Was my first fiction read in a while. Where do i even begin?

I think the premise of the novel is unique and is clearly what draws people in to read the book (at least that’s what drew me in). What I didn’t expect was just how much of an emotional (and depressing) ride the book was going to be! 

For instance, I found that while the love subplot was a bit simplistic it really added to the drama of the story and (as someone who did not read too much about the book’s premise other than the IQ part) I did not expect this much drama interwoven with the book’s central theme. It definitely had me super engrossed and help contribute to me getting through this fairly quick!

WRT to the central theme, I think with my X/Twitter timeline being chalk-full of HBD preachers and IQ obsessives, this book helped to recalibrate the dehumanized perspective on IQ that I’ve come to adopt through some process of enculturation. By this I mean I’m so used to seeing people cite Richard Lynn and off-handedly use IQ as a prime quantifier of human worth that I’ve subconsciously begun to do the same.

IQ is very controversial topic and the book does well to address that at the beginning when the main character Charlie asks what IQ is to the staff and students at the university administering the experiment on him. He’s given many different answers and concludes that no one really agrees on what IQ is, reflecting the real life consensus. 

I think that IQ as a subject is uncomfortable as it is (in the opinion of some) something that’s largely determined by genetics and is hard to alter past a certain point in development. Especially for those who like to think of themselves as smart (e.g. me) it’s tough to think about intelligence being this thing that’s as simply quantifiable as percentiles in a normal distribution. I at least don’t like the idea of having a specific number tied to my level of intelligence and having that aspect of myself taken out of my control. This is probably due to my ability in school being tied to my identity and with the odd chance that I’m simply ordinary, I feel it would be hard to cope with.

Before I continue to digress, I think the key message the book seeks to get across is that people with intellectual disabilities are people too, and in general, intelligence shouldn’t determine how you treat someone else. While clearly this is not too profound of a message I think in general it’s easy to “know” that say, being generous is good but, many people that “know” this are still not very generous. But, given a good demonstration of generosity in action, along with the benefits to the giver and the receiver, I believe that would be very convincing to make at least a few more people practice what they “know” a bit more. 

That same logic applies here, I think it’s easy for me at least, to get on my high horse and hate on people for being dumb. Whether it is me yelling at another driver while I drive, or someone cutting me off at the grocery store, I tend to let my temper get the better of me and (privately) insult the person acting unintelligently. 

With my recent effort at improving my morals (see the book I read right before this) I think this is probably the thing that I need to work on the most (i.e. I need to stop being so judgemental). Not just for me to become a better person overall, but I think that people who are harsh on themselves tend to apply the same criteria to those around them. I for one, am very insecure about my intelligence. I constantly second-guess myself and place such large importance on this aspect of myself. What if I learned to be more compassionate with myself wrt to my intelligence? Would this flow into my exchanges with others around me? Perhaps I need to think of Socrates’ line more…

"I neither know nor think I know” 

Anyways, I suppose this served more as a diary entry than a book review but I guess that’s what good fiction does!



Flowers for Algernon

The Nicomachean Ethics

A Christmas Carol

1984

The Design of Everyday Things

A very gripping read. 

As an Albanian born and raised outside of it, I’ve only ever learned about Albanian culture and history through my parents and family. Recently, I’ve found myself more interested in learning more about what it is to be an Albanian. This has led me to listen to more of the music, attempt (half heartedly) to speak more of the language, and finally learn the history.

Consequently this led me to read this book, an account Enver Hoxha’s regime told through the perspective of the people who suffered through it. What you learn is that the citizens of Albania had to suffer though an Orwellian, suffocating, and crushing regime.

The stories are nothing short of heartbreaking and through the various accounts you as the reader start to see the common threads recurring through all the tales these people have to tell.

Overall, this book has not only illuminated the horrors Albanians had to endure to me but also the brutality of totalitarianism into how it infects every aspect of everyone’s life who’s affected by it. 

Mud Sweeter Than Honey

Attempted to read this on my kindle but stopped a third of the way through. I will say, this book has a lot of interesting info but it’s a very breadth focused (which makes sense given its target audience!) but as a result you get stuck with some material which may bore you. Hence I loved like 50% of the chapter content but got really bored with certain other parts like the ones focused on disease. Still a very approachable read and one that i’ve taken ideas from and implemented into my own life.

Why We Sleep

Loved it. As a “Rest is History” fan I’ve really found myself yearning for an education in history and this book helped spark more of that curiosity. I loved the commentary provided by the author and intend to revisit this one in the future.

The Lessons of History

Very interesting book. This one took me a while and that’s because I feel it goes through a bit of a lull halfway through. I definitely would like to come back to this one in the future as it really gives an all-encompassing view to life and its origins which is a naturally interesting topic to explore.

The Vital Question

On the Shortness of Life

Lessons:
- Invert, always invert
- Create a multidisciplinary latticework of knowledge
- Pilot’s checklist
- Understanding human psychology
- Second-order and higher order effects

Overall, a very inspiring read with my main takeaway being that there’s wisdom to be extracted from every specialty.

Poor Charlie's Almanack

This book is a compilation of essays by the man himself. The first half of the book was not really my cup of tea as it covered subjects like nerds and high school as well as the very outdated claims on web apps being the next big thing (spoiler alert they were). So I powered through this part of the book to arrive at the more relevant and thought provoking second half. Here I sat through PG preach about Lisp, a high-level programming language. While at first I was quite skeptical of his claims, by the end of the book I was wholeheartedly convinced I needed to at least give it a go and try it for myself. Other ideas I appreciated was the parallel drawn between hackers and painters (as demonstrated in the title) and the clear distinction between hackers and computer scientists (something I only subconsciously noticed before). 

Also really loved his repugnance for Java, that language can rot in hell.

Hackers & Painters

This is a compilation of short stories, I don’t want to discuss all of them but one that particularly resonated with me was *The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling*.

This story is a dual narrative, where the narrator seems to be writing some sort of blog post in a near-future where a product called Remem is about to be introduced that constantly records your day and is always running, bringing up memories you mention or query for in the corner of your sight, like a Apple Vision Pro. 

The writer begins by writing about the virtues of organic memory and has a clear stance against the technology, arguing that it will remove the romance, nostalgia, and story of our memories. He cites marital feuds on who’s right vs. wrong as a type of issue this technology exacerbates.

Concurrently with this narrative we are taken back to the early 1940s where we are observing the Shangev tribe of the Tiv people in Nigeria. This part of the story follows a young boy named Jijingi who through a preacher named Moseby, discovers the power of writing. 

This story resonated with me because of the various ideas it presents without giving a full opinion on. Memory is an interesting subject, my earliest memory was as a child (probably 4/5 years old) in my townhouse with my family on my birthday and my dad coming in from work with a poster of Dash (character from the Incredibles). This memory is so heartwarming to me, the innocent happiness I recall feeling, the youth and energy of my family, who at the time were relative newcomers to the country. The story argues that a memory like this (which is probably artificially reconstructed at this point) is better left as an organic memory. If I had a live feed of it would I still feel the same warmth that I do now? Perhaps conversely, seeing it in finer detail would provide me with more to grasp onto and give me more to look back with love and nostalgia? 

I think this is an interesting thing to consider because I think we partially already deal with this issue to a degree presently with the prevalence of smartphone cameras and the nature in which people document such events so commonly today. 

We then get presented with a strong counter argument which is that our memories are very unreliable. We commonly look back on situations with a nostalgic lens which we can safely argue is not very harmful; we also tend to look back on some disputes with less intensity than we felt in the moment. This is what the narrator argues allows us to move past arguments after the fact, and they cite that perhaps if they had a running highlight reel of their arguments with their daughter, perhaps they would find it more difficult to move past these disputes. 

They then decide to try Remem and look through their arguments with their daughter to give a fair two-sided account of their argument. Essentially, their organic memory failed them and gave them a much rosier account with their relationship with their daughter. Pretty much they recall themselves more as a martyr and really what happened was that they emotionally abused their daughter. This causes the narrator to really reevaluate what they think of themself as a father but also on the utility of Remem as a technology. If it weren’t for Remem they would have continued their life in ignorance without fully understanding how they negatively affected their daughter. This technology enabled them to see things more clearly and take more accountability for their actions. 

Overall, this story shows how we as a humans tend to romanticize our lives. We tend to experience increased juvenoia as we age and discount the utility that certain technologies have despite how they upend certain foundational experiences. This story pretty much says that these technologies are a lot more grey than black or white in their impact. Social media is great because it connects us with family, introduces us to new friends, and helps us find community. It also is very dangerous to youth and can cause psychological problems. It is both good and bad, but if one mindfully uses it with the intent of extracting as much good and staying away from the bad it can be a very beneficial technology, just like how Remem itself could be too. I personally know many strong headed people that will remember certain events through their own rose-tinted glasses that could benefit immensely from such a technology, heck even I could use it as I am particularly stubborn on certain events/arguments.

Exhalation

Read Write Own

This book was pretty much Mandelbrot applying fractal geometry to SDEs which was interesting for me in particular as I took a course in SDEs while I read this. The main idea of the book was that modelling the market as a Brownian Motion is overly simplistic and does not accurately model the long tailed nature of the market, making models built on this assumption vulnerable to the volatile nature of markets. Mandelbrot goes on to provide examples of fractals being manifesting in real-world rock formation, tides, etc. to give some intuition on their applications. He finishes the book by explaining in more detail how fractals are applied specifically in financial markets and how using this model we can make better assumptions.

Finance is no science. Everyone uses their own models, and a lot of the time they’re very speculative and are built on very grossly oversimplified assumptions of how markets behave. Mandelbrot asserts that his model does something others don’t, which is that it restates the initial assumptions of how markets behave. The main differences exists in how standard Brownian motion is independent and normally distributed. Mandelbrot’s model states that actually financial markets demonstrate some long-term dependence as well as varying distributions which have longer tails than Gaussian ones. He introduces the concept of the Hurst exponent, H and alpha, ⍺ where the former describes the long-term dependence and the latter describes the fatness of the tails. This more generalized form allows us more flexibility when modelling markets as say a FOREX market may be different than a commodities market.

Overall I found the book to be interesting but I think it’s just a 12-page paper drawn out to be 276 pages in a more high-level novel. For business people, it should be cool to read but for a math student maybe less cool and perhaps I could have just read some scientific literature to get a more low-level understanding of how this idea looks in practice.

The Misbehavior of Markets

The Blood of Olympus

The House of Hades

The Mark of Athena

The Son of Neptune

The Lost Hero

Very insightful and interesting book. This one takes you through the history of Bell Labs from the very beginning to what remains of it today (although one could argue it died when AT&T broke up). 

Learning about various great minds such as Bill Shockley, and Claude Shannon and getting a glimpse behind the scenes of great innovations such as the transistor was fascinating.

My particular takeaways from the novel were two in particular. The first being that I want to work alongside other great minds! This book demonstrates the advantage of putting a ton of the greatest minds all in one place, which is that they tend to generate beautiful and innovative ideas! Even ones like Claude Shannon’s Information Theory which is attributed solely to him was surely helped by having so many other great minds around him. Also observing the multidisciplinary nature of the lab and how this played a key part in the innovation of the transistor in particular inspired me to explore topics and subject I’m not experienced in such as electronics and web design.  

My second major takeaway was great minds are unique minds. What I mean by this is that after reading Feynman’s bio and after reading about the lives of Shannon, Shockley, Piece, etc. I’ve learned that the greatest minds have their own ways of generating ideas and working. There’s no single formula to conducting research or working on a problem. While this is a bit obvious it was particularly important to me as it inspired me to begin exploring different ways of putting myself in positions to think more. I’ve begun going on more walks, writing down things, removing headphones/distractions from my daily life, and overall I’ve spent more time thinking everyday. I also felt some of my prior intuitions were reinforced after reading this. Things like how I tend to jump all over the place with my interests and passion projects (i.e. robots, electronics, software, finance, math, etc.) was reflected in how John Pierce jumped from different passions and interests (gliders, satellites, mobile phones, lasers, etc.). As well as my recent (2 years) resurgence in interest in reading albeit for different reasons (I read a lot of fiction as a child but now am more interested in thought-provoking material) being reflected in how Claude Shannon kept a home library which he explored and used to his heart’s content in his later years.

There’s a lot more this book showed such as how important ideas can have such humble beginnings (humble either through the humble backgrounds of all the scientists or by where the idea came from) as well as how these ideas can be manifested through chance encounters. Bell Labs was unique, and perhaps we will never have anything remotely close it again. The lessons learned from Bell Labs can be taken by many as they seek to work on important ideas in the future. 

The Idea Factory

The Last Olympian

The Battle of the Labyrinth

Titan's Curse

Sea of Monsters

The Lightning Thief

This book was nice, not much applied to me but it was still interesting and the main takeaway for me was that I need to focus more on consuming “great art” and that i need to work harder at minimizing distractions, giving myself more time to just think. The book was a bit too long imo and a lot of the ideas seemed similar and didn’t need to be separated but that may just be because they weren’t meant for a reader like me.

The Creative Act

This book was definitely not what i expected and I even completely stopped reading it at some point. Once i picked it up again though I flew through it. Feynman is a very interesting guy, he comes across as quite humble and as a very eccentric personality. The stories collected in this novel are very diverse and were very entertaining, making me laugh out loud on several occasions. Will definitely come back to this in the future.

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character

This once took me a while to finish. Not because it was a hard read but more so I found myself losing interest in it especially early on. This book really helps one get a good look at who Elon Musk is, he’s a driven, imperfect, and complicated individual with many interesting intricacies. Learning about his dark childhood and his relationship with his father helps the reader better understand how and why he acts the way he does today. It serves as a reminder that despite the power and influence these billionaires wield, they are still human and possess the same flaws and vulnerabilities that we all have. This manifests in how he treats the people around him and helps to explain a lot of his less desirable character traits. Outside of his personal life it was very compelling for me especially to learn about how he approaches his business and how he holds such strong conviction in his decisions. His concept of the “algorithm” in particular was very interesting and made me rethink how I approach projects in the future.
Here are some notes I took from this book:

# Friendliness does not equal success
	- If there's anything I've learned from this book and from Steve Jobs' book, it's that there's little to no room for camaraderie when leading a company. Elon regularly cycles through employees and does so without regard to whether he's acquainted well with you or not. This can lead to people having harsh feelings towards him but he cares more about his mission than maintaining a good image with the people around him
	- Message: Be willing to have people hate you in order to succeed. Do not settle for mediocrity

# The Algorithm
	1. Question every requirement.
		- Each requirement should come with a name of the person who made it or at least the origin. Find this and question whether this should be in place, no matter who or what deemed that it should be in place.
	2. Delete any part or process that you can.
		- You might have to add some stuff back later, but as the saying goes **If you don't end up adding 10% back later you didn't delete enough.**
	3. Simplify and optimize
		- Only after deleting do you then simplify and optimize.
		- Never optimize something that shouldn't exist in the first place.
	4. Accelerate cycle time
		- Speed up every process.
	5. Automate
		- Only after doing everything else should you begin automating.

Elon Musk

Very interesting book. Really helps give a high-level view of what to consider when looking to found a start-up and the anecdotes and reasoning given by the author is very compelling. It definitely is one to revisit and come back to as it conveys many ideas and will take more than one read for all of them to stick.

Zero to One

Honestly, I don’t really see the hype on this one. Really drawn out first half, with a very abrupt and fast second half. I will admit though I kinda binged the second half on an airplane while taking my sweet old time on the first half so I may have to revisit this book again in the future to give it another chance.

My main issue was that I wasn’t really gripped or enticed by the story. The betrayal was very obviously going to happen so that event was not very highly surprising or interesting to me at all. Also the writing of the characters was in my opinion very surface level and the only one I felt was interesting was Paul’s mother. 

Paul felt like a Mary Sue, he just had all these special abilities and while I guess his character still goes through struggle with his dad dying and his kingdom being overthrown, it didn’t really help that he was some prophecised leader of the Fremen.
Overall gave shone protagonist vibes like Naruto being the “chosen one”. 

Also, this book is definitely is more in the realm of fantasy than sci-fi but perhaps reading The Martian (a hard sci-fi novel) before this may have heightened this feeling. 

Overall, I feel my enjoyment of this novel was plagued by my own preconceptions of the book and I really feel encouraged to revisit it in the future with a more open mind.

Dune

The Martian

Cool novel, especially for someone with very minimal historical knowledge I feel it does a good job of priming one’s curiosity for history and serving as an entry point for one to continue exploring whatever they seem interested in. It is a bit opinionated but that’s to be expected and I find the POV of the author to be compelling and interesting. I don’t have many strong opinions on any concepts discussed in this book soI don’t have much to say about those other than that they were thought provoking and interesting

Sapiens

I can see why people would find this interesting but it is really obvious this was written in ancient times. Women are regarded as inferior intellectually and the book praises what by today’s standards would be pedophilic relationships. It was still interesting to get a view of what Plato and an ancient greek philosopher would think and i was more interested in the greek culture aspect of the work than the actual philosophizing done about love which i believe is very outdated and non-applicable to todays discourse on the subject.

The Symposium

Was a nice book. Pretty outdated though given the rise of ETFs in recent years and how they have changed investing for the lay-investor. Also some sections were simply outdated and too specific (e.g. the sections on specific bond types). I also made the mistake of buying the classic edition which is the one written in the 50s so it was even more useless (I then read the “newest” edition which was slightly better).

The Intelligent Investor

Will come back to review this once I get my copy back

Flowers for Algernon

The Nicomachean Ethics

A Christmas Carol

1984

The Design of Everyday Things

Mud Sweeter Than Honey

Why We Sleep

The Lessons of History

The Vital Question

On the Shortness of Life

Poor Charlie's Almanack

Hackers & Painters

Exhalation

Read Write Own

The Misbehavior of Markets

The Blood of Olympus

The House of Hades

The Mark of Athena

The Son of Neptune

The Lost Hero

The Idea Factory

The Last Olympian

The Battle of the Labyrinth

Titan's Curse

Sea of Monsters

The Lightning Thief

The Creative Act

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character

Elon Musk

Zero to One

Dune

The Martian

Sapiens

The Symposium

The Intelligent Investor

The Millionaire Next Door

The Vital Question