My motive for reading any given paper is generally not “for the sake of reading the paper from start to finish”. And these days I am not reviewing any papers for journals or conferences. So I start by identifying my purpose. Prerequisite #0: Define your purpose. Am I trying to learn a new area of …
Category Archives: Reading and Reviews
Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy
I finished the last book of Liu Cixin’s trilogy, Death’s End, a few weeks ago, and the first two last fall. So this review will be necessarily a bit more high-level and about my general impressions, because memory is faulty. Feel free to skip to the end for some quotes, though, because I have a …
Silence: In the Age of Noise
I do not follow modern day explorers, and so the name Erling Kagge meant nothing to me until I picked up and read his beautiful prose, punctuated by art, in Silence: In the Age of Noise. Kagge’s book is a reminder that observation is key to living well, and silence is key to observation. That …
Food Fights, Barbecuing, and Community
I rarely read one book at a time—and in an attempt to avoid the sunk cost fallacy I sometimes opt out of finishing books—so I thought perhaps I’d review books as I am reading them. Food Fights and Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste, by Tom Nealon, is a delightful book by any measure, but …