Eli Bendersky's website - "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" by Francis Fukuyama - while reading this book it occurred to me that domains of study like political sciense must be incredibly difficult and frustrating. Imagine trying to match a model onto a set of data; the model has thousands of parameters, but you only have dozens or a couple of hundred of data points. This is what political sciense is like; there's a huge number of parameters and variables, far more than actual historical examples. And moreover, the historical examples are vague and often based on very partial memory and sketchy records. So books like this most often just devolve to history. As a history book, this one isn't bad, but I found it hard to draw wide conclusions from the themes it presents.
- "Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell" by Phil Lapsley - a detailed history of phone phreaking. While I wish it focused more on the technical details than on the legal escapades of well-known phreaks, it's still a good book that provides decent coverage of an important era in the history of computing.
- "The Zone" by Sergei Dovlatov - (read in Russian) a satirical novella about the life of a guard in a Soviet prison camp in the 1960s. I liked this book less than "The Compromise".
- "The Joy of SET" by McMahon and Gordon x3 - explores the various mathematical dimensions of the SET card game. It's surprising how much interesting math there is around the game! Combinatorics and probability sure, but also modular arithmetic, vectors, linear algebra and affine geometry. This is a fun book for fans of the game (and of math); it's well written and even contains exercises. Don't expect it to teach you to become better at playing SET though - that's really not its goal.
- "Doom Guy: Life in First Person" by John Romero - Romero's auto-biography, also read by himself in the Audible version. Very good book, gives another angle at id software and the seminal games they developed. "Masters of Doom" is one of my favorite books, and this one complements it very nicely.
- "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist" by Roger Lowenstein - a detailed biography of Warren Buffett. Great book, very informative and interesting; the only issue is that it was written in 1995, and doesn't mention the last 30 years. It would be interesting to read an up-to-date biography at some point.
- "The Great Democracies: A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume IV" by Winston Churchill - the final volume, covering the years 1815 - 1901. There's still focus on England, but also coverage of the American civil war, Australia, and some of Britain's colonial interests in Africa.
- "Starburst and Luminary, an Apollo Memoir" Don Eyles - the author worked on coding the landing programs for the lunar module of several Apollo missions as a young engineer in MIT. The book must be based on fairly detailed journals, because it contains an astonishing amount of detail (given that it was written 50 years after the events described). Pretty interesting insight into that era, all in all, though I didn't care much about the author's mixing in his love life into it. It's his book, of course, and he can write whatever he wants in it, but IMO it just dilutes the other great material and makes it generally less suitable for younger audiences.
- "Stoner" by John Williams - I have mixed feelings about this book, and they will probably take (at least) another read to resolve. On one hand, the writing is clearly masterful and "mood-evoking" in a way that only few authors managed to do for me. Character development is beautiful, and there are glimpses of the flow of learning described amazingly well w.r.t. Stoner's own work. On the other hand, the characters are also too extreme - almost caricatures, and not very well connected to each other. There are huge amounts of page real-estate allocated to certain topics that are barely mentioned later on; this happens again and again. Edith, in particular, is a very troubling character, and since Stoner is clearly presented as someone who is not a pushover when he wants to, his behavior is puzzling to me.
- "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann. A young German college student arrives to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin who suffers from TB, and stays for years, chronicling the odd personas flowing through the establishment. There's always some risk with trying famous books from over 100 years ago, and in this case the risk materialized - I found this one to be tedious, rambling and outdated. It's not all bad; there are certainly good parts, funny parts and some timeless lessons about human nature. But on the balance, I didn't enjoy this book and the only reason I managed to actually finish it cover to cover is because of the audiobook format (which let me zone out at times while doing something else).
- "Breaking Through: My Life in Science" by Katalin Karikó - an autobiography by the molecular biologist who contributed significantly to therapeutic uses of mRNA, including its use for the COVID-19 vaccine. Highly recommended.
Re-reads:
- "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman - still a great book, though I did not enjoy the re-read as much as I'd thought I would.
- "The Man Who Changed Everything" by Basil Mahon
- "Of mice and men" by John Steinbeck