Traveling Light (Tove Jansson)
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Fiction, Short Stories (Hebrew translation). I love Jansson’s writing, and I loved this book.

The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
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Fiction. Still reading this one (hey, the year is not over yet!).

The Book Of Imaginary Beings (Jorge Luis Borges)
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Fiction(?). Weird stuff. A catalog of fictional creatures from literary and mythological sources, each with short and very Borgeseque esoteric anecdotes.

The Manifold Trilogy 1: Time (Stephen Baxter)
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Science fiction. Some themes were less to my liking, the writing is mediocre, and it feels like a “classic sci-fi” in a bad way (think Heinlein or Niven, and it even has some Rand-ish vibes). But in the end it’s all forgiven, since ultimately the book is ideas-driven, epic, and sensibly grounded in science. Its big-themes involve the bootstrapping of a large-scale space colonization project, and the long term (cosmologically-long) trajectory of technological civilizations.

The Manifold Trilogy 2: Space (Stephen Baxter)
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Science fiction. All my criticism of the first book applies: Baxter is certainly not a belletrist, and some of his themes and sci-fi ideas are annoyingly silly and unimaginative. Nonetheless, it’s the best book in the trilogy. It deals mainly with the Fermi paradox, and it sent me delving into the scientific literature on the subject (which is surprisingly profound and interesting!). I came out of this rabbit hole with a newfound respect for the book’s ideas (though I’m still convinced that the main idea is flawed).

The Manifold Trilogy 3: Origin (Stephen Baxter)
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Science fiction. The weakest book in the trilogy, by a wide margin (but still worth reading). It deals with variations on the theme of “what makes us human?”. Naturally some anthropocentrism is to be expected - and yet, it got carried away with it (the whole trilogy does). Also inherent to the central theme is violence and cruelty, but again it goes too far and I occasionally found myself skipping overly-disturbing paragraphs. It suffers from ethnocentrism and essentialism, and it attributes excessive teleological importance to the terrestrial Homo genus (again, the whole trilogy does).

The Forge Of God (Greg Bear)
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Science fiction. Following my revived enthusiasm for the Fermi paradox, I read Bear’s take on the subject - which offers a different perspective on the issue than the above (though both takes are bleak). I strongly believe that the Fermi paradox is fully solved by now (and these books got it wrong), but it does not invalidate them. Literary, Bear (who passed away this year) is a much better writer than Baxter, but I thought the book was a bit verbose, and I’m not a fan of the zeitgeist of the 80s that fills its pages. There’s something Naive about the plot, which is a bit ironic since it clearly meant to be a realistic and sober-minded story about the first encounter.

Being You (Anil Seth)
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Popular Science, Cognition, Philosophy of Mind. Possibly the most beautifully written popular science book I’ve ever read, and by far the best work I’ve encountered on conscience. Not all the chapters are equally good, but overall it presents the issue sharply and clearly, and introduces the state-of-the-hype approaches in the area (Predictive coding, Integrated information theory, Friston’s free energy principle, ...) with clarity, which is not an easy task for a completely nontechnical book. While I’m a bit skeptical of the research programme the author advocates (”controlled hallucination”/”beast machines") and I fundamentally disagree with the writer’s point of view (“the real problem” vs. “the hard problem”) - I enjoyed reading it, and wholeheartedly recommend it.

Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails (David Kaplan)
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Cocktails. Quite good, given its genre. like most cocktail books, it’s filled with annoying self promotion of useless personal anacortes (which some might enjoy, I guess). But other than that, it provides useful information and numerous solid recipes (including original drinks and variations).

Practical Foundations for Programming Languages (Robert Harper)
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Computer Science. The book covers applications of structural-operational semantics for language design. It’s better suited as a reference than as a textbook. It seems to try its best to be as dry as possible, and for every topic it touches, it consistently chooses to emphasize the boring aspects over the interesting ones (maybe that’s how the authors interpret “practical”). It is informative and, given a prior interest in its topic, a good read.

Specifying Systems (Leslie Lamport)
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Computer Science. Written by one of the masters of software engineering (I wonder if he would consider this reference as an insult or a compliment), and the inventor of the TLA+ specification language. Obviously, it's about formal specification and verification. The book is partly an introductory textbook for the temporal logic of actions, and partly a reference guide to the TLA+ ecosystem. It covers only usage and applications, and doesn’t touch algorithms and proofs. Still, I enjoyed it and learned from it.

Introduction to Lattices and Order (Davey, Priestley)
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Mathematics and CS. I’m still reading it. The subject matter is one of my favorite mathematical areas (I think I should be embarrassed to admit it?), and I also read this book as an introduction to denotational semantics and domain theory (which I know very little about). So far I enjoy the book’s presentation, although I don’t like the authors’ decision to completely avoid category theory (probably an 80s thing).

Visual Differential Geometry and Forms (Tristan Needham)
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Math. Needham takes the outlook (which he attributes to Newton) from his previous book, the acclaimed Visual Complex Analysis, and applies it to Differential Geometry. Once again he provides original and non-standard presentations of elementary topics. I really enjoyed reading it cover-to-cover even though as an Aphant I felt personally attacked by every single line. The bad: it has excessive typos (I usually rarely notice, and here I constantly found them), and the 5th act (about exterior algebra) is significantly less good.

Wild Cards II: Aces High (G.R.R. Martin, Editor)
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Superheroes, Fantasy. Still super-heros bullshit and still fun. Better and tighter than the first one.

How To Raise Successful People (Esther Wojcicki)
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Educatio. Unlike Polgar's “Bring Up Genius”, this book was written post factum. I read it anyway, noting that the author has a semi-respectable track record (one of her daughters is the CEO of YouTube, another is a pediatrician and anthropologist, and the third co-founded 23andMe). I hoped for some practical wisdom or an insightful theory - but what I got is mostly a sketchy rant from a dogmatic parent/teacher, mixed with a pile of mundane familial anecdotes. On the positive side, I’m fully on board with the values the book promotes (trademarked TRICK, for Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration and Kindness). On the flip side, these values are trivial, and the (infrequently occurring) concrete claims given in the book are mostly baseless and often they actually stand in blatant contradiction to established science (which, for example, emphatically shows that parents have infinitesimal influence on the indoctrination of the traits signaled by TRICK to their children).

Cribsheet (Emily Oster)
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Parenting. I heard it’s a “data-science book about education”. It is not. It is a distilled review of the literature regarding parenting issues, focused on ages 0-3. Oster is an Economics professor, so such a cost-benefit analysis is right up her alley. Disappointingly for me, it is >95% about parenting and only <5% about education (it covers stuff like feeding, sleeping, language development, screen exposure, potty training etc). It contains too many personal anecdotes, it’s a bit biased towards the author’s own personal experience and it contains a large dose of virtue signaling between the lines. Overall, it's probably a rare instance of a trustworthy and mostly fluff-free book for parents; but it has very little value for anyone else.

The Family Firm (Emily Oster)
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Parenting. Well, I had both, so I read both. This one is similar to Cribsheet, but focuses on ages 5-12. Its shtick is to focus on the impersonal aspects of parenting (education, health, extracurricular activities...), and to consider them via an evidence-based and quantitative lens, as if it was a case study in a business-strategy MBA class (e.g. by considering logistics, finance, risks, opportunity costs and so on). I guess readers will be divided in regards to the systematicity it advocates, where many would feel it’s painfully basic while others would call it ridiculously excessive. I think it’s both (for example, somewhere near the beginning there’s a section comparing Jira, Trello and Asana for parenting - yes, really). LIke Cribsheet, it’s useful and informative and to-the-point for parents - but useless for anyone else.

The Case against Education (Bryan Caplan)
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Education. Defeating my expectations, I strongly disliked this book. I think the thesis it promotes is completely right and I agree with most of its claims, but the author's tone and attitude are barely bearable. Furthermore, I think it’s somewhat intellectually dishonest. It’s really disappointing, because there certainly is a strong case against education, and the author was well-positioned to make it. In a nutshell, Caplan annoyingly yet convincingly argues that the objective benefits from education can be largely attributed to signaling and selection, in contrast to an improvement in human capital.

Experience And Education (John Dewey)
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Education. My main gripe with this short book probably boils down to its age and to my ignorance. It was published in 1938, and seems to be centered around some fierce academic disputes that I’ve never heard of, in which I find all sides to be not even wrong. Dewey, I believe, agrees with me.

The Book of all Skies (Greg Egan)
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Science fiction. The latest by Egan, whom I consider to be the most original, profound and creative science fiction author ever, and by a wide margin. On the one hand it’s a fantasy, a run of the mill adventure story that takes place in an alternative weird world; On the other hand, it’s the hardest of the hard sci-fi: the world is not “like ours, but with elves and dragons”, but rather one that operates by a coherent different physics, speculative yet thoroughly developed. The book’s raison d'etre is to explore the physical and metaphysical ideas encapsulated by its world-building. So it’s similar to Dichronauts (but much less difficult). It’s obviously excellent, but I won’t recommend it as an introduction to Egan.

Instantiation (Greg Egan)
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Science fiction. Short stories, 3 of which span a short-novella (Bit-players, 3-adica and Instantiation) proving that LitRPG has a non-empty intersection with hard sci-fi and mathematical-fiction. The book is a bit disappointing - but only because Egan’s other works set such a high bar. These stories are not better than what I would expect, say, from Ted Chiang. For any other author this would be the highest compliment; from Egan I expected more. Ignoring prior expectations, it’s excellent.

Incandescence (Greg Egan)
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Science fiction. An amazing book (though not a good one). It takes place in what I consider to be the most banal and least thoroughly thought through universe Egan has ever constructed (the Amalgam/Aloof setup) and mixes it with an extremely hard-core science-fiction plot line. How hard-core? Here’s an excerpt from Egan’s response to some of the reviews the book has received: “This leaves me wondering if they’ve really never encountered a book before that benefits from being read with a pad of paper and a pen beside it... I realise that some people do much of their reading with one hand on a strap in a crowded bus or train carriage, but books simply don’t come with a guarantee that they can be properly enjoyed under such conditions.”. He’s not kidding.

The Man from the Future (Ananyo Bhattacharya)
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History, Biography. John von Neumann - always the smartest guy in the building (even when Einstein’s room is across the hall). Possibly the smartest person to ever walk on earth. The guy whose presence made other generational geniuses seem dumb. The guy who single-handedly revolutionized mathematics; and physics; and computer science; and economics; and life as we know it. The guy who was arrested multiple times for reckless driving, and for suggesting that the USA should preemptively nuke the Soviets. An interesting guy. An interesting book.

King of Infinite Space (Siobhan Roberts)
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History of Mathematics, Biography. I was intrigued by the book’s subtitle: “Donald Coxeter - the Man Who Saved Geometry”. I’ve encountered Coxeter groups before, but I knew very little about the context in which they were invented, and absolutely nothing about their namesake. I wasn’t even aware that geometry was in need of saving! This book feels like reading a long Quanta article, and it often deviates into side-plots about other people and events tangentially-related to Coexter’s long life (1907-2003). This is a biography, not a textbook, but it naturally does try to explain Coexter’s work. I can’t really judge how well it presents it, but it was interesting enough to convince me find the time and delve a bit deeper (tbd). As a biography, well, Coxeter was an interesting guy living an impactful life, and the book does a great job painting it colorfully. Also, it’s definitely not fan-fiction, and Coxeter often comes-off like an asshole. Good stuff.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (John Koenig)
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A novelty book would be a generous description. It could’ve been an innovative kind of a poetry book (but it’s not). It could have been (as it falsely pretends to be) an amusing book about etymology and languages. It could have been (and very rarely it indeed is) an insightful book filled with existentialist insights. It’s almost great, but instead it’s trash.

The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber)
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Prehistory and Anthropology. A controversial book, written by two experts (an archaeologist and an anthropologist) with a lot of agenda and zero fucks to give. They go after both Rousseau’s and Hobbs’s deep-seated myths about prehistoric societies and their implications for modern-day inequality and power structures. They claim that long before agriculture (which they say was not a revolution at all) these societies were large, rich, complex and extremely diverse in their self-organization. Scientifically and academically the book is probably quite bad, but it’s provocative, rather interesting (while also a bit tedious) and despite all of its problems has some very good points.

Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive (Dettmer, Philipp)
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Popular Science. It's obvious that the book was written by an “enthusiast” rather than an expert. The author is supposedly an experienced science-communicator (as the creator of Kurzgesagt) - but the lack of depth, oversimplifications and forced childish analogies are all too abundant and apparent. Regardless, it’s an effective overview for total newbies (such as myself) and I learned a lot, and to the best of my knowledge this is the only pop-sci book (hence, the best!) on this very topical subject.

Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)
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Science fiction. 99% of my “reading” was actually listening (the only audiobook on this list), and the remaining 1% was in Hebrew. It was enjoyable and entertaining. Against it I hold the cheesy Hollywood tropes filling the plot, and its cavalier attitude toward astrobiology (which is not a minor issue: the book manifestly frames itself as hard science-fiction, and astrobiology is a central part of it). All-in-all I definitely liked it.

"We can usefully distinguish the phenomenological properties of consciousness from its functional and behavioral properties. These refer to the roles that consciousness may play in the operations of our minds and brains, and to the behaviors an organism is capable of, by virtue of having conscious experiences"

1. Alien civilizations are rare
1A rare earth
1B great filter
1C civilizations dont last long
1D intelligence is not natural

2. We cant detect then
2A they talk but we dont hear them
2B there hasnt been enough time
2C they dont have reason to talk
2D they hide from everyone

3. We cant recognize them
3A aliens are here secretly
3B aliens visited our ancestors
3C aliens are here but we cant tell
3D we are the aliens

4. Misc
4A zoo hyphothesis, prime directive
4B interdiction
4C self quarentine
4D living civilizations are very recent
4E ascention
4F technological singularity
4G rim migration
4H black hole farming

Welcome back!

2 The Alice network \ Kate Quinn

4 The foundation \ Isaac Asimov

8 When you were older\Catherine Ryan Hyde
9 Otis Spofford\ Beverly Cleary
10 Ellen Tebbits\Beverly Cleary
11 Ramona and Beezus \ Beverly Cleary
12 Ramona the Brave\Beverly Cleary

14 Slow horses \ Mick Herron
15 Dead Lions\Mick Herron
16 Real tigers\Mick Herron
17 Spook street\Mick Herron
18 London Rules\Mick Herron

20 italian shoes \ hennig menkell
21 The list+The Drop\ Mick Herron
22 The catch \ Mick Herron
23 Slough House \ Mick Herron

Legal Systems Very Different from Ours (David Friedman) / Law and Order / A very interesting project, based on a graduate seminar led by Friedman: an economist, physicist, and anarcho-capitalist, the son of Milton Friedman (... and Rose). The book reviews 13 real legal systems (“Ours” refers to the USA), including Jewish law, Romani law, Amish law, and Pirate law. It’s well-sourced, trustworthy, and written in an informal tone. I find it quite hard to imagine a reader who won’t find it fascinating.

Transformer (Nick Lane) / Pop-Sci / Biochemistry / Super interesting. Basically about the Krebs cycle (and metabolism at large), its relation to the origins of life, cancer, and aging, and its central role in Lane’s “Metabolism first” view. For me, it was somewhat difficult to read since I don’t really like or know chemistry, and the book doesn’t spare details, getting very technical (by my low standards, at least).

Quantum Steampunk (Nicole Yunger Halpern) / Popular Science / The subtitle is “The Physics of Yesterday’s Tomorrow,” and I had high hopes for the book. The topic is extremely interesting (the intersection of quantum information theory and thermodynamics). The tone, however, is annoying, with way too many personal anecdotes and unhelpfully detailed analogies. I accidentally read it simultaneously with “Alice and Bob Meet Banach” (a highly technical text about somewhat overlapping topics), which paradoxically helped me understand the pop-sci book and not the other way around (and that might be the worst thing to say about a popular-science book).

The Story Paradox (Jonathan Gottschall) / Pop-Sci(?) / Literature, Sociology / Impressively bad. Takes a potentially interesting topic - on which the author is an expert - and treats it in the most banal, trivial, and non-insightful way imaginable. Even the unindented associated irony of being a boring book about engaging narratives feels like a cliche.

Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon) / Science Fiction / A classic, published in 1930. The back cover sums it up nicely: “...not so much a novel as a history of the future, written with breathtaking imagination. Over the course of 2 billion years it describes the evolutionary rise and fall of 18 distinct races of men, of which Homo sapiens is the first and most primitive... No other science fiction writer has attempted, let alone achieved, a work on this scale”. Stapledon clearly got many things wrong (though he was also definitely very insightful about things to come, both social and technological). But even mentioning it is to completely miss the point of the book.

Trust (Hernan Diaz) / Fiction / Well written, fun to read. But ultimately not a very good book (and its “twist” is super obvious). Rashomon-like. The first two “novellas” are not-great almost by design, the third is very good, and the fourth is very short - and supposed to be the shocking solution, but at this point it’s obvious what’s coming.

Slow Horses (Nick Herron) / Fiction / Disappointing. I heard good stuff (including in Haayal) and was looking forward to a long sequence of fun books, but I didn’t enjoy it much. The characters were cartoonish, the writing sloppy, and the humor not funny. The world-building was horrible. I didn’t expect hardcore realism (the author clarifies in the preface that he has no personal familiarity with intelligence work), but I did expect some common sense.

Stone’s Fall (Iain Pears) / Historical Fiction / Pears is one of my all-time favourite authors, and while this is not his best work - it’s certainly a good book. A complex historical mystery set in the early 20th century, involving finance and intrigue. Great, but too long, and a bit too “sensational”. Still, Pears’s skill in weaving together multiple timelines and perspectives shines through.

Scale (Greg Egan) / Science Fiction / Excellent, and classic Egan. It starts like a normal detective story about a murder mystery, but instead of on a ship* or a train, it’s set in a world with alternative physics built around a hypothetical standard model with seven generations of leptons- which is developed in great detail and plays a central role in the plot.

Phoresis (Greg Egan) / Science Fiction / 3 novellas / This is going to be a bad review, so just recall that I’m a huge Egan fan and I believe that even at his worst he’s better than 99.99% of sci-fi writers at their best. The first novella (“The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred”) was probably the worst thing I’ve read by Egan - completely unlike him, and basically a space-opera dealing with social issues like a normie, boring sci-fi. The second (“Dispersion”) was much better but still not great, trying too hard at social commentary (though at least there’s some concrete scientific-mathematical aspect in the world-building). The third was also not very interesting, but it’s solid and distinctively weird, so I can’t complain.

* Ok, it's also literally on a ship.