The following is a list of books that made an impression on me in 2023. I listen to most non-technical books on Audible and read technical content on paper or my iPad.
The Trial, Franz Kafka (1925)
Franz Kafka wrote The Trial in 1914 and 1915, and it was published in 1925, according to Wikipedia. This famous work was particularly interesting to me, having grown up under a totalitarian regime. I wanted to read it for a long time, and I am glad I did, but it was an infuriating experience, as I am sure the author intended. The next level in this book is not that a citizen is unable to defend himself against the charges brought by the state; in this, there is nothing unusual as evident, for example, by the current trials under Putin and many before and after him, but rather that the protagonist, Joseph K., doesn’t even know what he is charged with.
Alan Turing: The Enigma, Andrew Hodges (1983)
Alen Turing was a British mathematician and arguably the first computer scientist. This is a thorough biography starting with Turing’s early life and education at King’s College, Cambridge, where he demonstrated remarkable facility with mathematics.
In his 1936 paper, “On computable numbers with an application to Entscheidungsproblem (decision or decidability problem),” he introduced what we now call a Turing Machine. The neat thing about the Turing Machine is that it is a purely theoretical construct, unlike, say, a Von Newman computer, which is a design of a digital computer. Turing Machine is a mathematical abstraction that can compute anything computable, and in the paper, Turing showed that not all things can be computed. This is a mind-blowingly general result.
Other details include Turing’s work at Bletchley part where he led the effort to crack the Nazi Enigma code (using Bayesian methods). The British government thanked Turing for his work by criminally charging him with “acts of gross indecency” (Turing was gay) and ordering him to undergo chemical castration. Alan Turing committed suicide in 1954 when he was 41.
Both Flesh and Not, David Foster Wallace (2012)
This is a collection of essays from my favorite essayist, and it did not disappoint. DFW’s fascination with tennis continues with an essay about Roger Federer, which is the book’s title.
Here is an opening quote:
It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner… until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court back hand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (= his left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scramblierfng to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does—Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side… and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner—Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands.
Wallace loves these near-infinite sentences even in assays (his fiction is full of them) and is one of the few authors who can get away with it.
Another tennis essay in the collection is DEMOCRACY AND COMMERCE AT THE U.S. OPEN. Those who know DFW’s work will recognize his fascination with advertising.
For the mathematically inclined, there is RHETORIC AND THE MATH MELODRAMA. Wallace has an appreciation for mathematics (he was an English and Philosophy major with a particular interest in modal logic). This essay introduced me to G. H. Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology,” which I will discuss later.
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth (2004)
I am pretty sure this book reads differently today, after Trump and the October 7 Hamas massacre, than it did when it came out. The premise is that Charles Lindbergh, a famous American aviator and a purported Nazi sympathizer, becomes president with somewhat obvious consequences, including the rise of anti-semitism, relocation of Jews, and so on. Roth is a master storyteller, and this book is a page-turner. I hear HBO has the miniseries now.
This story reminded me of another famous (Lativian) aviator and a Nazi collaborator, Herberts Cukurs, who earned a well-deserved nickname, the Butcher of Latvia. Mossad agents eventually assassinated Cukurs in Urugvaj, while Lindbergh died on Maui of lymphoma, having designed his own coffin.
Open An Autobiography, Ande Aggasi (2000)
This book is ghost-written by J. R. Moehringer and is the best sports biography I have ever read; it is the only sports biography I have ever read if I am being honest. Moehringer also wrote Phil Night’s Shoe Dog, a gripping story of the founder of Nike.
As DFW often noted, it is hard to imagine what it is like to be number one in the world in anything, much less something as competitive as tennis. Stories about Aggasi’s deranged father alone are worth the price of admission. Nothing was easy for Aggasi, but what he lacked in talent (which was not much), he made up in sheer will and perseverance. I found the book inspiring- it put me in a better mood every time I listened.
Educated A Memoir, Tara Westover (2018)
This is another “I can’t believe she made it” book that is both horrifying and uplifting. You can’t help but root for Tara as she navigates her abusive family, particularly her physically and emotionally abusive brother Shawn (pseudonym).
Einstein His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson (2007)
I read a few Isaacson biographies, and this one has been on my list for a long time. An ardent pacifist, who at one point believed that young people should refuse military service, Einstein gradually changed his mind observing the rise of Nazis. He worried that the Germans would develop the bomb first and encouraged President Roosevelt to fund the development of nuclear weapons, which eventually led to the Manhattan Project (he did not participate in the project directly).
The eventual Nobel Prize was not for relativity but rather for his work on the photoelectric effect, which improved our understanding of light and made possible future inventions like solar panels and any other devices that convert light into electricity.
Martin Gardner has an amusing essay in his book “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science” called “Down with Einstein!” In it, Gardner describes a few of Einstein’s skeptics (haters in modern parlance), some of whom unleashed a tsunami of invectives on the physicist. Here is an example of one attack by Jeremiah J. Callahan, a priest (*) and a student of Euclidean geometry, albeit a not-very-good one:
We certainly cannot consider Einstein as one who shines as a scientific discoverer in the domain of physics, but rather as one who in a fuddled sort of way is merely trying to find some meaning for mathematical formulas in which he himself does not believe too strongly, but which he is hoping against hope somehow to establish…. Einstein has not a logical mind.
(*) Lots of priests contributed to science; my favorite, of course, is Reverend Thomas Bayes.
Lying for Money, Dan Davies (2022)
This was Andrew’s (the Gel-dog, as my friend Arya calls him) recommendation, and you can read his detailed review here. As Andrew points out, the neat thing about this book is how Davies, who is an economist by training, considers fraud to be a necessary consequence of any functioning economy in that there is an optimal level of fraud — too little, and you are spending way too much money on prevention and punishment; too much, and you are losing too much in direct damages.
Case studies include Charles Ponzi, Bernie Madoff, Enron, Nick Leeson and the Collapse of Barings Bank (new to me), The South Sea Bubble, and The Nigerian Email scams.
Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck (1962)
This was pure comfort food. Tom Hanks recommended it to me (and thousands of other people who listened to the Marc Maron interview.) I started reading Steinbeck in my 30s when I decided it was time to learn about the American experience from quintessentially American writers.
The book is Steinbeck’s travelogue recorded in the 1950s when the author decided to take a journey across America aboard his truck, which he nicknamed Rocinante (*), and accompanied by his poodle Charlie. During the travels, Steinbeck interacts with ordinary Americans and, among other things, experiences the racial tensions and tropes prevalent at the time.
(*) Rocinante was the name of Don Quixote’s horse.
Nobody’s Fool, Daniel Simons & Christopher Chabris (2023)
This is another one of Andrew’s recommendations. I share Adnrew’s fascination with all kinds of fraud, so I usually take his recommendations on the topic.
The book has many exciting examples, including the famous Princess Card Trick. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth checking it out. Did you figure it out? Yes, all the original cards were replaced, not just the one you focused on.
Another one is statisticians’ favorite which goes by the name of survivorship bias. During WWII, the army tried to figure out how to retrofit B-17 bombers returning from their missions by looking at the pattern of damages they sustained. Suppose you see the following damage pattern.
On a casual inspection, you may want to retrofit the areas where the bullet holes are, but Abraham Wald realized that that would be a mistake. The reason why we do not observe any bullet holes in the blue areas is because the planes that were hit there did not make it back from their missions, and therefore this is where you should fortify the aircraft.
Here are some observations from their section on our collective lack of excitement for situations when something important is being prevented.
- We complain when a medication has side effects or doesn’t resolve our symptoms right away, but we don’t think about the possibility that we might have gotten much sicker without it.
- Successful precautions to prevent a catastrophic flood go unheralded, but a failed levee draws public ire.
- We respond with accusations when a bridge collapses, but we don’t support the engineers who have documented the need for repairs for decades—much less give any thought to the engineers who have kept all the other bridges standing.
- Governments might move mountains to respond to an acute health crisis, but health departments responsible for preventing such crises in the first place are chronically underfunded.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi (2020)
This was a difficult book for me, particularly after October 7, when I decided to read it. Khalidi is a Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University who has deep familiar roots in the region — his great-great uncle was Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi (1842–1906), a mayor of Jerusalem.
The book examines the formation and development of the state of Israel from the Palestinian perspective, starting from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the present day; it does not contain any anti-Semitic tropes (just in case you are wondering). To my knowledge, no one had disputed the historical accounts presented in the book (*), but some (not me) objected to the tone.
When trying to understand the world, I believe it is important to consider all credible perspectives, and this book was an important contribution to my understanding of the Middle East and the long-standing conflicts therein.
(*) Dmitry points me to the article by Diana Muir, “A Land without a People for a People without a Land.” In it, she cites some evidence that, contrary to Khalidi’s claim, the use of the slogan was not central to the early Zionist movement.
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
This was my second book by LeGuin. The first one was The Left Hand of Darkness, which left no impression on me when I read it the first time in college and completely blew my mind when I reread it in 2023. I guess there is a time and place for everything.
The story is set on twin planets Urras and Anarres. Urras is rich and abundant, reminiscent of Earth, with complex societies, including one that mirrors capitalist and patriarchal structures. In contrast, Anarres is a barren world where settlers, inspired by the anarchist teachings of Odo, have created a society without government, private property, or hierarchies.
The protagonist, Shevek, is a brilliant physicist from Anarres. His journey to Urras marks the first time in nearly two centuries that someone from the anarchist society of Anarres visits the capitalist Urras. Shevek’s goal is to complete and share his theory of time, which could revolutionize communication and travel in the universe.
ChatGPT 4
What I love about LeGuin is that the science part of her science fiction is beside the point. I wouldn’t even call it science fiction. She creates alternative worlds where different social, moral, and political structures are explored and developed with consequences that seem logical to LeGuin. The alien planets and peoples are a literary device, but their presence illuminates the presentation.
Infinite Powers How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe, Steven Strogatz (2019)
I hate certain popular books, particularly those that dumb things down so much there is nothing of substance left or, worse, a completely distorted picture of the subject. The airport bookstore is full of them, and I try to avoid them at all costs. This book is the opposite — it explores integral and differential calculus with some history of the subject sprinkled in; it is neither a textbook nor a purely popular book. There are equations, but they are presented with such clarity and context that I feel like anyone with basic knowledge of high-school math should be able to appreciate the underlying beauty that emerges when you slice things into infinitely many pieces and put them back together. Derivatives, integrals, power series, it’s all there.
A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy (1940)
David Foster Wallace recommended this book, and it did not disappoint. It presents the opposite view of mathematics than Strogatz’s Infinite Powers, which I believe is shared by many professional mathematicians. Hardy was interested in pure math, so he found engineering mathematics, like calculus, dull. Moreover, he enjoyed the fact that pure math has no practical utility. In his words:
It is undeniable that a good deal of elementary mathematics—and I use the word ‘elementary’ in the sense in which professional mathematicians use it, in which it includes, for example, a fair working knowledge of the differential and integral calculus—has considerable practical utility. These parts of mathematics are, on the whole, rather dull; they are just the parts which have the least aesthetic value.
He continues:
The ‘real’ mathematics of the ‘real’ mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholly ‘useless’ (and this is as true of ‘applied’ as of ‘pure’ mathematics). It is not possible to justify the life of any genuine professional mathematician on the ground of the ‘utility’ of his work.
This is an exaggeration, I think. For example, Gauss’s work on error functions is of great practical significance to statisticians, and of course, there is a Riemann integral. Nonetheless, I love Hardy’s mathematical puritanism.
Hardy’s love of pure math was not simply esthetic — he hoped that by practicing pure math, no weapons of war and destruction could be created using his tools. He was a pacificist, you see, a much more ardent one than Einstein.
Other Books
Other notable books that I keep coming back to and picking at are The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose (which got me excited about Complex Analysis), but I never got past Fourier Analysis, Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind (I got through the Lagrangian Mechanics but want to read more), Fads and Falacies by Martin Gardner, Regression and Other Stories by Andrew Gelman et al. (I am reading the Causal Inference chapters), and The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900, by Stephen Stigler.