Tag: books

The Rain by Joseph Turkot

Kind of a generic post-apocalyptic story, but told as a first-person narrative and was enjoyable.

Something happened and it started raining and then just never stopped. We’re going to set aside even where all the water would have to be coming from to raise the ocean levels as high as described, but fine.

The Returning by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Not sure how I ended up with this book, but it’s been sitting on my ereader for years.

The writing was pretty good, but the antagonist was kind of a Saturday-morning-cartooon, mustache-twirling, caricature.

Civil unrest in a sci-fi setting.

The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li

Our most recent book-group book at work. A sort-of-memoir, sort-of-history of the work on artificial-intelligence and machine-learning systems.

Though I found it a little grandiose to compare the (impressive, yes) improvements in AI capabilities of the past ~5 years to anything close to the revolution in chemistry and physics that was quantum mechanics and relativity.

Axiomatic by Greg Egan

This is a collection of short stories by Greg Egan which I really enjoyed. The stories are usually hard-sci-fi nuggets–explorations of “what if this were true about the universe?”

Some really great, though-provoking pieces.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks

Sacks recounts the development of modern chemistry through the lens of his childhood in England before, during, and after World War II.

A time when an 11-year-old kid could wander down to a supply shop and come home with all manner of caustic, toxic, and explosive chemicals to play with.

Wild in how fundamentally different his youth was from anything that would be considered “normal” today.

The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker

I bought this way back in 2016, but only just got around to reading it.

It describes the 14 principles that embody the “Toyota Way” of doing manufacturing–much of which has come to be known, in part, as “lean.”

I think perhaps the most distinct aspect from traditional American approaches is the requirement that systems be viewed holistically. Demanding that each individual process get faster/cheaper/better may get you worse results than are otherwise possible.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

This was my most recent pick for the tech-books book group I meet with at work.

Bell Labs was a ridiculously influential organization of the 20th century: the transistor, undersea telephone cables, microwave data relays, satellite telecommunications, cell phones, fiber optics, Unix, the C programming language–just to name a few. All that, so much more, and the foundation of Information Theory.

It’s kind of crazy how much of the modern world was influenced by that organization.

The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov, translated by Yisrael Markov

What if The Lord of the Rings were just the revisionist history of the warmongering men and elves of Middle Earth? In this retelling of the events of the War of the Ring we see Mordor as a civilization on the cusp of industrial revolution. Gandalf convinces the men and elves that if Mordor’s technological progress isn’t stopped immediately then the magic- and tradition-based societies of the rest of Middle Earth are doomed.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

This is the non-fiction story of Deogratias, born in Burundi (I hesitate to say “true” because, as Kidder acknowledges, it’s impossible to corroborate many of the events). Deo was a third-year medical student working an internship in a rural medical clinic when Burundi erupted into another wave of sectarian violence.

After surviving a horrifying journey filled with abject brutality he finds himself with a chance at safety in the guise of a series of plane tickets to NYC and a falsely obtained business visa to enter the country.

He speaks French and Kirundi, but not a word of English. In a few years, through the persevering kindness of strangers and his own grit, he graduates from Columbia University, restarts medical school at Dartmouth, and eventually returns to Burundi to open the medical clinic he’d been working for since childhood.