List of books I’ve read in 2019

  • 2019-12-25 Matthew Walker: Why We Sleep
    We sleep to restore. Can’t really recover of lost sleep. Note to self: go to sleep at the same time every day, take a hot bath before going to bed. Very good.
  • 2019-10-30 Lucian Boia: “Germanofilii” - Elita intelectuală românească în anii Primului Război Mondial
    Another myth busting book. Against the traditional nationalistic discourse portrayal of the First World War, Lucian Boia shows the variety of viewpoints held by writers, journalists, politicians, academic at the time, and their individual destinies.
  • 2019-07-07 Rose George: Nine Pints
    Book about blood. Journalistic style. OK, but not great.
  • 2019-06-18 Wilfrid Hodges: Logic - an introduction to elementary logic
    The good parts: samples of English sentences that are ambiguos (hence the difficulty of translating them in formal logic) and examples with solutions. The bad parts: not clear and precise where it should be. E.g. first-order predicate logic might be the crowning achievement of modern logic, but stating this sheds little light on what is first-order predicate logic. Also too much time spent on the tableaux method.
  • 2019-06-07 Kurt Gödel: On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems
    This 1962 translation by B. Meltzer comes with an introduction by R. B. Braithwaite. The introduction is not good. The actual paper is difficult, but it makes sense. I’ve only skimmed my way through. It’s worthy of a more detailed reading, though I’ll try to see if there are better translations/version available (in particular with regards to notation and typography)
  • 2019-05-17 Lucian Boia: Între înger şi fiară - Mitul omului diferit din Antichitate până în zilele noastre
    A history of the myths of ‘them’ vs. ‘us’. Not the best of his books, mainly due to the fact that it’s a history of nonsensical ideas. An example to remember is how during Enlightenment, thinking still dominated by religious ideas, meant that the other planets of the Solar System had to have a reason to exist, therefore they were inhabited; some thinkers were therefore trying to use reason to figure out what kind of people were living on the other planets, not questioning if. Update 2019-10-30: in time I have come to appreciate the book when I recognise patters in the portrayal of others in the current political discourse.
  • 2019-05-11 Torkel Franzén: Gödel’s Theorem - An Incomplete Guide To Its Use And Abuse
    An accessible exploration of what can and what cannot be implied from Gödel’s theorems. Good. Difficulty rating: 12 pages per evening

Book cover

  • 2019-04-27 Euclid: The Thirteen Books of the Elements / Translated and commentary by Sir Thomas L. Heath / Vol.1 (Books I and II)
    Beautiful insights into logic and reasoning from a book written more than 2300 years ago. Very very good. Difficulty rating: 3 pages per evening.
  • 2019-02-08: articles on unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
    See reading notes. Hamming’s one is particularly interesting.
  • 2019-02-06: N. Wirth: Programming Development by Stepwise Refinement / Communications of the ACM, Vol. 14, No. 4, p221-227, April 1971.
    Not a book, an article. Describes the eight queens problem. OK-ish.
  • 2019-01-21: Edsger W. Dijkstra: The Humble Programmer / ACM Turing Lecture 1972
    Not a book, an article. Gem about the nature of developing software. See reading-notes. Good.
  • 2019-01-18 - Hans Rosling: Factfulness
    In style of Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenement Now, it’s data supporting a view of the world such that the world is improving and it is possible to improve further. It describes a yardstick measure of life at four income levels. It describes the gap instinct of expecting to identify clear boundaries between categories where in reality things are murky and conflated. Also why war zone immigrants arrive in inflatable boats: because regulation prevents them to fly, which costs less, and the better boats get confiscated at arrival. Difficulty rating: 30 pages per evening.
  • 2019-01-18 Donald E. Knuth: Structured Programming with go to Statements / Computing Surveys, Vol. 6, No. 4, December 1974
    Not a book, a long-ish article, but full of gems including “Premature optimisation is the root of all evil” and “people have a natural tendency to set up all easily understood quantitative goal […] instead of working directly for a qualitative goal”. See reading notes. Difficulty rating: 6 pages per evening.

NOTE: Some books are rated for difficulty. That’s an estimation of pages I can read in a work day evening (after putting children to bed, dinner, catch-up with The Important One, etc.). An easy read equates to more pages per evening, a difficult read equates to less pages.