Eli Bendersky's website - "All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys' Soccer Team" by Christina Soontornvat - a very nice account of the unusual event that kept the world enthralled in 2018.
- "The Frontiersmen: A Narrative" by Allan W. Eckert - tales from the US frontier in the period right before the revolutionary war and until the war of 1812 (back when the frontier was Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana), told through the stories of two men. One an American frontiersman, the other chief Tecumseh. Very good and informative book overall, though it's hard to shake the impression that - despite the author's efforts and best intentions - this is a mix of history and fiction. Much of the story had to have come from ancient oral accounts of Tecumseh's exploits, for example.
- "Understanding Deep Learning" by Simon J. D. Prince - a good texbook on modern deep learning, with strong focus on convolutional networks, transformers and GANs. The book has nice colorful diagrams, is more fundamental (mathematical) than applied, and comes with a bunch of accompanying Colab notebooks that augment the text with working code. The author tries to reason why things work the way they do, and now just how they work.
- "Essays" by E.B. White - a collection of selected essays (mostly from his years at The New Yorker) by E.B. White on a wide variety of topics. I liked many of the essays here, in particular those about life on a farm in Maine. Many others only make sense in their original historical context, though. A very chill book about everything and nothing at the same time; great for pre-sleep reading (I don't mean this in a derisive way!)
- "The New World: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume II" by Winston Churchill - despite the name, this volume spends most of the time on the civil wars in Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries. Several wars with Scotland, Spain and the Netherlands are also covered. So much pain and suffering just because of different approaches to the same religion...
- "Poisoned Water" by C. J. Cooper with M. Aronson - subtitle "how the citizens of Flint, Michigan, fought for their lives and warned the nation". This book tells an important story that needs to be told, but it's written in a weirdly stilted and annoying way that makes it challenging to consume.
- "Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942" by Ian Toll - the first part of the Pacific War Trilogy, covering the period from Pearl Harbor and until the battle of Midway. Really excellent writing - it's hard to believe a nonfiction work of history can be so gripping.
- "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion" by Sean M. Carroll - the author aims for that elusive and difficult segment of "in-between a physics textbook and a popular science book", with the insight that readers should be able to read and use equations even if they don't understand their provenance. This is an admirable quest, but ultimately doomed IMHO. Sorry, unless you have actual advanced undergrad physics background and are just catching up, you're probably not going to go from "I did some Calculus in high school" to understanding what the author does with Riemann curvature tensors to calculate Minkowski spacetime metrics for black holes. The book is not bad - the author is a good writer and explainer, and provides some intuitive insights that I haven't encountered before; that said, for someone who typically resents being presented math without a chance of undestanding it on a deep level, the book definitely misses the mark. On a personal note, I should just stop even trying to read books like these; they're not good for light reading, and if I really want to learn something, then a textbook is better.
- "The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance" by Paul Strathern - a comprehensive history of the Medici family and their domain of Florence through roughly 350 years from the late 1300s to the early 1700s. Good overall, with interesting insights into how Europe operated in those days. Some parts of the book are a bit tedious and it's sometimes easy to keep track of the specific Medici family member being discussed (because the names are so similar).
- "The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944" by Ian Toll - the second part of the trilogy, covering the period from Guadalcanal to the conquering of the Marianas including Guam. This one is also very good, but I wish the author focused a bit more on the American industrial power that played a critical role in winning the war and less on individual battles.
- "Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets That Launched a Second Space Age" by Eric Berger - a detailed history of SpaceX from the early Falcon 9 experiments to 2023 or so (just before Starship started flying). Good book with lots of interesting technical details; the writing is a bit dry, but on the other hand I appreciate the lack of embellishment and minimal side quests. Enjoyable and fascinating, overall.
- "Starting FORTH" by Leo Brodie - the classical introduction to programming Forth. Good book, but not great. The format of the first chapters is useful, with helpful exercises at the end. My main criticism is that the coverage of I/O is rushed and confusing.
- "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner - a history of Bell labs and the most influential inventions coming out of it, focusing on the first few decades after WWII. The book attempts to uncover the reasons that made Bell labs so successful, but doesn't provide too many insights in that respect. While not a masterpiece, it's a decent book all in all.
Re-reads:
- "The Martian" by Andy Weir - very happy that they finally released a classrom edition of this book, and I had fun re-reading it with my kids.
- "Guns, germs and steel" by Jared Diamond
- "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse
- "We the living" by Ayn Rand