Tag Archives: books

War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List

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I have to be honest with myself – my reading pace has dropped way off during my intensive child-rearing (not to mention full time working) years. I just am not going to be reading long non-fiction books, and I will be chipping away at fiction very slowly, mostly as audiobooks. So that out of the way, there are some interesting books here that I will very likely not be able to read.

  • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. At first I thought what, is this about military strategy or business strategy or what? Turns out it cuts across many fields and that is why it sounds interesting to me.
  • The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare. I probably won’t read this. In fact, I don’t even want high-tech warfare to arrive, but it will so we might at least want to know it when we see it.
  • George Orwell. I would rather read George Orwell than books about George Orwell, but this reminds that George Orwell wrote a variety of books other than Animal Farm and 1984 (or are you supposed to write out the letters?) I read and enjoyed Burmese Days a few years ago, for example. I would like to reread 1984 though. I don’t usually reread books, but this is a classic I read when I was just too young to appreciate it. The interesting thing to me is that it depicts future governments as mastering propaganda through technology, when in fact technology is causing governments to lose control of communications with their own people.
  • Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan – I am always up for some near-future techno-dystopia!
  • Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Recently I have been trying to stop worrying about the line between science fiction and fantasy and learn to enjoy the latter more. But now we have something called “science fantasy” that straddles the line. I guess we have always had it and now it just has a new (to me) name. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all that.
  • The Red Trilogy by Linda Nagata. Military science fiction. Not always my favorite genre but I am always on the lookout for something even close to the classics like Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, and The Forever War. Of course, in all of those war is a means to explore a variety of social and psychological topics.

NYT best books of 2020

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I plan to boycott giving the New York Times any money from now until the end of time because of the weapons of mass destruction debacle. Unless I get a letter or phone call of apology from Judith Miller herself.

So I had a look at the NYT best books on 2020 on this website. I don’t see anything I am likely to read here. I think Obama’s memoir is an important work of history. I don’t need to read it because I listened to his interview with Terry Gross the other day.

Shakespeare in a Divided America and War: How Conflict Shaped Us sound marginally interesting. I may add them to my list of more-books-than-I-can-read-before-I-die.

The problem with arguing that war is just part of the human condition is that weapons keep getting more dangerous. Eventually we will get to weapons so dangerous that a decision to use them is a decision civilization can never recover from. That decision might be completely irrational, but there may come a day when it only takes one irrational decision to bring civilization or even life on Earth crashing down around us.

New York Times Top 10 Books of 2018

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Well, I had a look at their Top 10, and nothing really caught my eye. There are two book-length expansions of magazine articles I remember reading, one a Mother Jones article about private prisons, and Michael Pollan’s article on psychedelics. Both were good, but the articles were long enough and got the point across. I don’t need to read the books.

They also have a list of “books that didn’t make the top 10“. Steven Pinker has a new one on why things are actually not so bad in the United States right now. Incidentally, you can contrast it with this article about how things are really bad in the United States right now, or at least going in a bad direction when most of the rest of the developed world is making progress. I think it depends on who you are – things are okay if you are a middle-class professional or higher on the class ladder (and you pretty much have to be a professional to live a middle class life style these days, which is the problem – being at the median really does not necessarily mean a middle class life style these days.)

Another one that caught my eye – just in time for Christmas! – is called The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. I’ve always sort of thought that even in the Christian world of the Middle Ages was less enlightened than what came before, and arguably less enlightened than the Muslim and East Asian worlds of the time, it at least preserved art, music, and literature that was built on later. The title of this one (which I admit is all I have read) seems to cast doubt on that.

Bill Gates’s Favorite Books of 2016

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Don’t you just hate it when a multi-billionaire retiree says, “Even when my schedule is out of control, I carve out a lot of time for reading”? Anyway, Bill Gates has released his favorite books, and a couple caught my eye.

The Gene, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Doctors are deemed a “triple threat” when they take care of patients, teach medical students, and conduct research. Mukherjee, who does all of these things at Columbia University, is a “quadruple threat,” because he’s also a Pulitzer Prize– winning author. In his latest book, Mukherjee guides us through the past, present, and future of genome science, with a special focus on huge ethical questions that the latest and greatest genome technologies provoke. Mukherjee wrote this book for a lay audience, because he knows that the new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways.

The Myth of the Strong Leader, by Archie Brown. This year’s fierce election battle prompted me to pick up this 2014 book, by an Oxford University scholar who has studied political leadership—good, bad, and ugly—for more than 50 years. Brown shows that the leaders who make the biggest contributions to history and humanity generally are not the ones we perceive to be “strong leaders.” Instead, they tend to be the ones who collaborate, delegate, and negotiate—and recognize that no one person can or should have all the answers. Brown could not have predicted how resonant his book would become in 2016.

Honorable mention: The Grid, by Gretchen Bakke. This book, about our aging electrical grid, fits in one of my favorite genres: “Books About Mundane Stuff That Are Actually Fascinating.” Part of the reason I find this topic fascinating is because my first job, in high school, was writing software for the entity that controls the power grid in the Northwest. But even if you have never given a moment’s thought to how electricity reaches your outlets, I think this book would convince you that the electrical grid is one of the greatest engineering wonders of the modern world. I think you would also come to see why modernizing the grid is so complex and so critical for building our clean-energy future.

Time Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

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Yes, Time Magazine has a list of what it thinks are the 100 best all-time nonfiction books. There is a fair amount here that documents the history of the 20th century as it was unfolding, which would be interesting to read. It is a fairly politically left-leaning (e.g., Howard Zinn), pro-science (E.O. Wilson) list, although they do throw in Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater for good measure. It appeals to that small part of me that wants to retire, abandon my family, and just read from now on.

Bill Gates’s Blog

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New York Times has an interesting post on Bill Gates’s blog. He claims to read 50 books a year. That’s…let me get my calculator…about a book a week. And then he blogs about them.

this year I enjoyed Richard Dawkins’s “The Magic of Reality,” which explains various scientific ideas and is aimed at teenagers. Although I already understood all the concepts, Dawkins helped me think about the topics in new ways. If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really understand it…

Some, like Randall Munroe’s “Thing Explainer,” are written exactly for that reason. He uses diagrams paired with the most common 1,000 words in the English language to explain complicated ideas…

I like highlighting the work of Vaclav Smil. He has written more than 30 books, and I have read them all. He takes on huge topics like energy or transportation and gives them a thorough examination.