Wants to read The Auctioneer
book
Rated The Cartoon Guide to Statistics 8/10
There’s really only so far you can go simplifying statistics, which by its nature involves a lot of formulas and calculus, but you can get a pretty good gist of the how and why of probability and statistics along with some helpful examples - starting with coin flips and dice, but also health, consumer products, and politics. From the 90s so it’s a little dated both in sociocultural outlook and technology but if you want to be a little bit more literate on the basics it’s pretty well done.
Rated The Devourers 8/10
Wild and rich and unsettling. A young professor in Kolkata meets a mysterious stranger who claims to be half-werewolf and gives him two old documents to transcribe, revealing a secret world of demonic shape-shifters. It's not super long but the writing is so dense and lyrical that I found myself taking a lot of time with it. Absorbing.
Rated The Daughter of Time 8/10
A curious, talky little mystery in which a convalescing policeman considers the very very cold case of Richard III and his purported murder of his nephews.
Wants to read The Shadow of the Wind
Rated Crooked Kingdom 8/10
I enjoyed [b:Six of Crows|23437156|Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)|Leigh Bardugo|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1651710803l/23437156._SY75_.jpg|42077459] a lot, but was annoyed at how abrupt of a cliffhanger it ended on. All is forgiven because this one is even better. Fun, engaging, rich, a quick and compelling read, and aspirationally, the kind of thing I'd like to be able to write. You *do* need to read Six of Crows first, but they're both well worth it.
Rated Anna Karenina 10/10
Correctly regarded as great; it feels very modern despite being a century and a half old. It's only partly about the title character and her affair that upends a social circle of mid-level Russian nobles; more generally it's about *everything* that's upending these people's lives. In this era, Russia is very tentatively confronting modernity. They have photographs, bureaucracies, telegraphs, plumbing, and (notably) railroads, but they're also just barely emerged from agrarian feudalism, and nobody quite knows where they stand now. An emerging professional-managerial class overlaps largely with a fading hereditary noble class, and Anna's infidelity, like the character Levin's freethinking, is just a symptom of this sense of societal flux and displacement. It took me a long time to get through but I quite enjoyed it.
Added Crossroads of Twilight Book Ten of 'The Wheel of Time' to Read Books
Edited 44d ago
Rated The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives 8/10
I have a real weakness for pop math books and this is a great example - brightly written, easy to understand, but gets the wheels turning nicely in your head. <br/><br/>Goes in some depth into the history of probability and statistics, including brief sketches of the mathematicians who pioneered these fields of study, and the role of statistics as part of the history of science.<br/><br/>A surprisingly excellent companion piece to "Twilight of the Elites," which I just read, because it undermines the idea that success or failure is a perfect measure of merit, and investigates our tendency to see patterns and cause and effect and discount chance and luck.<br/><br/>A very smart, fun book.
Rated The Devils 10/10
Amazing and intoxicating big fat weird brutal imaginative gory fantasy novel. Huge (I had to read it sitting at a table). Joe Abercrombie is back!
Wants to read Die Wasserstoffsonate
Wants to read The Left Hand of Darkness
Wants to read Manhunt
Rated Writing and Being 6/10
A series of essays on the writer's responsibility to depict their time and place, through critical review of the authors Naghib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz, ending in Gordimer's description of her own involvement with the anti-apartheid movement. A little academic - the final essay is the most compelling.
Rated I, Claudia 8/10
A clever and fast-reading YA, adapting "I, Claudius" to a California high school. Generally pulls off what it's attempting; as with all adaptations of this type, there are ways it illuminates the original material, ways it stretches the premise delightfully, and ways it stretches the premise clunkily. Recommended if you like Veronica Mars, Megan Abbott's books, or any of those movies/books where it's, like, "here's Shakespeare but with surfers" or whatever. Objectively it has some eye-rolly aspects but I definitely found myself staying up too late or carrying my kindle around the house in order to keep reading, which is a good sign!
Rated The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes 10/10
An exemplary biography of a figure that I, like many, have *heard about* more than I've really *known about*. Carter makes an excellent case for the importance of Keynes through the 20th century and in our own time - it's insightful and grapples with Keynes' contradictions and misfires as much as it does the gravitational impact of his work on the world. A lot of this stuff is abstruse and opaque and Carter is a really good popularizer/explainer, putting into sharper definition a lot of ideas and concepts I'd struggled with. In particular, I think the last couple of chapters are really useful as they define the economic policies of the Clinton and Obama administrations as clearly - and harshly - as I've read in any text. Highly recommend!
Rated Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America 8/10
Not 100% sure how I feel about this book and my opinion wavered as I read it. In some ways the book itself is also the kind of thing the book is intended to critique: a well-intentioned poverty safari, a member of the elite trying to explain to other elites what the non-elite life is like, without really offering the reader anything to *do* about it. But it’s humble and kind enough that it doesn’t come off nearly as badly as it could, and Arnade doesn’t paper over or exclude the reality of racism and the deleterious effects of market capitalism. I don’t know who the ideal reader of this book is; I guess I’m included in that category, though I think I know a lot of the broader points he’s trying to make and certainly buy his worldview a lot more than other people in the technocratic-elite set he’s addressing. A quick but tough read, mostly in the ways it intends, and I’m glad it exists and I read it, but I do have some mild reservations about it.
Rated Passing 8/10
A soapy, fast-reading novel about two childhood friends, one living as a Black woman in a Black community, the other living as white. It's about people and not ideas, but never loses sight of the essential absurdity of a system that assigns status and merit based on ancestry. Predates - both in writing and in setting - [b:The Vanishing Half|51791252|The Vanishing Half|Brit Bennett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1577090827l/51791252._SX50_SY75_.jpg|73423787], but shares its themes and concerns.
Wants to read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity