2020 in books

I started working on this post a month ago, as 2020 was coming to an end, but I never got around to finishing it. It’s been a very busy month — I’ve been interviewing at a few different companies, accepting an offer from one of them, and searching, unfruitfully, for a house and trying to prepare for that process, when it comes, and the eventual move. So this blog has been neglected a bit.

Anyway, here are the books I read last year (and the start of this year), and my thoughts on them, organized, loosely, in the order in which I read them.

Books

• The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson. Purchased near the end of 2019. I love this translation. It’s so poetic. I’ve been re-reading this very slowly, so I still haven’t finished it.

• Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson. I was listening to an audiobook version in December of 2019/January of 2020. I don’t remember much of it; I do remember having to turn it off on one drive to Massachusetts because it was putting me to sleep.

• The Information by James Gleick. A popular history of information science. I listened to an audiobook at the beginning of the year. It was absolutely riveting, especially after Turing’s Cathedral, and probably the best pop-science writing I’ve read. I realized this field — information science — was the thing I had wanted to study in college and grad school, but I had somehow never heard this term and I didn’t know what to call it or how to articulate what I wanted. Instead I studied “digital humanities.” I never finished this because I stopped listening to audiobooks when I stopped commuting to work. I should buy a text copy of it to finish. Interested in reading other works from Gleick.

• Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. Another audiobook I listened to in January/February that I didn’t finish. The premise sounded interesting — a journalist spends a year training his memory in order to enter an international memory competition — but I found myself bored and disliking most of the major players and wondering what the point was. I don’t plan on buying a text copy of this.

• The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David Black. I read this in the beginning of the year. This book was a great overview of the Ruby language, and, really, a good introduction to programming in general. Highly recommended. One of very few programming books I read cover to cover. Could do with more exercises, maybe.

• Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz. I read this right after The Well-Grounded Rubyist. It was a very quick read — I think I read it over the course of a few days — and a great introduction to object-oriented design and test-driven development in any language. Highly recommended.

• Ansible for DevOps by Jeff Geerling. I started reading this some time in the spring and found the first couple chapters too basic, so I skipped ahead and still felt it was too basic. Maybe I knew Ansible better than I thought? I didn’t end up finishing this, but I don’t feel like I got much out of it, or that I was going to get much more. Would be a good intro, maybe, if you had never used Ansible before. Although the Ansible documentation is also very good, so I’m not sure why this is needed. Maybe I will revisit it if I ever start doing something more complicated in Ansible.

• How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. Good for learning basic patterns that can be adapted to cook lots of different meals. The recipes themselves are kind of boring.

• Algorithms Illuminated by Tim Roughgarden. It taught me mergesort, and the divide-and-conquer pattern. I got distracted by other things and never finished it. Should revisit this.

• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. A collection of short stories by the famous Argentine author. I purchased it in August and have been reading stories here and there since. I finished it in January of this year. Borges has always intrigued me and I knew the plots of many of the stories in this collection already — he is referenced frequently in the critical theory I read in college and grad school — but I’d never gotten around to reading him. The language is erudite and the imagined book reviews can be slogs, but the high points — The Garden of Forking Paths, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and The Library of Babel — are unforgettable.

• Programming Elixir by Dave Thomas. Purchased at the end of August. Lots of great info here, but something about Thomas’s style made it hard for me to parse — I often had to read sentences several times to get what he was saying. In many cases I found the Elixir docs more lucid, but I did find the book helpful in providing a structure through which to approach learning the various aspects of Elixir. I’ve put Elixir aside for the moment so I still haven’t finished this.

• The New Media Reader edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. After reading The Information and learning about Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu from somewhere I wanted to read some of the essays in here, so I bought a used copy off Amazon in September. I haven’t read much of it — “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing (a brilliant essay), and excerpts from Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson. Now that I think about it, that was why I bought this — I wanted a copy of that book, but it’s out of print and used copies were going for a couple hundred dollars on Amazon. It’s a good collection but, ironically, it’s the only book in this list I had to buy in print — I can’t find a digital copy anywhere that’s not a crappy scan.

• A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya by Satyananda Saraswati. I’m “only” about 100 pages into this (it’s a couple thousand, I’d guess). It’s exactly what I wanted: a systematic approach to building a regular yoga and pranayama practice. It’s great if you take the sections trying to clinicalize/scientize the practice with a large grain of salt, and skip the practices that seem questionable (like drinking salt water to make yourself puke).

• Dune by Frank Herbert. I started craving science fiction in October. I used to read a lot of science fiction, but haven’t in like a decade. I downloaded a sample of Dune and the opening chapter, with references to the Butlerian Jihad’s destruction of “intelligent machines” and painful tests to determine if one is human, had me hooked. I think I was also watching a lot of Rob Miles’ AI safety videos on YouTube at this time. It was an epic book.

• The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa. I actually purchased this years ago, when I was living in Urbana. Probably 2015. I re-read the first few chapters in October or November to get back into a meditation practice.

• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. I read this in December after Dune, wanting another sci-fi fix. The first couple chapters dragged but once I got through them it was a very quick read, and I couldn’t put it down. It was a beautiful look at what it means and takes to be free. When I was in college I presented at a conference in Portland, OR. LeGuin was the headlining speaker, but I was unfamiliar with her work so I skipped her talk to see Richard Hell read from his new book at Powell’s. I regret that choice now — looking forward to reading more from her (and less from Hell).

• Exhalation by Ted Chiang. I purchased this at the end of December, just finished it last week. A great collection of stories, each one thought provoking.