Summary of reading: January - March 2016

• "Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks" by Paul Butcher - full review.
• "Clojure for the Brave and True" by Daniel Higginbotham - an introductory book for the Clojure programming language. Covers a fairly recent version of the language and goes over the basics fairly thoroughly. It's hard to judge how suitable this book would be to beginner programmers, but the author does cover things like configuring Emacs, which could be useful for absolute beginners. The book is full of whimsy, though it manages to be not too distracting except in a few cases where more realistic examples would be easier to understand and follow. In general, while I found this book to be not too bad on the basics, it's lacking in coverage of the more complex aspects of Clojure. The coverage of concurrency-related issues leaves much to be desired, for example. Overall, while it's a decent book I would recommend looking for something else if you want to get started with Clojure.
• "The Price of Privelege" by Madeline Levine - secondary title is "How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids", which pretty much summarizes the book's main thesis. If you feel that your kids may grow up being spoiled because your own financial situation is significantly better than what you had growing up, then this book is for you. I think it's interesting and raises some very important points. Specifically, the statistic of unhappiness in affluent teens it unravels is significantly more worrying than mere "being spoiled". I think that at this stage of my life it's a bit too early because my kids are young. It's important to start developing good habits early on, but I'll definitely need a refresher in a few years. I found the first third of the book especially interesting; the rest, significantly less so. That said, I did like the book overall. I think it raises an important issue and provides some good tips for how to handle it.
• "The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah - a long and sad book about the lives of two sisters in France during WWII. Through them, the story of France in the war is told - the life of a small town occupied by the Germans, and life in the French underground that fought the Nazis throughout the war. Treatment of French Jews, concentration camps, different natures of German officers billeted within French homes, it's all in there. Mostly a very enjoyable read. A couple of small parts could be better, like the initial encounters between Isabelle and Gaetan. The author could spend a couple more pages on it. I heard the book through its Audible version and the reading was excellent - very good (as far as I can tell!) French pronunciation, different voices for different characters, etc. Overall, highly recommended.
• "C++ Concurrency in Action" - full review.
• "Structured Parallel Programming" - full review.
• "The First Amendment and You" by John E. Finn (audio course) - a deep dive into the first amendment to the US constitution, examining many landmark supreme court cases that focused on its different aspects. This book is fairly hard core, in my opinion, as far as newbie readers go. While I think I understood most of it, I certainly felt that a basic introduction to US law would be a good prerequisite - getting a more formal education of how the judicial system works (the supreme court in particular), and some basics of how arguments in courts are structured. Overall I did enjoy the course, though. It certainly gives you an appreciation of how complex fundamental laws are, even when it appears that they are fairly easy and brief to define. There are so many nuances and small difference to consider, that it's really hard (impossible?) to come up with an axiomatic system of reasoning and one has to rely on precedents set by past cases instead.
• "The American Revolution" by Allen C. Guelzo (audio course) - a pretty good overview of the American revolution, focusing on the military campaigns. The course doesn't go into much depth on any one subject, so it's best seen as an introduction and a "table of contents" for deeper delving into subjects of interest.

Re-reads:

• "Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden