Ask HN: What books are you reading this month?

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As it turns out I chose to learn Vue.js but nobody is really hiring for that. It's all react these days with a little Angular sprinkled in. Although after 25 years of doing this job I still feel Vue is superior to the other two in every way.

This week, I’m reading Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. I picked this up after finishing Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye last week – both are hauls from a library book sale a couple years ago. I also recently read Don't Look Now And Other Stories (a Daphne DuMaurier collection), & I'm working my way through PKD's little-known hardboiled novel Humpty Dumpty In Oakland and another book (called "The Book") that's a history of the codex format.

The Mind’s Eye is, like most of Sacks’ books, a series of compulsively readable case-studies with an autobiographical element – in this case, the overarching theme is the way people produce elaborate adaptations in order to remain functional when some of their faculties are removed, such as partial or total blindness late in life or the loss of the ability to speak or read.

The Signal and the Noise is shaping up to be a sort of forgettable retread – Silver isn’t a poor writer, but he’s not enough of a stylist to make the book compelling (the way Christian Rudder did with similar material in Dataclysm), and meanwhile, aside from some specific details about topics I don’t care very much about (like the names of specific election forecasters), the material seems to be composed mostly of things I’ve already read elsewhere – Tetlock’s fox/hedgehog model of personality, some stats 101 best practices, warnings about apophenia, a quick rundown of bayesian logic. This almost certainly belongs in that second tier of popular science books, where neither the ideas nor the style are shiny enough to somebody with a casual interest in the subject to justify the price of the thing (but I spent a dollar on it, so I don’t mind so much).

The DuMaurier collection was great. She has the kind of easy cruelty I associate a bit with Matheson, but moreso with the adult short fiction works of Dahl & Salinger (who I guess she was competing with for space in the men's magazines); unlike Matheson, she is hesitant & subtle with supernatural elements. Every one of the stories in the collection could have been an episode of the 70s anthology series Tales of the Unexpected.

Humpty Dumpty In Oakland is about on par, in terms of polish, with Dick's later work like A Scanner Darkly, but it's got his trademark circular amphetamine monologues too. It switches perspectives between two characters & it's sometimes hard to tell which is which because their inner voices are the same & they have similar problems.

The Book is very pretty (with glossy full-color pages), but thus far it hasn't actually told me anything about books that I didn't already know (as someone who has configured printing for self-published stuff & also has read some antique volumes).

Next in my queue is a general-audience introduction to cognitive science from 2000 called Mindware, whose author I have forgotten.

Over the course of my vacation (a few weeks ago), I managed to finish several books that I had previously started, and read a couple new ones all the way through:

* C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength combines some campus-politics satire with weird arthuriana in the style of The Dark is Rising and is political in ways that sometimes remind me of 1984, but the main appeal is how utterly alien Lewis’s political positions (which he takes to be obvious & universal) are to me. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the previous books in the series are some kind of John Carter style sword & planet SF, & that this entry is a departure in genre.

* Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain is full of interesting technical & biographical detail I wasn’t aware of from a lifetime of being casually interested in cybernetics, & makes some interesting meta-philosophical points about cybernetics as a discipline being performance-oriented. He claims that the way that cyberneticians are interested in the performative aspects of processes as opposed to a focus on categorization & situated knowledge is to blame for how difficult it was for early cyberneticians to find permanent slots in academia & that it made a lot of people find cybernetics hard to understand (since cybernetics is not really concerned with how information is stored or formatted, but only with how past experience can be made to influence future action).

* Many of the stories in The Best of Richard Matheson are familiar from adaptation, but adaptation gets rid of some of Matheson’s interesting tics (like extensive use of eye-dialect and unreliable narration). LaVaille’s introduction is fantastic & worth the price of admission alone.

* Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel was a lot more compelling than I expected it to be – Mizumura’s style (as modulated by the translator) is quietly engaging, and she paints a vivid picture without ever resorting to the kinds of fireworks that I usually prefer in prose. I was not caught out by having not read Wuthering Heights. I feel like the localization was somewhat inconsistent: in some cases, the translator fails to make explicit things that would confuse somebody totally unfamiliar with the japanese language, culture, and recent history, while in other cases, translation choices are made that are unnecessary to such a person or that actually eliminate information that would be of interest to such a person. (A concrete example: the translator fails to explain that pampas grass is a signifier of a haunted place in japanese ghost stories, says that the name ‘Fuyue’ is unexpected without explaining that the sisters’ names refer to seasons, and yet eliminates all honorifics & uses the same english word for two different japanese translations of ‘maid’ while talking about the distinctions between them.) However, the translation is generally very good, & I would have liked to read the translator’s notes. I got quite engrossed in it, even though it covers material that I don’t generally find interesting (I’m not enough of a weeb to be interested in Figuratively everything japanese).

* Mark Fischer’s Ghosts of My Life hung together less than I expected it to – it’s an essay collection composed mostly of previously-published material – and I was already familiar with some of the material in it simply from being in the general ecosystem of extremely-online left-theory people. However, it reminded me that Fischer, in addition to having a lot to say about Theory, was a skilled cultural/music critic, and as a result, I have a bunch of stuff I need to check out (and a new frame for making stuff I had previously dismissed interesting).

Also in my stack (partially finished): A People's History of Computing (which is hard to get through because it's structured to be extremely repetitive, in a way that would be necessary in a thicker & denser academic volume but is completely unnecessary in what has clearly been dumbed down and cut to pieces with an eye toward the general market), Jeff & Ann VanderMeer's anthology The Weird (which I've been chewing on since 2015), Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky (natch), and Interactive Programming Environments (an anthology of ACM papers on the subject edited by Barstow).