**18th book of 2021: How the world ends. ** It’s not difficult to envision childhood trauma and sexual frustration as the shaper of global catastrophe. After all, men with childhood trauma and issues with women are the ones who already nearly ended the world. (see: One Minute to Midnight ) Once the wrong fires are lit, * “[t]he whole world now, one vast uncontrolled experiment . . . and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate” * ...
** 17th book of 2021: Sex, Politics, Apathy. ** I have a rule when it comes to scifi: if the main character starts talking esoteric politics while engaging in strange sex, I’m out. House of Suns takes as its premise that humanity has spread through the galaxy, and planet-bound civilizations rise and fall in mere millennia. The only way to maintain civilization for longer periods of time is through clone family lines, known as shatterlings. These families roam the galaxy, fix stars with pseudo-dyson-spheres, trade with new civilizations, and meet for family reunions every 200,000 years or so. Family lines spend most of their time either in cryo or traveling at relativistic speeds, free to wander the galaxy, but clone club has two rules: ...
** 16th book of 2021: Dismal Science ** With advocates like these, capitalism doesn’t need critics. My advice? Skip this book. Great Escape is a free flowing riff on the last 100 years of growth (or lack thereof). As Deaton argues, * The evolution of income can be looked at from three different perspectives: growth, poverty, and inequality. Growth is about the average and how it changes, poverty about the bottom, and inequality about how widely incomes are spread across families or people. * ...
** 15th book of 2020: Science Says… Emotions Matter ** Parenting is about brain development. This isn’t a science, it’s an art. Yet like most toddler ‘artists’, we parents don’t have much experience or instruction, making our art something only a parent could love. Indeed, beyond our own children, most of our experience with parenting is the n=1 exercise of remembering what our parents did for us. So even if parenting is an art, I’d like to rely on the science. Unlike Expecting Better (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2809106496?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1), which takes an economist-skeptic’s view of things that parents shouldn’t do, brain-rules takes a credulous approach to the meagre state of the literature when it comes to parenting and what matters to kids. ...
** 14th book of 2021: Nomadic Empires ** Everybody hates Dubai. The common critique runs that Dubai is * “too new, too fake, too flashy, too lacking in history and culture, the cocky young kid on the block.” *Yet along with Doha, these two cities have become neutral cities, * “with echoes of Vienna in the Cold War, or a Persian Gulf version of the fictional pirate bar in the Star Wars movies.” * Every other city has centuries of history, art, and culture to rely upon. So it’s easy to think of these two cities as outliers, but peel away the layers of time, and the nomadic nature of Islamic empires reveals that each of the great capitals in the Arab world each had their brief and gaudy day century in the sun. ...
** 13th book of 2021: Director’s Cut ** Most of us suspect that we are pawns in a larger game. For me, the only advantage of working in the State Department was unambiguous evidence of pawn-status. So from my vantage point beneath 8 layers of bureaucracy, it was never quite clear what game Obama was playing at. Even with secret briefings and Ambassadorial brunches, information wasn’t available from within. Media coverage was (and is) useless, and contemporary books such as ‘Obama’s Wars’ took scraps of meeting notes and tried to assemble a cogent narrative. ...
** 12th book of 2021: Sci-Factoids ** To be a nerdy American millennial is to have unprecedented privilege in asking ‘what if?’ Not only do we benefit from sci-fi’s boom in American pop-culture, but wikipedia and search engines enable curiosity about time-paradoxes or quantum theory to be answered in an instant. So despite, or perhaps because of my proclivities in such pursuits, I found Exhalation underwhelming. As written in Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling: We are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What sets a story apart from a wikipedia article is the setting and the characters, which allow synthesizing human emotion with interesting idea. This is Chiang’s achilles heel: settings were often flat and characters felt recycled from story to story. ...
** 11th book of 2021: It’s Me who Decides ** Two things every parent craves: 1. Advice on how to be a better parent. 2. Validation that everybody else they know is doing it wrong. Bebe provides both, making it catnip for bibliophilic parents and singlehandedly launching the multicultural memoir sub-genre in parenting books. Get beyond the sugar-coated wrapper of delightful french audiobook accents and casual dunking on American parenting styles, and the content about authoritative parenting is still worthwhile. According to Druckerman, French parenting aspires to the cadre model:* a firm frame surrounding a lot of freedom.* French parents are clear that they are both the household authority and will providing for their own needs in addition to those of the children. French parents express this by enforcing children to ‘do their nights’ (i.e. sleep training), setting the expectation that children should eat at regular meal times, greet all adults, and generally maintain a quiet and respectful demeanor. Within these boundaries, children should be free to explore and fail, whether that means going for a weeklong school trip at the age of 6, or performing the occasional ‘small naughties’. Discipline should come from small, polite adjustments based on well established rules. ...
** 10th book of 2020: I Can’t Handle the Truth ** There’s no need to remember what I say, there’s no need to understand what I say * That’s a good thing, as I absorbed this book about as much as goretex absorbs water. Thanks to having read other books on meditation (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/25942786), a few pithy quotes landed: ** To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves. * ** Calmness is activity is true calmness. * ...
** 7th book of 2021: Sweet Morsel ** If Not, Winter is lyrical but accessible reminder of universal human experience and how little we can retain of even the best muses. Someone will remember us I say even in another time Off of paternity leave and back into the office, I’m ‘Looking for a better way to get up outta bed / Instead of getting on the Internet / And checking on who hit me’ ...