Summary of reading: April - June 2023

  • "WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide" by Brian Sletten - a wide and shallow overview of the WASM landscape. Logically, it can be seen as a compantion to "The Art of WebAssembly" which goes deep into the WASM language and spec; in reality, it falls short. The book is full of laborious explanations of computer basics, teaches basic C, basic Rust, etc. It's not clear if the book is meant for actual programmers or for non-technical folks getting the lay of the land. There's no depth in the code samples either - it's just a collection of "Hello World"-level snippets gathered from the introduction pages of documentation. It pains me to write such a negative review of a technical book - clearly there was a lot of effort put into this one; that said, it's just not worth the time, IMHO.
  • "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" by Richard Rhodes - a detailed history of the emergence of H bombs in both the USA and USSR, though it could equally accurately be called "The story of Soviet espionage in the US nuclear program" or "How the Soviets developed their nuclear weapons". In fact, these two subjects probably get much more coverage in the book than its title subject. The book is good, but more details on the actual physics and engineering of H bombs would make it great.
  • "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" by Richard Feynman - additional stories from Feynman's life; this is a sequel to "Surely you're joking". While some of the stories in this book are fun and new, some others overlap with the previous book quite a bit. The part on the Challenger disaster investigation is very long and takes up a good chunk of the book. Overall I enjoyed the book, though it's clearly approaching the threshold of diminishing returns for sequels.
  • "Inventor" by Gersh Taicher - (read in Russian) the next installment of this autobiographic tale, focusing on the late 1980s and early 90s, when the author created a company for well logging using nuclear magnetic resonance and tried other inventions with similar approaches. I liked this book a bit more than the previous one; it discusses the creative process in an insightful way.
  • "Things to make and do in the 4th dimension" by Matt Parker - a tour of various mathematical topics the author finds interesting, written in an accessible and conversational way. While the book's title mentions 4D and the author tries to dedicate some chapters to this topic, it's not a big part of the book and I didn't find those parts super insightful (4D is just hard!), though overall the book is not bad. Not amazing, but not bad either.
  • "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years" by Diarmaid MacCulloch - a very long history of Christianity from its inception and until the early 21st century. Overall, I found this book tedious and unsatisfactory. The first third or so - dealing with very early Christianity and its origins - is pretty bad, IMHO. Its organization is a mess, bouncing from topic to topic, with very little evidence provided for anything. It may be the case that indeed early Christianity just isn't very well documented; unfortunately, this was the part I was most interested in. The rest of the book is somewhat better and more readable (probably because it has actual written sources to rely on), but still not great. I'm relieved to be done with it.
  • "Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond" by Gene Kranz - autobiographic book by the NASA flight director who ran many of the famous lunar missions, including Apollo 11 and 13. Very detailed, in-depth account of how mission control works and the various problems they grapple with. When space missions are celebrated it's usually the astronauts and engineers in the limelight, but mission control plays a critical role too - and this book is good at explaining why.
  • "A Thousand Trails Home" by Seth Kantner - an auto-biographic story of the author's growing up in the family of subsistence hunters in the remote north-west of Alaska, mixed with tidbits about Alaskan history, the changes undergoing the state's landscape, animals and population, as well as a few Caribou recipes. Excellent book, highly recommended.
  • "The Infinite Staircase" by Geoffrey A. Moore - a grand theory of everything with the author trying to create a coherent philosophy of living rooted in modern secular values. Valiant attempt, but IMHO completely misses the mark. I found this book to be very tedious and don't recommend it.
  • "Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer" by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger - this book is alright, but it would be much better if it focused on the technical details rather than MBA stuff.
  • "On Call in the Arctic" by Thomas J. Sims - an autobiographical account of a doctor's 16-month assignment in Nome, Alaska in the early 1970s. Very interesting and well-told stories of local life, though it does feel like the author has a tendency for tall talking. Also, if you're easily grossed out by medical details, this book is probably not for you.
  • "how to: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems" by Randall Munroe - somewhat similar idea to "What if", but from a slightly different direction. Munroe gets to pick the subject and examine it from multiple angles. Another fun book!
  • "The Dark Forest" by Cixin Liu - part 2 of the "Three body problem" trilogy. I liked this part even more than the first one.

Re-reads:

  • "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard Feynman
  • "What If?" by Randall Munroe
  • "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri

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