Taylor

Reading Cosmos put me in awe of the universe we live in. Sagan gives a sense not only of the enormity, but of the way it has evolved and is still evolving. It is a system that was born from the laws of physics and a large mass of hydrogen atoms with some energy. And now we have stars going through life and death cycles, and also now we have complex ecosystems on Earth, including us - the humans who look up and wonder.

Sagan uses the history of science and the development of astronomy to add an extra layer to the book: it's not just an astronomy book. (If it were, the fact that it's out of date on some points due to being 40 years old would subtract from the book, but it doesn't.) Because more than a book about astronomy, it felt like a book about science: the role scientific pursuit has played in society, in development of civilization. How it interplays with religion, imperialism, slavery. Cosmos is inspirational - it almost makes me want to stop what I'm doing and go off and become a scientist.

Context - read through the book at ~11 kyu.

Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go is an ambitious book, with advice for pretty much any stage in a game, with an emphasis on real and realistic board positions that I appreciated. Most diagrams are accompanied not just by the correct follow-up sequence, but at least one incorrect sequence to help the reader understand why the answer is that way and not the other way. This is enough detail that I could play through some other variations myself to study further. Each section also includes a teeny bit of chatter to break up the study with some amusing stories related to the author's Go experiences.

The book's strong chapters, the ones that I came away with more, were the more concrete and specific chapters - those on tesuji, endgame and ladders and nets, covering approximately 30% of the book. In these chapters, there are examples, problems, and solutions, along with sufficient commentary explaining the though process for finding the correct solutions.

The weaker chapters, to me, were those on more vague concepts and higher-level strategy such as connecting and cutting and shape. In these chapters, I came away with just a little, as many of the positions were explained by declaring the wrong position obviously wrong or too amateurish or improper without any further details. Perhaps the ambition to cover so much material led to not much detail in each section; or perhaps the intended audience is stronger than I am and these things are clear when given just one or two variations, but I did not take away much useful information from a solid half of the book. Not nothing, mind you, but some vague concepts and no confidence to correctly apply those concepts in-game.

I liked how Energy is a tale of how developments in energy and the consumption of natural resources were intertwined with the priorities and needs of society throughout the past few hundred years. Rhodes shows how different discoveries and inventions were responses to the time period they happened in, and to some extent, the subsequent influence. For example, it was interesting to learn that early developments in engines were related to mining for coal for heating, which was important because of the limited availability of wood.

The style of writing didn't really work well for me, though. It felt like the author was trying to cram as many citations into the text as possible, leading to a dense text of quotes and not-always-important facts and leaving very little room for any kind of commentary or context-setting. And I found the way technical things (like how the engines worked) to be a bit strange in the level of detail - some diagrams and descriptions are included but yet not enough to actually understand the systems without external reading. This added to the feeling of slogging through the text for me.