Of course it's been a weird year in many respects. Difficult in some ways. Working from home and other forms of confinement have their benefits though - in particular I've had lots of time to read. A while ago I set myself a goal of finishing at least one new book every month; 2020 allowed me to greatly exceed that! And I think I learned a few things. Below is a list of (I think) all the books I "finished" (not necessarily reading every word, but getting to the end in a way that I don't think I'll need to go back to it for a while) in the year that just recently ended. This (and the mini reviews) is mostly to have a record for myself, but I'd recommend any of these books to others too if you find yourself with free time! Most are available as ebooks on Amazon Kindle or (even better) free from your library with apps like "Libby", which I've been very grateful for this past year.
Non-fiction
- Newton's Principia - as a physicist I'd heard of this for a long time but had never actually read Newton's work in his own words. It was quite fascinating in the level of detail he managed to get to and the number of different observations he pulled together in his analyses. Also of course the geometrical argumentation, which I'd seen sketched out here and there before, but was quite unfamiliar in relation to the algebraic calculations that are more familiar to today's students (I did skip a lot of the detailed argumentation on this after the first few chapters). I was most impressed that he managed to estimate even the densities of Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and Earth (based on orbital period/distance relations), but then also extended that to an estimate of the Moon's density (based on an analysis of relative strength of solar and lunar tides). He didn't get the numbers quite right, but I think they were within a factor of 2 or so which I would call impressive. There were also some interesting (and quite strange) speculations about comets, and other aspects of other bodies in the solar system.
- Naturally I followed that with Newton's Opticks. Again full of data - this time from his own experiments. He was seemingly very systematic in setting up many different configurations of prisms, lenses, narrow apertures, etc. and recording his observations, following up in logical ways to test various ideas he had. He very clearly saw how light is made up of a spectrum of different colors with slightly different properties; it seems to me he was seeing hints of diffraction in his experiments, but his interest was focused on ray-like straight-line geometry.
- Huygens' Treatise on Light - I'd also heard of this long before as the origin of treatment of light as a wave rather than a particle, and was interested to see the contrast with Newton's approach. Interestingly Huygens seemed more theoretical in general, first focusing on the (finite but large) speed of light. His analysis of propagation of waves at interfaces (reflection and refraction) is, like Newton's, largely geometrical, but with differing assumptions about the nature of the phenomenon. In particular he showed that the refractive index is equal to the ratio of the speed of light in the two media; the related angles (law of sines) derive directly from his wave approach under that rule.
- A Memoir on the Physical Review, A history of the first hundred years, by Paul Hartman. I acquired this somehow at work, but I don't remember from what source. It had been sitting in my office for years (it's been 27 years since the 100'th anniversary of the journals). It is mostly focused on the early years of the journal at Cornell University, and many of the stories about locations on the campus brought back memories of my own time there (long after the events of the book). It also chronicles the rise of professional physics research in the United States, contrasting the rather mundane research of the 1890s when things started with the growing excitement in the field as American physicists absorbed new ideas like X-rays and Einstein's theories and quantum mechanics coming from Europe, and then started making their own new discoveries and advances. The financial and governance details on founding and growing the journal were also quite fascinating.
- JSTOR: a history by Roger C. Schonfeld. I also somehow acquired this at work, probably from my old boss Bob Kelly. This book is all about the early years of the JSTOR project - almost entirely focused on the financial and governance details from its initiation through the Sloan Foundation. Also quite fascinating for anyone interested in how large projects in scholarly publishing get supported and funded.
- The Born-Einstein letters 1916-1955 by Max Born. These very personal letters also include correspondence between them and their wives, through the end of Einstein's life. Much of the history of the early 20th century, both of physics, but also of the tumultuous world around them, is reflected in their concerns for one another and those around them.
- Masterworks of Technology by E. E. Lewis - a great review of the history of engineering from the earliest times - civil, mechanical, and all its various manifestations
- Crystal Fire by Michael Riordan - the intertwined story of Brattain and Bardeen who discovered the transistor, and William Shockley who managed their Bell Labs group and, for all his faults, ended up creating the Silicon Valley we know today. The general history is perhaps well known, but the details of the physics and the research motivations behind many of the paths taken (many of which were wrong turns) are brilliantly explored and explained in this book.
- Harmony by Arno Penzias - I had somehow thought this book would be more a technical work as Penzias was a major Bell Labs figure, but it is actually primarily on the topic of how (mostly business/managerial) life will change as we rid ourselves of paper... It is of course very dated now, yet interesting to see the perspective of somebody in the early stages of the transition that is (even more so thanks to COVID-19) now pretty well complete. And some of the lessons he draws may still be helpful to us today.
- Capital and Ideology by French economist Thomas Piketty. I'd read his previous book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and so thought a follow-on would be interesting. I may post a longer article later with some more thoughts on this book, but in general he seems optimistic that political "ideology" can change in a country quite quickly, and the details of that ideology make a huge difference on his primary issue of wealth inequality.
- The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. A much-ballyhooed explainer for "Modern Monetary Theory", this does do a decent job of showing how federal governments (at least of nations with their own currencies) should think about their fiscal policy differently than has been typical. However, it also felt like there was something significant missing here; I'm not an expert on this and not sure exactly what, but I think a more physics-style exploration of the ultimate limits of fiscal policy would be worthwhile, for example.
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. I'd had this in my office for a long time, and never quite got around to reading it. 2020 was the year! It was really worthwhile - although Tufte's opinions may sometimes seem idiosyncratic, he is really clear on what makes a good visualization of data, and has a lot of almost hilarious examples of the bad. He does seem to think pie charts are never a good idea. I'll probably be looking at this more (and some of his later books) in future.
- Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce. I'd long heard of lambda calculus, but this book really gets into it with mathematical definitions of a huge variety of typing systems and the associated functional behaviors. Typing is complicated. The detailed proofs I skipped here seemed not that different from the detailed geometrical proofs in Newton. Still worthwhile for a general perspective on the mathematics behind functional programming.
- A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Jenna Levin. Maybe this should go under the "Fiction" heading - it is a fictionalized account of the lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel - but the history of the computational implications of their work is certainly interesting, and the idiosyncracies and relationships highlighted in the fiction are not so far removed from the real history. Somewhat depressing for both in the end though.
Fiction
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Somehow I'd never read this, though we had a copy lying around the house. Yes I did skip some of the detailed discussion of whales. And of course I knew how the general story went. Still it was much more fun to read than I'd expected.
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Corey Doctorow. I once attended a conference where Doctorow spoke passionately on the issue of copyright (and its abuses); I haven't read many of his books but what I have read has been fun. This one was no exception, though a little wild at times in its speculations (restoring people from backup copies is a major theme).
- The Malazan Book of the Fallen - Gardens of the Moon, etc. by Steven Erikson. One of my sons started me on this by discussing some of the characters with me and how fascinating he found it. He actually discouraged me at first because of their length - also some of the action described is horrifically brutal. And Erikson's writing style almost forces you to skip ahead and back quite a bit to try to figure out what's going on. This is a ten-book fantasy series that has perhaps the most awe-inspiringly vast collection of characters I have ever encountered in fiction. Each of the books is lengthy in itself, and there are seemingly dozens of simultaneous near-parallel threads of action. With so many different major characters the characterizations are surprisingly diverse and interesting; there is occasional excess melodrama surrounding the actions of major characters, and occasional excess slapstick involving some side characters, but in general the pacing and scope of these novels really is awe-inspiring. Far from every thread is tidily wrapped up in the end, but that's sort of what real life is like, and these are the first novels I've read that seemed to create a world close in scale to the vastness of our own. If you have a LOT of spare time (as I had during some bouts of self-isolation this past year) these novels might be just the ticket.
- The "Broken Earth" trilogy by N. K. Jemison - The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky - I'd read a bit about Jemison somewhere online, and found these recent sci-fi novels quite interesting, with a creative take on how those with exceptional powers may be treated.
- The City We Became also by N. K. Jemison. New York City (and its boroughs) come to life, with interdimensional enemies to boot. The start of a new trilogy I believe; it should be fun. Stay out of Staten Island though!
- This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Also suggested by my son. An exchange of letters between combatants involved in trying to reshape history, back and forth through the ages. Some interesting temporal loops and paradoxes arise.
- Recursion by Blake Crouch. Also on the subject of messing around with time; this one is pretty hard to describe, but I really enjoyed it. A good ending to a very complex story.
- Dawnshard and Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson, part of his "Stormlight Archive" world (4 major novels and several novellas written so far). I'd read the previous novels in the series, so the November releases were much anticipated. Unfortunately much remains unresolved, but Sanderson is pretty reliable in bringing things to a tidy conclusion. A fascinating and well-thought-out world, though it seemed a little more contrived after reading Erikson's novels.
- The first three novels in David Brin's "Uplift Universe" - Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War. I've long admired and respected Brin's political views (he has an interesting blog of his own on this platform) but I hadn't read many of his novels. And while I had heard of the Uplift universe, it didn't seem to be one I was terribly interested in getting into. But with some spare time I thought I ought to at least try it. While some of these first three novels seem a little dated (written in the 1980s), they do make you think about our place as humans in the universe - and provide an interesting contrast to Cixin Liu's harsh universe in "The Three Body Problem" and its sequels. I've already started reading some of his later works in this same narrative world.
Of course I've read an awful lot of Twitter threads and blog posts and Apple News articles (and even unfortunately Facebook on occasion) and other online info sources this past year. Our church had us reading the Book of Mormon again this past year too, which I think counts as my tenth time through it. There are definitely things in there I hadn't noticed before, so I'm glad we spent a year focusing on it again. I also got to read some of my mother’s diaries after she passed away in November. Although not everything she wrote was positive, it really does bring back strong memories of things we went through as a family. She had some pretty strong opinions on many different subjects. And I was impressed by her expressions of faith, which she wrote much more there than anything she said in person. "Thank you God, for this gift", was a common phrase.
Well, 2021 is a new year. I probably won't get quite as much reading in, but that will be because life is at least somewhat back to normal. For which I also will be very grateful.