Tag Archives: books

stuff I’ve read in 2023

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This is just a grab bag. I’ve read two reasonably entertaining novels set in near futures where climate change is ravaging the world. Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock was the more entertaining of the two. Stephenson is a good storyteller and his books are easy to read. But obviously, read Snow Crash first if you never have.

I’m about half way through Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Like all Robinson’s books I have read so far, this one is less entertaining but he does a good job of world building. I feel like he is trying too hard to educate me though – sometimes if I want to be educated I will go read a non-fiction book, and if I want to be entertained I will turn to fiction. Books that lie somewhere in between can be irritating.

I’ve enjoyed two mystery/action series this year. The Jack Reacher series is great escape fiction about your basic middle aged white male hero type who is good with guns and fighting, and fighting with guns. I hate violence in real life but it is hard to write entertaining stories with zero violence, so there. I don’t think I ever want to see the movie because I enjoy the book character too much. I’ve also been enjoying the Bernie Gunther series. This one is is bit dark and morally complex as it deals with a detective/policeman hero type who happens to be an involuntary reluctant Nazi. But seriously, it is good and recommended.

Speaking of dark and morally complex, I read a couple books by Octavia Butler – Kindred and Parable of the Sower. She subjects her characters to niceties like murder, rape, and slavery, and I guess you get to find out what they are made of when they respond to these situations. She is a good character developer and storyteller though and worth a read, as long as you are not already depressed going into it.

I read Dan Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos series, which is about Greek Gods, transhumans, Greek Gods who may be transhumans, robots, Shakespeare, Proust, and robots who like Shakespeare and Proust. This is pretty crazy stuff and you have to really like Dan Simmons to like it. I am liking but not loving it. I guess I would read the Hyperion series first, if you have not read any Dan Simmons.

Actually what prompted this post was a post by Charlie Stross (contains spoilers) about his Laundry Files and New Management Series. I gobbled up the new one that came out this year, Season of Skulls, because I gobble up all his stuff as soon as I can. It’s exciting to hear Charlie mention in this post that he has plans to wrap up the Laundry Files series with two more books “because his publisher insists”. (Could George R.R. Martin sign on with this particular publisher?) If you haven’t read any of these, I would go all the way back to the beginning of the Laundry Files, and enjoy!

best “urban planning” books of 2023

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And the “best of” posts begin… I put urban planning in quotes because the field is broad and covers a lot of ground that may be of interest to engineers, natural and social scientists, economists, and many others. Here are a handful that caught my eye:

  • How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between. Interesting to me because, in general, neither the United States nor my specific state or city seems able to get big things done. I think this is largely a failure of imagination and priorities, but I also listened to this Freakonomics podcast recently on how construction productivity in the U.S. has just gone nowhere over the last 50 years while productivity in other sectors has grown by leaps and bounds. They rule out lack of capital investment and excessive monopoly power. Some evidence seems to point toward regulation (whether health, safety, and environmental protections are “excessive” is in the eyes of the beholder, but this also includes misguided/outdated local land use policies like minimum lot sizes and parking requirements), citizen input/resistance (but in my city, legitimate public input takes place alongside some shady politician/developer horse trading and the two can be hard to distinguish, and of course, existing homeowners have a rational but unhelpful interest in resisting new construction and new residents, and this can also be tinged with racial bias). Nobody thinks better construction management and risk management would be a bad thing, and this is an area I think computers and automation (call it artificial intelligence if you want) might make a difference. Make a digital model of exactly what is supposed to be built where and when, then monitor the hell out of it during the construction process to try to anticipate and correct deviations from the plan before they occur. There is always interest in prefabrication and making construction look a lot more like manufacturing, which it superficially resembles except for taking place in the real world of weather, traffic, surprise underground conditions etc. And then (not really covered in the podcast) there is the high-tech stuff like drones, robots, and advances in materials science. Being in the engineering industry myself, I know it is fiercely competitive and yet relatively risk adverse and slow to adopt new technology.
  • Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. I’m not sure I want to be depressed enough to read this, but certainly an important topic. To solve poverty, you can give people money in the short term (which you have to take from other people/entities who have more than they need, although they won’t see it that way), and/or you have to give them education, skills, and job prospects in the longer term. That’s really the whole story – now go forth and prosper, everyone.
  • Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar. Well, before reading this everyone should read the classic The High Cost of Free Parking. But I have gotten jaded trying to change minds on this by providing accurate and rational information to the parking-entitled crowd, which is almost everyone.
  • Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet by Ben Goldfarb. “Road ecology” almost sounds like an oxymoron to me. Then again, it is really eye opening when you realize how much of the urban surface is made up of roads, streets, driveways, and parking lots. So if there really are ways to reduce the impact, it is worth thinking about.
  • Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City and The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown. Important topics, given that there is less and less land not altered by humans out there.
  • Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth. This covers population shrinkage in developed countries today, and possibility eventually in most countries. But developed countries will need to deal with increasing migration pressure in the medium term, so I am not sure how soon we will have the luxury of thinking about reducing our city sizes. Then again, maybe we should be letting some cities shrink while densifying others and making them as vibrant and human as possible.
  • The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. Okay yes, densify and improve the cities in good places.
  • A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? and The First City on Mars: An Urban Planner’s Guide to Settling the Red Planet. Fun to think about, because we need to have some imagination and practice thinking big even as we are solving all those tricky little problems close to home.

NYT best books of 2021

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And continuing the “best books” theme, this year’s New York Times list is out. The only one that really catches my eye is When we Cease to Understand the World. This appears to be historical fiction somehow knitting together the 20th century’s great scientists and their ideas.

Other books mostly cover a variety of racial and multicultural topics that are interesting and good to know about, but I do not have time to learn about them in book form. There’s a new autobiography of Sylvia Plath, and I like and am saddened by Sylvia Plath, but I think I would rather spend time reading her original work rather than an autobiography about her. Just a random note since I was briefly talking about Margaret Attwood yesterday – when I think of The Handmaid’s Tale I often think of Sylvia Plath, and also Anne Frank, and also Frederick Douglas and other first-person slave narratives. All depressing, and all things everyone should read. The Handmaid’s Tale is at least a work of fiction although it seems quite real when you are in the middle of it, at least for me, and especially the audiobook version.

Planetizen top 10 books of 2021

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Planetizen has its list of top ten urban planning books out. Here are a couple that caught my eye. I don’t know that I’ll actually read these – It’s not like I know everything there is to know about these topics, but I may know enough and be just bored enough to want to spend my dwindling budget of mortal reading time on other things.

  • Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The case against car-dependence and for walkability. I’m 100% on board. It’s a long and exhausting fight. Also, the title is a bit insulting to engineers, who do not consider our profession an illness to be cured. I guess the point is to draw attention to the book. Well, engineers may not be the intended audience if you are going to insult us before we even open the cover.
  • Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind’s Greatest Invention. I’m 100% on board with the idea that modern cities can be great places for human beings to live. It’s a long and exhausting fight (see above). This one looks interesting because it appears to be a comparative history of a number of famous cities in history.
  • The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is fiction, and definitely on my list. The reviewer feels that Mr. Robinson (he is neither female nor Korean, Kim being a fairly common British dude name at least in the past) “lacks the superlative writing chops of Margaret Attwood” and “some sentences are begging for an editor”. This surprises me, because this is certainly not Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel! Now I am even more curious to read it. I have always found Robinson a little challenging to read, but he has an astonishing imagination and is worth reading for this alone.

War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List

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I have to be honest with myself – my reading pace has dropped way off during my intensive child-rearing (not to mention full time working) years. I just am not going to be reading long non-fiction books, and I will be chipping away at fiction very slowly, mostly as audiobooks. So that out of the way, there are some interesting books here that I will very likely not be able to read.

  • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. At first I thought what, is this about military strategy or business strategy or what? Turns out it cuts across many fields and that is why it sounds interesting to me.
  • The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare. I probably won’t read this. In fact, I don’t even want high-tech warfare to arrive, but it will so we might at least want to know it when we see it.
  • George Orwell. I would rather read George Orwell than books about George Orwell, but this reminds that George Orwell wrote a variety of books other than Animal Farm and 1984 (or are you supposed to write out the letters?) I read and enjoyed Burmese Days a few years ago, for example. I would like to reread 1984 though. I don’t usually reread books, but this is a classic I read when I was just too young to appreciate it. The interesting thing to me is that it depicts future governments as mastering propaganda through technology, when in fact technology is causing governments to lose control of communications with their own people.
  • Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan – I am always up for some near-future techno-dystopia!
  • Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Recently I have been trying to stop worrying about the line between science fiction and fantasy and learn to enjoy the latter more. But now we have something called “science fantasy” that straddles the line. I guess we have always had it and now it just has a new (to me) name. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all that.
  • The Red Trilogy by Linda Nagata. Military science fiction. Not always my favorite genre but I am always on the lookout for something even close to the classics like Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, and The Forever War. Of course, in all of those war is a means to explore a variety of social and psychological topics.

NYT best books of 2020

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I plan to boycott giving the New York Times any money from now until the end of time because of the weapons of mass destruction debacle. Unless I get a letter or phone call of apology from Judith Miller herself.

So I had a look at the NYT best books on 2020 on this website. I don’t see anything I am likely to read here. I think Obama’s memoir is an important work of history. I don’t need to read it because I listened to his interview with Terry Gross the other day.

Shakespeare in a Divided America and War: How Conflict Shaped Us sound marginally interesting. I may add them to my list of more-books-than-I-can-read-before-I-die.

The problem with arguing that war is just part of the human condition is that weapons keep getting more dangerous. Eventually we will get to weapons so dangerous that a decision to use them is a decision civilization can never recover from. That decision might be completely irrational, but there may come a day when it only takes one irrational decision to bring civilization or even life on Earth crashing down around us.

New York Times Top 10 Books of 2018

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Well, I had a look at their Top 10, and nothing really caught my eye. There are two book-length expansions of magazine articles I remember reading, one a Mother Jones article about private prisons, and Michael Pollan’s article on psychedelics. Both were good, but the articles were long enough and got the point across. I don’t need to read the books.

They also have a list of “books that didn’t make the top 10“. Steven Pinker has a new one on why things are actually not so bad in the United States right now. Incidentally, you can contrast it with this article about how things are really bad in the United States right now, or at least going in a bad direction when most of the rest of the developed world is making progress. I think it depends on who you are – things are okay if you are a middle-class professional or higher on the class ladder (and you pretty much have to be a professional to live a middle class life style these days, which is the problem – being at the median really does not necessarily mean a middle class life style these days.)

Another one that caught my eye – just in time for Christmas! – is called The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. I’ve always sort of thought that even in the Christian world of the Middle Ages was less enlightened than what came before, and arguably less enlightened than the Muslim and East Asian worlds of the time, it at least preserved art, music, and literature that was built on later. The title of this one (which I admit is all I have read) seems to cast doubt on that.

Bill Gates’s Favorite Books of 2016

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Don’t you just hate it when a multi-billionaire retiree says, “Even when my schedule is out of control, I carve out a lot of time for reading”? Anyway, Bill Gates has released his favorite books, and a couple caught my eye.

The Gene, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Doctors are deemed a “triple threat” when they take care of patients, teach medical students, and conduct research. Mukherjee, who does all of these things at Columbia University, is a “quadruple threat,” because he’s also a Pulitzer Prize– winning author. In his latest book, Mukherjee guides us through the past, present, and future of genome science, with a special focus on huge ethical questions that the latest and greatest genome technologies provoke. Mukherjee wrote this book for a lay audience, because he knows that the new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways.

The Myth of the Strong Leader, by Archie Brown. This year’s fierce election battle prompted me to pick up this 2014 book, by an Oxford University scholar who has studied political leadership—good, bad, and ugly—for more than 50 years. Brown shows that the leaders who make the biggest contributions to history and humanity generally are not the ones we perceive to be “strong leaders.” Instead, they tend to be the ones who collaborate, delegate, and negotiate—and recognize that no one person can or should have all the answers. Brown could not have predicted how resonant his book would become in 2016.

Honorable mention: The Grid, by Gretchen Bakke. This book, about our aging electrical grid, fits in one of my favorite genres: “Books About Mundane Stuff That Are Actually Fascinating.” Part of the reason I find this topic fascinating is because my first job, in high school, was writing software for the entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest. But even if you have never given a moment’s thought to how electricity reaches your outlets, I think this book would convince you that the electrical grid is one of the greatest engineering wonders of the modern world. I think you would also come to see why modernizing the grid is so complex and so critical for building our clean-energy future.

Time Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

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Yes, Time Magazine has a list of what it thinks are the 100 best all-time nonfiction books. There is a fair amount here that documents the history of the 20th century as it was unfolding, which would be interesting to read. It is a fairly politically left-leaning (e.g., Howard Zinn), pro-science (E.O. Wilson) list, although they do throw in Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater for good measure. It appeals to that small part of me that wants to retire, abandon my family, and just read from now on.