Summary of reading: July - September 2023

  • "Ordinary Wolves" by Seth Kantner - a fictional account about coming of age as a subsistence hunter and fur trader in remote Alaska wilderness in the 1970s and 80s. Since I've read "A thousand trails home" already, the plot is very familiar - the author projected a lot of his own autobiography here. Overall the book is good, but the language is too convoluted and artsy in my opinion - plain writing would have made the book much better. Of the two, the non-fiction "A thousand trails home" is much better.
  • "Julia Child - An extraordinary life in words and pictures" by Erin Hagar and Joanna Gorham - a short, beautifully illustrated biography of Julia Child for young readers. As mentioned before, I really enjoy reading books for young readers once in a while because they deliver the same information with much less fluff; not being beholden to the same minimum lengths as adult books, the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher. This book is a great example, if you want to learn about Julia Child in detail in just a couple of hours.
  • "Endurance: My year in space and how I got there" by Scott Kelly - an autobiography by the NASA astronaut who spent a year on board the ISS as part of a scientific experiment. This is the young readers edition, though still quite hefty at 300 pages. Nice book, with lots of interesting details about the careers and daily work of astronauts.
  • "Death's End" by Cixin Liu - the closing chapter in the "Three-Body Problem" trilogy. Of the whole series, I liked this book the least, by far. It may still be worth reading just for the closure, but IMHO some parts of it are moving too fast, others way to slow, and a lot of it is just... too weird.
  • "Or and Alexandra" by Isaac Noy - (read in Hebrew) a youth novel about a blind boy and his relationships with classmates, teachers and others. An OK book that consistently overdoes it with flowery language, maybe for educational purposes.
  • "Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story" by John Bloom - the history of the Iridium satellite project, focusing on the struggle to keep it alive after Motorola decided to shut it down in the late 1990s. Very good writing with tons of interesting technical and business information. The parts about negotiations to secure funding did get a bit tedious, but I do highly recommend the book overall.
  • "The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human" by Siddhartha Mukherjee - the latest book of the cancer-researcher-turned-writer. Here Mukherjee starts with describing animal cells, how they were discovered and covering different cell types in the body, leading into discussions of diseases (focusing on cancer). Pretty good book; the cell biology didn't feel particularly in-depth (nowhere near Nick Lane's level), but it ties several disciplines together fairly well.
  • "Coming back Alive" by Spike Walker - the story of an epic rescue mission by the US coast guard in Alaska in the 1990s. Provides some general information about how the coast guard works in that area; alas, it mostly focuses on one mission, which makes it a bit tedious to my taste.
  • "CORS in Action" by Monsur Hossain - a short book (booklet, really) describing CORS, with examples for both the client and server side. The book does a good job, but has two glaring issues: first, it's almost 10 years old at this point and things have changed. XHR is not used as much as fetch these days, and there's less need for workarounds for clunky versions of IE. Second, it tries really hard to fill space in order to qualify as a book, but really the core contents could fit in a longish blog post. Many of the explanations are long-drawn, with detours and tables comparing HTTP methods, etc. Thankfully the book is still short so it's not too daunting to scan through these. All that said, it's a useful, comprehensive resource to learn about CORS.
  • "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera - a novel set around the 1968 Prague spring, mostly following the romantic travails of 3-4 protagonists. I'm sure that when this book was originally published in the early 80s, it was considered very avant-garde for the poignant criticism of the communist party, the philosophical sprinkling and the explicit sexual details, but I personally found it a chore and couldn't wait for it to end.
  • "The Opposite of Spoiled" by Ron Liebler - the subtitle is "Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money" and it's a good summary of what the book is about. It's a collection of relevant topics with varying quality; I found the book to be scannered and not overly insightful, but it does have a couple of good points that are worth thinking about.
  • "Chasing Space" by Leland Melvin - another astronaut autobiography. Nice read overall; it would be even better if he spent a bit more time talking about the details of his space missions.
  • "Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry" by Jeffrey Lieberman - a very interesting history of Psychiatry as a science and clinical specialization, focusing on the 20th century.
  • "Finding me" by Viola Davis - the acclaimed acctress's autobiography, focusing on her difficult childhood. Very good, powerful book; especially the first 2/3rds or so. The writing is also very genuine, almost feels raw and unedited in some places. Every semi-famous person seems to be writing books these days through shadow writers; something tells me that Viola Davis didn't use one for this book, and that's commendable.

Re-reads:

  • "Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd edition" by Marijn Haverbeke
  • "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
  • "Masters of Doom" by David Kushner
  • "Little House on the Prairie" by Laura Ingalls Wilder

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