My wife has started to get into some classics, and I am following suit. Currently reading through The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo, which is interesting if short.
Permanent Record - Edward Snowden
Just finished this on Audible. Very good. Snowden comes across very well - basically a principled guy who blew the whistle on massive illegal US government surveillance. He spends a fair bit of the book on his childhood and teenage years - I actually found it a bit boring in places (in an odd way, another good sign I think - heās not trying to be sensationalist at all). The part where he talks about the capabilities of XKeyscore is very chilling (Snowden is sitting in his office in Hawaii spying on an engineer in Indonesia using the camera and microphone on the guyās laptop to watch and listen to him playing with his kid. The āreasonā the engineer was being spied upon by the NSA was that he had applied to work in an Iranian university).
Edit: Snowden also said that if you look up XKeyscore on the internet and comment about it, youāll probably get flagged somewhere for a closer inspection. Oops.
On Writing - Stephen King
Read this when it first came out nearly 20 years ago. Just listened to it on Audible. If youāre anyway interested in writing, itās a fantastic book. The first half is a sort of auto-biography and the second half gets into the nuts and bolts of writing. Full of really good advice.
2 Likes
Iāve read most of Kayās books, mostly in my early 20s. Not sure how theyād hold up now, as my tastes have changed, but at the time I thought they were awesome; really different from the schlocky sci-fi and fantasy I was used to. Iād recommend starting with Tigana and/or Lions of Al-Rasaan. The Summer Tree is also highly acclaimed, but itās a trilogy, so more to commit to.
1 Like
Stephen Kingās āOn Writingā is a good book about writing, but he throws in anecdotes about his career and his life at the times he was writing some of his best novels. He talks about Misery and how in retrospect he thinks itās really about his struggle with addiction/alcoholism.
1 Like
I didnāt enjoy the movie but the book was amazing.
Currently reading The Overstory by Richard Powers. Wiki says:
The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers published in 2018 by W.W. Norton. It is Powersās twelfth novel. The novel is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. Wikipedia
Which does the novel no credit, it is beautiful.
1 Like
I will read Lakoffās Moral Politics and Snowdenās Permanent Record. @skydiver8 and @IrishRunner, feel free to send me your copies.
Just finished this last weekend. Some stretches are better than others (ldo, I guess), but overall I really loved it. Been talking about trees to anyone who will listen, lol.
Iāve read several of Powersā novels since being assigned Galatea 2.2 in college in the '90s. Iām sure the AI aspects of that novel are laughable now, but I was impressed by him right from the beginning. I recommend The Echo Maker as well.
Iām a Stan for Sean Carroll, so Iām reading Something Deeply Hidden, about Quantum Mechanics, and his arguments for why the Many Worlds interpretation is the bestest. I just finished the intro to QM and am starting with his arguments (which, from his blog and essay writing, at least stem from the fact that MW is the most parsimonious).
2 Likes
I listened to Permanent Record on Audible. You can get a free monthās membership (i.e. one audio book) if you sign up. As long as you cancel membership before the 30 days are up, you wonāt be charged anything.
The Education of an Idealist - Samantha Power
Another Audible listen. Iām only about half way through this autobiography by second-term Obamaās Ambassador to the UN, but itās very good and very well written (Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on genocide āA Problem from Hellā published in 2002). Iām only up to 2009 when Power has only a relatively minor role on foreign policy in the White House. She writes very well about the tension between her idealism and the reality of trying to get anything done on foreign policy in a Washington in 2009 in the middle of the financial crisis when itās far from only Republicans who have pretty shitty views.
Thanks both. Iām going to give On Writing a shot.
Any other SK titles to rec? Obviously itās quite a long list of worthy options. I have read The Shining and Cujo. I own The Stand but am a little intimidated to pick it up - itās like a thousand pages!
The Stand is his best novel
2 Likes
The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism
I guess if youāre into that sort of stuffā¦ I found it a bit cliche and pedestrian.
2 Likes
Itās weird because I read a ton but itās almost all academic journals now. Sometimes I read nonfiction books but find myself questioning how much of them I believe afterward and it feels slow like playing live poker. Nonfiction is basically impossible for me now; it feels like one-tabling live play money.
However, I have gained an appreciation for poetry here lately. Would definitely take some recs on that.
1 Like
Imagine multi tabling play money.
Any starting preferences? Iāve put some of my cards on the table here https://unstuckpolitics.com/t/there-are-no-good-english-poems-written-after-1977-come-at-me
I remember I was really into Emily Dickinson when I was in college. I am not knowledgeable about anything poetry related though, so take that for what itās worth.
I am a total noob but will take a look at both, thanks. Iāve liked everything Iāve read by Edgar Allen Poe. Earliest serious exposure to poetry I can remember is being forced to read a lot of Thoreau and Emerson in high school and thinking ānope.ā Iāve never really appreciated literature as an art form. I think it has a lot to do with how they force feed it to teens with no life experience. Dunno about you guys but in high school I had summer reading lists every year and we would plow through 8-10 classics for summer homework. So itās July and my friends are out doing shit and Iām inside doing a critical reading and review of Little Women or Walden Pond. They lost me.
1 Like
I remember high school summer reading, but definitely do not remember it being 8-10 classics.
Just read Speculator and the follow up book Drug Lord. Both extremely well written. Both show how harmful government regulation often is and how corrupt regulators often are. Drug Lord is relevant to the health care debate. It shows how difficult it is for a small biotech to get a drug approved by the FDA. It shows how the FDA acts a protectionist racket when a drug does get approved to keep out competition that would lower costs. It points out the FDA kills multiple more people by keeping good drugs off the market with delays vs the lives saved by keeping bad drugs out for safety reasons. It shows how cheap generic drugs in other countries that arenāt subject to the patents are. It pointed out how ridiculous it is that pharmacists canāt prescribe drugs. It intertwined philosophy with great story telling. Much better written than Atlas Shrugged, imo. For someone looking to understand why people are skeptical of regulation these books make the case better than I have seen made.
Speculator is great. It is very accurate in the details of how a pump and dump scheme works in the junior mining sector.