Summary of reading: January - March 2023

"The Nine: Inside the secret world of the Supreme Court" by Jeffrey Toobin - a detailed survey of the Supreme Court's justices, their selection process and key cases from the mid 1980s and until ~2007 or so. Very interesting look inside the works of the court that helps one understand how it operates. Unfortunately, the book is author to remain politically neutral, although he seems to be trying to. IMHO this book could be much more powerful and impressive if it didn't have a political agenda in the background.
"The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu - a pretty good work of science fiction, very original. It's refreshing to read a book where the plot doesn't circle around the US, the protagonists aren't American or European and not everyone speaks English. I also felt like the book teaches a bit of history about China in the 1960s-1980s, and has additional - more global - political overtones talking about extreme environmentalism leading to self-loathing and striving for destroying humanity. The science fiction aspect of the book is wide-ranging, from Martian-style hard science fiction, to completely fantastical dreams. The mixing up of technological levels is a bit jarring - a society that can unfurl fundamental particles into different dimensions and communicate across the universe using quantum entanglement surely will have better computing paradigms than etching VLSI circuits with PN junctions onto 2D surfaces, right? That aside, I did enjoy the book quite a bit and will read the next part.
"The Way Things Work Now" by David Macaulay - a large, illustrated book that explains how much of modern technology works, with detailed hand-drawn diagrams and a bunch humor using silly mammoths. While the diagrams are really great, the book is often quite shallow. It does serve its main goal - to keep kids engated while learning about technology.
"Birds, Beasts and Relatives" by Gerald Durrell - book 2 of the Corfu trilogy, detailing some additional adventures the author had with his family. Interestingly, many of the stories here (both human and animal) are... reproduction-oriented, I guess? Not sure if it's accidental or aims to represent the protagonist's age and thought process in some way. One of the funniest books I've read in a long while.
"What If? 2" by Randall Munroe - additional questions answered; these are a bit more esoteric on average, but still fun to read with a good mix of hard science and humor.
"Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction" by Tracy Kidder and Richart Todd - in this book the Pulitzer-winning author Kidder and his long-time editor share their thoughts and experience in writing and editing nonfiction articles and books. It's a nice read if you want to learn how writing happens in real life; if you're looking for tips on writing nonfiction, this book won't be of much use IMHO.
"Handprints on Hubble" by Kathryn D. Sullivan - one of the space shuttle astronauts tells about her career, focusing on her role in the development and launch of the Hubble space telescope. Very comprehensive book with lots of interesting details, particularly w.r.t. serviceability in space and how they planned and trained for it.
"Bond Investing for Dummies, 3rd edition" by Russell Wild - a very detailed and thorough book, and I found the advice given in it sound overall; the author's general investing philisophy seems well aligned with mine (not just on bonds). It's up-to-date (published in mid-2022), but the author didn't spend much time talking about the bond market in 2022 - which turned out to be unusual. I can sort of understand the ommission - the book wants to stay relevant for years to come - but this is my only criticism. Otherwise, very solid.
"A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking - I'm quite sure I've read this one before, but it was more than 20 years ago so there's no record. Hawking is a prominent theoretical physicist that described the process by which black holes emit radiation (now called Hawking radiation); he wrote this book "for people without physics background", trying to explain modern physics from its beginnings and all the way to advanced origin-of-the-universe topics. The book is well written and interesting, but many parts of it are still extremely dense and require a physics degree to decipher. The book also shows its age, as several important discoveries were made after 1988 (for example - the detection of gravitational waves).
"Atoms in the Family" by Laura Fermi - a biography of Enrico Fermi, written by his wife. Starts with Fermi's childhood, through his career in Italy and the move to the USA with stops in NY, Chicago and Los Alamos. The writing is straight-to-the-point and unadorned, which is a refreshing change from typical professional biographers. Pretty good book overall.
"The Art of WebAssembly" by Rick Battagline - a nice introduction to programming in WASM. This book focuses on the WASM language itself (the textual format), discussing many aspects of its usage and interaction with the JS host environment (in the browser or Node.js); there are numerous code samples to try and experiment with.
"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens - a lightweight mystery novel about a woman who grew up alone in the marshes of the North Carolina coast, having been abandoned by her family from a very young age. The mystery plot is a bit weak, but the descriptions of the flora and fauna of the region make for a pleasant reading overall.
"Emigrant" by Gersh Taicher - (read in Russian) a family member recommended this book - an autobiographic account of an emigrant from the USSR to Israel in the 1970s. The book is entertaining, humorous, and likely interesting for people with the right background. I did find the writing to be somewhat too self-centric, however. Granted, this is an autobiography, but I've read many of those and something's a bit off here. Perhaps everyone is self-centered, and the author is just being more honest than average? Another observation is how rooted the author's world-view is in his USSR past; it's quite remarkable, really, given that he left there at 26 and wrote this book in his late 60s. This is very interesting to ponder w.r.t. when our brains mature and get "set" for life.
"How we got to the Moon" by John Rocco - one of those rare gems you find while randomly browsing the science section of a public library with your kids. In this book the author presents a detailed description of the Apollo 11 mission, focusing on all the science, engineering and training that went into it. The information is distilled enough to be understood by middle-schoolers, but isn't dumbed down. The author presents "problems" and "solutions" and covers pretty much every aspect of the mission, with details as minute as the design of the flame deflector for the launch or how thermal insulation between fuel tanks works. What's most amazing about this book is the colored illustrations on every page, drawn by the author himself. The illustrations cover everything from engineering details to the people involved in the mission. Extremely impressive work.
"The Covenant" by James Michener - historical epic novel about South Africa. Paints a fairly damning picture of the Afrikaans population leading to apartheid, and in particular the role fanatical religious zeal played in it. Interestingly, this book was written in 1980, right before the critical decade that saw the dissolution of that regime. Like in some of Michener's other books, he tries to give equal treatment to different eras in terms of book pages; while this is a noble goal, it doesn't always make sense. Much more is known about the 20th century than about ancient Xhosa, for example, so the Xhosa stories end up being long-drawn soap operas while precious little page budget is dedicated to pivotal historial moments in the last 200 years and some parts read like a condensed encyclopedia entry.
"Meltdown: Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima" by Deirdre Langeland - a short but detailed and interesting book about the Fukushima disaster.

Re-reads:

"The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" by Michael Pollan
"Unaccustomed Earth" by Jhumpa Lahiri
"American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race" by Douglas Brinkley
"Little House in the Big Woods" by Laura Ingalls Wilder