Category: Books

What if you slept… by Samuel Taylor Coleridge What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in your hand Ah, what then?

I probably read this book for the first time around ’97-’98, and it was an eye-opener. It should be required reading for all engineering students. This time around, I read it in a fraction of the time that it took me then, and I’m happy with how comfortable I am with the contents. It also…

Slice of life and society, and what a contrast to Musashi and Shogun. Well, not surprising, considering that this one is set in the 20th century! And then there’s this: The Seven Ways to Attain Victory Suppressing the opponent’s ki Anticipating the attack Responding to the attack Holding down Driving back Overwhelming Proper adjustment The…

How little we know about the world around us! And how interconnected everything is — I hadn’t realized that a Star Trek Discovery character was named after a ‘shroom expert! Plenty of recalls to ‘How to Change Your Mind.’ And, we understand so little about the world around us..

This was not intentional, but I ended up reading a book a week this year — probably more than I ever have! I went back and looked at what I’d read, and here’s a bit of a summary. This year was dominated by sci-fi, but these were mainly entire series (total 24 books!): 3-body (3),…

What a wonderful way to end out an absolutely fantastic reading year! My notes: Three basic questions: What should we do? What is there? How do we know? And different -ism’s: Metaphysics or what sorts of things are there? Dualism (mind & matter), v. Materialism and Idealism Epistemology, or how do we know? Empiricism (perceiving…

I honestly don’t know what the purpose of this book is. Introspect on your life? Stuff matters? It violently clashes with my current exploration of my own philosophy, so probably wasn’t a good time for me to read it…

Wow! This is one way that we evolve into post-human constructs. And people currently worried about the ethics of AI should add a whole new dimension about what could happen!

This has been a pretty poor year for books recommended by friends — such as this one! There are some cases where you know what you’re looking for, and you search for it. And that is all that you’ll find. If you wander around aimlessly, you’ll find other interesting stuff that you otherwise wouldn’t have…

Recommended by a friend. My gut reaction was that I wouldn’t get much from this book, and I’m sorry to say that I didn’t. I guess I’m just too jaded! I don’t disagree with anything that Morrie says, but the book had more of the surrounding drama and the actual message tends to get lost…

I had to struggle to get the context right while I was reading this book. He explicitly targets the liberal arts, and I was trying to apply his statements to engineering, and disagreeing with them. I get what Caplan is trying to say at an intellectual level. The amount of analysis that he’s done is amazing, …

This (of course?) reads like vignettes of episodic occurrences that are very loosely strung together in a supposed story, and it ends pretty abruptly. I didn’t have to work too hard to imagine Keillor speaking this as I was reading it. Beautiful, descriptive prose, brings back fond memories of NPR in California and living in…

I’m pretty sure I haven’t read these books before but get the feeling that I’ve read something similar to Ciri moving through space and time. Oh well. Always be scared if you’re the sidekick. Especially if one of the other sidekicks is stepping away from the stage…

Revisiting an old favorite… A glass of tea; the moon; The frogs croak in the weeds. A bat wriggles down across Gold disk to silver reeds. The distant light of lamps. The whirr of winnowing grain. The peace of loneliness. The scent of imminent rain.

How is it even possible to create such worlds?