For the past couple weeks, I’ve been reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I started it on the recommendation of a coworker, not realizing what kind of book it was. It’s been a slow few weeks, but I finally finished it, and it was pretty good.

So One Hundred Years of Solitude is literary. Like, really literary. It won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not knowing this going in, I was kind of surprised, but it was a pleasant surprise and I think all-told I liked the book. OHYoS tells the story of the fictional Mexican town of Macondo and of the Buendia family that founded it and lived in it until the end. Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, this video of author Reza Aslan made the rounds on the interwebs. It’s pretty ridiculous, and it inspired me to buy his book Zealot. I don’t know a lot about biblical history, so I was excited to read Aslan’s book and get a historical outlook on Jesus.

Aslan divides this book into three parts. The first section is an overview of ancient Judea for about a century before and after Jesus’s birth. This was great because it provided a lot of background on the political and social climate that existed at that time. The second section covers Jesus’ life and ministry. The third covers the history of the early church for about a century after Jesus’ death.

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David Borgenicht’s Action Hero’s Handbook is a good novelty book, but it has some good information and it is an enjoyable read. In the first chapter you learn how to clear a room, secure a crime scene, handle a hostage negotiation, and kill a great white shark. I don’t care who you are, you gotta love a first chapter like that.

Handbook is full of short, fun how-tos for all kinds of improbable situations. It’s not a textbook, but it’s useful to get oriented in case you ever need to keep a bus going at over 50 miles per hour. The only complaint I have about it is that it’s a little short. It doesn’t help that two of the chapters, “love skills” and “paranormal skills” are filled with nothing but platitudes and pointless knowledge, so those are essentially wasted pages.

It only takes a couple days to read Handbook, and it’s a lot of fun to learn all of these skills, so if you’re looking for something to kill time with or a gift for a non-reader, give this one a shot, it’s worth it.

See the full list of books that I’ve read for this project here.

One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic is a book you have to read. It isn’t that long. More of a pamphlet, really. When I think of Lawrence Lessig, I still think of him as a copywrite/EFF guy, but he’s established himself as a top notch political thinker. In One Way Forward, he presents a well crafted case that money is at the core of the US government’s problems. He posits that in this era of connectivity, we are uniquely positioned to bring about a radical change in our government.

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I had never heard of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore until my roommate recommended it to me, and I’d never heard of its author, Robin Sloan. But I decided to give it a shot, and I have to say: This book is awesome!

Written at the crossroads of centuries-old secret orders and cutting edge web services, Penumbra’s is funny, exciting, gripping, and totally off-the-wall. It follows the story of Clay Jannon after he’s laid off by a San Francisco startup. He finds a new job working at a strange, old bookstore for the equally strange and old Mr. Penumbra. Soon he gets wrapped up in the store’s mysteries, using data visualization to solve a secret puzzle and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to crack a centuries-old encrypted book. Continue reading →

No, not the movie/ballet. The NYT bestselling nonfiction (because “philosophy” sounds too scary) book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I’ve heard a lot about this book, and I’ve heard it’s very good. It’s definitely challenging.

After reading Outliers, I was a little disappointed. I wanted something more in-depth and controversial. The Black Swan is definitely that. The central theme of the book is summed up in its subtitle, “The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” Broadly, Taleb thinks that humans as a whole are poorly adapted to live in an environment where a single event can change the world. These are “black swans” (a couple of black swans that Taleb, or “NNT,” as he calls himself, uses as examples are the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 and the “black Monday” stock market crash of October 19th 1987). Because we don’t appreciate the impact of these events, Taleb argues, not only are we driving a car while blindfolded, but we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that we can see the road.

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This week I read Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse. I would call it a poetry textbook, but handbook is more appropriate. It’s short, but it’s very challenging. John Hollander wrote each example in the form of the poem he was describing. So, an Elizabethan sonnet about about sonnets, and an Italian sonnet about how Italian sonnets differ from the Elizabethan ones.

I’ve never been a big fan of poetry. I’ve never read much, I’ve written less, and I’ve never really enjoyed it. But Rhyme’s Reason gave me a better understanding of how to read poetry in 3 days than years of formal English classes. It’s only 70 pages long (plus an ample appendix), but because it’s almost entirely written in verse, you spend a lot of time on those pages.

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Yesterday I finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. It was pretty much what I expected: short, readable stories all on the theme of success. Gladwell made a good case that the traditional narrative of success was flawed, but I would have loved it if he had dug deeper into the subject. To me, Outliers read like an extended TED talk – fascinating and entertaining, but short on meaningful ideas.

Don’t take that to mean it wasn’t a good book – it was. It’s enjoyable and it raised questions that I’ve never really thought about before. Gladwell is a good writer and a great storyteller, and I’m sure that this book accomplished everything he aimed for. I just wish he had aimed a little higher. A little more analysis, a slightly stronger argument – I think Gladwell is on to some cool ideas and I wish he had the guts to keep pushing. He grabbed my attention with his stories about how individual success occurs at the junction of good luck, good timing, good upbringing, and a lot of hard work. Imagine how much more he could have done in another hundred pages.

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Last week I caught up with the Song of Ice and Fire book series. I’m not going to drone on about these books here, but suffice it to say that I’m hooked. If you’re not watching the show, start. If you’re watching the show and you haven’t read the books, definitely start.

The only other thing I want to say about this book series is that I’m glad I’m finally done (for now) – the later books are all over 1000 pages long, so I had to make up for the multiple weeks I read these with Shakespeare plays and Dr. Seuss stories. I’m glad to go back to reading my usual fare. Somehow, despite reading constantly, I still feel like I don’t read enough.

See the full list of books that I’ve read for this project here.