Book cover for Do you remember being born? by Sean Michaels

Do you remember being born?

by Sean Michaels

★★★★☆

I picked this book up at the library as it was a Staff Pick with a striking cover and had a Douglas Coupland blurb on the back. If I had known it was about AI I perhaps would have left it on the shelf, but I stuck with it and enjoyed the book overall.

The book is written from the perspective of an elderly poet (apparently based on Marianne Moore – I’m not familiar with them or their work) and large portions are conversations with a LLM. I was distracted by the juxtaposition of the author writing as both a poet and a computer and had a sneaking suspicion that the latter really was a computer, a suspicion that was confirmed in the acknowledgement at the end of the book.

Marian’s internal dialogue and many of the scenes she found herself in surprised me and will stay with me for a while. As a artful AI book about AI’s role in art it has an unsettling, precarious footprint.

I felt the book was let down by a schmaltzy happy ending and a resigned pro-Big-Tech conclusion that seemed at odds with what the rest of the book had to say.

book icon finished

Book cover for Firebugs by Nino Bulling

Firebugs

by Nino Bulling

★★★★☆

Appreciated the thin, red & black artwork in this one. A queer story of a failing relationship with soft and hard allusions to climate catastrophe.

book icon finished

A flawed, sometimes disturbing collection. Hard to read between the lines as there’s very little commentary. Nevertheless I enjoyed many of the artists and will seek them out in the future.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Eagles of Hornby Island by Douglas Carrick

The Eagles of Hornby Island

by Douglas Carrick

Eagles of Hornby Island

For the second time this year I found myself on one of the Southern Gulf Islands reading a book by a local author. This time it was Hornby, a small island accessible from Vancouver Island by a ferry (not just any ferry but a cable ferry) before driving across Denman Island and catching one more ferry to the final island destination. Hornby surpassed expectations and has natural beauty that far outpaces it’s relative small size.

Eagles of Hornby Island sat on my shelf for a few years and I brought it along to crack open while the baby napped and before bed. I’d describe the book as a rambling citizen science / naturalist / slice of life tome, one in which Douglas Carrick puts his best foot forward to write a book to the best of his ability.

It’s an endearing little collection of anecdotes, anecdata and light-hearted opinions held by Doug on the topic of eagles. His passive interest in the birds slowly morphed into a scant obsession with his large feathered friends and it’s charming that Doug was able to collate all there was to say about the things he learned living so close to them.

The final quarter of the book recounts the rush of attention Doug and his collaborators received upon placing a camera into an Eagle’s nest and broadcasting the images on the internet. The year was 2006 and the novelty of beaming real life images across the globe was intoxicating. Millions of people viewed his cameras during the Eagle’s season.

It’s curious reading Doug’s hesitancy upon being presented with this new-fangled technology with which he can share his passion. He includes a handful of inspiring, touching quotes from viewers. Doug has no experience with technology and is hesitant about some of the intricacies of making the stream work. It seems as though he would be happy if the eagles were to remain on his CRT TV in the centre of his living room. It appears to be a unique idea to all involved.

At one point the ISP hosting the cameras adds adverts to the site without Doug’s permission. Doug then receives negative feedback that hits him hard and his regret at potentially disrespecting his audience’s trust in the project is palpable.

After finishing the book I tried to look online to see if any other seasons were filmed on Hornby since 2011. In the book, Doug notes that they were unable to repeat the exercise the following year. A few news sites note the return of the feed but despite some fishing on Google I couldn’t find any evidence apart from a handful of Youtube videos from six years ago, mostly failing to get more than a few tens of viewers. http://www.hornbyeagles.com fails to resolve.

Eagles of Hornby Island appears active on Facebook but on closer inspection but it’s swamped with pseudo-viral TikTok slop.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Maus Now by Hillary Chute

Maus Now

by Hillary Chute

Interesting book of essay discussing Maus and it’s impact. The interview transcript near the end was free-wheeling and illuminating.

book icon finished

Book cover for Astra by Cedar Bowers

Astra

by Cedar Bowers

★★★★★

An emotional, disarming Western Canadian Goon Squad. Loved it.

book icon finished

Book cover for Rework by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried

Rework

by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried

Marginally better than I expected.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Complete Maus

by Art Spiegelman

book icon finished

Book cover for Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar

Strangers Drowning

by Larissa MacFarquhar

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for How to Baby by Liana Finck

How to Baby

by Liana Finck

★★★★★

book icon finished

book icon finished

Book cover for The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

The Creative Act

by Rick Rubin

★★☆☆☆

Nothing groundbreaking but a helpful reminder of ways to tend to creativity, in all it’s forms.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick

Co-Intelligence

by Ethan Mollick

★★☆☆☆

A concise evaluation of how the use of LLMs is transforming business and education, disrupting existing processes and systems.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Employees by Olga Ravn

The Employees

by Olga Ravn

★★☆☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Salt Spring Has Issues by John Bateman

Salt Spring Has Issues

by John Bateman

★★★☆☆

It’s fun to read about a place while you’re visiting. I wonder what it would take to write a humour book like this.

not knowing where to start has never stopped me

book icon finished

Book cover for Be Funny or Die by Joel Morris

Be Funny or Die

by Joel Morris

★★★★★

Comedy is made up of three notes: construct, confirm and confound.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for The Initiates by Étienne Davodeau

The Initiates

by Étienne Davodeau

★★★★★

I was surprisingly moved by this graphic novel. A charming, earnest interchange of craft, patiently recounted with humour and grace.

book icon finished

Book cover for Wool by Hugh Howey

Wool

by Hugh Howey

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

Filterworld

by Kyle Chayka

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon

A Poison Like No Other

by Matt Simon

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Fierce Bad Rabbits by Clare Pollard

Fierce Bad Rabbits

by Clare Pollard

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for Nejishiki by Yoshiharu Tsuge

Nejishiki

by Yoshiharu Tsuge

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for Red Flowers by Yoshiharu Tsuge

Red Flowers

by Yoshiharu Tsuge

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge

The Swamp

by Yoshiharu Tsuge

★★★★☆

image

book icon finished

Book cover for Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Going Postal

by Terry Pratchett

★★★★☆

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Ametora by W. David Marx

Ametora

by W. David Marx

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys

by Colson Whitehead

★★★★☆

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

Goodnight Moon

by Margaret Wise Brown

book icon finished

Book cover for Number Go Up by Zeke Faux

Number Go Up

by Zeke Faux

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Heaven

by Mieko Kawakami

★★☆☆☆

“You know how the cord on the vacuum has that strip of red tape at the end, to tell you when it’s out? But before you make it to the red part, there’s some yellow tape, too, right? What are they trying to say? Don’t you think the red one is enough?”

book icon finished

Book cover for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

The Goblin Emperor

by Katherine Addison

★★★★★

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Not Funny by Jena Friedman

Not Funny

by Jena Friedman

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky

Boys Weekend

by Mattie Lubchansky

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for The City & The City by China Miéville

The City & The City

by China Miéville

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Convenience Store Woman

by Sayaka Murata

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Water Knife

by Paolo Bacigalupi

★★★★☆

book icon finished

headphones icon finished

Book cover for The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

The One Minute Manager

by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

book icon finished

Book cover for Ways of Being by James Bridle

Ways of Being

by James Bridle

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso

300 Arguments

by Sarah Manguso

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich

The Secret of Our Success

by Joseph Henrich

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Paul at Home by Michel Rabagliati

Paul at Home

by Michel Rabagliati

★★★★★

IMG_3754 IMG_3756

book icon finished

Book cover for Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Novelist as a Vocation

by Haruki Murakami

★★★★☆

Halfway through “Novelist as a Vocation,” I realized how much a Murakami fan I’ve become. Not that I’ve read all his books, mind, but I’ve devoured most of them, gained a sense of his psyche, improved my understanding of the translation process that’s so intrinsic to my enjoyment of his work, and warmed by his clarifying preamble in a short story collection.

At the beginning of this book, Murakami warns that the written word therein is reminiscent of the content delivered at a lecture opposed to a fully-realized book. This is one of the book’s strengths. There’s no stench of cynically polished productivity advice, it’s one (famous, inspiring) author’s take on his writing process, how his life has been impacted by his approach and how the world has swirled and reacted to that in the past 50 years.

The book was a delightfully lucid read. The author’s heart and craft is captured in off-the-cuff musings, made notable by his self-awareness when he repeats himself for the sake of it or when he delivers tangential rants about nuclear power and Japanese domestic policy.

On particular passage will stay with me. In a later chapter, Murakami delivers his thoughts on motivation and personal drive for satisfaction. His plain, succinct language is disarming as he delivers.

Still, not grasping what it all means, I persist in my daily running routine. Thirty years is a long time. To continue one habit that long requires a great deal of effort. How have I been able to do it? It’s because I feel like the act of running represents, concretely and succinctly, some of the things I have to do in this life.

I love the inevitability of this. The cold reasoning behind it. Committing yourself to something – not because it’s a noble thing to do – but because you’ve decided that it is something you have to do in this life.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

★★★★★

headphones icon finished

Book cover for The Con Artists by Luke Healy

The Con Artists

by Luke Healy

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for A Fairfield History by Ken Roueche

A Fairfield History

by Ken Roueche

book icon finished

Book cover for When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

When We Were Orphans

by Kazuo Ishiguro

★★★☆☆

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Acting Class by Nick Drnaso

Acting Class

by Nick Drnaso

★★★★☆

This was so strange and unsettling.

book icon finished

I picked up this book as I wanted to learn more about Moresby Island and didn’t realise there are (at least) two Moresby Islands in BC. There’s a private island near Sidney off the Saanich Peninsula – 1.2 miles wide with an estimated population of two people and cattle.

This book isn’t about Moresby Island, it’s about South Moresby, the second largest of the Haida Gwaii Islands that was made into a Canadian National Park in 1988. But really, this book isn’t even about South Moresby, it’s about Gwaii Haanas, the traditional home of the Haida people.

Paradise Won is written by Elizabeth May, well known for her time as the leader of the Green Party of Canada. The book recounts her days as a Senior Advisor to the Environment Minister and documents in meticulous detail the steps, triumphs and setbacks of creating a new National Park in Canada.

As a new Canadian, the book weaved together a number of cultural strings that had previously been separate. It helped me to understand Governmental history, the interplay between the provinces and agencies, and Elizabeth May’s advocacy for environmental issues. It was also a sad reminder of the bureaucratic nightmare First Nations people find themselves in under the Canadian government. In one notable passage, 30,000 books are pulped because they included photo captions as the history they communicated was seen as verboten by government officials.

There was a reasonable amount of representation for the Haida people in the book but I couldn’t help notice a bifurcation between the government bods and friends and those living in the places in question. May herself didn’t set foot in Haida Gwaii until the Park agreement was all but inked. While the achievement was remarkable and a testament to their hard work, the fizzy celebrations and pats on the back sit in stark contrast to the further years of negotiations and even threats to other assets including mineral rights.

One thing I did appreciate was the blow-by-blow account of the negotiation between the BC provincial and Federal governments. I hadn’t seen a large negotiation like this spelled out, and it was interesting to reverse engineer the tactics taken by each side to get what they wanted.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

The Memory Police

by Yoko Ogawa

★★☆☆☆

In The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, words are disappearing. In the Memory Police, by Yōko Ogawa, it’s time for everything else to disappear.

It’s a considerate book that spells things out in a precise, laborious fashion. There’s a nightmarish book-in-the-book with a horror tone that plainly reflects the main story.

I’m intrigued by the enigmatic choices made, in particular: why are two of the main characters only ever referred to as “The Old Man” and “R”? The book didn’t capture my imagination otherwise.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

★★★☆☆

A common theme for me is to start a book like this, get enthralled by the world building and characters and then start a slow, steady descent into disinterest. Towards the end I found it hard to care about the endless stream of creative names for people and places – nevermind tell them apart.

As a fantasy book with a modicum of magic, it’s certainly unique. It’s (intentionally) impossible to match the regions and races of people in the book to real-world counterparts.

If you like the machinations and plotting in A Song of Ice and Fire and fancy 300 pages of Council of Elrond-esque meetings between backstabbing nobles then you’ll probably love this. It has a lot of interesting things to say about colonialism with a big splash of economic theory to boot. I appreciated the flawed, titular anti-hero. But it doesn’t compel me to pick up the sequels any time soon.

book icon finished

Book cover for We Need to Talk by Celeste Headlee

We Need to Talk

by Celeste Headlee

I borrowed this from the library after reading Dave Rupert’s rave review. It reminded me of Talk to Me by Dean Nelson: a journalist imparting wisdom on effective communication with a handful of interesting anecdotes to help illustrate the points.

The book wasn’t groundbreaking but there were a few takeaways for me:

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Upgrade by Blake Crouch

Upgrade

by Blake Crouch

★★☆☆☆

After being burned by a book with an extremely similar premise, I gave Upgrade a chance as I remember enjoying Blake Crouch’s 2019 novel, Recursion.

To it’s credit, the first third of Upgrade kept my interest but my enthusiasm quickly waned with the formulaic second and third parts. Any emotional resonance in the book was undermined by schlocky writing and over-explanation of the protagonist’s feelings. By the time the main character described a database query he was writing to advance the plot I was ready to be done.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer

by William Gibson

Twenty minutes, then gravity came down on him like a great soft hand with bones of ancient stone

When I started this book I had no idea just how unintelligible I would find it. Nothing prepared me for the onslaught of unbridled, hold-onto-your-butts cyberpunk vibes. I’m smitten by Gibson’s writing but I’m not certain I could recall the plot to any degree of accuracy.

One I’m going to have to come back to, for sure.

Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction.

book icon finished

Book cover for Binge by Douglas Coupland

Binge

by Douglas Coupland

★★☆☆☆

The one line that sticks with me from this book is

He muttered and choked out all kinds of lies. It was painful to watch—like a hot dog trying to tell you how it was made.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Abandon the Old in Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Adrian Tomine, Yuji Oniki

Abandon the Old in Tokyo

by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Adrian Tomine, Yuji Oniki

★★★★☆

Mildly disturbing, greatly evocative.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Emissary by Yoko Tawada

The Emissary

by Yoko Tawada

★★★★☆

“That word is also dead.”

If I hadn’t read the back of the book I suspect I would have twigged that this author had a thing for language. A published author in both Japanese and German, Yoko Tawada excels at dreamy sequences interspersed with lucid discussions of the words we use how they make us feel.

The Emissary is a short novel set in a future where Japan has isolated itself from the world as a result of an unnamed catastrophe. Only the elderly, the octogenarians and older, are healthy. Their younger friends and family are poisoned by the land and unable to imagine a future for themselves.

This book was better-conceived than “Scattered All Over the Earth,” it’s loopy, shifty ending will linger for a while.

book icon finished

Book cover for How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

★★☆☆☆

It’s not clear what didn’t click with me and this book: in principle it overlaps with many of my interests. It focuses on self reflection through an eco-environmental awareness. It also achieves much of the feel I aim for with the more narrative-driven source/target editions. I was close to giving up on it and likely would have if it wasn’t an audiobook.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of a condescending tone illustrated by unremarkable anecdotes, along with inconsequential nature observation passages that rarely transcended their pat delivery. Lots of mourning what we may have lost in nature with limited calls to action.

The last few years haven’t been kind to the then-topical sections. Breathless anti-Trump passages are beyond weary at this point and date the well-meaning sentiment.

One upside was learning more about Oakland, a place I’ve visited a few times but never digested in full.

I suspect I acquired too much of the media surrounding this book via osmosis back in 2019. The core conceit was unremarkable and covered better elsewhere.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, Edwin McClellan

Kokoro

by Natsume Soseki, Edwin McClellan

★★★★☆

Written in the early 1900s, this was a short, thoughtful book of three distinct parts. The first introduces the protagonist and his relationship with an elderly man identified throughout the book as Sensei. In the middle part, the protagonist returns home to look after his ailing father and rejects opportunities to move his life forward. The final and longest part is a letter from Sensei explaining his experiences as a young man that lead him to be the man he is today.

I enjoyed the book and found the allusions to progress and depiction of male relationships to be quite revealing. The inner dialogue of the protagonist (and, later, Sensei) was a realistic portrayal of the dissonance faced when navigating complex social dynamics. Some of the tale remains mysterious and open to interpretation – it’s a book that will reward a repeat visit.

book icon finished

Book cover for Loggers of the BC Coast by Hans Knapp

Loggers of the BC Coast

by Hans Knapp

★★★★☆

A fascinating first-hand account of living and working at logging camps after the Second World War.

Hans Knapp moved from Austria in 1951 and began work as a logger at the North end of Vancouver Island. The glossary of logging terms at the back of the book is a required reference for some of the more dense sections covering the older logging roles and terms.

Working in extreme weather conditions and faced with the drudgery of working long days in the wilderness, quirky personalities clash and tensions fray. Much of the book describes a range of characters with memorable names such as “Slippery”, “Jolly Good”, “Terrible Ted” and “The Garlic Twins.”

There are countless depictions of various accidents that befall the loggers. These include freak events, near misses and depressing fatalities.

In one tonal shift, Knapp recounts stumbling upon an old abandoned prospector’s cabin on a Sunday afternoon hike. The eerily preserved home sits hidden amongst a lush wilderness tamed by the long-absent owners. The gold rush has been and gone but Knapp belongs to a new breed of opportunists extracting from the land.

book icon finished

Book cover for Change Agent by Daniel Suarez

Change Agent

by Daniel Suarez

Daemon by Daniel Suarez was a book that made me remember that sci-fi was a thing that I enjoyed.

It was a gripping thriller with assured tech credentials. Published in 2006, it was also prescient in it’s depiction of modern-day cyber threats.

Looking for an audiobook on Libby, I stumbled on Change Agent and the bioengineering angle piqued my interest. Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood was a rewarding read in this area for me.

After a bold start I was hoping it might match the heights of Daemon but the book slips into hackneyed “wanted suspect” crime novel territory with trite plot devices and repetitive internal dialogue.

Other sci-fi authors like Gibson and Miéville will occasionally test my patience with their stream of undefined concepts that must be cracked like contextual riddles.

Change Agent goes too far in the other direction.

Every little bit of unfamiliar technology, however slight, is explained at length. This has the effect of wringing out all the joy of exploring futuristic ideas, however dystopic.

I gave up at 56% and have wired up my reviews to accept a D.N.F.[1] rating. There’s no need to feel obliged to complete books I’m not enjoying.


  1. Did Not Finish ↩︎

headphones icon finished

Book cover for User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

User Friendly

by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

★★★★★

Just under 10 minutes into the 2017 upload of the “Mother of all Demos” on YouTube, a wave of irritation flickers across Douglas Engelbert’s face. “What the hell happened to that?” he mutters, almost inaudibly, as a thin smile and nervous giggle betray a moment of mild panic. It’s 1968 and he’s just started a presentation showcasing countless technological techniques that will echo for a half a century and beyond.

Engelbert is one of many characters covered in this fantastic book from Cliff Kuang – individuals obsessed with reorienting the world with visionary ideas of how technology should aid rather than abrade. The book avoids oblivious hero worship in favour of a global collection of stories.

With various stutters and beeps Engelbert finally wrangles his list into a quiet order. A breeze of relief leads way to a soft apology before he forges ahead to reveal the future.


Affordances

Don Norman is probably most famous among designers for popularizing the idea of an affordance—physical details, designed in products, that tell us how they’re to be used, such at the subtle curve of a door handle that tells you which way to pull, to the indentation on a button that tells you where to push.

Metaphors

Navigate, browser, hyperlink, search engine.

It was explained to us all so slowly, over time. We learned what the web was by using it. Eventually, we didn’t didn’t the metaphors at all.

(As the design theorist Klaus Krippendorff writes, "Metaphors die in repeated use but leave behind the reality that they had languaged into being.)

But to those women in GP Block Pitampura, the internet had simply arrived one day, devoid of any explanation at all. No wonder it was baffling at best, even terrifying.

Beauty

In the user-friendly world, beauty is a tool that transforms something that’s easy to use into something we want to use.

Beneath every product you see, there is a designer, sometimes a good one, whose fodder is an intuition about what you’ve seen before, what you might admire. “Beauty” is the word we use when a designer’s vision overlaps with our own.

Industrial Empathy

In 2018, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed more than 100,000 executive-level design decisions across three hundred publicly held companies those with robust design-thinking processes had 32 percent higher revenues than their peers over a five-year period, and 56 percent higher shareholder returns.

Disability as an Engine of Innovation

Perhaps you’re reading this book with your phone by your side, checking your email whenever your attention drifts, tapping text messages to a friend. You sit at the end of a long line of inventions that might never have existed but for people with disabilities: the keyboard on your phone, the telecommunications lines it connects with, the inner workings of email. In 1808, Pellegrino Turri built the first typewriter so that his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters more legibly. In 1872, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone to support his work helping the deaf. And in 1972, Vint Cerf programmed the first email protocols for the nascent internet. He believed fervently in the power of electronic letters, because electronic messaging was the best way to communicate with his wife, who was deaf, while he was at work.

Perhaps one day someone will write a history of the internet in which that great series of tubes will emerge not as some miracle of technical progress meant to connect people faster and easier but rather a chain of inventions each meant to help more and more types of people to better communicate. But the most critical piece of the history will be this: Disability is so often an engine of innovation simple because humans will invent ways to satisfy their needs, no matter their limitations.

Design Leaders

In setting the Imagineers on a pedestal apart from operations, Walt had created a model common across countless companies today, in which innovation is viewed as a function owned by an anointed few, rather than an emergent property of the system.

Automation Paradox

As cognitive psychologists and human-factor researchers began inventing better and better solutions to hand off control between pilot and machine, they noticed a worrying dynamic: As planes became more automated, the pilots themselves were less and less practised in flying their planes …

The automation paradox suggests that as machines make things easier for us—as they take more friction from our daily life— they leave us less able to do things we once took for granted.

Re/action

Rosenstein brought up the idea of a Hegelian dialectic— the idea that society creates a thesis that’s met with a reaction, then an antithesis that amends that prior paradigm, and finally a synthesis, which resolves the tension between the two.

Competitors

As Michael Margolis, a user-experience partner at Google Ventures is fond of saying, “Treat your competitors as your first prototypes.” Take advantage of all the effort that some designers have put into their work and learn from it.

Other Sites

Jakob’s Law: “Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”

Unfinished Tasks

In the 1920s, the Soviet psychiatrist Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik conducted a study in which she found that uncompleted tasks are easier to remember than successful ones, a discovery known as the Zeigarnik effect.

book icon finished

Book cover for Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Born Standing Up

by Steve Martin

★★★★☆

After reading Bob Odenkirk’s memoir I wanted to try another, reportedly better, one. It didn’t disappoint. Short and funny with the right amount of detail. I recognised a range of comedy setups that I now realise must have been inspired by Steve’s act in the 70s.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for The Makioka Sisters by Junʼichirō Tanizaki

The Makioka Sisters

by Junʼichirō Tanizaki

★★★☆☆

A dense book filled largely with the dull daily activities of a once-prestigious family in pre-war Japan. I found it realistic and captivating at times, especially when tracking the formal matchmaking process and protocols of the time. There’s a thread of disease and illness throughout the book that seeps into the characters existence in ways I didn’t appreciate until the end. Glad I stuck with it but it was a slog at times.

book icon finished

Book cover for Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

Moon of the Crusted Snow

by Waubgeshig Rice

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Burning Chrome by William Gibson

Burning Chrome

by William Gibson

I checked a few reviews before I started this short story collection by William Gibson and a few noted that the final, eponymous, story was the best of the bunch. Reading it I was a little underwhelmed. But reading around it I learned that it was the first use of the word cyberspace back in 1982. This put the whole collection in perspective – forty years later what was once novel is now routine.

My select favourites from this collection include:

book icon finished

This inessential memoir kept my interest, but I’m not sure I needed to hear Bob describe each of his favourite sketches at length.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada

Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yoko Tawada

★★★☆☆

An interesting complement to The Candy House with dovetailing characters introduced in each chapter adding to the main party of protagonists. In this thinly-described pseudo-dystopia the idea of nationality is almost foreign. Language is a gloopy tool for expression and nothing and nobody are quite as they appear.

This short novel was dreamlike, lyrical and captivating.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

The Candy House

by Jennifer Egan

★★★☆☆

I enjoyed this although it didn’t have the same impact as Goon Squad. The core conceit of wildly overlapping characters was satisfying and the email thread chapter was a gleeful highlight. I found a few of the individual character chapters reminded me of Douglas Coupland short stories where things fizzle out with either mild unease or surprising resolution.

book icon finished

Book cover for Sahara by Michael Palin

Sahara

by Michael Palin

A bit of comfort audio whilst recovering from the dreaded Coronavirus. Michael Palin is eternally affable, unflappable and overwhelmingly amiable. It’s strange reading a travelogue from over 20 years ago, a strange snapshot from a distant place and time.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for A City is Not a Tree by Christopher Alexander

A City is Not a Tree

by Christopher Alexander

book icon finished

Book cover for Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris

★★★★☆

headphones icon finished

A heady mix of egotistical self-promotion, gimmicky wins and dated sales strategies.

book icon finished

Book cover for Ask a Manager by Alison Green

Ask a Manager

by Alison Green

book icon finished

Book cover for Games: Agency as Art by C. Thi Nguyen

Games: Agency as Art

by C. Thi Nguyen

book icon finished

Book cover for Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

★★★☆☆

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Devil House by John Darnielle

Devil House

by John Darnielle

★★★★☆

Really enjoyed this. Better than Universal Harvester and on par with Wolf in White Van.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford

The Atlas of AI

by Kate Crawford

book icon finished

Book cover for New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

New York 2140

by Kim Stanley Robinson

★★★☆☆

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Man Descending by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Man Descending

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Undrowned

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

book icon finished

Book cover for Busy Doing Nothing by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega

Busy Doing Nothing

by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Hell Yeah Or No by Derek Sivers

Hell Yeah Or No

by Derek Sivers

book icon finished

Book cover for Small Giants by Bo Burlingham

Small Giants

by Bo Burlingham

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Raincoast Chronicles 11 by Howard White

Raincoast Chronicles 11

by Howard White

★★★★★

Fantastic tales of whalers, loggers, hoax real estate and a cast of coastal characters.

book icon finished

Book cover for Actual Air by David Berman

Actual Air

by David Berman

book icon finished

Book cover for The Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

The Sputnik Sweetheart

by Haruki Murakami

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Living in Data by Jer Thorp

Living in Data

by Jer Thorp

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin

LaserWriter II

by Tamara Shopsin

★★☆☆☆

I expected to love this but the “cast of characters in a quirky company” vibe never quite landed for me.

book icon finished

Book cover for Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Four Thousand Weeks

by Oliver Burkeman

★★★★★

Okay, okay this is the first and last time management/productivity book I’ll read this year. But it’s pretty good! An antidote to the others, Burkeman describes the sheer finite nature of our time on this planet and makes recommendations to overcome the fatigue of overflowing todo lists.

Decline to clear the decks

Make it a conscious decision to “tolerate the discomfort” of less important tasks building up while you focus on the most important things.

The measure of any time management technique is: “Does it help you neglect the right things?” To take a phrase from financial planning you should pay yourself first and prioritise the things you want to do over the less important things you feel you should be doing.

Pitfalls of convenience

We have a dependence on technology that makes it convenient to eat, travel and live. Silicon Valley builds products to remove pain points but it’s the brokenness of everyday processes that make us human. By relying on technology to make every process smooth we remove the delicate social threads binding a network together, binding a neighbourhood together.

David Cain on happenstance

I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.

Warren Buffett

Make a list of the top twenty-five things that are most important to you. Top five are the crucial use of your time, discard the rest as they are just a distraction.

Idleness aversion

“Core ingredient of the modern soul.”

Developing patience

  1. Develop a taste for having problems
  2. Embrace radical incrementalism; focus on brief, regular actions over trying to do too much at once
  3. Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality, “stay on the fucking bus!”

Time is a “network good”

Value is derived from how many others have access to it too. Same for phones and social media networks.

Chain of centennial lifespans

Egocentricity bias

We look after ourselves to give the best chances of staying alive. This is in contrast to our sheer insignificance.

Five questions to consider

  1. Where are you pursuing comfort when you should pursue discomfort? Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment.
  2. Are you holding yourself to standards of productivity and performance that are impossible to meet?
  3. In what ways have you accepted who you are, not who you think you ought to be?
  4. What areas are you holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
  5. Without worrying about actions reaching fruition, how would you spend your days? Do the next and most necessary thing.

Recommended steps

book icon finished

Book cover for Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me)

by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

★★★★☆

This book was fantastic. A deep dive into how people self-justify their actions and the cognitive dissonance they are comfortable living with.

Pyramids

The guiding metaphor of this book has been the pyramid of choice: As soon as people make a decision, whether reasoned or impulsive, they will change their attitudes to conform to that choice and start minimizing or dismissing any information suggesting they chose the wrong option.

Imagination Inflation

more you imagine something, the more confident you become that it really happened—and the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go

Benevolent Dolphin Problem

A fun shorthand example for confirmation bias.

There are stories of dolphins helping nudge shipwrecked humans to safety. To accept this as evidence they like humans we would need to know about cases where dolphins have caused harm and, ultimately, have killed humans. But

We don’t know about those cases because the swimmers don’t live to tell us about their evil-dolphin experiences.

Arrogance Control

At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.

Retaliation

We can all understand why victims would want to retaliate. But retaliation often makes the original perpetrators minimize the severity and harm of their side’s actions and claim the mantle of victim themselves, thereby setting in motion a cycle of oppression and revenge. “Every successful revolution,” observed the historian Barbara Tuchman, “puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.” Why not? The victors, former victims, feel justified.

book icon finished

Book cover for Doing Content Right by Steph Wright

Doing Content Right

by Steph Wright

book icon finished

Book cover for The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

The Mom Test

by Rob Fitzpatrick

★★★★☆

Short and sweet, the core few concepts in this book resonated with me and have clear applications in sales. The title and main conceit is a touch misogynistic, sure, but the author isn’t the first to recommend speaking to someone unfamiliar with a topic to gauge quality.

A recent New York Magazine article about the late “anarchic anthropologist” David Graeber, notes the use of his mother Ruth as an influence on his work:

Ruth herself never went to college. She was a constant reader, however, and years later, she was the audience her son kept in mind when he wrote. Graeber, Leve recalls, used to say that “if he understood something, he should be able to write it in a way that would be accessible and interesting to her.”

My main takeaway is that it’s easy to lead people to say the things they think you want to hear.

The Mom Test

Rules of The Mom Test:

  1. Talk about their life instead of your idea
  2. Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
  3. Talk less and listen more

It’s easy to get someone emotional about a problem if you lead them there.

Good questions about them:

Avoiding bad data

“Venture capitalists are described as professional judges of the future” – I like that.

Sometimes people will discuss a problem that irritates them but they would have no intent of buying a solution to that problem.

that person is a complainer, not a customer. They’re stuck in the la-la-land of imagining they’re the sort of person who finds clever ways to solve the petty annoyances of their day.

It’s recommended to cut off pitches as early as possible:

Being pitchy is the dark side of the “seeking approval” coin. Instead of inviting compliments by being vulnerable, you’re demanding them by being annoying. It’s when you hold someone hostage and won’t let them leave until they’ve said they like your idea. Normally, compliments are well-intentioned. In this case, they’re just trying to get you out of their office. “Won’t-take-no-for-an-answer” is generally a good quality for a founder to have. But when it creeps into a conversation that’s meant to be about learning, it works against you.

Asking important questions

Avoid prematurely zooming – that is getting into the weeds hearing what you want to hear.

When you fall into a premature zoom, you can waste a ton of time figuring out the minutia of a trivial problem. Even if you learn everything there is to know about that particular problem, you still haven’t got a business

If you ask When he talked to farmers, he asked questions like, “Would you switch trackers if something cheaper and more effective was available?” That’s the same as asking someone whether they would like more money.

Commitment and advancement

It’s on you to get a commitment. This can take many forms:

Time commitments

Reputation risk commitments:

Financial commitments:

Good rule of thumb:

It’s not a real lead until you’ve given them a concrete chance to reject you.

Finding conversations

The author discusses some strategies to talk to potential customers about your idea.

Be persistent:

Unless your plan is to sell your app via cold calls, the rejection rate is irrelevant.

Strategy for conversations is summarised as Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask

Don’t mention your product, just your vision:

You’re an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z.

Frame expectations:

mention what stage you’re at and, if it’s true, that you don’t have anything to sell.

Show weakness:

give them a chance to help by mentioning the specific problem that you’re looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you’re not a time waster.

Put them on a pedestal:

show how much they, in particular, can help. Explicitly ask for help.

In terms of mindset, don’t go into these discussions looking for customers. It creates a needy vibe and forfeits the position of power. Instead, go in search of industry and customer advisors. You are just trying to find helpful, knowledgable people who are excited about your idea.

Running the process

When all the customer learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck. Avoid creating (or being) the bottleneck. To do that, the learning must be shared with the entire founding team promptly and faithfully, which depends on good notes plus a bit of pre- and post-meeting work.

Conclusion

You’re never going to be perfect, but it always helps to be better.

book icon finished

Book cover for Make Time by Jake Knapp

Make Time

by Jake Knapp

A few good insights to start but quickly devolved into listicle-worthy life hacks.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Cathedral by Raymond Carver

Cathedral

by Raymond Carver

★★★★★

A wonderful collection of short stories. Carver’s spare, tight sentences draw a much more emotive picture than they have any right to.

Particular highlights for me were “Chef’s House,” “A Small, Good Thing” and “Fever”.

book icon finished

Book cover for This Census-Taker by China Miéville

This Census-Taker

by China Miéville

★★★☆☆

Odd little book, quite unsettling.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories by Various, Jay Rubin

The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

by Various, Jay Rubin

★★★★★

I’ve been picking this up every other week since I was gifted it last Christmas and I finally finished it with a burst of completionism. It’s a beautiful curation of Japanese short stories from between 1898 and 2014 translated to English. I enjoyed all of them with the exception of the gory “Patriotism” by Mishima Yukio.

It was so rewarding to read each short story before flipping back to the commentary from Murakami. I now have a much deeper appreciation for Japanese literature and will definitely seek out some of the further reading.

Here are my favourite short stories in this collection:

Kono Taeko – In the Box

This is a story of a petty grudge and sheer irrational behaviour. I loved it for the lack of explanation and the domestic yet unpredictable setting.

Natsume Soseki – Sanshiro, Chapter 1

A strangely nostalgic tale of transition to a big city.

Tanizaki Jun’ichiro – The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga

The book starts with this novella of sorts: a mildly unbelievable but alluring mystery that slowly unravels.

Genji Keita – Mr English

I enjoyed just how mundane this story was. A tale of work politics and salarymen.

Betsuyaku Minoru – Factory Town

An allegory with a plausible backbone. Written in 1973 but could have been published in the last decade.

Uchida Hyakken – Kudan

This short story was from the section entitled “Dread” and describes a Kafka-esque world of transfiguration and misunderstanding. Haunting.

Sawanishi Yuten – Filling Up with Sugar

An unsettling depiction of the decline of a relative to a fantastical disease. Pay close attention!

Seirai Yuichi – Insects

A heartbreaking account of the fallout from atomic warfare, wonderfully crafted and deeply evocative.

book icon finished

book icon finished

Book cover for Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil

Weapons of Math Destruction

by Cathy O'Neil

★★★☆☆

I was pretty cynical about this at first as I thought I’d heard it all before. I think this should be required reading for anyone working with data. I can’t shake that the injustices created by the use of data as described in this book are just the tip of the iceberg.

Just like with Humankind’s homo puppy I winced at the use of the WMD acronym, a purposefully overloaded term.

Three factors to systems deemed “Weapons of Math Destruction”

  1. Opacity: Are the rules of the system transparent to those that are being judged and analysed?
  2. Scale: Does the model have the capability to grow exponentially?
  3. Damage: Is the model unfair? Does it have a “pernicious” feedback loop that only makes it more unfair?

Clopening is when a worker is scheduled to both close a location at night and then re-open it in the morning. This can be stressful and result in an erratic schedule for workers balancing a number of responsibilities.

A large amount of Facebook users believe the algorithm behind the scenes is just presenting factual information and isn’t tailored to them.

In 2013, when a University of Illinois researcher named Karrie Karahalios carried out a survey on Facebook’s algorithm, she found that 62 percent of the people were unaware that the company tinkered with the news feed. They believed that the system instantly shared everything they posted with all of their friends.

I wonder if this is still the case eight years later?

O’Neill uses the phrase “birds of a feather” a few times to discuss how members of the same social network will often behave in similar ways. One example is that they may click on the same ads on Facebook.

Some recidivism analyses use this concept and inadvertently encode bias by taking acquaintances, jobs and credit rating to predict behavior. This sort of data would be inadmissible in court.

Interesting dataset alert:

A few years ago, MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees for Bank of America to find out why some teams were more productive than others. They hung a so-called sociometric badge around each employee’s neck. The electronics in these badges tracked the employees’ location and also measured, every sixteen milliseconds, their tone of voice and gestures. It recorded when people were looking at each other and how much each person talked, listened, and interrupted. Four teams of call center employees—eighty people in total—wore these badges for six weeks.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

How to Pronounce Knife

by Souvankham Thammavongsa

★★★☆☆

Enjoyed these stories on their own but all together they felt a little heavy-handed.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

The Courage to Be Disliked

by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

★★★★☆

The dialogue is a little clunky and I need to do some reading around Adlerism but there were quite a few “aha” moments for me in this book. It was a library loan but I picked up a copy to give myself more time with it.

causation/purpose

Etiology is the study of causation while teleology is the story of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than it’s cause. In Adlerism we don’t think about past “causes” but instead about present “goals.”

Lifestyle is the tendencies of thought and action in life.

No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.

A life-lie is the state of coming up with all manner of pretexts in order to avoid life tasks. e.g. “I’m busy at work so I don’t have enough time to think about my family.”

Separation of Tasks

All problems are interpersonal relationship problems.

Adlerism denies the need to be recognized by others, one must not seek recognition. You are not living to satisfy other people’s expectations. Do not behave without regard for others – separation of tasks. All interpersional relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having one’s own taks intruded on.

The life tasks of interpersonal relationships are:

  1. “Tasks of work”
  2. “Tasks of friendship”
  3. “Tasks of love”

We need to think with the perspective of “Whose task is this?” and continually separate one’s own tasks from other people’s tasks.

Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?

Intervening in other people’s tasks and taking on other people’s tasks turns one’s life into something heavy and full of hardship.

All you can do with regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in. On the other hand, what kind of judgment do other people pass on that choice? That is the task of other people, and is not a matter you can do anything about.

Horizontal and Vertical relationships

Horizontal relationships are relationships where members have equal standing whereas vertical relationships are those where one member has greater power, authority, knowledge or wisdom over the other.

Don’t praise or rebuke: praise is passing judgement from someone with ability to someone with no ability. By praising we are making vertical relationships, not horizontal ones. All healthy relationships should be horizontal.

The more one is praised by another person, the more one believes they have no ability.

Go from praise to gratitude.

Community

When Adler refers to community, he goes beyond the household, school, workplace, and local society, and treats it as all inclusive, covering not only nations and all of humanity but also the entire axis of time from the past to the future.

The scope of community is infinite! People are never truly alone or separated from community and cannot be.

You must consider yourself part of the community rather than the centre of the world. The goal of personal interpersonal relationships is a feeling of community. Use separation of tasks to “unravel the threads of the complex entanglement of one’s interpersonal relations.”

When running into difficulties in interpersonal relationships, one should zoom out and “listen to the voice of the larger community.”

Dots

Life is a series of moments called now, not a linear map from birth to the top of the mountain.

Think of this as a line drawn with pencil, if you magnify enough it’s made up of tiny dots. These are the now.

book icon finished

Book cover for Humankind by Rutger Bregman

Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

★★★★★

A very readable, refreshing look at human nature. I didn’t expect to enjoy this quite so much. The author covers a fascinating array of studies and historical examples to show that, contrary to popular belief, people tend towards being good.

I cringe a little at the repeated reference to homo puppy – the moniker given to the empathetic humans we evolved to be.

Ten Rules to Live by

  1. When in doubt, assume the best
  2. Think in win-win scenarios
  3. Ask more questions
  4. Temper your empathy, train your compassion
  5. Try to understand the other, even if you don’t get where they’re coming from
  6. Love your own as others love their own
  7. Avoid the news
  8. Don’t punch Nazis
  9. Come out of the closet: don’t be ashamed to do good
  10. Be realistic

book icon finished

Book cover for Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

★★★★★

Reading them in quick succession it’s hard not to blend the worlds of Project Hail Mary, Three-Body Problem and Ministry for the Future into one. Speculative near-future fiction with climate overtones, spaceships and a hope for cooperation between the entire human race.

The main character in this jarred on me at first but reading around I appreciate that Weir’s “gee-whiz” schoolteacher is a tongue-in-cheek inversion of the sweary protagonists of his previous books.

Really enjoyed this, appreciated the thorough science, twists and dedication to an idea.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The Three-Body Problem

by Cixin Liu

★★★★☆

The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of other people’s gestures and movements.

book icon finished

Book cover for A World Without Email by Cal Newport

A World Without Email

by Cal Newport

★★★☆☆

A book of two halves. I loved the first part as Newport described how email overtook as the dominant communication method for businesses, despite being inferior to traditional methods.

A misjudged reference to The Tragedy of the Commons marked the beginning of the book’s decline. The author describes common Kanban tools, provides some introspection on writing the book and finishes by rattles off a few productivity life hacks.

The bits I liked the most echoed Newport’s advice in Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

Technological Determinism happens when we allow technology to control how we act and behave

book icon finished

Book cover for Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz

Never Split the Difference

by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz

★★★★☆

I wasn’t sure at first but this turned out to be a good listen. Lots of helpful considerations for successful transactional conversations. One undercurrent in the book was that a strong negotiation strategy is simply to buy time and extract information from your “counterpart” to aid the process of reaching an agreement.

Labelling is an interesting idea. Effectively calling out something for what it is without ascribing blame.

It seems that …

rather than

I think you …

Harks back to non-violent communication with the aim of being as non-judgemental as possible.

Similarly I liked the example Voss gave of showing contrition early if you’ve done something wrong. Getting ahead of the situation and keeping in control.

Mirroring is a remarkable active listening device with a clear benefit.

Voss recommends leaning into the conflict that’s at the core of any negotiation and to see it as a collaborative process to reach agreement.

Calibrated questions should be used early and often in negotiations. Voss’s favorite is the oft-repeated

How am I supposed to do that?

but any open question that draws information out of your counterpart is worth using. Questions starting with “how” or “what” will spark a cooperation for both sides to agree.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

by Robin Sloan

★★★☆☆

I had high hopes for this book at the start but my enthusiasm waned towards the end. The optimism of the spunky, tech-savvy protagonist and ease in which he could achieve his goals soon grew weary as the mystery slotted into place.

I was surprised how much the book aligned with my interests, in particular data visualization, typography and cryptography. It reminds me there are many people interested in the intersection of these topics.

The fawning Google-worship proved too much. The undeserved, magic code-breaking scene betrayed what is otherwise a reasonable “hard” science fiction fantasy book. The fantasy-novel-in-a-novel failed to escape it’s use as a plot device and a vehicle for some cringe-worthy geekery. Oblique references to Harry Potter were apt considering the author’s fondness for Dumbledore-adjacent names.

All that being said I did enjoy this and I’m not sure why I’m being so harsh. The book just seemed to go off-the-rails a third of the way through and never recovered.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Elements of Style  by William Strunk

The Elements of Style

by William Strunk

There were a few humorously archaic references in this book, but for the most part it holds up 100 years later!

Here are the main rules that stood out to me, most likely because I flout them all.

Usage

  1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's
  2. In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.

Oxford comma, I don’t do this but perhaps I should?

  1. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas

I do a lot of parentheticals. Good core rule to remember.

  1. Place a comma before a conjunction introducing a co-ordinate clause.

So before the and or but. I need to do this.

  1. Do not join independent clauses by a comma.

If two or more clauses, grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction, are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.

Or a period.

  1. Do not break sentences in two.

  2. A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject

e.g. about the subject of the sentence:

Walking slowly down the road, he saw a woman accompanied by two children

vs. referring to the woman

He saw a woman accompanied by two children, walking slowly down the road.

Composition

  1. One paragraph to each topic
  2. Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence, end it with conformity with the beginning
  3. Use the active voice as it’s more “direct and vigorous”

A common fault is to use as the subject of a passive construction a noun which expresses the entire action, leaving to the verb no function beyond that or completing the sentence.

e.g. A survey of this region was made in 1900 vs. This region was surveyed in 1900.

  1. Put statements in positive form
  2. Use definite, specific, concrete language
  3. Omit needless words
  4. Avoid a succession of loose sentences
  5. Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form
  6. Keep related words together

The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning.

  1. In summaries, keep to one tense
  2. Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end

Words to avoid

Certainly, can (instead of may), factor, feature, interesting, so, sort of, kind of, system, very, while

book icon finished

Book cover for Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

★★★★★

My recent reading list tracks Tom Macwright’s closely, mainly because I see he’s rated something with five stars so I go to the library website to add it to my holds. But I forget to pause the hold until some reasonable date in the future, the book arrives at the library and – bam – I start it in earnest.

This book hooked me. The sharp character observations along with the grey areas of intent and purpose made it a magnetic read. I respect the ending but it felt a little unresolved.

book icon finished

Book cover for On Writing by Stephen King

On Writing

by Stephen King

★★★★★

This was really good. A very clear, cogent take on the craft of writing. It almost made me want to start writing a novel.

On distractions

… I’m sure all writers feel pretty much the same, no matter what their skill and success level: God, if only I were in the right writing environment, with the right understanding people, I just KNOW I could be penning my masterpiece

In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. And the larger the work looms in my day—the more it seems like an I hafta instead of just an I wanna—the more problematic it can become.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe

The Last Crossing

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Healing Back Pain by John E. Sarno

Healing Back Pain

by John E. Sarno

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Exit West

by Mohsin Hamid

★★★★☆

We are all migrants through time

book icon finished

Book cover for Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

★★★★★

To have a “thin ear” is to be too easily swayed by the advice of others.

book icon finished

Book cover for Talk to Me by Dean Nelson

Talk to Me

by Dean Nelson

★★★★☆

I don’t have any plans to interview anyone but this was a good read on the things to consider if I ever do. The tone was a touch smug at times but it was a breezy read with plenty of anecdotes to help it flow.

Finding a way in

Nelson suggests finding something unusual that proves you have done your research and shows the interviewee that they are in safe hands. One example digs into the craft – Nelson asked about a particularly long sentence in something Gay Talese had written. Looks like it’s reproduced in this article.

Heat and Like

Heat for heat’s sake or heat for light’s sake

This is referenced a few times, the first time as quoted from Chris Wallace. I really like it. “Heat for heat’s sake” is something that’s pleases an audience. I liken it to virality online and pushing for controversy. “Heat for light’s sake,” however, is the process of “making things a little bit difficult for the object of your scrutiny in order to really try to help the audience understand.”

In my comparison to online discourse this would be drawing attention to something in a non-confrontational way for the purposes of greater awareness.

Open Questions

Unsurprisingly open questions are lauded as important devices for getting good answers from interviewers.

What kind of father were you?

What do you think?

There are also lots of examples of asking questions that you already know the answer to in order to keep in control of the interview. This is a powerful technique when combined with the knowledge you’ve learned “on backround.” But if you don’t know then stick to open questions:

Did it change you in some way? How so?

Always end an interview in this way

This is a surprising question to most and even if someone has a “conventional” name confirming regardless will ensure that the printed result won’t upset them in some way. At the least you will prove that you’re thorough.

Give your source a chance to tell you something that they were hesitating to bring up.

I love this because it’s all about referrals and loops. “There’s always someone who knows more, someone behind the scenes, someone who isn’t quoted or sought out very often.”

Leaving the door open with a source is likely to pay off in the future.

Creativity budget

As per Anne Lamott,

each of us has a hundred dollars of creativity to spend each day. How will we spend that hundred dollars? If we just have two hours available to write today, we could spend some of that time on the internet […] Then we can focus on getting our work done—wisely spending the remaining dollars.

You can’t bank this money, “You get a hundred dollars today”

The interview is not about you

Above all a good interviewer leaves their ego at the door. An interview is not about the interviewer. In the same vein one should learn to be comfortable with silence if it helps draw out interesting details from a source.

An audience with…

When interviewing and unsure about your source you should consider your audience and try and focus on one person in particular. Consider what they would want to know from this source and take away from the interview. This holds for all writing.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian

The Alignment Problem

by Brian Christian

★★★★★

An engrossing, cogent look at Machine Learning safety

Reinforcement learning

Imitation Game

Imitation and aping, it’s more of a human thing than an ape thing

Professor Procrastinate & Moral uncertainty

BOGSAT

Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table

book icon finished

Book cover for The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

★★★★★

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It opened my eyes to the new realities of climate change but matched those realities with some thought-provoking, optimistic steps we could take in the future.

I found myself marking lots of pages with interesting ideas and collated them below.

Gini coefficient

The Gini coefficient is a measure of income or wealth disparity in a population, typically given as a fraction between 0 and 1.

0 is the coefficient if everyone owned an equal amount, 1 is for if one person owned everything and everyone else nothing.

The Gini coefficient for the whole world’s population is higher than for any individual countries as there are so many more poor people in the world. It’s roughly 0.7 for the world.

Monocausotaxophilia is the love of single ideas that explain everything – “one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors.” The Gini coefficient is a good example of this, some countries have the same coefficient despite a large difference in the average annual income. We should consider the spread between the richest and the poor.

Cognitive errors

Foreshortening is a common perceptual distortion.

When standing under a cliff in the mountains and looking up at it, the cliff always appears to be about the same height—say a thousand feet or so. … Only when you get miles away […] can you actually see the immense height …

Other cognitive errors include “anchor bias (you want to stick to your first estimate or what you have been told) and ease of representation (you think an explanation you can understand is more likely to be true than one you can’t).”

The book mentions an “excellent circular graphic display of cognitive errors” – it could be this graphic but it doesn’t quite match the description.

Another one from later in the book is the “availability heuristic,” in which you feel that what is real is what you know.

Secret actors

Hebrew tradition speaks of those hidden good people who keep the world from falling apart, the Tzadikim Nistarium, the hidden righteous ones. In some versions they are thirty-six in number, and thus are called the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six righteous ones.

They emerge and act when needed to save their people before sinking back into anonymity. They are exemplars of humility, if someone were to proclaim himself to be one of the Lamed-Vav, this would be proof that actually he was not. The Lamed-Vav are generally too modest to believe they could be one of these special actors.

The stories of secret actors are the secret action

Paradoxes

The Jevons paradox is that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease. Originally written in reference to the history of the use of coal.

At this point it is naïve to expect that technological improvements alone will slow the impacts of growth and reduce the burden on the biosphere.

2,000 Watt Society

The 2000-watt society is an environmental vision, first introduced in 1998 by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zurich), which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) by the year 2050, without lowering their standard of living.

Carbon coin

The book posits a carbon coin, or carboni, a cryptocurrency backed by central banks to reward and promote ecological actions. I’d like to learn more about this potential for cryptocurrencies, it sounds fascinating.

Hazards

Some of us talked about the bathtub graph. People doing dangerous things make mistakes when they’re first learning it, and then when they’ve known it forever. Theses were the two periods with higher rates of accidents, while the in-between was a stretch of low accidents.

Avoidance

One pathologicial reaction, a form of avoidance, has been called The Masque of the Red Death Syndrome, after the story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, a group of privileged aristocrats, isolated in a castle on a peak above a countryside devastated by a plague, stage a masquerade to distract themselves, or to display indifference or defiance to their eventual fate.

A silent masked stranger then appears and stalks through the party, and few readers are surprised when this stranger turns out to be death itself.

Even more extreme pathological responses to biosphere collapse are possible and have been observed. Some who feel the end is near work to hasten it, or worsen it.

Götterdämmerung Syndrome ~ the Goddamning of the world or “twilight of the gods.”

Shorting civilization & assorted quotes

Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long.

You could literally fill a medium-sized encylopedia with the good new projects already invented and waiting to scale.

Are your machines learning?

Data mining tells us things we wouldn’t have known unless we did it. That could be called artificial intelligence but it’s what we used to call science. What we have really is computer-assisted science. Best to call it that. It’s getting stronger. But we have to figure out what to do with it.

Mail delivered by Lions

Charles Fourier was a French utopian with followers in France and America. There were communes based on his ideas. For him the animals were very important—they were going to join us and become a big part of civilization.

So at one point he says, The mail will be delivered by lions.

After a cursory look online I can’t find anything about this but it’s a nice idea.

book icon finished

Book cover for The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

The Mountains Sing

by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Bird by Bird

by Anne Lamott

★★★★☆

I listened to this on audiobook and loved the thinly-veiled contempt throughout. Lamott had a world-weary, bitter outlook on many aspects of writing so it was remarkable how inspiring I found the book in it’s totality.

Writing is labour, any other idea is romantic

Radio KFKD

I need to bring up radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked, here….If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo.

Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open, and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is.

Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on.

The unconscious

My friend Carpenter talks about the unconscious as the cellar where the little boy sits who creates the characters, and he hands them up to you through the cellar door. He might as well be cutting out paper dolls. He’s peaceful; he’s just playing.

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Here (graphic novel) by Richard McGuire

Here (graphic novel)

by Richard McGuire

★★★☆☆

pencil icon finished

Book cover for On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu

On Fragile Waves

by E. Lily Yu

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Essentialism by Greg McKeown

Essentialism

by Greg McKeown

book icon finished

Book cover for The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo

The Infinite Machine

by Camila Russo

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Intimations by Zadie Smith

Intimations

by Zadie Smith

book icon finished

Book cover for No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

★★★☆☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami by David Karashima

Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami

by David Karashima

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Book cover for Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes

Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design

by Kat Holmes

★★★★☆

book icon finished

Graphical excellence

complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency.

that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the shortest space

graphical excellence is nearly always multivariate

And graphical excellence requires telling the truth about the data

Data-Built data measures

Using the data itself to plot data “increases the quantitative detail and dimensionality of a graphic”

If we are going to make a mark it may as well be a meaningful one. The simplest—and most useful—meaningful mark is a digit. (Tukey)

Examples:

Color guidance

Color often generates graphical puzzles. Despite our experiences… the mind’s eye does not readily give a visual ordering to colors.

Greyscale shades show varying quantities better than color.

Multiple layers of information

  1. What is seen from a distance, an overall structure usually aggregated from an underlying microstructure.
  2. What is seen up close and in detail, the fine structure of the data
  3. What is seen implicitly underlying the graphic

Consider the viewing architecture of a graphic.

Data-ink ratio

Data-ink is the non-erasable core of a graphic, the non-redundant ink arranged in response to variation in the numbers represented.

data-ink ratio=data-inktotal ink used to print the graphic\texttt{data-ink ratio} = \frac{\texttt{data-ink}}{\texttt{total ink used to print the graphic}}

Whitespace

Even part of the data measures can be erased, making a white grid

range-frame

the frame of a graphic can become an effective data-communicating element simply by erasing part of it.

should extend only to the measured limits of the data

Data density

Taking into account the size of the graphic in relation to the amount of data displayed yields the data density:

data density of a graphic=number of entries in data matrixarea of data graphic\texttt{data density of a graphic} = \frac{\texttt{number of entries in data matrix}}{\texttt{area of data graphic}}

book icon finished

book icon finished

Book cover for Bad Island by Stanley Donwood

Bad Island

by Stanley Donwood

book icon finished

Book cover for How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang

How Much of These Hills Is Gold

by C Pam Zhang

★★★★★

book icon finished

Book cover for Indistractable by Nir Eyal

Indistractable

by Nir Eyal

book icon finished

book icon finished

Book cover for Deep Work by Cal Newport

Deep Work

by Cal Newport

book icon finished

Book cover for Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann

Tyll

by Daniel Kehlmann

book icon finished

Book cover for Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte

Visual Explanations

by Edward Tufte

book icon finished

Book cover for How Not to be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

How Not to be Wrong

by Jordan Ellenberg

book icon finished

Book cover for Beautiful Evidence by  Edward Tufte

Beautiful Evidence

by Edward Tufte

book icon finished

pencil icon finished

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Shantytown by César Aira

Shantytown

by César Aira

book icon finished

Book cover for Familiar Face by Michael DeForge

Familiar Face

by Michael DeForge

pencil icon finished

Book cover for The Man Without Talent by Yoshiharu Tsuge

The Man Without Talent

by Yoshiharu Tsuge

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna

Year of the Rabbit

by Tian Veasna

pencil icon finished

Book cover for The House of Owls by Tony Angell

The House of Owls

by Tony Angell

book icon finished

Book cover for Algorithms to Live by by Brian Christian

Algorithms to Live by

by Brian Christian

book icon finished

Book cover for Freedom Hospital by Hamid Sulaiman

Freedom Hospital

by Hamid Sulaiman

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Fire on the Water by Scott MacGregor

Fire on the Water

by Scott MacGregor

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin

Little Eyes

by Samanta Schweblin

book icon finished

Book cover for Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

book icon finished

Book cover for Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine

Killing and Dying

by Adrian Tomine

pencil icon finished

book icon finished

Book cover for Unbuilt Victoria by Dorothy Mindenhall

Unbuilt Victoria

by Dorothy Mindenhall

book icon finished

Book cover for How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard

How to Measure Anything

by Douglas W. Hubbard

book icon finished

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Showa 1953–1989 by Shigeru Mizuki

Showa 1953–1989

by Shigeru Mizuki

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Bandwidth by Eliot Peper

Bandwidth

by Eliot Peper

book icon finished

Book cover for Embassytown by China Miéville

Embassytown

by China Miéville

book icon finished

Book cover for Non-Violent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg

Non-Violent Communication

by Marshall B. Rosenberg

headphones icon finished

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

Radicalized

by Cory Doctorow

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Sandworm by Andy Greenberg

Sandworm

by Andy Greenberg

headphones icon finished

book icon finished

Book cover for Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

book icon finished

Book cover for Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg: This Is Our Territory by Gidigaa Migizi (Doug Williams)

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg: This Is Our Territory

by Gidigaa Migizi (Doug Williams)

book icon finished

Book cover for Atomic Habits by James Clear

Atomic Habits

by James Clear

headphones icon finished

Book cover for Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Dark Matter

by Blake Crouch

headphones icon finished

book icon finished

book icon finished

book icon finished

Book cover for 9 Stories by J. D. Salinger

9 Stories

by J. D. Salinger

book icon finished

Book cover for Permutation City by Greg Egan

Permutation City

by Greg Egan

book icon finished

Book cover for 100 Days in Uranium City by Ariane Dénommé

100 Days in Uranium City

by Ariane Dénommé

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet

Turn the Ship Around!

by L. David Marquet

book icon finished

Book cover for Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine

Shortcomings

by Adrian Tomine

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Creation by Sylvia Nickerson

Creation

by Sylvia Nickerson

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Blankets by Craig Thompson

Blankets

by Craig Thompson

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Maggie Garrison by Lewis Trondheim and Oiry

Maggie Garrison

by Lewis Trondheim and Oiry

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Beverly by Nick Drnaso

Beverly

by Nick Drnaso

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Off Season by James Sturm

Off Season

by James Sturm

pencil icon finished

Book cover for Brother by David Chariandy

Brother

by David Chariandy

book icon finished

Book cover for Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Digital Minimalism

by Cal Newport

book icon finished

Book cover for Most Human Human by Brian Christian

Most Human Human

by Brian Christian

book icon finished