List of books I’ve read in 2018

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  • 2018-10-16 Lucian Boia: Istorie şi mit în conştiinţa românească
    I learned the history of the textbooks in school. I faced the propaganda, in the media about the Romanian past: ‘our Dacian origins’, ‘the Latin purity of our language’, ‘Mihai Viteazu united the Romanian principates’, ‘our national poet: Mihai Eminescu’. These ideas smell, do not sound truthful, but as a pupil I did not know better. Lucian Boia explains them as myths, and explores their origins and political motivations.
  • 2018-08-20 Mircea Eliade: Istoria Credințelor și ideilor religioase (vol I, second ed. 1991)
    Encyclopedic coverage. Four out of five stars. Debatable statement that religion is integral part of conscience. Sexist statement that in early humans men were hunting because women could not provide enough food by gathering (equally one could say that women had to gather because men were not providing enough food hunting). Covers: early humans, Mesopotamia, Egypt, megaliths, Hittits & Canaanites, early Jewish, India before Gautama-Buddha, Zeus, Olympians, Greek Heroes, Eleusis misteries, Zarathustra, Dionysus.
  • 2018-08-15 Radu Preda: Jurnal cu Petru Țuțea
    Interview notes with Petru Țuțea. Having spent 13 years in the communist prisons, P. Țuțea appeared as an intriguing character in the Romanian media in the years after the 1989 revolution. I’m sure the author is a nice person, but the book is full of mistico-regligios-heroic-nationalistic non-sense. A bad read, not recommended.

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  • 2018-08-14 Robert Endre Tarjan: Data Structures and Network Algorithms
    Very good introduction to graph algorithms in a short book. The style is dense, but correct (one could provide more details, but would need to use more words). It has 9 chapters: 1 of basics, 4 on helper data structures and 4 on graph algorithms. I did not quite get the last and a half chapters very difficult. The disjoined sets (one of the data structures) were easy to understand once the usage was clarified. However the analysis of the complexity of the disjoined sets operations is cool, but very difficult: it’s the first time when I saw the Ackerman function used meaningfully for anything else other then a short statement “here is a function that grows faster than exponential”. NOTE: I found later that it took him about 1 year to derive the complexity analysis for the disjoined sets operations, then I did not feel so bad any more. Difficulty rating: 3 pages per evening.

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  • 2018-08-04 - Charles Petzold: The Annotated Turing
    See review. Difficulty rating: 10 pages per evening.
  • 2018-06-14 Albert Einstein: Teoria relativității pe înțelesul tuturor
    Should you be an imaginary creature living in a 2D surface, you can figure out if the space is is flat or not (e.g. a plane or the surface of a sphere) by measuring the ratio between the circumference of a circle and the diameter. For a flat surface it’s π (pi). If it’s not π, then the surface is not flat. Difficulty rating: 10 pages per evening.
  • 2018-06-10 - James Comey: A Higher Loyalty
    Difficulty rating: 50 pages per evening.

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  • 2018-06-01 - Steven Pinker: Enlightenment Now
    Very good book 10 out of 10 see review. Difficulty rating: 30 pages per evening.
  • 2018-05 - Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner: Clear and simple as the truth
    Definition of style of writing as deep attitudes with regards to truth and the relationship between the writer and the reader. Presents the classic style as one where the writer has something meaningful to say, assumes that the truth can be presented, and that the reader will recognise.
  • 2018-04 - Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: How Democracies Die
    Two guys specialist on malfunctions of democracies (one in South America ones, the other in Easter Europe ones) said to each other: with Trump now we can apply the same to US. In a democratic regime the powers (e.g. executive, legislative, judiciary) restrain from using the full power of the law (e.g. Congress does not remove the president just because it has the majority to do so). The US politics have become polarized long before Trump.
  • 2018-04 Keith Hitchins: Românii. 1774-1866
    Romanian history by an American. Covers about a century up to shortly after the Union Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. OK, but not as incisive as the works of Lucian Boia. Among other pieces of info: how small the population was, in particular in cities, how production of wheat was taken by the Turks, hence peasants were keen to plant other things like corn, why the national ideology about the Roman and Dacian origin (Roman provide reputation whereas Dacian extends timelines). Funny fact: aristocracy (boyars) tried at some point to define the day of work the serfs were obliged to provide to be longer than an actual day.
  • 2018-03 - Herbert A. Simon: Reason in Human Affairs
    Great insight on how we take decisions.
  • 2018-02 - Chip and Dan Heath: Made to Stick

  • 2018-01 - Lucian Boia: Mitologia ştiinţifică a comunismului
    There is nothing scientific about communism/marxism.
  • 2018-01 Carlo M. Cipolla: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
    Tongue and cheek essay on human stupidity e.g. “Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.”

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.