Eli Bendersky's website - "Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century" by Jessica Bruder - describes the lives of the modern van-dwellers, mostly of older adults that travel around the country between seasonal jobs and live in their RVs or cars. Interesting book that tells a good story and avoids being preachy most of the time.
- "Oxygen: The molecule that made the world" by Nick Lane - one of Lane's earliest books. Like the others, it's a packed whirlwhind tour of biochemistry, loaded with enough information to cover a couple of graduate courses and enough ideas to kick-start a hundred new research projects. The pace is brutal - blink and you miss it; for anyone with deep interest in the covered subjects, it's probably worth reading this book several times.
- "The Catalyst: How to change anyone's mind" by Jonah Berger - the signal to noise ratio here is rather low, but it includes some interesting and useful ideas so a worthwhile read overall.
- "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" by Victor Serge - a tale about the great terror era in the Soviet Union; a government official is randomly assassinated by a disgruntled student, and this leads to a series of arbitrary arrests and executions of people across many levels of power. Not an easy book to read, but pretty good overall for anyone interested in that era.
- "An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives" by Matt Richtel - a journalist's (non-scientist) approach to describing the immune system and some of the recent advances in medical care enabled by a better understanding of this critical part of the body. The actual technical descriptions here are certainly inferior to Dettmer's "Immune" book, but there's more focus on the human angle, so the book is also interesting and a decent read. Caveat lector - if you hypochondric, the descriptions of people suffering from cancer or auto-immune diseases in this book are quite graphic.
- "The Age of Dinosaurs" by Steve Brusatte - a young readers edition of the author's book about the history of the dinosaurs. Excellent book - very well organized and methodical, and reflects the state of research until just a few years ago with many new discoveries in the last decades.
- "Lights Out: Pride, Delusion and the Fall of General Electric" by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann - chronicles the last 20 years or so at GE. Sobering read about the difficulty of running huge conglomerates and the effects certain leadership policies have on their future. Also seems to be an example of a strong focus on immediate returns to investors (via stock buybacks and dividends) causing significant drain for the company in the long term.
- "On Immunity: An Innoculation" by Eula Biss - a markedly odd book, which on the surface tries not to offer any opinion - just the author's experience raising her son from infancy and the dilemmas she faced w.r.t. immunizations. Wrapped in a lot of personal stories about her own family that have little to do with the subject, it's not easy to find actual arguments in this book. I think the author's strategy is to subtly nudge anti-vaxxers to realize that their fears are unfounded, and as such it's a valiant attempt. Hopefully it works in reality.
- "The Long Haul: A trucker's tales of life of the road" by Finn Murphy - a long-haul packing and moving driver, of the kind that moves the contents of houses across the nation. An amusing set of stories about life on the road, difficult work schedules and all kinds of odd situations these people encounter. It was interesting to read about the state of deep focus movers have while packing their trailers - sounds very familiar for engineers enjoying the state of "flow".
- "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin - a novel about a pair of friends making computer games together in the 1990s and early 2000s. Sam and Sadie are childhood friends who graduated from playing games together to starting a game development company during their college years. I liked the first 2/3rds of the book, but not the last 1/3rd - its plot twists seemed banal in one sense, and entirely unnecessary in another.
- "Mapping the Deep" by Robert Kunzig - a history of oceanography, with accessible descriptions of the most prominent research in this field up to the year 2000. Very good book - easy to read while providing a trove of interesting information.
- "Murderbot Diaries, Books 1-4" by Martha Wells - a collection of sci-fi novellas about a self-aware humanoid security bot that wants to become indepdendent and is addicted to binge-watching soap operas. The novellas in this collections are "All Systems Red", "Artificial Condition", "Rogue Protocol" and "Exit Strategy". They all follow a somewhat similar trajectory with long action scenes that are moderately tiresome. Overall it's a nice story with some thought-provoking concepts and ideas.
- "The unknown about the known" by Gregory Khait - (read in Russian) a collection of short stories, written by a relative. It's a mix of non-fiction (both factual and speculative), fiction and humor on a diverse selection of topics ranging from the moon race to semi-biographical accounts of jury dury in SF.
- "Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang - a collection of sci-fi short stories. Very original, imaginative writing! The author is not playing it safe and takes risks; some of the stories are definitely thought provoking, but some border on the absurd.
- "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" by Alfred Lansing - a classic account of Shackleton's failed expedition to Antarctica in 1914, when their ship was stuck in ice and had to be abandoned, followed which the crew spent a harrowing 1.5 years on ice and the open sea in horrific conditions. The book is beautifully written and will really make you appreciate your warm, dry bed at night.
- "Mistakes that worked" by Charlotte Foltz Jones - a short, fun book aimed at young readers about all kinds of inventions that came about accidentally. I wish the book was a bit longer with some more details on the science, but perhaps it's just sufficient for the attention span of kids.
Re-reads:
- "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg
- "What you should know about politics... but don't" by Jessamyn Conrad