Fiction

I love Bujold but really can’t get into this series. Main character is a prick, and about a third of the way though I’m rooting for him to suffer all the consequences. DNF

** Barbarous Statistics ** I don’t follow baseball, but I can’t escape statistics. Whether making hiring decisions, investment calls, or building experimental design, statistics haunt every day. In Moneyball, Lewis has found an all-star protagonist and crowd-pleasing backdrop to spin a yarn worth listening to. Lewis’ lesson is not that one should use statistics over gut instinct. Instead it is that statistics are only as useful as the totality of their methodology. A mistake in any level that started by translating the real world into quantized data, then aggregated it to actionable insights, invalidates the entire process. ...

**History’s Dictionary ** History is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. * After finishing this book I can understand why. 10 volumes into the Story of Civilization, the Durants have struggled to find narrative thread in the haystack of personalities and surviving documentation. While this book begins and ends with Rousseau, it is not a biography, and it certainly does little to tell about the epoch defining French Revolution, analysis left for book 11. Yet is also not a history of civilization nor even a history of Europe. It overlaps with volume 9 in timeline, and only vaguely splits the political and economic history of the times. Instead, the fundamental building block of this book is short biographies proto-wikipedia style entries of the great thinkers, politicians and artists of the time. ...

**Build an Empire, Were it So Easy ** The Warrior’s apprentice takes a cocky 17 year old Miles as he machinates his way through warring factions to build a mercenary empire. From Miles’ initial failed leap of faith, I felt myself losing connection to both the characters and the world-building as every improbable and sub-optimal move led to spectacularly successful results. Would you jump off a wall too high to safely land knowing that you might break both your legs, just to make a point to a competitor that might not be paying attention? Do you want to read a full novel about somebody dumb enough to make that choice? ...

Watch cosmos instead. Or take even a little bit of time to read a full book on the subject.

** 81st, 82nd books of 2020: Work = Success** China does well with standard education. In the 2018 PISA results, China Singapore, Macao, and Hong Kong scored 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th respectively. (Link (https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png)) In the US, Asian Americans are sufficiently overrepresented in academic pursuits such that it has become a meme in American culture. One way to describe this difference is in how we get kids to do the things they don’t want to do. In Little Soldiers, Lenora Chu is unable to get her son Rainey to eat eggs. She is astonished to discover that her Chinese preschool teachers had succeeded but horrified to learn how they did it. Every time Rainey spat out the eggs, the teachers would put eggs back in, until eventually Rainy gave up and swallowed. To our American author this was terrible: force-feeding akin to what would be found in Guantanamo. To a Chinese preschool teacher, it was standard discipline - eggs are a good source of protein and Rainy needed protein to focus during the day. ...

71st book of 2020. ** Tidy History of an Important Story, Perhaps Too Tidy ** The story of Genghis Khan is of course amazing. If I could start over with history, this might be the first story I’d want to learn. Genghis Khan (Temüjin) started as an orphan and a slave, eventually won over his rivals, unified the steppe, then launched a dynasty that over the course of the next 100 years conquered more of humanity than any other. Mongolian steppe culture may be alien, but seems like the nomadic version of many modern successful companies: “they did not find honor in fighting, found honor in winning.” ...

30th book of 2020: American Carnage. In deaths of despair, the authors discuss the rising trend of three types of fatalities: drugs, alcohol, and suicide. In most of the first part of the book, the authors break apart the trend, but all you really need to know is the graph above. (must be on computer to view) Since 2000, deaths in this category have nearly tripled across the country, and the trend is accelerating. For some in America, Trump’s vision of American carnage is real. ...

Kinda disappointed by the 1 star reviews here. The sparse words and for some reason strange illustrations have made this my son’s favorite book, despite the fact that he is far more comfortable with Chinese than English. Indeed, this is the first book that he’s learned to request by name (ca go fa!) and he requests it every night. We’re at least 50 readings in and there’s enough happening in the illustrations to do something new every time.

A masterclass in equanimity. This was never meant to be a book, so I read it as series of ’notes to self’ on how to live life, and strive for happiness. Perhaps because I was rather stressed out while reading it, I appreciated the cosmic perspective and happiness based purely on our own actions, stripped away from considerations of events outside our control. I’ll read this again.