** 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’ ...
** 5th book of 2021: First Principles of Parenting** One constant of learning to be a parent is contradictory advice. People and authors are sufficiently convinced by limited or non-controlled sample sizes and new parents have no priors to push back on bad advice. This is why we have… science. Eliot provides a scientific framework for the massive changes that happen to infants throughout the first 5 years, and while answers are not delivered in the sense of listicle or lifestyle advice, the underlying framework makes this the most compelling book on parenting I’ve read to date. ...
** 4th book of 2021: Somewhere between zero and infinity ** In modernity, we accept that evidence and experimentation can lead us to answering some of life’s most important questions. By applying Bayesian reasoning, we can use priors and the accumulated body of evidence to evaluate new and sometimes deeply strange hypotheses like quantum physics. Yet for SETI, the priors point in opposite directions, creating Fermi’s Paradox: the one solar system we are close enough to investigate thoroughly has intelligent life. Every other part of the universe we have the tools to investigate reveals nothing, only an eerie silence. ...
** 3rd book of 2021: Reversion to the Mean ** A common fallacy among China watchers is assuming that liberal democracies are the norm or a logical endpoint of human development. I would describe this as 井底之蛙, or the frog looking at the world from the bottom of the well. Much of the American China watching community both lacks sufficient experience with non-democratic systems or, frankly, with history, to properly grapple with China’s development. ...
** 2nd book of 2021: Free Play ** friluftsliv * is the nordic concept of getting outdoors as a means to cure all maladies. With the craze started by books like ‘Bringing up Bebe’ this book talks about how Swedes approach parenting, mainly by going outdoors and playing with little supervision. As somebody who grew up in a junk yard, modern ‘junk parks’ seem a both an amusing concept and an essential part of childhood. Like the author, I grew up in a rural environment and wonder what the effects of growing up in a deeply urban city will have on the next generation. Unfortunately most of the book is spent in circular reasoning author’s preferred parenting style and environments are beneficial. I don’t disagree with most of the points, but after the first few chapters, I also didn’t gain much either. ...
** 1st book of 2021: The Forest and the Trees. ** After reading this near 4000 page epic, I found myself made of questions. What is Rome? What is history? What is a book? I don’t know enough to know whether Gibbon threw out the norms, or just wrote this before the norms were created, but Decline and Fall is like trying read a fractal version of game of thrones while playing a memory game about every person you met in elementary school. Is this something you would enjoy? Read on… ...
2021 was a strange year. My first year as a dad changed how I spent time as well as the topics that interest me, and the second year of the pandemic made this year seem almost static. I started and ended the year sitting in the same desk for more hours of more days that I ever have before or will again. I read 110 books but only 53/63 of my target books, and did 100% of my reading in English. Next year I’ll hopefully get through more in Arabic and Chinese. ...
Watch cosmos instead. Or take even a little bit of time to read a full book on the subject.
A book with a reasonable narrative using only 300 word-groups! Very helpful.
Best of the 300 word level books, simple but worth starting out .