Reading Archive

Finished

  • Ron Milo and Rob Phillips, Cell Biology by the Numbers [read about half of it]. This book pairs really well with The Machinery of Life (below). Together they paint a detailed picture of what happens inside a cell. This book, unsurprisingly, takes a more quantitative approach. It focuses on the sizes, speeds, concentrations, intensities, and many other aspects of the key objects and processes inside a cell.
  • Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. One of the most disappointing books I've read in a long time. It was more about octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish (which are certainly cool) than about "other minds" or intelligent life per se.
  • David Goodsell, The Machinery of Life. Spectacular book for developing intuition of what goes on inside a cell. The text is OK but the illustrations are absolutely stunning and make the book worthy of a strong recommendation. If you like this blog post by Ken Shirriff, you'll probably like Goodsell's book. You can also check out most of the illustrations on Google image search.
  • Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, The Dictator's Handbook. Very good, highly recommended. See tweetstorm for more details.
  • Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar's Guide to the City [audiobook]. Strong meh. The book was entertaining enough, I suppose, and well-written, but I hardly learned anything from it. There was a very small kernel of an interesting concept, but it was spun out too far and couldn't hold the weight of a full book, IMO.
  • Cesar Hidalgo, Why Information Grows.
  • Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy. Not recommended. Offers a concrete suggestion for how to change the incentives around banking/central banking, but it doesn't seem like a great idea to me. This is the best (most critical) review, IMO. Also suggests that modern econ doesn't sufficiently emphasize our "radical uncertainty" about how markets will evolve. IOW, we put too much faith in models and don't realize how often they completely break down. Fair enough.
  • Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny. Great (and short!) book. Probably preaching to the choir, but it's a great sermon. I like Sam Harris's advice (from this podcast): The book is worth reading even if we aren't on the road to tyranny.
  • Geoffrey West, Scale. I'm strongly ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, the topics he covers are extremely important, and he brings a fresh/deep perspective to them. On the other hand, the book is poorly-written. It suffers from long-winded digressions, weird jabs against non-physicists, and (most disappointing of all) a surprising dearth of explanations for the phenomena he describes. Also I think he overstates the case for some of his big claims. If you want a good overview of the main ideas without the bother of having to read the book, I do heartily recommend this lecture of his from a few years ago.
  • Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything. Recommended. See tweet (TBD: some choice excerpts).
  • Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene. See tweetstorm. Bottom line: not recommended. It's thorough and well-written, but the ideas:stories ratio is way too low for my taste.
  • Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By (HT: Julia Galef, Ben Mathes). I wanted to hate this book. I expected it to be a vapid popularization of trivial ideas from computer science. Mostly, I was jealous that the authors had identified such a great idea for a book, and I was hoping they would botch the job. Buuuuut they didn't. The book was great. I can't say there was anything radically new for me (although I did learn some things), but the biggest takeaway was just how many different areas of life can be studied algorithmically. (Caveat: I skimmed and skipped around a lot.)
  • Robert Caro, Master of the Senate (HT: Kevin Kwok, Alok Singh). I made it about two-thirds of the way through, so given my track record, I'll count this one as "finished." It was great! And it was exactly as Kevin pitched it to me — simultaneously a portrait of a system and of a man within that system. In other words, it's as much about the Senate as it is about LBJ. If (like me) you dislike traditional biographies for focusing too much on psychological factors, Caro is a breath of fresh air. He's a keen systems thinker, and it shines through in his work. Bonus: some soaring prose.
  • Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet, Perfect Health Diet. Write-up coming soon.
  • Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Solid self-help book on how to cultivate a more deliberate relationship with your possessions. Full of quirky advice inspired by Shintoism. Here's my full book report.
  • Tudor and Pearson, North Korea Confidential. Write-up coming soon.
  • Philippe Rochat, Others in Mind. I was pretty excited for this book, especially after reading Sarah Perry's riff on it. Its thesis is right up my alley — namely, that we develop self-consciousness by interacting with others and internalizing their models/judgments of us. Unfortunately I didn't get a lot out of the book, and gave up halfway through. I recommend reading Sarah's blog post instead of the book. You can also read my notes and highlights here.
  • Pieter Hintjens, The Psychopath Code. (Amazon paperback; free e-book.) Easy read, pretty insightful. Full "book report" here.
  • YouTube channels. I realize this isn't exactly "reading" material, but it's been intellectually stimulating nevertheless. I recommend PBS Space Time (astrophysics), 3Blue1Brown (math), and Caspian Report (geopolitics).
  • Podcasts. Also not "reading" material, but there's some truly amazing content out there — in particular, Hardcore History and EconTalk. These two podcasts have both been around for a while, but for some reason I didn't start listening to them until just recently, despite many recommendations. Well, let me add one more voice to the chorus: these are both excellent.
  • Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield, SuperCooperators. Read half of it, then got distracted. Excellent overview of the many different ways Nature has found to cooperate. I explored one of these mechanisms in this post, but it's good to understand all the different mechanisms. In particular, the idea that cooperation can evolve because of spatial configurations was new to me (chapter 3).
  • Michael Chwe, Rational Ritual. Read half of it, then got distracted — but it's very good. Subtitle is "Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge." If that piques your interest, you will almost certainly enjoy this book.
  • Yuval Harari, Sapiens. Read half of it, then lost interest. I'm ambivalent about this book. On the one hand, it provides a useful, somewhat contrarian perspective on human history. (For example: the agricultural revolution probably sucked for the people who went through it.) On the other hand, it's full of sweeping pronouncements that I can't fully endorse. Here's an interview of Harari by Russ Roberts of EconTalk.
  • Charles Murray, By the People. Read half of it, then got distracted. Not my usual fare; it's much more explicitly political than what I typically like to read. That said, of all the political causes out there, liberty is the one I'm most eager to embrace. My favorite chapter was chapter 2, which helped me to appreciate how many things go into "the rule of law" besides a strict, literal following of the law.
  • Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems. There's some good stuff in this book, but it's not at all what I was hoping for. I wish it had spent more time discussing systems that include selfish/strategic agents. Instead, the book is focused mostly on mindless systems. If you want to understand stocks, flows, and feedback loops, this is a great primer. If you want to understand human systems... well, I suppose it's a good starting point, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. For example, there's almost no game theory in the book. At some points, Meadows seems to treat system failures like "tragedies of the commons" as arising from insufficient information, as if agents would act for the good of the whole system, if only they knew how.
  • Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave. More unsettling to my worldview than anything else I've read in the past few years. Not sure how many of Perry's conclusions I agree with, but they're extremely thought-provoking. For example: I'd always taken for granted that, if life isn't worth living, it's easy to cash in the chips. Now I understand it's much harder than that. Suicide is hard, and therefore we can't use people's continued "choice" to stay alive as evidence that their lives are tolerable. See a related argument by Perry in this blog post.
  • Mark Changizi, The Vision Revolution. Pretty neat hypotheses about the evolution of human vision. Particularly fascinating were the chapters on color vision and optical illusions. Changizi argues that human color vision evolved to detect subtle changes in skin color among our associates(!!). My priors for such a hypothesis were pretty low, but my posteriors are considerably higher. He also argues, very persuasively, that most of the geometric optical illusions arise from our brains' attempt to model a fraction of a second into the future.
  • John Lee, The Persian Empire [audible.com lecture series]. Not the most compelling lecturer OR subject matter. It turns out we don't hear much about the ancient Persians (the Achaemenids) not because of Western bias, but because there isn't a ton of information about them.
  • Bart Ehrman, From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity [audible.com lecture series]. Awesome glimpse into the early, chaotic, "startup" years of the Christian religion. The lecturer was especially keen to the idea that theology is just the continuation of politics by other means — or perhaps early Christian era is just an especially good case study in that idea.
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Pretty great, if you ask me. And this is coming from someone who hasn't read or even watched Harry Potter and who generally snubs his nose at fan-fiction.
  • David Christian, Big History [audible.com lecture series]. Probably my favorite Audible lecture series to date. As I wrote in Border Stories, "Big History is an emerging discipline that seeks to explain all the interesting structures in the universe in one grand, sweeping narrative. This, as you might imagine, is a bit of a mindfuck — but one that I can't recommend highly enough." If you don't want to commit to 24 hours' worth of lectures (12 if you listen at 2x!), you can get a taste for this material in a TED talk (18 minutes) or a Crash Course video series (2 hours).
  • E. O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth. Great information on the evolution of the social instincts; terrible (IMO) speculation about human evolution. The subtext of the book is strongly political: We all have to band together or we'll destroy the planet — and "science says" we evolved to band together. Yuck.
  • Douglas Kenrick, Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life. One of the best and most accessible overviews of evopsych I've read. I especially enjoyed Kenrick's formulation of human cognition as "deep rationality," i.e., rational in light of our evolutionary goals, if not our proximate utility maximization.
  • Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style. Solid advice, and I learned quite a bit. But for writing advice, I vastly prefer George Gopen's The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader's Perspective.
  • [Assorted authors], Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition [audible.com lecture series]. Great way to develop a passing familiarity with the canon. Not a lot of great ideas in this lecture series, however.
  • Jean-Louis Dessalles, Why We Talk: The Evolutionary Origins of Language. Most eye-opening book I've read all year. More later.
  • John Gray, Straw Dogs. Ultimately I disagreed with about 80% of this book, but I did find it extremely interesting and worth reading, especially paired with The Beginning of Infinity. Gray and Deutsch seem to be have taken positions that are about as opposite as possible, given a deep understanding of science, and so it was fun and productive to compare their arguments.
  • David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity. Even better than Fabric of Reality (thanks Mills, David, Andy). Deutsch offers the most compelling left-brain worldview I imagine it's possible to construct, given our current understanding. Of special note are (1) his emphasis on knowledge as a physical phenomenon, and (2) his ideas on the evolution of creativity. Probably going on the all-time greatest list.
  • Gregory Aldrete, History of the Ancient World [audible.com lecture series].
  • Marc Zender, Writing and Civilization [audible.com lecture series]. Interesting to hear about the development of different writing systems. Good lecturer.
  • John Hale, Exploring the Roots of Religion [audible.com lecture series].
  • Brian Fagan, Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations [audible.com lecture series].
  • Richard Baum, The Fall and Rise of China [audible.com lecture series]. Great intro to modern Chinese history. Unlike the previous history series I finished (Brier's history of ancient Egypt), this one offered analysis in addition to raw stories. Most interesting for me were the many many lectures devoted to Mao and the Community Revolution.
  • Bob Brier, The History of Ancient Egypt [audible.com lecture series]. Decent quick intro to ancient Egyptian history, if you listen at 2x or 2.5x and don't mind Brier's (the lecturer's) verbal tics. Lots of facts, very little theory. You can tell that Brier cares mostly about the stories, less about the mechanics of Egyptian society. He attributes way too much power to the pharaohs and their actions, and hardly mentions the economy, for example. Still, useful to me, at least for giving the broad-strokes outline of people and events in Egyptian history. 
  • John McWhorter, The Story of Human Language [audible.com lecture series]. Awesome lecture series. A more accurate title might be "The Sociology of Language." Discusses the way languages are used and how they evolve in human populations. Also, McWhorter is an excellent lecturer, one of my favorites. His sentences are precise, dense with information, and spiced with a nice, dry wit and colorful turns of phrase. Highly recommended.
  • Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised. I read about half of these chapters, each of which covers one of the "modern" TV shows (Oz, Sopranos, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, etc.). Interesting to hear some of the back stories, but ultimately this was very specific to TV, and pretty devoid of takeaways for media more generally.
  • Grant Hardy, Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition [audible.com lecture series]. Got about 5/6 of the way through this before realizing that the marginal utility of each lecture was getting too low. A good primer on Eastern thinking, something I was in sore need of. These lectures were interesting, insofar as they were a chance to see the world through the lens of three cultures (India, China, Japan) who, unlike the West, didn't get particularly hung up on mind/body dualism. Unfortunately a lot of it — just like a lot of historical thinking in the West (and if Sturgeon is to be believed, 90% of everything) — is utter crap.
  • Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Alan Watts isn't for everyone, but if you like the topics I write about (especially the weirder ones), you'll probably like him. I recommend starting with his two lectures, Myth of Myself and Man in Nature, available free on YouTube.
  • George Gopen, The Sense of Structure. So, so, so good — the best book on writing I've ever read. Its subtitle is, "Writing from the Reader's Perspective." Rather than presenting a series of rigid writing rules (do this, don't do that), Gopen focuses on how readers read — how they parse sentences and paragraphs, where they look for topic orientation, where they expect the emphasis to be, etc. I eagerly await Pinker's new book, The Sense of Style, in the hope that it will follow in Gopen's footsteps.
  • Robert Garland, The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World [audible.com lecture series]. Not really a book or even an audiobook, but a lecture series I found on Audible. This is (Western) history from the perspective of the common people and their daily lives — a good complement to the history of famous names and events. Nothing particularly earth-shattering, but it was good material and very easy to listen to (e.g. for commuting), even at 3x speed. I'll certainly be listening to more of these lecture series.
  • Robert Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. A great antidote to the Morreall book (below). Provine sheds a lot of great empirical light on laughter. This book suffers from a deficit of theory, but the data is great.
  • John Morreall, The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (skimmed). Fantastic overview of a 2,500-year tradition that's been shown, by more recent studies, to be completely bankrupt. Good summary of this book at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict. This is one of those great books that portrays, with exacting precision, concepts which seem obvious, except that somehow you never quite realized them until they were pointed out. Will be referencing this in an upcoming essay or two.
  • Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Etiquette as a lens on society. Fascinating read, if a little tedious at times. I wrote a blog post inspired by some of Elias's ideas: UX and the Civilizing Process [ribbonfarm.com].
  • Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness. Second time through was even better than the first (10 years ago). I think I've learned a lot in the intervening decade, to help me better appreciate what Jaynes was doing. Here's part 1 of my review.
  • David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Fascinating and frustrating. I think Greg Rader's review captures my opinion on this one.

 

Abandoned

Last updated December 23, 2019.