Finished in 2023

There are 27 items here.

Man's Search for Meaning

Sign me up for the central idea of Logotherapy — that life is not about finding pleasure or even happiness, but meaning.

Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons

This was quite boring in a welcome way, and just the thing I needed for bedtime listening after establishing the habit with Geddy Lee’s memoir: Interesting enough in its pop-culture storytelling, while also forgiving of drifting off to sleep and having to jump back the next night. It left me craving more history after Gygax’s ouster in 1985, especially about the seemingly explosive 2nd Edition era in the 1990s, when I got into the game.

H.M.S. Surprise

Another dose of pleasure, texture, and flavor to be infused into the rest of life. It’s astonishing to think that there are twenty of these.

My Effin’ Life

What a treasure it is to get to hear directly from the single most influential creative person on my young self. I’m a better person, who’s had a better life, than if this guy hadn’t been there doing his thing. I could listen to him talk about everything, indefinitely.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

2023 re-read with Cousin Steve. This was my favorite as a kid in the 90s, which is unsurprising given the surreal wackiness.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

2023 re-read with Cousin Steve. The darkness and cynicism about humanity came through much more strongly for me this time, and while the experience was enjoyable I found myself left wondering, “so what do you propose we do about it, then?”

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

I enjoyed occupying this chamber precisely like I expected to: stories that ask at every turn “what if everyone was flawed yet did their best to care for one another” rather than modern fiction’s usual “what if everyone was flawed and despicable”.

Armageddon

Just continuing my gradual reinterpretation of religious tradition as fascinatingly human history.

Mostly Harmless

From reading this final book when it came out, around age 11, I had an impression of it being darker and sort of resigned, compared to the zaniness of the prior ones. But upon rereading it as an adult, I found it to have a weird kind of hope and peace that fits well with my own understanding of possibility space and the multiverse.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

I was shocked by how immediately compelling and fresh this felt, after the first three novels; especially with my prior memory of the series having the inverse sentiment. What was an unfamiliar and confusing “grown-up” tone back then made for a more mature, warmer, wiser experience this time.

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Ikoku Nikki is complete. I realized in conversation with a friend recently that much of what I love about this manga is that I have come away from it feeling meaningfully better-equipped in my own life. It’s not just entertainment or dwelling in a certain feeling or aesthetic, like much manga is — it’s got a philosophy of its own that’s worth learning from.

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50 Years of Text Games

I so looked forward to reading an entry in this book each night. It offered a warm welcome-home from a hobby subculture I’d been adjacent to since playing and building text games in the 1980s. This is how I want to replace the otaku-lifestyle video games I said farewell to over the past couple of years. Next I’ll go back, comb through the hundreds of games mentioned, and compile a list of titles to try.

Seveneves

2023 fortress reread. I don’t reread books often but I needed something familiar and guaranteed to be enjoyable, a fortress to return to while otherwise delving many dungeons in other areas of life. I could have set up some elaborate project for choosing just the right book to revisit, but that itself would have been a dungeon. This stood out from the Kindle library screen and before I knew it I was well into it.

It was even more captivating and enjoyable the second time around, and has joined its sibling Anathem on the “personal canon” shelf. Stephenson has both a myth-making mind and a scientific mind, and loves to show us again and again how real heroes and gods, resonant with our spiritual instincts, could come to be in a rational universe.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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Sometimes I forget that I have a sense of humor that can be reached by media; but this series is sparking it repeatedly.

A Brief History of Earth

I’d still like to understand more about the deep, geological-time history of this planet, especially in light of my suspicion that our planet is very, very weird and lucky. Plate tectonics and our unlikely escape from runaway processes leading to snowball planet; mass extinction events repeatedly failing to wipe the planet; ramifications for the Fermi paradox.

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Every panel is a micro-masterpiece of warmth and quiet hilarity.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Rereading this series along with my cousin Steve, after last reading it together in 1992. This story is so well-worn in my mind, through rereads, the Infocom game, the television show, and so on; that I barely noticed it going by. The theme that emerges for me as an adult reader is the absurd contrast between the overwhelming grandiosity of reality and the idiotic banality of life in it. The book itself is wry and hip, while no character is more than incidentally admirable; from clueless Earthlings to vastly powerful extra-dimensional beings.

What’s Our Problem?

I agree with most of the points in the book, but spent most of the book frustrated by how the points were made. Given the argument of the whole text, I expected more nuance, complexity, and compassion throughout.

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Ikoku Nikki is quickly becoming an emblem of what I want manga to be. Each character is treated with love. Each scene is handled with grace. The entire stack of books exudes poetry and warmth. The message is delivered again and again: the world is hard and absolutely worth it.

If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare

Mostly glad I read this paper behind the popular grabby aliens model in order to find elements which my disagreement with generates ideas for a fiction project I’m pursuing. Most centrally — I sure do philosophically dislike the principle of mediocrity, and I don’t at all buy that expanding into the galaxy ends up looking like a worthwhile thing to do for advanced civilizations.

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: The Nitpicks of Power

This series developed quite a bit my understanding of wanting stories to feel grounded in reality and like they are made of consequences. For me it completes a sort of trilogy of critiques of modern Tolkien screen adaptations, including Lindsay Ellis’s series about the Hobbit films and Moviewise’s video about the main Jackson trilogy.

Post Captain

An ordinary good book is pleasurable while you read it. But O’Brian seems to be able to create an experience that continues to deploy enjoyment throughout the day, as you reflect back on it. The echo of having read it last night, and the promise of getting to read it again tonight, infuses life itself with additional texture and flavor.

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe — Space, Time and Motion

For decades I’ve been reading physics books that purport to explain the nature of the universe without including inscrutable equations, but that end up requiring the reader to trust that the math undeniably and elegantly leads to this or that conclusion. It came gradually clear that in order to feel the significance of what we know, one really needs to understand the math at least somewhat, not just stories about the math and the people who discovered it. This book is the first of a promised trilogy from Sean Carroll, who was already one of my favorite science explainers. I appreciate his willingness to at least sometimes start from the most fundamental principles of what we know rather than defaulting to telling the historical sequence of who discovered what when and then who later found something more fundamental. The idea of the series is to cater to people who want to make the effort to understand the math, but don’t plan to study it at an academic or professional level. That’s me! After reading this I feel a dramatically deeper understanding of what is going on in the universe than any physics book has ever given me, and understanding the universe is one of my elementary particles of meaning.

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