In 2023, I read a lot of longer, technical papers for which I took notes (as usual) but that don’t really qualify as books, as such. Some of them were of what some might call book-length, though. I present these with original—though very sparse—comments amid the citations I found interesting and relevant from those documents.

Programming

1. The Usability of Advanced Type Systems: Rust as a Case Study (January, 2023)
2. nato1968 − Software Engineering (October, 1968)
3. IEEE-Annals − A Brief... [More]

A friend forwarded me the page called Books I’ve read by Derek Sivers, which is a long, long list of books. I perused it with the default ordering, from highest-rated to lowest-rated.[1] I didn’t see a lot of overlap with my own reading interests. We’d read only one or two books in common—out of hundreds!—and almost none of his books are on my wishlist.

A cry for help

There were a what I would call a disturbing number of financial self-help books, like You Can Negotiate Anything, The Entrepreneur Roller... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is my second Murakami book. While the subject matter is very, very different—this one’s a love story whereas Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was a sci-fi, crime-novel, philosophical excursion—the coolness of the protagonist and the mood of the writing is the same. And I loved both the protagonist and the mood. This book relaxed me.

This is a book for people who read and people who listen to music. It is a book of its time, written and published a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Cover ArtThis was my first book by Murakami. I very much like the writing style that bleeds through the translation from the Japanese. The world, though Japanese, feels comfortable and familiar to me. It would, of course. Though it is set on the other side of the world geographically, in an ostensibly completely alien culture, it is temporally congruent with my upbringing, with my so-called formative years. Having been raised in the U.S. in the 80s, and Murakami seeming to be an... [More]

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Book CoverYou will often hear this book described as a feminist masterpiece. I honestly can’t figure out why. It is about so much more than feminism, though it is also about that. I think it is a masterpiece, though. It is a wholly realized world, limned with light brushstrokes onto which the reader hangs their own detail, unlike so many modern books where every last detail is included, to avoid the reader having to fill in anything themselves. Instead, Le Guin has a light hand,... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third in a series of reviews that so far includes Book 1 and Book 2. Carl recieves the titular Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, which is a special book that only he can read. It’s a compendium of the experiences of dozens if not hundreds of other crawlers throughout the myriad seasons that passed before the Earth season chronicled in these books.

The book introduces itself to him,

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is book two of the Dungeon-Crawler Carl series. I’d read Dungeon Crawler Carl: Book 1 and moved on immediately to this book. This is a really, really fun series, written by a smart and funny author who has a good amount of world experience that he brings to his wild and complex stories about an Earth-sized dungeon that’s been built on the remains of Earth for the sole purpose of galaxy-wide entertainment.

This is not hard sci-fi! The books don’t bother explaining how... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Dungeon Crawler Carl CoverThis is my first book in a genre that a very good friend of mine said was quite popular in Japan—Isekai (Wikipedia)—which is “[…] a sub-genre of fiction. […] that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe”. Closely related is a sub-group with a more western-sounding name LitRPG (Wikipedia), which is “short for literary role-playing game, is a literary genre combining the... [More]”

Standard disclaimer[1]

This book is a 200-page, tightly edited, tour-de-force summary of many of Noam Chomsky’s writings, liberally sprinkled with Vijay Prashad’s interpretations and some of his own writings. It is structured as a conversation between the two authors, with some parts of Noam’s conversation being new and other parts being citations from his incredibly voluminous past work.

Despite a deep familiarity with the material, I very much enjoyed this book and just couldn’t stop... [More]

For the last couple of years, I have been keeping track of books that were potentially written by AI that my Kindle saw fit to advertise to me on the lock-screen page. As I wrote at the top of each installment of Kindle Books Written by AIs,

“[…] This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog.”

Until recently, it was kind of interesting because the provenance of the content could have gone either way:... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in and did it. This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.

Access... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in and did it. This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.

I’ve... [More]

As I started doing in the previous year, I’ve included a partial, “teaser” review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes a full review with all notes, as well as citations and rough notes.

I only hit 20 titles this year, but some of them were pretty hefty tomes, though none in German and only one in French. A couple of public-policy books this year, with the accompanying analysis.

Project Hail Mary (2021)

by Andy Weir

Andy Weir manages to comes up... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third Witcher book, but the first book in what is called the Witcher Saga. Geralt is still the same. The world is worse.

The kingdom of Cintra has fallen to Nilfgard. Queen Calanthe is dead, Ciri is on the run. Nilfgard seeks her with all of its power, bending its will to finding the heiress who could try to take back the throne... [More]

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This is a play about prison and prisoners. Chris Hedges worked on this play with his friend Boris Franklin. They met when Boris was one of Chris’s students in a writing course in prison in New Jersey. They are still friends today. There were 28 students in all, all of whom contributed to the story. Chris and Boris hammered a play out of their over two dozen stories, with the assistance of Chris’s wife, actress Eunice Wong.

This is a story about prison, and prisoners, but... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

I read this seven-volume, ~500-page treatise on spinning and yarn-production for work. The first four volumes were published in 2008, while the fifth and sixth—rotor-spinning and alternative spinning (primarily air-jet spinning)—were written in 2009, and the seventh volume—on man-made fibers—arrived five years later, in 2014.

• Volume 1 – Technology of Short-Staple Spinning
• Volume 2 – Blowroom & Carding
• Volume 3 – Spinning Preparation
• Volume 4 – Ring Spinning
• Volume... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the first book featuring the Witcher, a magically gifted, preternaturally physically gifted, and potion-enhanced monster-hunter. He wields a silver sword, pulled quickly from a sheath on his back. His hair is long and silver, his eyes jet black. His eyes match his head-to-toe leather armor, studded with spikes along the shoulders. The ladies love him; his enemies fear him. He knows lore; he is good with animals. He is wise and bides his time. He is a bad-ass, an... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is an excellent book. Everyone should read it, but especially every American should read it. It’s not an easy read, but neither is it easy to confront the fact that you’re part of a monstrous machine that chews up poor people and spits out yachts.

This machine runs on war. It runs on conquest, pillage, and piracy and all that war entails. It not only doesn’t care about the overwhelming number of victims of all kinds—those directly killed, those grievously injured,... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a kind of a meta-plot-twist book: it’s a book with multiple pretty inventive plot twists about an author who becomes famous for having written a book with a nearly shockingly inventive and unique plot twist.

Jacob Finch Bonner is an author who stormed out of the gate, more or less, with a highly critically acclaimed first novel that never landed on the NYT best-seller list, but garnered a few industry awards that left everyone waiting for his next book. He takes a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a sequel to The Peripheral that, because of the wormhole technology involved, actually takes place before that book. The story takes place in an alternate future that had suffered through something called the “Jackpot”, which was a climate apocalypse that eliminated pretty much everything we’re being told it will actually eliminate, but from which a tiny portion of humanity managed to escape with technology wildly beyond ours. They have flying cars, cloaking... [More]

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As usual in a Neal Stephenson book, there’s a lot going on. As usual in a Stephenson book of late, every single last character is possessed of a unique and ostensibly fascinating background, is confident, self-sufficient and self-reliant, interesting, eloquent, funny, smart, skilled, and almost invariably independently wealthy. Does that take a wee bit of the tension out of the book? You betcha.

There is the constant undertone that people who are not like the characters... [More]

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This is a wonderfully written and incredibly honest and sobering look at how America treats what it clearly considers to be detritus—the dead and the wounded from its wars. On the one hand, there is an incredible respect and attention to detail for the dead and wounded. The wounded are offered incredible levels of care—right up until they are no longer in danger of dying, but can no longer be of any conceivable use to the military, at which point they are dropped like... [More]

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This is the story of the press in Great Britain in the 1930s. It paints a decidedly unflattering picture of the entire industry, one that, however hard we would try to claim to the contrary, fits extremely well in describing the media and journalistic culture in this, nearly the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. It is beautifully written, biting satire.

Suffice it to say that absolutely no-one is in any way interested in what actually happened or what the truth... [More]

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This is a short lecture delivered by Albert Camus at Columbia University. He spoke of humanity’s moral decline—or more the obvious fact that it was less declining and more failing to rise to any occasion—and how we should continue to strive for peace, despite the hopelessness of the endeavor. He takes particular issue with the intrinsic hypocrisy that underlies every society we’ve known.[2]

It is our hypocrisy that prevents us from truly moving forward because we are... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the ninth and final volume of The Expanse. Whereas the first books were set very firmly in hard sci-fi, with plenty of orbital mechanics, the second half of the series got much more into the quasi-religious, quasi-magical nature of truly advanced technology. The protomolecule technology and its inventors were so advanced that anything we have looks positively Newtonian in comparison. The other-dimensional, multiverse-hopping demons that destroyed them are even more... [More]

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This is the story of a young man named Joe Bonham who wakes up in darkness and silence. The last thing he remembers is that he was in Europe, serving in the army during WWI. He slowly learns that it is dark and silent because he is deaf and blind. He learns that he can’t speak because he no longer has a mouth to speak of: no tongue, no teeth, just a weird emptiness that he can sense, but not feel. He can’t feel because he can’t move his arms and legs. He can’t move any of... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the eighth book of the The Expanse series. It’s four years after Laconia came in and took over everything in Persepolis Rising. Chrisjen Avasarala has finally died and been interred in the capitol city on Laconia. Holden, who is still being held prisoner there, attends the funeral. He attends a lot of state functions, keeping his ear to the ground. Duarte tolerates him because of his first-hand knowledge of the civilization that destroyed the protomolecule engineers... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

I am often amazed by the holisticity[2] of my research, of how often I happen, by what seems like pure coincidence, to read about several interrelated things. This book starts off in a direction vaguely similar to Amusing Ourselves to Death, but becomes much more. It addresses some of the same topics as No One is Talking About This, but goes much further, investigates the phenomenon of the Internet much more deeply, places it more firmly in the flow of history.

I’ve been a... [More]

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Lockwood has a great feel for using a modern, hip vernacular to describe this world of ours. Her styles feels a bit like Gibson, with his similar penchant for emphasizing cultural relevance with product placement.

The first half of the book is about the “portal”, a kind of stream-of-consciousness brain-dump about what it’s like to live on the Internet and simultaneously in the modern world as a privileged first-worlder. She’s not even shy about comparing herself to a... [More]

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This book explores the thesis that printed material is the sweet spot for delivering information to human beings. The move in the mid-twentieth century to audiovisual presentation is a step in the wrong direction. The medium of television transforms everything it touches into entertainment. The book was written in 1985 and deals with the hole punched in culture by television.

Thirty-seven years later, the direness of the situation has been turned up several notches, with... [More]