One weird piece of dialog was when\nElecrta says, “Mother’s pawned us for a husband” and I thought – does\nanyone remember Iphigenia?
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tl;dr: Orestes murders Clytemnestra and the Furies are fucking\nfurious about it.
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In contrast to the Libation Bearers which is just soooo\nboring, The Eumenidies is super interesting and it’s basically\nApollo, Athena, and the Furies in a Law & Order type court room\ndrama talking about who it’s OK to murder.
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The Furies think it’s OK to murder people you aren’t related to;\ni.e., not, say, your mom or your daughter\ncoughOrestescoughAgamemnoncough.\nMeanwhile, Apollo thinks it’s OK to murder people the god’s ask you to\nmurder. I’m a don’t murder anyone ever-type myself, but I think\nthat if we’re saying murdering is OK then the Furies at least have an\nethos. Apollo’s argument seems a little capricious for a system of law.\nA jury of Orestes’ peers isn’t sure, Athena is on Apollo’s side so\nOrestes walks. The Furies are placated by Athena who says that they’ll\ndole out justice to Athens in the future. The fact that the Athenian\nidea of justice is confusing as fuck is mentioned by no one.
I read this book as part of my 2021 goal to finish the\n“History of Civilization”\ncourse from the Harvard 5-foot-shelf reading guide. I’ve meant to read\nthis book for a few years, and started it once before. I’ve finally\nfinished it.
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One problem in reading ancient Greek text is I can’t read Greek – I\nhave to find a translation. The translation in the H5fs is done by S.H. Butcher & A. Lang and\nit’s fine. Translation is meant to keep not only the meaning of the\ntext, but the feeling of reading the text in the original language.\nCapturing the feeling of a text perfectly for a particular time period\nmay obscure the meaning in a translation in another time period. I don’t\nknow if Alexander\nPope’s translation captures the feeling of reading the original\ngreek, but it’s about as decipherable as the original greek to me.\nBlazey recommended the Robert Fitzgerald\ntranslation and this seemed like a more understandable translation\nthan the S.H. Butcher/A.Lang translation, so that’s what I read.
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One particular problem with all translation is that in Greek epic\npoetry (evidently) there are just a million names for everything. The\nGreeks themselves are alternately called the Argives (20 times), Argos\n(24 times – 3 times it refers to a Dog named “Argos”), Danaans (10\ntimes), and Akhaians (97 times). Also, translations differ on things\nlike spellings of names: Telemachus vs Telémakhos. Additionally, Romans\nhad different names for all the different names: Minerva vs Athena.\nRoman translations also use Ulysses rather than Odysseus. Shit’s\nconfusing.
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There are some names like “Pallas” for Athena that I just don’t know\nwhere they came from. I’m only a little ashamed to say that the “Pallid\nbust of Pallas” mentioned in Poe never clicked until I was\nabout 1/3rd of the way through this book.
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There are so many other events that happen outside of this\nstory that this story only touches on. The entirety of the incident of\nHelen in Troy, the Trojan war, Agammemnon – all of this is mentioned,\nbut none of it is really explored in the Odyssey. There’s a whole\nunderworld sequence where Odysseus rattles off names like the liner\nnotes to an album called, “NOW That’s What I call Mythical Greek\nMortals: Volume I”: Kastor and Pollux, Oidipus, Hercules, Orion,\nPhaedra, etc, etc, etc. I guess that’s why it’s a good introduction to\nmythical Greece – there’s a little bit of everything. To understand\nevery throw-away reference in the play would take forever.
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Reading a great poem is a lifetime job – Charles Van Doren
\n
\n
A recurring thought I had during my reading of the Odyssey is: man,\ndoes the Duck Tales version really nail this. There was a 1987 episode\nof DuckTales entitled Home Sweet\nHomer that, while it doesn’t follow the detail, really does provide\nsome memorable visuals. In DuckTales Telémakhos is King Homer and\nOdysseus is Ulysses. Essentially, King Homer nee Telémakhos does all the\nstuff that Odysseus describes to the Scherians (AKA Phaiakians, AKA\nPhaeacians, sooo many names) in The Odyssey.
\n
Cerce is perhaps a bit more evil in the DuckTales version, but does\nturn the crew into swine just like in the story. Aeolus is reimagined as\nKing Blowhard (which is waaay easier to remember) who is allergic to\npersimmons (called “Umma Gumma” fruit, but just look at them, they’re\npersimmons – I assumed this was a referrence to something from\nthe Odyssey, but it’s evidently just a weird detail of the DuckTales\nversion). There are sirens. Scylla is Yuckalinda (which\nis also a way better name). Ithica is Ithaquack.
\n
Anyway, I’m not saying the DuckTales version was better\nexactly, but they did a lot right.
\n
Weirdly, the DuckTales version didn’t have a cyclops. It’s especially\nweird because the cyclops scene had the world’s first “Who’s on\nFirst”-type routine in recorded history where Odysseus tells Polyphemos\nthe cyclops that his name is “Nohbdy”, stabs his eye out, and when\nPolyphemos asks his other cyclops friends for help he says, “Nohbdy’s\ntricked me, Nohbdy’s ruined me!” to which comes the sage reply: “Ah\nwell, if nobody’s played you foul there in your lonely bed, we are no\nuse in pain given by great Zeus.” Hilarious.
\n
Another detail mercifully absent in the DuckTales version: the\nancient Greeks seem to kind of hate women. I think we’re supposed to\nhate all women other than Penelope, Nausicaa (princess of the\nPhaeacians), and Athena (who notably did not have a mother and sprang\nforth from Zeus’s forehead). Circe (witch), Calypso (evil nymph),\nCletemnestra (murdered her husband to marry his cousin – the plays of\nAeschylus make this a little more complicated), Scylla (who is literally\na 3-headed serpent), the sirens (who lure men to their doom). That one\nrandom maid – Melantho – that Odysseus calls a slut and threatens to,\n“cut [her] arms and legs off”. Penelope, also, paitiently waited for\nOdysseus’s return for 20 fucking years when everyone said he was dead –\nand that’s the ONLY woman we’re supposed to like – that’s what it takes.\nOverall, the treatment of women in the Odyssey is completely fucked and\nmakes for a dubious foundation for “the history of civilization”.
\n
During the 20 years that Odysseus has been away – first fighting the\nwar in Troy and then held by the nymph Calypso – Penelope has been\nwarding off a bunch of suitors that are gradually consuming her estate.\nMost of the story builds to a violent ending that you as a reader are\nexpecting from the start. While you see the eventual deaths of the\nsuitors at the hands of Odysseus coming what you may not see coming is\nthe Quentin Tarantino level of violence at the end of the story. The\nclimactic scene starts with Odysseus disguised as a vagabond in his own\nhouse when Penelope announces that she will marry the suitor that can\nshoot an arrow through the hole in 12 axe heads.
\n
Let me pause here to say: I had a hard time visualizing what shooting\nan arrow through the hole in 12 axe heads looked like so I did an image\nsearch. From this image search it’s safe to say: no one has any idea\nwhat this looks like. My best guess is that we’re talking about the haft\nhole of the axe, but, honestly, who the fuck knows.
\n
Anyway, after winning the context, Odysseus and Telémakhos kill all\nthe suitors, hang some portion of the maids, and violently remove pieces\nof the goatherd. There was enough murder that they end up lighting a\nfire for it’s “cleansing fumes” to get rid of all the murder stink, I\nguess. Of course then they’re briefly on the run for murder and seem\nlikely to murder a whole lot more people, but then Athena makes them\nstop and they do for some reason and I guess no one cared about all the\nmurder too much, the end.
\n
The Odyssey is a story in three parts: the Telemachy: Telémakhos does\nsome things, the Apologoi: Odysseus’s adventures post-Troy (Cyclops,\nking Blowhard, crew killed for murdering the sun’s cows, etc.), and the\nMnesterophonia: all the murder. Of these parts the Telemachy may as well\nhave not happened. Telémakhos could just as well not exist for most of\nthe story overall he’s pretty useless.
\n
The last thing I’ll say about this story is that there is a really\nsad part about a dog that Odysseus trained as a tiny puppy who\nrecognizes him after 20 years away and then immediately dies. This is a\nstrange throw-away detail, but it also, somehow, feels like the most\nmodern part of the story. The relationships between men and women is\ndifferent, we’ve got different religions, we blame circumstances rather\nthan gods when things don’t go our way. There are fewer man eating\ngiants now (aside: there 2 – TWO! – islands with man-eating giants). But\ndogs still love\ntheir people and I like that.
Herodotus is known as the father of history, but could just as easily\nbe called the father of the travel channel. Herodotus’s account of Egypt\nreads like a proto-tourist-guide created without the benefit of an\neditor or fact-checker.
\n
Herodotus’s account opens with a description (that is pretty much the\nplot to a Paul Auster novel) of the efforts of the Egyptian king\nPsammetichos to determine the first civilization by depriving newborns\nof all human interaction and observing what language they naturally\nspeak. Having taken psychology 101 at a small university in\nSouth-central Kansas I feel more than qualified to say that this would\nnot, in fact, lead to the discovery that the Phrygians were the first\npeople (nor a pre-Tower of Babel original language as in Auster), but\nis, in fact, child abuse.
\n
Herodotus is a complete tourist who’s thrilled to report back to you\nwhat he’s seen. And boy howdy what a whirlwind it’s been. He’s\nhere to tell you that Egyptians are:
\n
\n
opposite to other men in almost all matters: for among them the women\nfrequent the market and carry on trade, while the men remain at home and\nweave; and whereas others weave pushing the woof upwards, the Egyptians\npush it downwards: the men carry their burdens upon their heads and the\nwomen upon their shoulders: the women make water standing up and the men\ncrouching down
\n
\n
In addition to that bit of secondhand TMI there are other interesting\nrevelations about flying snakes:
\n
\n
its form is like that of the watersnake; and it has wings not\nfeathered but most nearly resembling the wings of the bat.
\n
\n
Birds that may or may not exist:
\n
\n
There is also another sacred bird called the phoenix which I did not\nmyself see except in painting, for in truth he comes to them very\nrarely, at intervals, as the people of Heliopolis say, of five hundred\nyears;
\n
\n
And an entertaining if misleading description of the Hippo:
\n
\n
he is four-footed, cloven-hoofed like an ox, flat-nosed, with a mane\nlike a horse and showing teeth like tusks, with a tail and voice like a\nhorse and in size as large as the largest ox; and his hide is so\nexceedingly thick that when it has been dried shafts of javelins are\nmade of it
\n
\n
Throughout his account Herodotus evinces himself an Egypt fanboy. His\nfanboyishness leads him to make some interesting claims. For example,\nHerodotus supports the claim that the Greek gods’ names all came from\nEgypt:
\n
\n
the naming of almost all the gods has come to Hellas from Egypt
\n
\n
And Homer’s Odyssey wasn’t written by Homer, but he heard it from\nsome Egyptians who knew it from the first-hand account of Menelaos (King\nof Sparta):
\n
\n
the “Cyprian Epic” was not written by Homer but by some other man
\n
\n
Oh, and also, forget Pythagoras:
\n
\n
and I think that thus the art of geometry was found out and\nafterwards came into Hellas also
\n
\n
And so on:
\n
\n
Egyptians were the first of men who made solemn assemblies and\nprocessions and approaches to the temples
\n
\n
And so forth:
\n
\n
Amasis too who established the law that every year each one of the\nEgyptians should declare to the ruler of his district, from what source\nhe got his livelihood, and if any man did not do this or did not make\ndeclaration of an honest way of living, he should be punished with\ndeath. Now Solon the Athenian received from Egypt this law and had it\nenacted for the Athenians, and they have continued to observe it, since\nit is a law with which none can find fault.
\n
\n
I don’t get the impression that Herodotus is a fabulist. Herodotus,\nbeing a single individual, is working from the information he’s given\nand observations he can make by himself. Some of his observations are\nastute. There is a particularly canny passage about the flow of the Nile\nbased on Herodotus’s observations of the regional topography. The\ndescriptions of mummification seem much the same as the descriptions\nI’ve seen in modern sources. There are some good descriptions real,\nactual animals: crocodiles, ibis, etc. Basically, everything Herodotus\nsaw seemed reasonable and sane, and everything he was told seemed like\nhis guides were kind of fucking with him.
\n
This is the start of the history of Western civilization according to\nthe Harvard classics collection. It’s unique in that it was committed to\nwriting contemporaneously. This work was an early move away from an oral\ntradition. For that reason it is uniquely rigorous – flawed, but\nconstrained in the flaws in makes. The first stumbling of what was to\nbecome what we understand as history. I can conclude that the advent of\nWikipedia has been a boon in terms of knowing what hippos look like.
I am very ignorant of pretty much the entirety of bible, so this is\nmy first time reading the book of Job.
\n
Most of the story is a dialog that attempts to address the problem of\nwhy bad things happen to good people. The answer, it seems, is that God\njust does shit sometimes and it may seem capricious (and maybe it even\nis) but you can’t assume that bad things happen to bad people and good\nthings happen to good people.
\n
\n
What knowest thou, that we know not? What understandest thou, which\nis not in us? – Job 15:9
\n
\n
In the story the reason for Job’s suffering is that Satan mentioned\nto God that Job is probably only pious because he has a cushy life so\nGod destroys his life because reasons.
\n
The majority of the reading is Job’s friends Eliphaz, Bildada, and\nZophar insufferably insisting that Job repent for his wicked ways. Job\nkeeps insisting that God is causing his suffering for no reason,\nrandomly, and he has nothing to repent for – which (from our omniscient\nnarrative prospective) we know is totally correct – and his friends say\nthings like:
\n
\n
Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, neither will he help\nthe evil doers – Job 8:20
\n
\n
And
\n
\n
For the company of the godless shall be barren, And fire shall\nconsume the tents of bribery. – Job 15:34
\n
\n
And
\n
\n
Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity\ndeserveth. – Job 11:6
\n
\n
Which are, it occurs to me – like Polonius’s speech in Hamlet (best\nembodied by Bill Murray in the 2000 movie version of Hamlet) – likely\nquoted out of context all the fucking time in the misguided belief that\nthat they’re not meant to be banal, naive, and (in this instance)\nultimately incorrect platitudes.
\n
God swoops in at the end of the narrative and restores Job at his\nfriend’s expense and explains basically nothing which is probably the\npoint.
\n"
},
{
"id": "https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/race-and-language-freeman/",
"title": "Race and Language by Augustus Freeman",
"url": "https://tylercipriani.com/books/2021/race-and-language-freeman/",
"author": {
"name": "Tyler Cipriani"
},
"tags": [
"books"
],
"date_published": "2021-01-09T21:44:00Z",
"date_modified": "2021-01-26T02:04:45Z",
"content_html": "
Freeman is famous for his history of the Norman conquest. There are a\nfew good quotes in the early part of this reading.
\n
There is an early section where he talks about race as an artificial\nconstruct:
\n
\n
A hundred years ago a man’s political likes and dislikes seldom went\nbeyond the range which was suggested by the place of his birth or\nimmediate descent. […] That feelings such as these, and the practical\nconsequences which have flowed from them, are distinctly due to\nscientific and historical teaching there can, I think, be no doubt.
\n
\n
Which is a thought that I’ve never had before: that our ability to\nhate our fellow human beings has in modern times has been enhanced by\nscience and history’s creation of the concept of race.
\n
Freeman goes on to argue that while race is an artificial construct,\nit’s an important construct – if only because it effects the behavior of\na large number of people:
\n
\n
A belief or a feeling which has a practical effect on the conduct of\ngreat masses of men, sometimes on the conduct of whole nations, may be\nvery false and very mischievous; but it is in every case a great and\nserious fact, to be looked gravely in the face.
\n
\n
This all seems fair enough.
\n
After these initial insights the reading gets pretty cringy pretty\nfast. I went on to read the Wikipedia page for Edward\nAugustus Freeman and overall he seems like a racist piece of shit,\nso I don’t feel too bad for abandoning the first reading of the\ncourse.
\n
This reading does make me a little anxious about the shelf’s ability\nto contextualize the readings in a way that’s relevant to me.
At the beginning of this year, I randomly downloaded the Harvard\nClassics/Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of books. This is a set of books\nthat contains a selection of classic readings meant to provide a full\nclassic liberal education in themselves.
\n
My first exposure to this series was at my Granny’s house where she\nowned a subset of the shelf. I’ve never had a mind to read the entirety\nof the shelf.
\n
Volume 50 of the 50-volume series contains several suggestions of the\nways in which a reader may choose to tackle the task of intelligently\nnavigating the embarrassment of material in the collection. I’ve naively\nchosen to follow the first suggested course of reading: The\nhistory of civilization.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
\n
\n\n\n\n
Final thoughts on 2021
\n
Depending on how you count (if you count the Book of Job as\na “book”) I read either 37 or 38 books this year. I read more books this\nyear than I’ve ever read in any previous year. My Kindle tells me that I\nread every single day this year (or at least I unlocked my Kindle).
\n
I read every night before bed and sometimes I read a few pages as\nsoon as I wake up. I “read” eight of these books on audible, but I ended\nup buying additional copies of Deep Work, Atomic\nHabits, and Measure What Matters because they all had so\nmuch good content, and it was easier to take notes using digital or\nprint editions.
\n
I read the remainder of these books on my Kindle. I love the reading\nexperience of the Kindle, and I recently learned about readwise which helps me export\nall my notes from my kindle to my computer. I bought a book\nstand at the end of 2021. My goal is to use it to read an actual\nphysical book and take notes on my computer. Prior to\nthis year (and my discovery of readwise), I most likely would have said\nphysical books were my preferred format. At the end of 2021, I tend to\nprefer reading on the Kindle; however, there are a few books that don’t\nlend themselves very well to the paperwhite (any of the Tufte books for\nexample).
\n
Unlike in years past, I didn’t read any graphic novels this year —\nthis is another Kindle limitation. I think I’ll revisit that in 2022 —\nI’d like to try some mangas (not that I have any idea where to\nstart).
\n
As of today (2022-01-01), there are six books that I’m more than 30%\nof the way through. I have plans to finish at least two of them, so that\nshould give me a headstart on my 50 book(!) goal for 2022 😅.
pg 29: There is a “veritable academic industry” of people decrying\nthe OED as racist and sexist.
\n
pg 45: The “madman”/W.C. Minor’s forebearers founded the state of\nConnecticut
\n
pg 55: Irish immigrants fought in the civil war, but were often used\nas canon fodder.
\n
pg 73: The phrase “Look something up” didn’t appear in English until\n1692
\n
pg 79: Part of the philological society’s motivation for supporting\nthe creation of the OED was imperialism
\n
pg 84: In 1746, 5 London booksellers contracted with Samuel Johnson\nto write his dictionary which he published in 1755 in an almost entirely\nsingular effort
\n
pg 93: Richard Chenevix Trench conceived of the OED in a speech in\n1857 stating the it would be “the combined action of many”\nvolunteers.
\n
pg 119: The system of collecting quotations for the OED was to put\nthe “catchword” in the upper left of a half-sheet of writing paper.\nUnderneath you write the date, author, title, and page number followed\nby the full quotation using the catchword.
pg 14: Art became a form of clarisy in the 20th century, you had to\nunderstand theory to understand art, “There were no manifestos in the\nworld of art prior to the twentieth century”
\n
pg 17: International style favored labor; however, it favored\nmachine-made objects vs handmade artisan objects as in the Arts and\nCrafts movement in England “proved” that only the rich could afford such\nitems.
\n
pg 24: Le Corbusier called his houses “machines for living”
\n
pg 26: Stalin: “Engineers of his soul”
\n
pg 32: The Museum of Modern Art was founded by John D Rockefeller,\nJr.
\n
pg 44: “The fundamental pedagogical mistake of the academy arose\nfrom its preoccupation with the idea of the individual genius” - Walter\nGropius
\n
pg 72: Frank Lloyd Wright, “catered to the hog-stomping Baroque\nexuberance of American civilization” (this is a magical phrase)
\n
pg 108: Venturi’s definition of architecture, “shelter with\ndecoration on it”
\n
pg 109: You can’t take on a new fashion by calling it ugly; you have\nto acknowledge it and create a still more avant-garde style.
Reading fiction is not that dissimilar from watching a movie in your\nbrain. The ways in which audio-visual consumption of fiction and reading\nfiction diverge is in their demand on engagement – when reading I must\nlearn new words, I struggle to find meaning, I use my imagination, I\nslowly strengthen understanding – I meet books more than half-way in my\nmind’s eye.
\n
Movies and television, in contrast, demand less engagement from the\nviewer – much of the vision and interpretation is handed (or forced) on\nthe audience. As popular movies and TV demand less, they also seem more\napt to acquiesce to popular whim – mirroring the culture that consumes\nthem rather than challenging it. The level of engagement demanded by\naudio-visual entertainment is also subject to a shifting baseline – that\nis, it’s gotten less challenging over time.
\n
This is not a knock on all television and movies as a form\nof art. Often television, movies, and documentaries are the perfect\nmedium to convey a particular message. Also, there are many movies and\ntelevision programs which are, in fact, very challenging to their\naudience in addition to being very enjoyable.
\n
Also, it is noteworthy that I tend to read mass-market crap – the\nbook-equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup. I’ve come to terms with\nthis fact. I read some crap, I read some good things, occasionally I’ll\nread a few great (and nominally “great”) things. I end up with a greater\nsense of accomplishment and satisfaction from reading crap rather than\nwatching crap – YMMV.
\n
This is a long way of saying – I think that reading is a Good Thing™\nand I want to do more of it. To enforce more of a habit, I set reading\ngoals for myself at the start of each year. In 2015 I wanted to read a\nbook a month. In 2016 I wanted to read 2 books a month. In both 2015 and\n2016 my grasp has exceeded my reach – which is not how goals are\nsupposed to work.
I also reviewed a couple of these books\nover the course of 2016, hopefully I can continue down that path in the\nyear to come.
\n\n\n
Goals for 2017
\n
I’m going to try to read roughly a book a week in 2017 – 50 books for\nthe year. Hopefully 50 books is an ambitious enough goal. Additionally,\nI’d like to try to do 6 book reviews on this blog as a means of:
\n
\n
Tracking what I’ve read
\n
Checking my understanding
\n
Engaging and owning what I’ve read
\n
\n
I’d also like to lay claim to my crazy ambitious plan to read 4\nwhole, real, grown-up (i.e., not beer- or computer-related) non-fiction\nbooks this year.
\n
As I’m proclaiming these goals publicly for the first time, I’m sure\nI’ll come up woefully and shamefully short – yay blogging!
The language of computer hardware and software is not particularly\nwell hidden in my experience. The more I interact with software, the\nmore those interactions reflect their makers and materials. This fact is\nslowly permeating the zeitgeist as we all, collectively, realize that facebook\nis not the open\ninternet\n(no matter how much it may insist on its own benevolence),\nand that the current state of AI is simply one of money laundering for\nbias. While it is increasingly true that our high-level interactions\nwith machines are broken, it’s important to\nrecall that we haven’t fixed any of the low-level problems either (tried\nsubtracting 399999999999998 from\n399999999999999 in Google’s calculator lately?).
\n
These incredible Rube Goldberg, hacks-all-the-way-down, leaking piles\nof abstractions that are modern computers are fascinating and powerful.\nThe modern computer reveals its own history – each layer of abstraction\nrepresenting a previous geologic era. The ancient .plan\nfiles of the Sumerians and Hittites.
\n
CODE builds forward through time. Revealing each innovation\nnecessary to create a fully functioning computer. It works its way\ntowards the modern computer starting with binary data representation\nusing morse code. From there it\ncovers non-base-10 number systems, telegraphs, electromagnets and the\ninvention of the relay, the flip-flop switch that allows temporary\nstorage of a single bit. All of this background culminates in a truly\nwonderful chapter in which you use this technology to build a fully\nfunctional computer in your mind’s eye.
\n
The book goes on to explain the Von\nNeumann architecture and from there moves into topics with which I\nam more familiar – high level programming languages, object-oriented\nprogramming languages, and “The Graphical Revolution”. In these later\nchapters, an evident object-oriented/graphical/IDE as the logical\nend-point for computing bias rears its ugly head, but in a book\npublished by Microsoft Press it’s a surprisingly light touch.
\n
CODE is one of the more interesting technical books I have\never read, and also one of the few that I read cover-to-cover over the\ncourse of a few reading sessions. It is a story rather than a series of\nideas surrounding a theme. It is a history book, not a handbook.
\n
My one critique is that the chapters after the climactic computer\nconstruction feel a bit disjointed. There is no real conclusion to the\nbook – I expected a more satisfying wrap-up than I was given. Instead of\na tying-up of loose-ends we move on to topics like object-oriented\nprogramming, and IEEE 754\nfloating-point numbers. While the treatment this book provides these\ntopics is interesting, the organization is somewhat lacking.
\n
To spite the lack of organization towards the end of the book, I\nfound CODE a wonderful read and would have no qualms\nrecommending it to anyone at any level of computer literacy.
\n
Rating: 9/10
\n
\n
Meta Note:
\n
As part of my effort to delve more deeply into reading, I will be\nfeaturing more review-type content. I will be tagging it all with the\n“books” tag. If you hate this, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for\n“computing” to continue to read my insights on something I’m perhaps\neven the slightest bit qualified to talk about in any sort of informed\nway.
\n
\n"
},
{
"id": "https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/10/08/book-review--the-tombs-of-atuan-by-ursula-k-le-guin/",
"title": "Book Review: The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K Le Guin",
"url": "https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/10/08/book-review--the-tombs-of-atuan-by-ursula-k-le-guin/",
"author": {
"name": "Tyler Cipriani"
},
"tags": [
"books"
],
"date_published": "2016-10-08T16:36:10Z",
"date_modified": "2017-02-14T15:11:05Z",
"content_html": "
\"Ahra\", the Eaten One, the high priestess of the Tombs of Atuan\nbelongs to the Nameless Ones. She is, herself, nameless. Her name along\nwith her family and future were taken from her in a ceremony on which\nthe novel opens. At the beginning of the novel, her 6-year-old life is\nspared so that she may live the remainder of her life serving the\nNameless Ones of Karg in the far East, outside of the Archipelago, in\nthe realm of EarthSea. So it has always been at Atuan and so it has\nalways been with \"Ahra\" – the high priestess is also The One Priestess\nin that she is continually reborn as herself. Within an hour of the old\npriestess\'s death, a new One Priestess – who is the same in essence – is\nborn.
\n
Ahra is under the often indifferent and sometimes cruel tutelage of\nKossil – High Priestess of the GodKing – the rulers of Autan, Thar –\npriestess of the Twin Gods, and (to some degree) Mannan – a eunuch and\nher life-long companion. Each often conveys their understanding of the\nTombs, the Nameless ones, and the appropriate place and behavior of the\nOne Priestess.
\n
Thar, though harsh, is often an ally to Ahra. After Thar\'s death,\nAhra\'s relationship with Kossil becomes increasingly strained. Kossil\nshows Ahra the Undertomb and Labyrinth that lay under the Tombs of Atuan\n– these are the dark realms of the One Priestess where the Nameless Ones\nhave their greatest strength. Ahra becomes increasingly obsessed with\nmemorizing all the twists and turns of the Undertomb and Labyrinth\nspending much of her time exploring their depths and learning the\nlocation of various spy-holes that look into the Labyrinth. Kossil makes\nmention of the ring of Erreth-Akbe that is the greatest and most magical\ntreasure of all the many treasures kept in the Labyrinth.
\n
Soon Ahra discovers Sparrowhawk, who\'s origin story is covered in A\nWizard of EarthSea, wandering the Labyrinth in search of the ring of\nErreth-Akbe. Although Ahra has been taught to fear magic and sorcerers\nher curiosity about this intruder who has lived a life so different than\nher own dull existence leads her to imprison Sparrowhawk in the\nLabyrinth rather than kill him (as she told Kossil she would).
\n
Eventually, Ahra grows to trust Sparrowhawk, particularly after he\nreturns to her her name – Tenar, and after revealing his own true name –\nGed. In EarthSea learning something\'s true name gives you power over\nthat thing. Magic is just a recitation of the original language and\nmagic is enacted over objects and people by calling them by their\noriginal and true names.
\n
After being won-over by Ged when Kossil\'s intensity and treachery\nreach a fever pitch, Tenar decides to help Ged escape Autan which, along\nwith the her and Kossil\'s other indiscretions, leave the Nameless Ones a\nbit miffed.
\n
The Tombs of Atuan was a very readable and approachable novel,\nprobably owing to its young-adult target audience – it is short at only\n211 pages. This is the second book of the EarthSea series and it seems\nslightly more focused and, perhaps, less expansive than the first – A\nWizard of EarthSea. The themes of the power of names and places are\nmentioned throughout this book. It is interesting that the things over\nwhich no one has any control are nameless, specifically the Nameless\nOnes – the dark forces mentioned throughout the novel; however, it is\nonly after regaining her own name that Tenar is able to exert any\ncontrol over her own life.
\n
It\'s got a good beat and I can dance to it: 8/10.
\n
\n
Meta Note:
\n
As part of my effort to delve more deeply into reading, I will be\nfeaturing more review-type content. I will be tagging it all with the\n\"books\" tag. If you hate this, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for\n\"computing\" to continue to read my insights on something I\'m perhaps\neven the slightest bit qualified to talk about in any sort of informed\nway.
\n\n"
},
{
"id": "https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/08/20/library-thing/",
"title": "Library Thing(s)",
"url": "https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/08/20/library-thing/",
"author": {
"name": "Tyler Cipriani"
},
"tags": [
"books"
],
"date_published": "2012-08-01T00:00:00Z",
"date_modified": "2017-02-14T15:11:05Z",
"content_html": " \n\n\n\n\nEarlier this year, I stumbled across Library\nThing and almost immediately decided that\nI wanted to join—which is a rare thing for me concerning online\nservices.\n\nSo I did what any normal person would do and I bought a barcode\nscanner\nand wrote some python to build my catalog.\n\nThe python\nscript\nis just a loop that shows a prompt and waits for an ISBN, t to input a\ntag, q to quit. Meanwhile it\'s generating a csv file that\ncan be uploaded to LibraryThing.\n\nThe fruits of this labor were/are my (and Blazey\'s) Library Thing Catalog\n\n"
},
{
"id": "https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/08/20/to-read/",
"title": "To Read",
"url": "https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/08/20/to-read/",
"author": {
"name": "Tyler Cipriani"
},
"tags": [
"books"
],
"date_published": "2012-08-01T00:00:00Z",
"date_modified": "2017-02-14T15:11:05Z",
"content_html": " \n\n\n\n\n* the green hills of earth - Heinlein\n* Crypto anarchy, cyberstates, and pirate utopias by Peter Ludlow\n"
}
]
}
![](\"https://photos.tylercipriani.com/2022-12-31_readwise.png\"\nalt=\"Notes)
\n![\"Ghost](\"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41-a+QkxQEL.jpg\")
\n![\"Show](\"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51N+Ba1mYOL.jpg\")
\n![\"An](\"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51aTO3pGp9L.jpg\")
\n![\"The](\"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51mN3bY0JjL.jpg\")
\n![\"Snow](\"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51fQam1TU8L.jpg\")
\n![\"Breath](\"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/413cAh3xCfL.jpg\")
\n![\":))\"](\"https://tylercipriani.com/smileys/smile3.png\")
![\":)\"](\"https://tylercipriani.com/smileys/smile.png\")