Cool. I've ordered this, and it reminded me to check and see if I've read all of John McPhee's collections.

For anyone who hasn’t read “120 Days of Sodom “ my advice would be not to do so.

anyone read the Andromeda evolution?

100 pages of The Brothers Karamazov left. Hope to finish tomorrow. Book is brilliant

I've had this book for many years but finally got around to reading 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond. Very much enjoying it and it blends history, biology, agriculture, and other disciplines. The basic thesis is: Why didn't guns,technology, and more start in South America or other places instead of Eurasia?


I really enjoyed Sapiens and this is kind of similarly themed.

I'm going to try to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 'The Black Swan' for the 2nd time. I couldn't stand his writing before but I'll try to gut it out. I've heard many people enjoy his writing and work so there must be something to it.

Fooled by Randomness, an earlier book by Taleb, is sort of Black Swan Lite and is a better book exploring many of the same ideas, might be worth reading instead imo although a lot of it is a regurgitation of Kahneman (tbf I think the book predates Thinking Fast and Slow but draws heavily on Kahneman's work). If you can deal with the borderline insufferable arrogance oozing out of almost every page, there's a lot of valuable content in Taleb's stuff.

When I was young and the shadow first came upon me I would sleep with a copy of Shakespeares plays under my pillow for comfort; yes he is that good

I too enjoyed Diamond’s book but Charles Mann’s 1491 Takes you further and in some places explicitly corrects Guns, Germs & Steel A great read

diamond is a fantastic story teller but an extreme cherry picker of data - so much that there are a half dozen or so books written expressly to debunk his theories (but to be fair it's easier to sell your nonfiction if you market it as a good companion book to one of the all time best sellers)

i definitely subscribe to a lot of what gg&s advocates though

if you like that style, you'll probably really enjoy Andrade's Gunpowder Age and Frankopan's Silk Road as they both use snippets of history to attempt explaining the world in a manner you'd probably overlooked and they are very fascinating reads

Silk Roads - tells the story of how the rest of the world completely ignores central asia and yet a lot of world history was and culture was strongly influenced by places and events there

Gunpowder Age - starts off as a simple history of the development and transmission across the world of gunpowder but then dips it's toes into the great divergence and tries to explain how out of nowhere Europe rocketed to world dominance and places that were previously the wealthiest in the world became what is today the third world

I hated Sapiens, first 40 pages were amazing, next 100 or so pretty meh and by the end you could tell he was just filling content to make it marketable in book format - nearly everyone i know who says they loved it when I pressed them admitted they had only read the first few chapters

If you're a poker player and you read 2plus2, you're going to find Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness fairly pedestrian -- they are books for people who haven't discovered variance or fat tails. If you are interested in investing, I'd recommend Antifragile, if you are interested in the modern political situation, I'd recommend Skin in the Game.

jmo

This made me chuckle. I don't remember feeling that way about Sapiens although I definitely felt that way about one of his follow-up works, H0m0 ("h0m0" is apparently a blocked word) Deus. Lots of fat could have been trimmed off that one.

Was gonna post a couple of things, but oops someone beat me to it:

And again:

I like some insufferable arrogance, only bettered by sufferable arrogance IMO

If your user name a Brothers Karamazov reference?

Indeed it is. Glad you’re reading it.

Oh man. I've been busy and havent finished the last hundred pages yet but when I do would love a discussion. I'm a very novice reader as a heads up

Sure, feel free to PM me when you’ve finished. If you haven’t read The Idiot yet, consider checking that one out next, it’s just as amazing a book. Also fwiw I’ve read only the Constance Garnett translation of The Brothers Karamazov, am planning on reading the P&V translation some time this year.

The Counterfeiters by Hugh Kenner. This was discussed in the thread sometime back when I bought it. I finally read it...enjoyed it greatly though I took my time reading it. My main takeaway was that I have to re-read Gulliver’s Travels. The way Kenner smashes together like an atomic collider Swift, Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Pope and many more soars and gives me a richer appreciation of the world we’re stumbling through.

Hi,
Is there someone who read books in kindle and can recommend on a nive kindle reader in reasonable size that will not harm too much to my eyes? I got some PDF I want to read and reading it in computer is really uncomfortable.
budget is 70~100$
Thanks!

Paper white for kindle. They are very easy on the eyes

can get a new one for $100

I had a rougher time with this one, maybe its because (to me) it seemed a bit less structured and more rambling.

Black Swan is better than the first go around but there are still many passages that I dislike. While I do think there's valuable information to be gleaned from Taleb, I don't like his writing style very much at all. About 1/3rd done with this one.

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Also, thanks for those recommending other books relating to Guns, Germs, and Steel. 1491 was also recommended to me by a friend and I'll likely check that one out in the future.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
was great

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
currently reading, good

both published this year

Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (2018)
in the mail, looking forward to this

New David Mitchell today. It’s like Christmas morning.

Finished Stephen King's "If It Bleeds" and Ben Macintyre's "The Spy and The Traitor." King's book is four novellas. I thought none of the four really held up to the standard he set many moons ago in Different Seasons, but I like pretty much everything King and it was definitely readable. One story kind of irritated me because the main character did any number of relentlessly stupid things that no actual human being in that situation would ever do, and the story lost plausibility for me.

Macintyre's book was superior. It's the biography of Oleg Gordievsky, who was a KGB agent who started working for MI6 while staying in the KGB and who was ultimately betrayed by Aldrich Ames. It's a pretty detailed biography but is extraordinarily tense; I stayed up most of the night to finish it. Highly recommend.