Books of the Year 2025

 I read 72 books this year, which is more than my usual count, probably because I started reading more graphic novels again, which tend to read fast. The best book I read this year was probably Twitter and Tear Gas. If you want to understand why the civil rights movement and the labor movement won, while "occupy wall street" and the "arab spring" failed, this is the book to read. Zeynep Tufekci's writing is worth reading wherever you can find it. It's rare to find a book where I regretted checking it out from the library instead of buying it, and this book is exceptional. Other exceptional non-fiction were Abundance and The Woman Behind the New Deal. I will admit that I treated those two books as escapist fiction into a world where the American people actually elected leaders who could do good things.

The best fiction I read this year was Exhalation, but of course that was a re-read, so it shouldn't count. The best novel that was new to me was probably Norwegian Wood. It got me to read more Haruki Murakami, though that binge didn't last. A runner up would be A Widow for One Year.

The best graphic novel I read was Flashpoint. It's an excellent story and very much worth your time, even if you're not normally into superheroes.

I only got through one Audio Book this year, The Power Broker. It's well worth your time and you should read it in conjunction with Abundance to see how the American system went from being capable of doing amazing feats of construction in New York City to being barely able to build a toilet for $1 million in San Francisco. It's not for bad reasons, but you still wish that the pendulum hadn't quite swung all the way.

Here's to another year of great reading!

Review: Very Far Away From Anywhere Else

 I remember reading Very Far Away From Anywhere Else as a teenager and finding it very moving. It was sort of a teen romance story, but without any external drama, or even an unrealistic ending. I worried as I re-read it as an adult that it would be one of those stories that didn't age well, but I shouldn't have worried --- this is Ursula Le Guin, and the story is timeless.

Owen is a nerdy, introverted kid with aspirations for MIT and big ideas. He doesn't have any friends and is alienated from his own parents since they don't understand him but have expectations for him that he doesn't want to live up to.  He meets Natalie (or rather, finally notices her, since they're in the same classes) one day on the bus and they finally start to talk and get to know each other.

Their relationship develops but encounters the uncertainty and mixed-upness that teenagers would have, except in this case Natalie is much more mature than Owen, and knows what she wants out of life and Owen doesn't.

I won't spoil the ending for you --- it's a bittersweet ending and not the usual saccharine endings that most Americans would expect. The book's a short read, and well, if you're anything like the kid I was when I was 16, it will haunt you for years.

Review: Plays Well With Others

 Plays Well With Others claims to dispell myths about human relations with science.  It turned out to be a fun book to read and well-written. Fundamentally it, it covers certain aphorisms you might have heard of, such as "A friend in need is a friend indeed", "No man is an island", and "Love conquers all." The author, Eric Barker, then does a deep dive into the meaning of the aphorism, and the scientific evidence for and against.

Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire says you tell about two whoppers a day. Whom do you lie to most frequently? Mom. (kindle loc 605)

I enjoyed the discussion on how bad humans are at lie detection. And why is that? It turns out that trusting people is much less stressful.  

One study asked people how much they trust others on a scale of one to ten. Income was highest among those who responded with the number eight. And low-trust people fared far worse than overtrusters. Their losses were the equivalent of not going to college. They missed many opportunities by not trusting. In The Confidence Game Maria Konnikova points to an Oxford study showing that “people with higher levels of trust were 7 percent more likely to be in better health,” and 6 percent more likely to be “very” happy rather than “pretty” happy or “not happy at all.”  (kindle loc 738)

 The section on love is also surprisingly upbeat. It does provide the context that in the past most marriages were not based on love, and the modern divorce rates are incredibly high. But it also notes that when modern marriages work they work far better than historical marriages did with huge benefits to both parties.

Other interesting titbits from the book include the fact that Prozac is largely a placebo:

 A 2014 paper concluded: “Analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect.” And another study, titled “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo,” looked at over 2,300 subjects and found “approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors.” Did these papers result in a torrent of pushback from the scientific community at large? Nope. (kindle loc 2791)

In fact, the placebo effect is so strong because we're so wired to be social that the fact that someone is paying attention is enough to make most problems go away, since the fact that you're socially supported in itself is enough for your brain to think that you're fine. In fact, the most optimistic scenario tends to happen in a crisis, when despite popular conception, people ignore class and party lines and just give help to everyone in an egalitarian fashion:

When we are one, we don’t need placebos. We give care and are provided with care. During war, psychiatric admissions decline. This phenomenon has been documented time and time again. When Belfast experienced riots in the 1960s, depression plummeted in the districts with the most violence and went up where there was none. Psychologist H. A. Lyons wrote, “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.” (kindle loc 2851)

I found the book rich with insights and very easy to read. Recommended.

 

Review: Aurora

 Aurora is Kim Stanley Robinson's book about a generation starship arriving at Tau Ceti after several generations. The colonists onboard the ship have at this point been several generations apart from the folks who volunteered to go on this mission, and the ship itself is falling apart. We learn that the planet they're supposed to colonize ("Aurora") is actually a moon of another world orbiting Tau Ceti, and upon landing on the planet, they discover that the planet is not actually lifeless as they thought but has a mysterious micro-organism that starts killing the colonists.

A conventional science fiction story would have the colonists trying to find a cure to this micro-organism (which isn't a virus or a bacterium --- we never know what it is), but Robinson didn't not write a conventional science fiction novel. Instead, there's next to no biologists with technical expertise to come up with any kind of cure, and the moon was kinda sucky anyway as a place to live --- very strong winds, and no actual way for the colonists to self-sustain without serious terraforming work.

So the colonists take a vote on what to do next, igniting a civil war when two factions cannot agree on what to do. In the end, the somewhat sentient starship takes a role, and the groups compromise on setting up the "stayers" for success on a different moon within the system, and the "backers" get to take a reduced version of the starship back to Earth. The "stayers" obviously do not have a good outcome, and the story then follows the "backers" on their exciting journey back to Earth on a rapidly deteriorating craft ending up with an exciting rescue and a denouement of the idea of colonizing planets in other systems.

I enjoyed how well thought out the generation starship approach was, as well as the ideas about what tends to go wrong with such systems and how 2000+ people (about the population of the Starship Enterprise) wouldn't be sufficient to last over 200 years on a journey. I'm not sure I liked the section about the sentient starship which wasn't actually sentient at the start of the journey, and I disliked how few technical people there were for a project of this magnitude. You could argue that expertise was lost over generations, but it seemed that cross generation education wouldn't be something you would want to leave to chance.

The book also assumes that people will continue to want to have more children than they're allocated, but the last 20 years might teach you that the kind of highly educated people who would want to go on missions like this would probably have the opposite problem!

All in all, I enjoyed the critique of "man's mission is to expand to the stars", and the realistic view that when you sign up for one of these generational missions, you're signing up your children and they might not want to do what you signed them up to do. The characters are as wooden as any you'll find in science fiction, but not so badly written that I stopped reading.

Review: Struck by Genius

 Struck by Genius is the story of Jason Padgett (ghost written by Maureen Seaberg) about his transition from being a non-academic party animal to becoming a Savant after a mugging that caused a traumatic brain injury.

It is very rare that brain injury can have benefits rather than being purely detrimental, but Padgett was one of the lucky ones. He described his life prior to the mugging, with very little discipline two marriages and a kid out of wedlock, with a focus on partying and disliking academics. He describes this memory like remembering another person.

After the mugging, he started seeing patterns and shapes whenever he saw numbers, and the PTSD caused him to hole up in his apartment for 4 years, seeing no one except his daughter whenever he visited. His fascination with Math and patterns developed and after he had enough self-learning he went back to working at his father's furniture shop and enrolled in community college to learn formal math.

In between, he was compelled to draw. The pieces of art he draws range from simple geometric shapes to his interpretation of a hydrogen atom or quantum events. He says he read Born On a Blue Day and identified himself someone who saw numbers in shapes or colors, and then started going to conferences for people with that syndrome, where he met doctors who tested him and attested that he had all the attributes of a savant born with that syndrome but with fewer drawbacks.

There are all sorts of theories in the book that don't pass muster with me --- for instance, there's a doctor that claims that his mathematical abilities are a result of genetic memory. That makes zero sense and I see no way mathematical concepts could be encoded into genes, other than that the structure of the brain itself is determined (obviously) by genetics. That's also compounded by the fact that as far as I can tell, Padgett hasn't contributed to academic mathematics.

The book is easy reading and quite a bit of fun. I'm not sure I'd agree with many of the conclusions he or his doctors draw from his syndrome, but it's still a remarkable event and story.

Review: Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex

 Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex was on sale for $2, so I picked up the kindle copy. In case you haven't kept up with any of the Ghost in the Shell movies, the world is a cyberpunk universe in which major Motoko Kusanagi runs a top-shelf police/commando unit that deals with criminals, terrorists, and political operators in world where human brains can be moved into cyborg bodies and brain swapping is something that's feasible.

This particular story isn't written/drawn by the original creator of the universe, but in some ways that's a good thing --- there aren't any assumptions that you know what the conventions of the cyberpunk genre is, and so concepts are introduced in such a way that a reader is not lost. The characters are a bit wooden, and the art occasionally hard to follow.

The mystery in this episode is easy to follow, and most important for someone like me, fair. You're given all the clues in the story (along with the world-building needed to make use of the clues), and when the reveal happens you're not left feeling like the writer cheated you by pulling out some previously unknown facts.

The action in the story is just OK. I suspect that at the time the comic was written it probably would have been perceived as much more innovative than it is today, but obviously the bar for special effects has been raised quite a bit.

I enjoyed the book, despite having been away from cyberpunk for a while. It's enjoyable and easy to follow.

Review: The Grand Design

 The Grand Design came recommended by the Amazon Kindle direct mail ad, and it was available at the library so I checked it out and read it. It's an easy to read Physics primer that discusses the difficulty reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, and discusses what the evidence for the accuracy of these theories are.

What I enjoyed was how clearly written the descriptions of the weak Anthropic principle and the stronger versions of the Anthropic principles are. In particular, the authors go over how finely tuned the fundamental constants of nature are, and even go so far as to explain why the Universe had to have 3 dimensions instead of 4 or 6 or 10:

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit are necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. Circular orbits are possible in other dimensions, but those, as Newton feared, are unstable. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun, so we would either burn up or freeze. Also, in more than three dimensions the gravitational force between two bodies would decrease more rapidly than it does in three dimensions. In three dimensions the gravitational force drops to ¼ of its value if one doubles the distance. In four dimensions it would drop to ⅛, in five dimensions it would drop to 1/16 and so on. As a result, in more than three dimensions the sun would not be able to exist in a stable state with its internal pressure balancing the pull of gravity. (kindle loc 1530)

Where the book fails is that it promotes M-theory as the one theory that would unify quantum theory with relativity, but doesn't go into why it's superior to all the other theories. One issue is that it's not a single theory, but a class of overlapping theories that can effectively have constants plugged in to satisfy the constraints of the universe we find ourselves in. The authors pretty much state that scientists have to give up on the idea of our laws of physics all deriving from one fundamental theory that fixes all the constants. That's quite disappointing for those who value elegance in their theories, but of couse, nothing says that our messy universe has to correspond to a model of a simple and elegant fundamental theory.