Total books read: 40 (see my goodreads profile for a full list)
Best book: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut. My review:
This book is really going to bork my knowledge of the science history of Haber, Schwarzchild, Grothendieck, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, but that’s ok. A dark fiction of nonfictions, it is a book of imagined tails of these giants on the edge of discovery and disaster.
Some will be offended by the male genius trope, but others might consider that these are not heroes, and that science on the edge is, by definition, madness. Most scientists never get to live on this boundary, spending their lives in the cold comfort of existing structures, and Labatut captures this terrifying boundary in dense dark prose.
Best book’s buddy book who was not nearly as good: The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut. Perhaps because I know a lot about von Neumann, and the surrounding characters, this book fell far short of When We Cease to Understand the World. A true masterpiece involving this particular Martian still awaits telling.
Most read author: Adrian Tchaikovsky. Cage of Souls, Service Model, Elder Race, and Alien Clay. I will continue to pick up most anything he writes.
Best non-fiction: Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth. A romp though rhetorical grammatical structures, what they are and how they are used.
Non-fiction book I was most disappointed with: The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius by Patchen Barrs. I had high expectations, Penrose is certainly one of the most fascinating theoretical physicist of the last century. Somewhere I have a xeroxed copy of his PhD thesis on spin networks. Sadly this book focuses more on the complicated relationships in his life, and less on the complicated physics and mathematics in his life.
Number of Neal Stephenson novels: 1 new (Polostan), 2 rereads (Snowcrash, Seveneves)
Books in progress: 4. I still have 12 hours to finish them!
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (reread)
- The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick (reread)
- Discovering : Inventing Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge by Robert Root-Bernstein
- Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence by Sara Imari Walker
Next years reading goals: More non-fiction in areas I know little about.