The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen by nostalgebraist. A revelation (ἀποκάλυψις = “unveiling”) told through the eyes of a developmentally-disabled teenager. You will never guess where it goes. This came across my desk because I really enjoyed The Northern Caves, which is both a great horror story and an evocation of the Internet forum culture of the late 2000’s.
Algebraic Models for Accounting Systems. I like anything along the lines of, “let’s take a technical field that formed its ontology, vocabulary, methods etc. before modern mathematics, and set it on a modern, algebraic, formal foundation”. And this is that, for accounting. It is a pleasant read.
Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima. The artist’s confession. “I had decided I could love a girl without feeling any desire whatsoever”.
Paul and Virginia by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Published in 1788, very sentimental, but I think it helped me to get in the mindset of late 17th century French society: the bucolic, Rousseauist kick, the whole “simplicity of nature” thing. This landed on my reading list because many, many years ago I read a Cordwainer Smith story called Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, and I read somewhere that the characters in the story, Paul and Virginia, were an allusion to Paul et Virginie.
De Monarchia by Dante. This is another “get into the mindset of another century” book. It’s interesting because it’s written like a logical, geometric proof: there’s modus ponens and modus tollens and case analysis and proof by contradiction. But the axioms are very eclectic: quotations from various Virgil, Plato, Livy, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas et al. and Dante’s private interepretation of bits from the Bible. The theorem he wants to prove is that to attain the highest development of humanity, the whole world must be unified into a world-state ran by the Holy Roman Emperor.
Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold. Nominally an oral history of the development of SimCity. That’s how he gets you. Then the trap is sprung, and you are given a history of cybernetics, WW2 fire control systems, cellular automata, artificial life, computation, Vannevar Bush, pedagogy, cognition, the World3 model, The Limits to Growth, Forrester’s system dynamics. “Unexpectedly Borgesian technical book” is one of my favourite genres.
Antigone by Sophocles, in the translation of Robert Fagles. “Don’t fear for me. Set your own life in order”.
The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon. I’m not sure what to make of it, honestly, but when I have the time I want to read Leo Strauss’s lectures on Xenophon, where he expounds on the hidden meaning of the text.
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette. The author’s account of caring for his partner who was dying of AIDS in the 80’s, while he himself was actively dying from AIDS. Frightful. The author died just a few years before HAART therapy became available.
The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer is unique. I don’t know quite how to characterize it. His writing is very disarming and innocent without being sentimental, he is earnest and free of cynicism. A love story in 17th century Poland, after the Khmelnytsky pogroms. It’s very magical realist, in a good way, not in the hysterical sense. The world is shot through with the supernatural, but the inner lives of the characters oscillate between religious awe and a very contemporary cynicism.
Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler. The inspiration for Eyes Wide Shut. I was surprised by how much of the movie, that I thought was mostly Kubrick’s invention, is actually from the story. It’s a great mood piece: you can feel the cold of early morning in Vienna, and see the paving stones, and the gas lamps, and the carriages disappearing in the fog.
The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem. I like Lem when he’s serious (Solaris, His Master’s Voice) and not so much when he’s doing satire (The Futurological Congress) so when I picked this up years ago and saw that it was a collection of fairy tales I put it away. I tried again this year and found I actually enjoyed it, but some of the later stories go on for far too long. I think The Seventh Sally is the one everyone likes.
The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Another Singer, this time in 19th century Poland. A rake is punished by God. Short and fun. I like that Singer doesn’t write giant doorstoppers, so that quality per page is high.
Mephisto by Klaus Mann. A socialist actor in interwar Germany saves his career by making friends with the Nazis. I was surprised by how Randian it was: the characters are divided into two disjoint categories, the Good, who are upper middle class, burgeois people, or aristocrats from old and noble families, and the Bad, who are vulgar, parvenus, thugs, and boors. It’s kind of ironic to think people become Nazis because of bad breeding.
What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger. Before modern crystallography, NMR, DFT etc. people had to learn about the nanoscale through clever reasoning. Schrödinger uses the limited knowledge of the day to set up a constraint system, and finds the solution: genetic information is stored in an aperiodic, covalently-bonded crystal, and he even estimates the physical volume of the genome from experiments relating mutation rates to X-ray exposure.
Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Another Singer, back in the 17th century, this one is more fire and brimstone, and it’s about a historical episode I had not heard about until the last few pages of The Slave: the case of Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish mystic who, at one point, had most of the Jewish world convinced he was the messiah. This happened in the year 1666. The novel is about what it’s like, phenomenologically, to live in a remote village in 1600’s Poland. How do you know anything about the world? People come in, from time to time, traders, and they have news, but the news are just words that come out of their mouth. And you have to interrogate them, ask questions, compare notes. Like living in a Pacific island. Has the messiah come? Is there such a place as the Ottoman Empire? Is there even a world outside Poland?
Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini. A book about interface design from 1992. A lot of the advice is good, and a lot of it is interesting for the historical context, and the constraints people worked with in the past. One aspect I found interesting: how many products and companies are mentioned of whose existence I can find little to no evidence today. This makes the hoarder in me sad. This one across my desk because I read a blog post implementing one of the UI ideas from the book.
Term Rewriting and All That by Franz Baader and Tobias Nipkow. I feel that I understand what computation is now.
Indistinguishable From Magic by Robert L. Forward. If you’ve spent years steeped in Orion’s Arm then most of the ideas in the book will not be new to you. But they were new once. And it’s interesting to read a book and think: this is where starwisps and launch loops all come from.
The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. Surreal and a pleasure to read.
Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations by John F. Sowa. Delightful, particularly the early bits about the history of logic, and many chapters explaining the work of Peirce and Whitehead on ontology.
I have not finished reading this book, but I am in the first few pages of A Shorter Model Theory by Wilfrid Hodges, and I am delighted. The very first exercise in the book involves a formalization of Aquinas’ account of the trinity.