My Q1 2023 Reading List

Selected books I’ve read in Q1 2023, and my thoughts about them.

• The Emperor of All Malladies. This one took me a long time to read — I’m a sensitive guy and e.g. the radical masectomy chapters were a bit disturbing. Not all of my expectations were met — I wanted rather a future-oriented book, reading about what we know about cancer *now* and what directions are we exploring in research/practice. Instead, the book was more historical, about things we did not know in the past. The presentation is not just about facts, but also about people — the doctors, the patients, both historical and present, from the author’s own clinical practice. That makes the book more authentic and human — at the cost of being quite long. All that said, I’m happy I’ve read it, as I’ve learned a lot about cancer — not practically useful, but contextually enriching.
• Lifespan. I really liked the book — mostly for its scientifically optimistic tone and motivation. The practical advice can be compressed in part into what I’ve already had on my list — calorie restriction, cold exposure, intense exercise, etc; and in part to the more supplemental area of MDM, Reservatrol, and others, which was relatively novel to me. I became mildly more interested in all that, though I still remain wary and suspicious. And I’ve learned a new cool word — xenohormesis!
• Data-Oriented Programming. The book presents the material frequently as a dialogue — something I have last seen used by Machiavelli. It was somehow fun to read, but along with a large volume of code examples, made me to progress through too fast due to low information density. I think the dialogue-based exposure suits more cases where the core material is hard or with unclear resolution. The topic itself can be slyly summarised as “treat everything as untyped json”, which I did not found alluring. Not that I wholly oppose the book — -e.g., the separation of data and code is something I do like, albeit for slightly different reasons — -but the core message just didn’t resonate.
• Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. This was a really good discovery — Smith is roughly in the same category as Howard or Lovecraft, and of those I find his prose the most dazzling and choice of words the most pleasing. His writing is, however, a bit sparse or loose — there is Conan to Howard and Cthulhu to Lovecraft, but no such anchor for Smith.
• Dawn of Fire. Warhammer40k — the bland mileage of my reading marathons. Beside this series, my Warhammer readings also included Ahriman: Unchanged, the Shadespire novel, and Krieg; all without any deeper impression, as hoped for.
• Rust in Action. This was a good one — I don’t think it’s necessarily a good introduction to Rust, as the core language exposure is too skimmy. But I think it was a good decision by the author. This book is more about showcasing Rust applications of systems programming nature, with increasing difficulty, thus serving as a good study companion. I’ve read it along doing Advent of Code in Rust, and reading selected parts of the official book / official docs.
• Nuclear Physics. I like the Very Short Introduction books in general, even though in many I tend to doze off during the middle part which start to delve too deep. This was one such case — all the details of reactions were neither comprehensible nor interesting. That said, the beginning and the end made this read worthwhile; but I think I should have rather read the Nuclear Power book instead, to suit my current interests better.
• Book of Lost Tales. To read this book requires having had contraced and developed an advanced case of Tolkienism. That probably is my case, so I enjoyed reading what is basically early versions of things presented already in Silmarillion, being more narrative but less consistent. I believe it is a pity that Christopher took the fully editorial approach, instead of teaming up with some other author and fleshing those out as narrative-heavy comment-free books. Still, this is an acceptable compromise, the editorial comments covering up for the inconsistencies and providing some context, and the core gives pleasingly escapist reads. Perhaps an upside of the chosen aproach is that it is nigh unadaptable as a movie.
• Global Warming. I’ve read this one as a companion to the Coursera by the author himself, so I’ll judge both together. I really enjoyed it, because it covers a lot of ground while giving you good exercises with various climate models. Not practically useful as far as I can see, but fun to play with. It definitely ranks very high on my book list ranked by what percentage of exercises in it have I finished.
• Wandering Mind. A slightly disappointing one — my expectations were rather high after reading Eric Barker’s review. However, instead of something in spirit of Deep Work, this was more a historically accurate and extensive description of the lives of mediveal monks, at the expense of the volume of practical and ponderworth thoughts. Still, it gave me some uplifts and motivations, so I’ll keep it at a prominent spot in my library as a visual anchor and possibly a future re-read.
• Algorithms to Live By. This book nicely mixes content for me — most of the technical background has been known to me, to the level of e.g. being able to prove optimality of the listed algorithms (however, I haven’t heard about Erlang Distribution before, a shame!), but what extended it was the putting of them to the real life context. It feels like a counterpart to Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow — it shows that some of the heuristics people use in their daily lives are actually not bad at all.
• Proofs and Refutations. I had this essay on my list for over 10 years, so I’ve read it while recalling some memories from the time when I was doing research in pure mathematics myself. It is also written in the dialogue style as the Data-Oriented Programming given above, and I think in this case it is a really good choice and it makes the read a more digestible one. It deals with a similar topic like Fooled by Randomness by Taleb (which I found better) or Logic of Scientific Discovery by Popper (which I found worse).
• How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. This was better than I expected — I guess I may have been biased by never having liked Windows. Anyway the book has a pleasant wikipedia-feel to it, giving a just-deep-enough tour across all the areas that we need to fix, with ballpark numbers for orientation, and a very pragmatic mindset. It will likely get outdated in a few years, but until then, it is, I believe, a good reference about what matters and how much.