Category: Reading

  • Loneliness & Company

    Spoilers within, because there are points I want to keep track of. The premise of this book: a top-of-her-class researcher is hired to a company post-graduation to help with the development of an AI application meant to resolve the idea of “loneliness.” In the end, the project more or less fails. If technology drove up…

  • Failing Creativity – Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act

    “Hate” is such a strong word, but I can’t get my head around Rubin’s dumb book any other way. I’ve soured on Rubin over the years as he has shifted from less business and more “creativity,” wandering the world in his unruly, unwashed opulence. Sure, he looks the part of a creative guru, but my…

  • Notes on: Figuring by Maria Popova

    “So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections.” And just like that, with the thesis set, Maria Popova takes us through over five hundred pages of invisible connections between Johanns Kepler in 1617 to the launch of the Voyager space probe in 1977. Between…

  • Recently Read – August 2024

    Two major novels of note: Heretics – Leonardo Padura Translated by Anna Kushner The back of the book alluded to Padura being “Cuba’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez” – which is quite the statement. Heretic’s is a novel of Jewish diaspora masquerading as a crime novel set across a vast span of time and locations. 17th century…

  • The Ghost of The Living

    The Ghost of The Living

    “They say when you meet someone who looks just like you, you die.” p.Wish, The Doppleganger “No one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another.” Naomi Klein, Doppelganger Going through Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, something I snagged from the library purely because of the subtitle “A Trip into the Mirror World,” I was opened…

  • The Age of Information, The Aging of Information.

    The Age of Information, The Aging of Information.

    Some thoughts on James Gleick’s The Information. “The alphabet is like a contagion – both the virus and the vector of transmission in and of itself.” Back in the “learn to code” days – a phrase shot off in mean spirit by anti-intellectuals to journalists and academics who were loosing their jobs by the thousands…

  • 6 Months with the Boox Palma

    6 Months with the Boox Palma

    This post was updated on January 29, 2005. I still love the device. Just some little things came up that I wanted to address. Since day 1, e-reading hasn’t exactly been easy. There is always some kind of chore that stands between where the books are and where you can read them. It’s gotten better…

  • Planned Life

    Words about Alex Shakar’s “Luminarium”

  • The Lost Art of Reading

    Some notes and such from David L. Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading

  • Spending 2024 with Infinite Jest – Notes on the first readthrough.

    Four months, one reading. And I’m not finished yet! Time to flip this over and see what else it can tell me.