A Year of Reading in Review, Vol 4

This is my fourth year of writing up a yearly reading review. In time, that's about equal (more or less) to a college education. I'm not convinced that I've lived up to that in the past, but future reading trends are pointing a more scholarly direction. You can see a type of specialization happening in my reading from this year already -- when I find something I like I really dig down into it.

There were several of these types of 'marathons' this year. Previous years have definitely had themes to them, no doubt about that, but this year's felt particularly interest driven. Michael Lewis and Hannah Arendt are the two biggest carry-overs from 2017, so I definitely 'completed' the goal of reading more of them in 2018. To date, I think I've read almost every book Lewis has published. I'm probably about halfway through Arendt's works. I've got one of her books on the docket for 2019 but I'm not very optimistic about getting through it. My interests for 2019 are taking a bigger role in dictating what I'm prioritizing reading, and I don't think that Arendt quite makes the cut.

Stats

I try to keep track of the books that I read in Goodreads. One because it makes it easy to sort and two because they do a nice year end summary of total pages and book counts. I still have to compile publication dates by hand, though. Here's hoping they add that as an easy metric to track at some point in the nearish future. 

I hate to say it but I think I'm going to be extra lazy this year and not put together a 'when was it written' histogram. As much as I love knowing the stats, I'm not feeling particularly up to it at the moment. I might come back and update this later, but probably not.

According to what I've remembered to enter into Goodreads, I either finished (or decided not to finish) 50 books last year, for a total of 15,006 pages. Compared to last year that's almost twice the number of books, but only 5,000 pages (33%) more.

Errata

For what it's worth, 2018 felt like the year that reading hard books got a lot easier. Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism in some weird, unfathomable way, marked a big turning point in my personal ability to read 'difficult' works. I mean, I've read a lot of technical, not so easy things over the past decade or so, but something about the subject matter and just Hannah's insightful way of writing feels like it changed the game in terms of both what kinds of work I find myself able to enjoy and my bar for what good writing should read like.

In addition to moar reading, I also did lots more writing in the second half of 2018. Both on this blog as well as my two other media properties, plus Twitter. I also was an 'official' editor for the first time ever in 2018, for The Prepared. I edited the piece they just published on supply chains in Africa.

I also got into reading technical papers and books, more so than any previous year. As with previous years, I spent a lot of time on Twitter -- I probably spent hundreds of hours reading and replying to threads. I wonder how many books that reading time would have translated into. This next week I'm going to try picking up a book in the morning instead of my phone, to see how much farther through my stack I get.

And boy howdy do I have quite the stack right now. 2018 was a big year for book buying. I read a small fraction of the books that I acquired, and I'm looking forward to lots of great reading in 2019. To be honest, this year-end review is a huge motivator for getting through the books I've got piled up, a bit like looking forward to adding them to my killsheet. If we're being honest, if I stopped buying books today (and trashed my library card) I would, hands down, have enough books to get me through 2019.  Is finishing books the point? Yes definitely, because each book represents a specific skill or interest that I'd like to acquire. I'm a very greedy person, in that regard.

As you're wont to do in your senior year, I've finally hit upon a writing project that is going to require a good amount of reading investigation. I expect this coming year to be filled with books that help support my latest academic interest: quantum rhetoric (you can follow along with my reports back on the project's blog: http://foolproof.ink/).

Reviews + Top Picks

Alright, enough exposition. Here's my top picks.

Top Picks

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Classic on investing and stocks.
Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber. What is money, really?
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. Great fucking book on where political movements come from, specifically authoritarian ones.

My top picks are all about explanation: political and economical and marketable. See below for a bit more info on these, and every(?) other book I read in 2018.

Hot Takes

The Question Concerning Technology Martin Heidegger, translated by William Lovitt

7/10

First off, fuck William Lovitt. As far as I can tell, his is the only translation of Heidegger's essay "The Question Concerning..." in English and it sucks. It is hot, over done trash. It reads like a graduate student's project. I mean yes, I am grateful that he spent the time to translate it because the essay is really phenomenal but I cannot, unfortunately, recommend the translation. It's on my 'todo' list to put out a translation of the translation -- i.e. something actually readable, because the essay deserves it. Sort of.

If you can get past the terrible translation, this essay is marvelous and brilliant and thought provoking and Heidegger is a fucking trolling turkey and I love him for it. Written around the time of the nuclear bomb, Heidegger attempts to situate human's relationship with technology in terms of our general 'nature'. It's an absolutely stunning piece, one that comments deeply on the often talked about relationship between technology and the humanities or arts.

Trouble in Paradise, Slavoj Zizek

-/10

I didn't finish this, as I just couldn't get interested in it. Maybe someday, in the distant future. Maybe someday, in a different reality.

The Soul of An Octopus, Sy Montgomery

-/10

Yet another book I tried and failed to read. This book fit a writing style or pattern that I seem to be struggling to engage with lately. It's a personal memoir with science-y anecdotes thrown in, more portrait than prose or narrative. Or maybe not, I honestly just couldn't get into it. I wanted more of a contemplation on consciousness, but this book wasn't it.

The Economic Naturalist, Robert Frank

2/10

The intro to this book alone is far higher than 2/10 but the rest of the book is incredibly not worth reading. It's mostly a compilation of questions about why the world is the way it is, that's attempted to answer via an 'economic' mindset. Entertaining, sort of but it got old really quickly.

Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, Jane Jacobs

4/10

I've concluded that I've read almost all I can by Jane Jacobs that would be new information. This book, sadly, only reinforced that idea. It's got some great interviews with her, but none of them were really new to me. Ce la vie, eh?

Making Things Move, Dustyn Roberts

8/10

Oh my goodness this book was absolutely amazing. It's more of a how to for electronics projects, but as someone who knows not very much about circuits or power or how motors work, this book was the perfect introduction. I now own a benchtop power supply because of it and feel 100% more confident in my ability to get motors and other electronic projects up and going. I highly highly recommend this book to anyone who's circuit or electronic project curious.

Worth noting that Dustyn was a professor at ITP, an amazing graduate arts / technology program at NYU.

The Bone Season, Samantha Shannon

The Mime Order,

The Song Rising,

The Pale Dreamer.

6/10

Fantasy series from a British author. Good, light reading about a dystopic London filled with magic and shadowy death creatures. I read them while hiking through Portugal on vacation and while I can't recommend them for a hiking backpack (they're a bit voluminous), they're great fun escapism. I'm looking forward to her next 'standalone', The Priory of the Orange Tree

Mastering Bitcoin, Andreas Antonopoulos

8/10

This book really changed the career game for me this year. I read it in March/April when I started a new job working on a Bitcoin custodial wallet, and I immediately fell in love with Bitcoin. The book is a great primer on the topic from a technical angle, but is a bit far behind now in terms of SegWit and Lightning. If you're looking for a nuts and bolts explanation of how Bitcoin the protocol works, you could do far worse. I even talked my mom into reading this one. She was suitably not impressed.



Flash Boys, Michael Lewis
8/10

This book really opened my eyes to the realities of modern stock market trading and dark pools and front running, and weirdly enough, convinced me that stock trading isn't nearly as complicated as the jargon makes it out to be. Caveat emptor: You may not have the same thought reading this book.  It's the story of a man named Brad Katsayuma and his quest to build a stock exchange that looks after the interests of its investors, not the hedge fund traders looking to bank in on having a technical edge -- one that lets them cash in on microsecond long information asymmetries.  If you're at all interested in how modern money markets work, this book is a must read.


The Big Short, Michael Lewis
7/10

I read a lot of Michael Lewis this year. Because his books are great -- every single one of them. This book tells the story of the financial crash of 2008. I took a couple things away from this story. The first is that willingness to dig in and just read the information that's public and out there sets you apart from 95% of anyone in a field. At least, used to. The other is that even money is political. Spoliers coming but: I can't remember the character's name, but the weird med student turned hedge fund trader that sets up shop in California, makes a big bet on the subprime market collapsing, cashes in big, and then gets abandoned by all of his big investors because of the tactics he pulled to make sure that the bet came off ok. Trust is important, no matter what field you work in.



Binti, Binti:Home, Binti: Night Masquerade Nnedi Okorafor
6/10

One of the few sci-fi series I read last year. I really enjoyed getting into some shorter fiction. They didn't quite hit my system construction buttons as much as I would have liked, but I think that was a function of length. Short synopsis is about a woman who leaves her small town backwater for space university.


The Tompson Method of Bodywork, Cathy Thompson
8/10

My voice teacher recommended this book to me for the vocal exercises in it. I'd never heard of bodywork, but this book is revolutionary in it's wholistic look at emotions and aches. I've long believed that emotions and mindstate is heavily influenced by our bodies -- that the mind/body connection is more connected than the little slash between the two words would have you believe (mind is a construct that originates in the body and all that). This is an incredibly practical book full of low key stretching exercises to help you sort out and find apparent and latent pain. I'm terrible at doing body maintenance things regularly, but this book helped me work through some excrutiating back and arm pain earlier this year. Desk work sucks!


Men Explain Things To Me, Rebecca Solnit
4/10

In a lot of ways, this book helped sparked a movement called `mansplaining`. I'm sure it's good, but I don't remember it so I'm giving it low marks. These sorts of tracts are ones I always have trouble holding in my head, which imo is never a great sign for the writing or topic.


Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt
9/10

Forget fucking Anne Frank's diary. This is the book that we should be making high school children read when we teach the fucking Holocaust. Arendt attended the trial of a Nazi party wonk in Jerusalem and wrote back court reports for an American magazine. This book is the compilation of those reports. This is easily one of Arendt's most accessible books, and it's brilliant and scathing and so incredibly damning. It was hugely controversial in the Jewish community when she released it, mostly for how it told the real story of how Jewish communities in Europe inadvertently helped keep the gas stoves full. All in all, this is a world class portrait of bureaucracy and personal responsibility -- issues that are more modern now than ever.


Boomerang, Michael Lewis
7/10

I read a lot of Michael Lewis this year. I think this one is the one where he goes around to all the countries that got fried by the 2008 financial crash and reports back what the aftermath of the meltdown has been. Destinations include: Greece, Germany, Iceland, and Vallejo, CA.  This kind of detail on a financial crisis is what makes Lewis such a great, and reliable story teller. His stuff is good because he does the on the scenes reporting, talking to the characters that no one else seems to think to ask about.


Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, Max Page
2/10

Another one I don't really remember the content of. I picked this up a while back when I was looking to get a better understanding of what critical work had been put out in response to Jane Jacobs' theories about economies. The short answer is not much. This book has some rebuttals but none of them were particularly coherent or salient.


The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
10/10

Out of all the books I read in 2018, this is one of the ones that I'm the most proud of having finished. It was a real job to get through it, as the prose is incredibly dense. Dense, but so rich. The level and clarity of Arendt's insights into how human political bodies think and the history of their motivations is unparalleled. This work is a classic, and speaks so soundly to our modern era. I truly think that Arendt will prove to be the philosopher of our modern times. It really upsets me that she's not as widely read as other, more ancient philosophers like fucking Descartes or Plato or Nietzsche or fucking Marx. Like fuck Marx. He doesn't have nearly as much relevant shit to say as Arendt fit into this one book.  Briefly, Origins covers three large social trends in Europe from the late 1800's up until the 1940's: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism, and Authoritarianism. Part history lesson, part philosophy, part sociology, Arendt explores the events and motivations for human action that contributed to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the Bolsheviks in Russia. Meticulously researched, if I let her, she'd have filled up my reading list for the rest of the year with original sources. I did buy Democracy in America on her recommendation, and am looking forward to getting into it in 2019.


Networks of New York, Ingrid Burrington
3/10

This book is more like a who's who of network paraphernalia and ISP providers in New York City than the indepth look at computer networking that I was hoping for. It's well researched and the pictures are quite good. I rather liked learning about the companies behind all of the city's connectivity but my initial disappointment at wanting a book on 'networking' rather than equipment and companies is why it's rated so low.


Aw yeah here it comes. The great Lewis run. Ready?

Panic!, Michael Lewis
9/10

This book is a compilation of news articles and clippings surrounding the last four biggest stock market crashes that we've had, internationally as well as in the USA. The goal of this book seemed to be to show us how incredibly nothing that we as humans know and understand about financial crashes; both that no one can predict them and that they're devastating. The article format didn't make it the smoothest in terms of narrative, but it did change the way that I think about investing and crashes and that's been incredibly valuable in the last few months.


The Money Culture, Michael Lewis
6/10

Compilation of articles Lewis wrote while he was working at an i-bank in NYC in the 80's. Great look at the mentality of men who trade money for a living. A bit dislocated because of the article nature of it.


Home Game, Michael Lewis
7/10

Journalistic recounting of the joys and pains of fatherhood. Great short read.


The New New Thing, Michael Lewis
8/10

Profile of Silicon Valley told through the lens of the story of the man who made a zillion dollars at least twice during the first dot com boom (Silicon Graphics and Netscape): Jim Clark. In some big way, Clark was responsible for a lot of the way investors approach Silicon Valley. At least, according to this book he is. Most of this book focused on the huge side project Clark worked on during most of his time during the period that he was supposedly starting big new projects -- a self-sailing sailboat called Hyperion. (Which incidentally is now up for sale.)


next, Michael Lewis
9/10

I loved this one. It's a short series of profiles of people who's lives have massively changed by the Internet, way back in the 90's. It reads incredibly fresh and relevant, even 20 years later. I'm continually amazed at how Michael is able to pick up on interesting trends and movements in society and then find interesting stories to showcase them. Ace job on this one, imo.


Losers, Michael Lewis
8/10

This one's interesting to me, because it doesn't really readily appear on most collections of Lewis's work. I think I found it on Wikipedia, or another book's list of 'other works by'. It's basically a behind the scenes tour from the 1994 campaign trail, from the Republican field as they work towards knocking Bill Clinton off of the pedestal. Ultimately a failure, but it's again fascinating to see how certain, um, trends in the Republican platform have been around for pretty much forever at this point.


Pacific Rift, Michael Lewis
7/10

A look at Japanese business and money culture, from Lewis's time working in the financial industry in the 80's.


Coach, Michael Lewis
7/10

Short book telling the story of Michael's high school ball coach, that's also a meditation on growing up, personal responsibility, and the role of parents in their children's lives these days.


The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis
8/10

I really didn't want to read this book, as I thought the reviews of it weren't that interesting (two economists that work together, who cares?). I was wrong. As usual, Lewis found a great story to tell, this time of two Israeli economists who spent a lot of their time re-evaluating how human emotion and biases impact our actions and judgments. This feels, in a lot of ways, like a furtherance of the themes on bias and numbers that Lewis started with Moneyball.


The Blind Side, Michael Lewis
8/10

Absolutely a great story about how the game dynamics of football changed the value of a particular position, and the rise of one particular low-income boy who just so happened to be the perfect build for that particular, now well valued, position.


The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis
8/10

Recently, Lewis has been working to understand what kind of an impact the coming Trump presidency will have on bureaucracy in America. For this one, Lewis went around and interviewed a bunch of people that worked on the Trump presidential transition as well as long time bureaucrats who left office with the regime change. Fucking terrifying in its conclusions with regards to project management expertise and the current administration.


Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber
10/10

Graeber's one of those writers to watch. If I had a million hours, I'd definitely go back and read everything he's written. Which is a hell of a lot, to be honest. In Debt, he digs into the history of money. Where did it come from? I really enjoyed the anthropological view that he took on money. This book definitely changed the way that I think about both commerce and Plato's theory of forms. It also led me to some particularly interesting insights into Bitcoin, which you can check out in this basicbitch post.

Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke
-/10

I didn't finish this because I couldn't stand the narrator. I'd classify this as an overhyped business book. It might have some gems of wisdom in them, but I'm not about to torture myself to get them. Ostensibly about Duke's experience winning poker hands.

The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham
10/10

This book is a bit slow going, but really great. If you get it, get the updated copy with commentary from Jason Zweig -- some of the regulation and availability of different securities has changed in the last 60 plus years.  Graham 'invented' the concept of value investing, which basically means buying stocks that are worth the money. He also goes into how bonds work, and various different types of investments. I learned a lot and it's really made picking stocks out a bit more fun than it was before. If I was actually taking his advice though, I'd buy index funds. I might try to set this up for 2018.


Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, Silvia Federici
9/10

Collection of essays and articles by feminist Federici. This is one of the most coherent takes I've seen on the chronic undervalue of women's labor -- both at work and in the home. Federici argues that we should be paying women a wage for housework and I couldn't agree more. Between this book and Graeber's Debt, I think I've got a pretty good case for the masculinity of money.


Distributed Systems, van Steen and Tannenbaum
7/10

I wanted to take a course on distributed systems, but couldn't make it work with my schedule so instead I read the textbook. That was this one. I managed to get through it in a week, which was no small feat but holy cow did reading this book change the game for me in terms of understanding both Bitcoin and modern problems in computing. I'm not sure I'd totally recommend it though, since the writing style is more case study like than explanative. That being said, it's really clear that the authors know their stuff -- I really appreciated their ability to understand and sort convey the importance behind a bunch of key work in distributed systems.


The C Programming Language, Kernighan and Ritchie
9/10

This book is about the C programming language. It's good for people that are new to the language. I really enjoyed the tone that this book was written in and found the exercises incredibly helpful. It's short, to the point, and does a great job of pointing out the nuances of the language in an easy to understand way.


The GNU Make Book, John Graham-Cunningham
5/10

Just ok, I think. I picked this up because I don't really understand Make. I understand it a bit better now. This book did a good job of talking through some of the more advanced usages of the make system, but I didn't love it.


Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, Richard Bach
6/10

A short book slash parable about what it'd be like to be god. Pretty good if you're into new age philosophical works.


Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground, Kevin Poulsen
8/10

It feels like I read a bunch of books about early Silicon Valley this year. This is one about a hacker named Max Butler who gets into the stolen credit card game, what was easily the biggest 'digital money' available for stealing on the Internet, at least until Bitcoin. It was interesting to read about the Hungry Hackers gang -- it seems like a good number of them still live in the Bay Area.


Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson
6/10

I picked this book up because it teased something about quantum mind states. It turned out to be another new age philosophy slash metaphysics books. It goes through the levels of consciousness and awareness, consolidating thought from  Freudian, yogic, tarot practices, to name a few.  Thought provoking and a quick read, I learned a lot about tarot from it.


The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
9/10

Great book by an amazing comic. I was, in some way, struck by how similarly the Adams' prose mimics some short stories I've written in the past. It was eerie to realize that other people had a similar style. About the book: adventure story about getting blasted around the galaxy with a man who's a professional intergalactic hitchhiker. I was really shocked by how close this book gets to discovering quantum rhetoric on its own.


How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan
7/10

Both a history and personal recounting of psychedelic research in America. Based on the broad conclusions of this book, I would love to see psychadelics both decriminalized as well as institutionalized in terms of being an easily available form of treatment for depression and addiction.


My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
5/10

Depressing fucking book about what happens if you disappear from your life with the help of a bunch of prescription pain pills. Sort of a great portrait of what a disconnected, disappearing life in New York City is like. I really like reading books based in NYC, so this one was super fun for that.

vittgenstein

i feel this strange pull toward wittgenstein, an increasing curiosity, largely inspired by the inability to find the book of his that i bought in portland earlier this year.

i need to read wittgenstein.  i know nothing about wittgenstein, only that i must read him. i must read him, i must. i know that he tweeted. i know that he has only one full book. i know that he is quoted on the wikipedia article for occam's razor.

i have so many books to read. so many blog posts to write. but i need to know this man. i need to know what he thought.

i need to know why i can't stop thinking about him.

rethinking

I've had the opportunity to really rethink some things this weekend and I honestly couldn't have thought of a better way to spend the time. I also read a metric shitton and it was the best thing I could have imagined doing with my time. I feel like I'm finally getting over some really big hang ups with algorithmic thinking and computational problem understanding. It's huge in a way I can't describe, really. The ease with which I can flip through a textbook on programming topics and really grok what they're talking about is mind-bendingly new and radical. I mean, I've had this happen to me before in other domains, but this honestly feels like a new kind of superpower. It's not just a problem domain, it's a way of understanding problem domains.

Honestly, what's helped the most is all of the difficult, non-fiction book reading I've been doing lately. I've really dug in, in the last year, to reading dense, long form non-fiction books. It felt really crazy to be devoting so much time and energy to reading such difficult stuff in my free time, but man has it paid off in spades. What really helped me get through them was picking stuff that I find genuinely interesting and that's just blow-your-socks off amazing. Which is to say, authors that sincerely reward the effort. Ok ok, it's mostly just Hannah Arendt. Her stuff is so good though. Finding someone that can really reshape the way that you see the world is intensely powerful. I made it through Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. I'm really glad I started with Condition, it was by far the most difficult of the three, but incredibly worthwhile. I've got her short book On Violence floating around somewhere -- I seem to have lost track of it but I'm super keen to get to it, if and when it ever shows up.

I took my personal vanity, which has always given me much personal grief in the form of guilt, and put it in this new, intelligent, true context. I look at myself because I want to know what I look like. It's a curiosity. The real negativity comes from feeling like I shouldn't want to look, and really, who needs that kind of negativity weighing down their features.

Slowly drying you out of my head one table turning conversation at a time. It's a weird thing to evict a tenant of any standing. It's not like it's been long, but I know you're better off elsewhere. It's been nice to have my perspective back though, and to really see instead of watching the picture window my fantasies have been projecting out onto reality. They don't call it a reality distortion field for nothing, sweet jesus. One of the biggest reframing of it though, has been to realize how much having you inhabit my head was, in some ways, not unlike having a muse. I agree, it's a very strange and grandiose comparison, but, in some ways, not totally inaccurate. The real tragedy would be to have been inspired by the experience and not embracing that.  In fact, more people should be upfront about their muses, traditional gender roles be damned.

I looked in the mirror today and the first thought was that I'm turning into a terrible looking middle aged woman. Then I tried looking at myself as if I were a man: was I handsome, how strong is my jaw? and, well fam, I don't look particularly striking as a man either. Some things are just good to see.

lately

I've been writing a lot more lately, and it feels like it's completely changed my relationship with this blog.  Instead of this being the outlet for the first barage of thoughts, I've only got more distilled information for you.

I find myself wanting to report back from the fields of inquiry, rather than using this as a place for self expression.

Journaling is so wonderful because it really lets me organize my thoughts and gives me this great fodder of jumping off points for inquiry later, when I'm not in a productive or contemplative mood.

Two things have come up lately, both related to works that I'm currently reading.

The first is around investments and returns, precipitated by Benjamin Graham's Intelligent Investor book*. I'm about a quarter of the way through the book (I just finished chapter 4). There's some interesting discussion about T-Bills, municipal bonds, and preferred vs common stock. I spent some time tonight digging into how bonds are valued (what's a discount versus premium bond means, and how to approximately calculate their value to maturity).  I added a couple questions around this to Anki, which feels super good.  I figured out how to search for Houston municipal bonds in EMMA, and even ran a couple of calculations of what the YTM (yield to maturity) would be for a few of them.  It's pretty cool that EMMA will show you the tax-preferred status of bonds in the titles. Some bonds are subject to the AMT. According to the internet, these trade at a bit of a better rate, so if you're not subject to AMT it might be a good deal. (Most salaried people aren't subject to AMT).

I also went through and looked up the current dividend status for all of my current stock holdings. About a quarter of the stocks that I own currently have a dividend. The highest rate was 6.69%, the lowest was 0.23%. Of course, rate is a function of the stock price itself so this fluctuates based on the stock's valuation. A dip in stock price would mean that dividend rate would go up.

The next things I want to look into are: how to invest in bonds using my existing trading account, and what is some currently available corporate paper rates. Write up a small Excel program that can calculate the total return of a stock pick based on both it's stock price gains plus dividends, ideally connected to some data source that can just keep the damn thing updated. Graham's function for how to value a stock was price + dividend return - inflation - tax rate.  I'd love to get a calculator that can handle this for me.

Karthik and I were talking about soccer and I realized that soccer, as a game is still in this really young, malleable state. They update the rules for the game constantly, and no one seems super upset about it. They're really far ahead in terms of understanding how to cut out trolls and protect the game, too. They have this amazing policy of not replaying video of fans that rush the field, so as not to encourage copycats. It's both frustrating and also incredibly amazing. They care about the game, and making it better, and it really shows. I'm sure soccer has other problems, but as a game and community it seems really wholesome.

I want to start an ETF for soccer. It would grow marvelously over the next 30 years.



The second thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is networking. This particular train of thought was mediated by starting another book, Ingrid Burrington's Networks of New York. As a preface to reading it, I tried to write down everything that I already knew about computer networks, specifically the Internet, worked. It turns out that I get lost somewhere between "TCP is a packet formation and call/response protocol" and "RS232 is a way of sending data between two computers". What's missing is all of the routing and packet switching info.

Ingrid's book didn't really answer this for me**, so instead I've started reading RFC 791, which lays out the IP (Internet Protocol).



* It's the updated version that was annotated by Jason Zweig around 2002.
** It really reads like more of a who's who and where's what of NYC internet infrastructure.

A Year of Reading in Review, Vol. 3

It's time for the annual year of reading review.  There's a number of books on the list this year that really deserve a longer blurb than I'm going to give here. Hopefully this year I'll do a better job of actually writing in depth reviews of books I've read.

On the face of it, I read far less books this year than in the past two years.  In 2016 I read 52 books, roughly one book per week. This year I reported reading just over half that many, 29.  There's a few reasons for this discrepancy. The first is that I simply read less books.

Secondly, in 2016 I counted books that I decided not to read.  I did this because "deciding not to" was a theme of 2016 and I wanted to celebrate the books that I chose to put aside.  I took several books off of my reading list in 2017, but it felt so natural it doesn't seem worth counting.

According to Goodreads, these 29 books contained 10,289 pages. The oldest book was Eric Hoffer's True Believers; the newest, Phillip Pullman's first installment of his new Book of Dust series, was published in Octobe of 2017.  Believe it or not 3 of the books that I read were published in 2017.  Talk about quick turn around time!

Looking at the histogram of when the books I read were published, I feel that I did a pretty good job of reading a mix of older books while keeping up on new works.

On a whole, I feel like the quality of the books I read this year was higher than last year's. I really enjoyed the majority of the books that I read in 2017, and found a few new favorite authors!

Authors I'd Love to Read More of in 2018

Hannah Arendt.  Hannah's writing and clarity of insight is boss level good. Her book The Human Condition is, at least on Wikipedia, quoted as being one of the best books of the 21st century.  I do not think that they are exaggerating. In terms of depth and quality of analysis of real world phenomena, I'd put her on par with if not better than Jane Jacobs.  I'm really looking forward to reading more of her work in 2018, particularly Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Michael Lewis. Lewis is a master storyteller.  His books paint the most vivid pictures of the people involved, in a really concise and clear way.  He does such a great job of contextualizing everything; it's really inspiring. If I could write like anyone, I would want to write like Lewis does.  I wasn't expecting to enjoy his books as much as I did.

Themes

Stories about the way the world works, the people that work inside of it; books that inquired into the nature of human work and trade and thought; I tried out a few new fiction series, none of them really stuck. I read my first ever Chinese fiction and realized what an enormous super power Asia will be for the 21st century.  I read books about urban structures and power systems within them.  I learned a lot about the specific history of some niche industries and phenomena.

Top Picks

Usually my top picks for books are the ones that contain vital human truths that everyone must know.  This year's a bit different -- instead I picked books that I really enjoyed reading.  Vital truths aren't always the most enjoyable!

The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan
Fortune's Formula, William Poundstone

Book Synopses / Hot Takes

Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
6/10

This is a collection of short works of speculative fiction.  I found the central conceit of the stories to be incredibly good, but the actual prosic execution lacking in spark.  More than anything, the tone and pacing of the stories didn't feel very natural.  Worth reading for the brilliant story lines alone, however.

Creativity, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
2/10

I'm rating this book low because I found it lacking in rigor and insight; the writing was just plain boring.  However!  Csikszentmihalyi attempts to find commonalities between people that he terms Creatives with a capital C -- the difference being that a Creative has an impact on a community; whereas a normal creative doesn't necessarily build a practice around their work.  Another thing that Csikszentmihallyi points out, but without much extrapolation or further exploration, is that most of the individuals his team marked out as 'Creative' lost one or both parents at an early age.  I personally can't stop thinking about this; in particular what does it say about the parent child relationship? How has a rising age limit on people changed our ability to build independence; what is the relationship then between independence and creativity?  These questions are not addressed in this book, but I find them incredibly relevant; our politicians are on average older than ever.  On a personal note, all of my grandparents and parents are still alive (and I just turned 30!).  Is it normal for humans to live for 30 years without a close personal loss?  Has this affected my own independence/creativity?  Hard to say.

The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher
5/10

This is the tell-all novel of Fisher's 3 month affair with co-star Harrison Ford during the filming of the first Star Wars film.  This book convinced me that Star Wars owes its success to both George Lucas's genius and Carrie Fisher's wonderful love for life.  Fisher passed in Dec 2016; I'm glad she got this book out before she went.

A Manual For Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
3/10

In isolation, I think Lucia Berlin writes amazing stories.  As a collection of work, however, the themes and situations that her characters find themselves in struck me as incredibly repetitive. Make no mistake, Berlin is a masterful storyteller, but I got burnt out.

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street, William Poundstone
9/10

I love books that tell stories about people in real life, while teaching you something about the world. This book does that; it clearly shows how the Martingale betting strategy works while telling the story of the men who created and refined it.  I know considerably more about the world of bet making now, with the historical context to understand it.  So good.

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis
7/10

This book is weird. It doesn't really fit into any category outside of a certain genre of woke literature. It tells the history of L.A. through various aspects of the city's geography. It's incredibly good and also incredibly dense; it took me forever to read this book. More than anything, I blame this book for slowing down my reading progress in 2017.  Definitely worth a read if you're interested in urban spaces and the political power of space.  Also, being new to California, it was an AMAZING primer into the history of land use and speculation in Cali, and more than anything really drove home why the rent is so goddamn expensive here.  History matters yo!

La frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante
6/10

This English translation of Elena Ferrante's was released in Oct 2016; I didn't get around to reading it until early 2017.  I was absolutely floored by Ferrant'es Neopolitano series; Frantumaglia is a collection of Ferrante's letters writing about her writing process, her relationship to her readers, and some further context for the inspiration for her work.  Ferrante is well-known for her secretiveness -- Elena Ferrante is in fact a pseudonym; no one knows for certain who the actual author is.  I enjoyed reading her personal correspondences and interviews but eventually found them to be a bit repetitive.

Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis
9/10

This is such a good book. Lewis is a masterful storyteller.  In Liar's Poker, he walks us through the politics and personalities of the Salomon Brother's trading firm in the 80's, when the mortgage credit derivative desks were getting their start.  It's a must read for anyone who wants to better understand how trading desks actually work, and why the Sarbanes Oxley act was so incredibly necessary.  More than anything, this outlines the history of mortgage backed securities, more or less foreshadowing the crash of '08.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, James Howard Kunstler
-/10

This is embarrassing. I honestly don't remember much about this book.  I think I read it too close in time to Organization Man; they both largely trace the same phenomenon but through different lenses.  Org Man focuses very acutely on a single neighborhood and the psychology of large organizations; Geography of Nowhere focuses more on the built environment and the impact of a car based culture.  Good but apparently not incredibly memorable.

Milk and Honey, Rupi Kaur
6/10

A collection of very personal poems. A good, quick read.  Honestly I think I would have enjoyed these a lot more had I read them 6 years ago.

The Organization Man, William Whyte
8/10

I found out about Whyte's book through a biography of Jane Jacobs; I believe that Whyte was an editor or peer of Jane at the Architectural Forum, but don't quote me on this.  I loved the close, psychological profile that Whyte paints of the type of individual that does well in corporate environments. In a large way, it echoed the guardian syndrome that Jane spells out in Systems of Survival.  His comparison of organization men to socialist societies is A+; as well as his in depth dive into the communal aspects of early suburban living.  My favorite thing about this book is the appendix where he tells you how to beat personality tests that are given to you by corporations. It would have come in handy back in high school -- I failed the first one I ever took, for a job working as a cashier at a suburban grocery store chain.

 Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, Jessa Crispin
2/10

All I remember from this book is thinking how terribly written it was.  It was one of two books published in 2017 that I read and is a stark reminder of why Nicholas Nassim Taleb recommends reading older books as they've mostly already been weeded out for you.  While it might have had good points based on my recollection of the terrible writing, I don't recommend this book.

The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, Samuel Florman
7/10

This book is an older but incredibly relevant collection of essays and thoughts on the ethical responsibility of engineers and the communities that engineers work in.  He's got a great, early essay in the appendix on why getting more women into technical careers is important for the robustness of engineering solutions and the societal impact of engineering innovations.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis
8/10

When Moneyball came out, I was an undergrad at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.  A lot of my professors and fellow classmates were incredibly enamored with this book; for that reason alone I stayed away from it. That was a mistake. This book is pure bloody genius. If anything, its a great story of how the commerce mindset disrupts a traditionally guardian industry of picking ball players.  I'm glad Michael Lewis chose to tell this story.

Crazy Rich Asians, #1 #2 & #3  Kevin Kwan
10/10

This fictional series of books about a rich family in Singapore is pure beach reading material. It's wonderful and satisfying and witty in all the right ways. I'm actually looking forward to the movies, if nothing else for the sets and clothing.  I loved this book because it changed the way that I think about Asia and Asian wealth.  There's a fuck ton of money in Asia; it's no wonder American companies are all into breaking into the Asian market.  It was also really interesting to see what wealthy people care about: not just fancy clothes but having the most exclusive clothes that money can buy.  Rarity, exclusivity, difficulty in procuring a thing, big events where you could showcase your ability to get the rare thing -- these are the conceits that rich people spend their time with.  Well, some rich fictional people, at any rate.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
8/10

It felt appropriate to read Joan Didion during my first year in California, a transplant from New York City. I connected with the stories in this book on a really personal level.  Joan's writing is wonderful and her perspective and clarity of vision very refreshing.

A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1), George R.R. Martin

Guys, I hate to break it to you but George Martin is never finishing Game of Thrones. At least we have that in common. I picked this one up because my roommate was giving up this gorgeous set of the first (and only) five books; I really enjoyed it, especially getting to know the backstory that the TV show largely leaves out. I feel no real pressure to finish them though, so while I enjoyed them I really enjoy reading other books more.

Reflections on the Human Condition, Eric Hoffer
4/10

A collection of quips from Eric Hoffer's writings. I found it punchy, but overall harder to understand without the complete context that Hoffer wrote them in.  If you're gong to read Hoffer, I wouldn't recommend this one.

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1), Cixin Liu
7/10

A sci-fi novel about aliens and physics in a post-Cultural Revolution China.  Good but not a super fun read; I think the flow of the narrative suffered a lot in translation.  I don't necessarily mean in word choice, but also probably in narrative style that doesn't translate culturally. Or maybe not.  The degree to which this book expressed novel and compelling uses of technology in a fantastical/futuristic setting radically changed the way that I think about China's capacity for technological innovation. I expect to see a lot of really amazing new technological advances coming from purely Chinese innovators in the next decade.  That being said, I don't feel any pressing need to read the sequels to this book.

A Darker Shade of Magic (Shades of Magic, #1), V.E. Schwab
4/10

I've had this book on my reading list for a long time now, mostly based on the cover art alone. Guilty.  It was a good novel, but not the best fantasy novel I've ever read. Chalk up another one in the Series I Enjoyed The First Book of But Probably Won't Read The Rest column.

Astronomical Algorithms, Jean Meeus
9/10

Once I figured out what Meeus was talking about, this book is good fun.  This is hands down the best book for computational astronomy.  The preliminary chapter on debugging computer programs quaint and also incredibly useful.  The equations in it are what power the Moon Clock project I did last year too.  I still find the amount of human observation that must have gone into compiling the equations for this book downright baffling. It's a textbook, so I'm not sure I'd suggest reading straight through it, but if you need to figure out some planetary movement shit, this is the book you need.  At least, for the next few hundred years before all of our equations are outdated.  Those planets be moving, yo!

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, Robert Pirsig
10/10

If there was an Honorable Mention for favorite books of 2017, this would get one. This book is hands down the best reconciliation between Western and 'Eastern' philosophy that I've ever seen. It's also incredibly relevant. Pirsig gives the best definition of art that I've ever seen, and explains in words that I would have never been able to find what's wrong with pure, Aristotelian logic.  This is the kind of logic that I see men in power use to the detriment of my women friends (and myself) all the goddamn time, and it felt so good to see this clear, logical yet firm and absolute rebuttal of the nature of pure logic.  Robert Pirsig passed away in April 2017.

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, Peter Frase
3/10

I picked this book up on a recommendation; it's an attempt to depict four different futures of humanity, if you were to hold a few general trends steady. I found the framework superficially interesting but lacking in any clear or original conclusive, analytical thought.  I'd pass.

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer
7/10

Eric Hoffer has a dim view of mankind, especially movements of mankind. In this book, he traces the forces and personalities that play into mass movements, for better or for worse.  His points felt uber-relevant reading for the first year of Trump's presidency, especially the part about how traitors and staunch loyalists have this strange tendency of being one and the same person.  Belief in a cause sometimes can lead you to undermine the integrity of what you're fighting for...

The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
10/10

There is no other book like this one.  It is dense, rich in revelation, and highly applicable and understandable. It was also incredibly slow reading, but so incredibly rewarding for the effort.  This book is hard to summarize because it covers so goddman much material in so little pages.  But, I'll try anyway.  Hannah's Human Condition takes us on a journey through the history of the modes of human activity: labor, work and action.  This is philosophy though, so she ties in the history of Greecian slave society; what the absolute truth of an unknowable future means, truly, for human interactions; the impact of Galilean astronomical revelations on the scope of philosophic thought; and more.  This book is goddamn great. Read it, and reconsider everything you know about your life.

Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky
7/10

This book is a compendium of the history of salt.  I picked it up for two reasons. One is that Jane Jacobs mentions salt making in her fanciful description of an ancient city's economical growth (The Economy of Cities) and I was curious in what ways salt served as a backing for ancient economies. The other is that, considering the breakdown of modern survival systems, I was curious what value salt might have.  In other words, should I stockpile a 25-lbs bag of salt from Amazon now, and hope that I can use it to barter for goods in some bleak future scenario where the global trade network has temporarily collapsed?  The answer, it seems, is a bit complicated, but in case you're wondering, salt is pretty key in two ways for 'pre-modern' humans: food preservation and anti-bacterial properties.  If global trade breaks down, it'd probably be handy to have around; in case you're wondering Morton's Salt is a privately owned company.

La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust #1), Philip Pullman
8/10

I love Philip Pullman's narrative style. Even though I could tell this was written for a younger audience in mind, I still really enjoyed reading Philip's prose.  This is the first book in a new series (trilogy?) about Dust, the magical property that featured prominently in his first trilogy, His Dark Materials.  La Belle Sauvage tells the early story of Lyra came to live at Oxford.  A really fast paced a good read; of all the series I started and did not finish in 2017, The Book of Dust is the one most likely to find it's way onto my reading list in the future (the other books haven't been published yet!).

here is a series of thoughts that i have had today

reality is not what you think it is.

my name is neil saitug and i write about things.  i also read things.  most of what i read will never come to fruition as written thoughts.  this thought, in a great company of other sad thoughts, saddens me the most greatly.

here is a series of thoughts that i have had today, and a few recurring thoughts from this week:

- the power of explanation, as expostulated by David Deutsche in his two books, The Fabric of Reality and the Beginning of Infinity, are everywhere.  it is one of the core functions that powers great teachers and great ideas alike.  explanations are cross-cultural; they are universally treasured by humans of all creeds, classes, occupations and concerns.  in fact, I would naively posit that the key to understanding any group or single human being is to understand the explanations that they make use of.  this thought is so deep, that I find it reflecting back at me in almost any media or interaction, both present and past.

- the true revolution that underlies the free software movement (rebranded and watered down in the mid-aughts as Open Source software). this thought is driven largely by finishing off Gabriella Coleman's Coding Freedom.  coincidentally, the Google v. Oracle debate that is occurring right now makes a great stage for dissecting the current day status of copyright vs freedom of speech legal status of open source code; in fact I would argue that the lawsuit is one of the most monumental public and legal moments for open source/free software meets copyrightability that has occurred since Coleman's book was published in 2012.  on a more personal note and as someone who writes code, i found myself deeply reconsidering my own attitudes and proprietary assumptions surrounding the code that i write.  when i write and publicize code on the internet, what is my relationship with the people who find it?  how is that similar (or different) to the relationship that I am assuming right now, with you, my reader?  to what extent is code different than essays?  what is the most important thing about putting my code out in the world: is it freedom of that code to become part of the commons of code that exists for the world to use, or is it recognition of authorship, or monetary?  how much control do i as a creator of a public work do i retain for myself over the work itself?  how much does that matter to me?  are ideas really free, if they have a creator?  or am i just a vessel for the work?  (can you hear it?  the voice? no?  i'll tell you what it's saying: ego, ego ego).  i'm leaning strongly towards allowing the next bits of software that i write to be strongly free, but am struggling with accepting that other people may make money off of them.

- book mania.  i've been buying books like a fiend for a while now, and have been feverishly reading through them.  i'm starting to flag a bit tho, as the number of books that i want to read, while currently in my lifetime an attainable goal (that is to say that given all of the books that i would like to read currently, if i were put a hard stop on the list, i would ostensibly be able to finish all of the books within the end of my lifetime.  there is a point where this will no longer be the case, however.  what that point it is is...?)  so, given that i can read all of the books that i want to read, is there an ordering or certain works that are more important to read earlier than later?  this builds a bit upon the idea that there are certain thoughts or habits that can act as catalysts for further thoughts or lines of inquiry; ideally these generative books would be the ones that i read first, and save all the others for later, where the timeliness for them is less important.  ok, so how do i pick out which books are more timely than others?  i don't have a good answer for this yet, but here's a few general rules of thumb that i've been using: recently written books get higher priority, as they're more likely to be timely/about currently actionable things.  books that are recommended to me by someone else are more important than books i've found via Amazon.  books that pertain to lines of inquiry i find currently interesting are ranked higher.  fictional works have currently taken a bit of a backseat, the thought being that most plot lines are things that I've read before, and assuming that most fictional work is not contributive to 'generative' thought as other works (i'm sorry to say it, but recent experience has proven this to be exceptionally true).  here's a list of the books (and book genres) that i'm currently attempting to find time for: finishing David Deutsche's Beginning of Infinity; a book/dissertation of the results of a generative, social AI experiment (starting to wonder if i wouldn't have gotten thru this faster if it had been in ebook format); a number of books on the history concerning the 34th street district (Macy's, Santa Corp, Empire State Building, Penn Station) -- these have a deadline of next Monday; Pychon's Bleeding Edge; a book of short stories; Hamilton's biography; a book on the engineering systems underlying NYC; Tuttle's beginning Chinese characters; a very recently published book on poverty and racism in America; an ethnography on sex, commercialism and public space in Times Square; there are more but i can't remember them.  Ok so maybe the most daunting thing right now is finishing Deutsche's Beginning of Infinity (it feels like I've been stuck on it for months now).  Unsticking this one should hopefully let the others flow more quickly.  Books that I've abandoned as being not longer relevant or just plain uninteresting: A.O Scott's book on Criticism & Camus' The Rebel.

- ups and downs of having a dog.  i've been a bit down on myself lately for not entirely appreciating the responsibility of having a pet, to say the least.  it is a bit of work, and time and, most prohibitively, a certain amount of guilt inherent in leaving her at home by herself, or not letting her sniff the flowers for as long as she'd like to because i need to get home.  strangely, one of the bigger pluses of having her (besides the companionship and built-in schedule reinforcement) is the removal of the curiosity of what life would be like with a dog. i've been talking about getting a dog for years now, waffling on it you could almost say.  now i rarely have that mental pressure or distraction.  in a way, the relief is a huge validation of the power of doing things and dealing with the consequences than not doing things but forever wondering whether or not *now* is when I should do that thing.  ie: favor action over waffling, because the peace of mind pays dividends a thousand fold.  a strong corollary to this is writing thoughts down -- writing things down and publishing them on the internet has the effect of helping to clear out my mental space, like reducing the pressure in a hose.