Sandy
My mom recommended this to me as a quick book to read on the flight to Istanbul. I didn't end up reading it on the flight to Istanbul, but about a week afterwards. Thankfully I had nothing to fear; there was no Turkey-necessitated context that I needed to make use of.
The book itself though, ehh. We have two characters whose initials are AZ and ZA, and AZ gets some sort of immediate, incurable disease that's going to kill him in a month. The rest of the book is reflections on their marriage, and coming to terms with the end. Perhaps it's more salient in ones golden years; the message didn't connect with me, but I can see how it might in thirty years or so.
God damn, what an interesting book. It's essentially a history of science and understanding, starting from astronomy, giving rise to calendars, then to timekeeping devices, to clocks, to high-precision machinery. But that's just one of the 15+ “books” in this book. There's also a book on the rise of intellectual communities, and of academic journals. There's one on the rise of mathematics, and its slow and successful application to the world.
I didn't read the whole book, but it's well-enough organized that I felt like I could safely skip around and read only the pieces that interested me. I skipped a book or two on philosophy and psychology, for example. But I'm certain that those parts are just as well written as the rest of it. Very highly recommended; probably the best thing I'll read all year.
Abandoned. While the title promises a great deal, the book does not deliver. It's much less about ants than it is about the researchers studying ants, and the very quaint methods they used to study ants. What took them 20+ years of hard summers in the field, wandering around with magnifying lenses following ants around the desert is the sort of thing we could automate today with a couple of cellphones and a little bit of software in a month. Being a grad student sucks in the 2020s, but it seems like it must have been much worse in the 90s.
I found this book in a little street library that was chocked full of books I loved when I was 16. Figured whoever had put it there had great taste, and that I'd groove on this. I was right!
It's been a few years since I'd voraciously torn through a book like I did this one. The first two acts are excellent, but doesn't manage to stick the landing. Everything gets tied up in far-too-convenient bows, but nevertheless it was a fun romp.
It's charming book with a neat wake on the unreliable narrator, but overstays its welcome for the last third. Fun, but ultimately unmemorable (as indicated by me having seen a theatre adaptation a few years back and still having no idea where the book was going.) 3.5 stars, but I rounded up because at least it's short.
Surprisingly great, even though OOP is silly. My takeaway from this book was that there are good patterns in programming which transcend paradigms, and that these design patterns are means of achieving those goals in an OO setting. If you read between the lines and the designs, the advice here is applicable to functional styles as well; just try not to get too caught up in the factories and visitors.
This is a weird book, separated into three parts. The first is on building utopian societies, by rethinking how to thoughtfully organize our macro world into things that work for humans. This section is aspirational without much in the way of how to bring it about—it's fun to think about, but probably not very relevant unless you're directly responsible for building a city.
The second part is what makes for good neighborhoods. Things like how far away parks should be in order to actually use them, what sorts of public squares people will hang out at, and how to bring about a sense of belonging and ownership in your local environment. This stuff reads like a guide to live in the city, much like my takeaways from “The Life and Death of Great American Cities.” While it might not be directly actionable, it's helpful for naming why things do or do not work, and is probably helpful when you're in a position to choose where you want to live.
The third part is on how to put together a building for humans to live in. It discusses things like the optimal size for a patio to encourage conversation, which rooms in your house should be in the sun, intimacy gradients of the rooms in which you will host people, and just generally how to make your place feel homey. This part is extremely actionable, especially if you're currently thinking about these things as I am.
I haven't finished this book, but intend to come back to it. The first two sections, not being particularly actionable, are fine to read front-to-back, but the third is much more random access. I'll certainly pick it back up (as reference material) when I buy a house.
This book is an excellent book on what exactly is going on in music, and why what leads to music that our brains are capable of parsing as music. It discusses the structure of melody, and makes the spicy claim that harmony is all bullshit (arising only due to counterpoint, but not being worth studying on its own.) Melodic lines have structure due to how our brains want continuity, and Westergaard discusses tools for maintaining or breaking that desire of continuity depending on the goals. He gives machinery for parsing music into these underlying operations, or, alternatively, a set of rules for deriving music from basic structure, as well as providing an “interesting-to-humans” metric that closely correlates to the ambiguity and depth of that parse.
I don't know if this book has made my musical skills any better, but it's far and away, hands down the best book I've ever read on music theory. If you've ever been frustrated by the wishywashiness of usual theory that depends on memorizing a billion facts without giving any explanation as to where those facts came from, this is the book for you.
This is the musical theory aimed at grade 8 RCM players? Assuming this book is a representative sample, music theory is in a bad, bad place. Because this book is absolute drivel. In the hundred-or-so-pages, I only spotted two actual occurrences of anything you could call “theory.” Instead, Celebrate Theory is full of inane exercises like “provide an Italian term for ‘lively'.”
Worse, it has perfunctory explanations like “contrast can be achieved in a variety of ways, including changes to the rhythm, melody, or harmony. To create a pleasing effect, composers strive for balance between contrast and unity.” And that's all that Celebrate Theory has to say about THAT topic.
I don't know what's harder to believe; that music theory is in such a bad place, or that I actually spent $50 on this piece of shit.
I didn't much care for this book, but it did make me want to read more Dennett. He comes across as a delightfully clever man who isn't afraid to take his own ideas seriously and go up against the establishment. That's a vibe I could get more into, but this book failed to deliver what I was hoping. I wanted more “here's how I learned how to think” and less “let me tell you about the fun I had in Paris one summer.” Maybe it gets better, but after being bored for a few chapters (with ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE QUOTES SPRINKLED HERE AND THERE) I started jumping to more interesting-seeming chapters.
I never got what I was looking for, but maybe reading his books on philosophy would be more amenable.