2018 in Books

Despite spending a lot of time on planes in 2018, I didn’t manage to meet my reading goal of 70 books. This was partly due to starting a book club with the managers on my team, where I reread books like Turn The Ship Around and Lean Startup, but probably also attributable to buying a Nintendo Switch.

There weren’t many new themes this year, mostly follow-on from books I read in 2017.

Science

• The Character of Physical Law Feynman, Richard — my first Feynman and what a start. Galactic scale made understandable as well as an ode to science and the importance of uncertainty.
• The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality Panek, Richard — a history of our understanding of the cosmos and survey of current study in the field.
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History Kolbert, Elizabeth — an interdisciplinary study of the ongoing human-caused mass extinction.

History

• Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” Hurston, Zora Neale — fascinating interview with the last surviving African to have been brought to the US and enslaved.
• Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World Metaxas, Eric — I’d never read about Martin Luther beyond history class and was looking for a way to understand the man better. This book covered not just Luther, but the political environment that made it possible for him to defy the Catholic church.
• The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth Krimstein, Ken — a graphic novelization of the life of the woman who coined the term and defined the nature of totalitarianism.
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century Snyder, Timothy
• If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating Alda, Alan — I freaking love Alan Alda and thoroughly enjoyed Scientific American with him as the host. This is the story of the origins of the show and Alda’s desire to make science accessible.

Sociology

• The Social Conquest of Earth Wilson, Edward O. — read as a follow-up to Sapolsky’s Behave, which I read last year. A study of social animals (humans and ants get special attention), what makes them similar and different and how they evolved that way.
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Pinker, Steven — I’d say these were Chomsky Cliff’s Notes, but Pinker is funny and novel on his own. Some of the word order work has been disproven in recent years, but it’s still a fascinating reference on the structure and evolution (linguists prefer “transformation”) of language.
• The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Taibbi, Matt

Technology and Other Work Stuff

• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions Christian, Brian — I saw one of those sites that illustrated various sorting and searching algorithms and saw a few I didn’t recognize from school. It made me wonder how much algorithms had advanced and I decided to pick up a book to figure that out. There wasn’t much new, but the footnotes gave me more material, particularly around scheduling algorithms.
• Scheduling Algorithms Brucker, Peter — can’t say I recommend this to anyone who isn’t about to work with scheduling algorithms, but it’s a good technical overview of the topic for those who are.
• Living with Complexity Norman, Donald A. — Einstein said, “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” Norman makes a similar argument here, drawing a line between perceptual and conceptual complexity and discussing their tradeoffs.
• Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done Bossidy, Larry
• Time Travel: A History Gleick, James — a history of the concept of time travel in human society. What lead to the creation of the concept and how it’s changed our perception of reality.
• The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood Gleick, James — Gleick’s better known book, a primer on information theory.
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It Voss, Chris
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Tegmark, Max

Fiction

• Perfect State Sanderson, Brandon — a fun quick read that played with a few fantasy and sci-fi tropes.
• The Gone World Sweterlitsch, Tom — it’s great to see sci-fi grappling with the moral implications of quantum physics.

Continuing series:

• Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3) Sanderson, Brandon
• Wrath of Empire (Gods of Blood and Powder, #2) McClellan, Brian
• The Disappearance of Winter’s Daughter (The Riyria Chronicles Book 4) Sullivan, Michael J.
• Age of War (The Legends of the First Empire #3) Sullivan, Michael J.
• Thrawn: Alliances Zahn, Timothy
• The Lies of Locke Lamora(Gentleman Bastard, #1) and Red Seas Under Red Skies(Gentleman Bastard, #2) Lynch, Scott — books one and two of this series were clever and surprising, but it started to wear off by book three.