January 2, 2022

Favorite books 2021

I've been reading mostly fiction this year. Rather than go over my favorite books, this year year I'm recommending three authors whose books I find consistently enjoyable.

  • Edward Abbey: A few years ago, I was backpacking in southern California with a copy of Abbey's Desert Solitaire, a book about the desert wilderness and Abbey's thoughts on protecting it. A few days into my hike, I was taking refuge from the noon sun under a small bridge. To pass the time, I took out Abbey's book and continued reading. One phrase that I found interesting was "Poetry and revolution before breakfast". It didn't immediately make sense to me what Abbey meant by that phrase, so I put the book down and looked up to think about it. I noticed someone had scrawled some graffiti on the underside of the bridge. They were a bit faded, but it was still clear that they said... "Poetry and Revolution before breakfast". Which proves that the "number of weird things that happen to a person in the wild is directly proportional to how much time that person spends in the wild" (Steven Rinella in American Buffalo).
  • Richard Russo: Russo writes so well that I sometimes feel guilty reading him. An author who knows how to tell a story like that can't be serious, right? I haven't yet come across any book by him I didn't like, but the one I've read multiple now is The Risk Pool, which recounts his childhood in upstate New York, growing up with a partly absent, sometimes violent and always hard-drinking father. Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool are great novels too. Nobody's Fool was turned into a movie starring Paul Newman that I'm re-watching every few years and that has just the right amount of sentimentality and snow for the holiday season. 
  • Jim Harrison: Harrison's trademark style is first person stream of consciousness. But unlike Thomas Bernhard, who  pioneered this style or maybe just took it to its extreme, the protagonists in Harrison's novel are more likable and their musings are less abstract. I like The English Major best. It's about a recently divorced, broke and lonely man and it's unexpectedly heartwarming.

December 10, 2020

Favorite books 2020

Of the non-fiction books I read in 2020, here are the ones I recommend:

  • Paul J. Steinhardt: The Second Kind of Impossible. Reviewed here and my favorite non-fiction book of the year.
  • Peter Godfrey-Smith: Other Minds. Out of 34 animal phyla, only three have species with complex active bodies: The chordates (including mammals), the arthropods (including insects), and one group of mollusks, the cephalopods (squids, octopuses, cuttlefish, nautilus). There are no individually smart arthropods, which means that cephalopds are the group of smart animals that are evolutionarily most distant to humans and other mammals. Or, less clumsily put, they are "an island of mental complexity in a sea of invertebrate animals ... [They] are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien". Other Minds focuses on the minds of octopuses and how their intelligence compares to ours. Overall verdict: Ink-redible.
  • David Epstein: Range. This book has been recommended and reviewed here by someone with more credibility than me.
  • Chris Arnade: Dignity. If you've read or seen Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance and want to get a broader (and frankly, better) perspective of poverty in a rich country, consider this book. It's a portrait of what Arnade calls back row America: The homeless, the addicts, the prostitutes and their quest for community, spirituality and, above all, dignity. The parallels between what it means to be at the lowest rung of society in modern America and in 1930s Europe as described in George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London are obvious. The biggest difference? Hunger has become less central to the plight of the poorest and its place has been taken by drug problems.
  • Sebastian Junger: Tribe. Reviewed here.
  • Richard Powers: The Overstory. This book is not just different from the others I'm reviewing here because it's a novel, but it's also different from any novel I've ever read. It's experimental in the sense that it is composed of multiple tangled stories, much like the canopy of a forest, which is appropriate since it's a book about trees and how we relate to them. "A book about trees" doesn't do it justice though, since that may give you the impression that it's slow and boring, which it is not. On the contrary, the best adjective I can think of to describe the writing is crisp.

June 7, 2020

Paul J. Steinhardt's The Second Kind of Impossible

Short version: This is the best science book I've read in some time and I recommend it.

Long version:

Typically, crystals are formed by identical, neatly arranged building blocks. One example are the stacked water molecules that make up ice crystals. Quasicrystals are different. Penrose tiling is a good way to illustrate this in two dimensions. The Penrose tiling pattern is composed of multiple kinds of tiles and, unlike a typical crystal, is aperiodic. You can probably tell that if you cut the pattern along the tiles and rearranged the two parts, they wouldn't easily fit together. That's the definition of aperiodicity. Quasicrystals are like that, but in three dimensions.


Penrose tiling is an amusing subject, and that could be the end of it. Fortunately, there are scientists like Steinhardt who strive to make the connection between theoretical physics and real life. In The Second Kind of Impossible, he describes his discovery that quasicrystals, rather than just being a mathematical amusement, exist in nature. He and others pursued this idea even though Richard Feynman, when hearing about the idea, was skeptical and Linus Pauling was outright hostile, saying: "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists." They were wrong, and in 2011 Steinhardt's colleague Dan Schechtman was awarded the Chemistry Nobel price for his work on quasicrystals. 

I'm not giving away too much by mentioning that the story involves international mineral smugglers  and an expedition to Siberia. I wish that more scientists wrote books like this. But even more, I wish that more scientists took risks in what research topics they pursue the way Steinhardt did. It would make for better science and better science books.

Aside: While reading Steinhardt's description of quasicrystals, I remembered that in his 1944 book What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger described the molecule carrying genetic information as an aperiodic crystal. This was before the discovery of structure of DNA in 1953. While DNA is aperiodic - otherwise, it wouldn't encode information - in its native state it is not a crystal. Just in case you were wondering, there's therefore no meaningful connection between DNA and quasicrystals.