What I Read in 2017

I managed a book a week in 2017.  This year there was a lot of fiction; most of the technical reading I did was blog articles, working through tutorials, or just plain coding. Still, there were a lot of good books this year. I highly recommend the Timbuktu Librarians book, Machina, the Nexus series, Thrawn, and Protestants, all of which are linked below! Feel free to add any good books you read in the comments!

January

1.) Pythagoras’ Revenge: A Mathematical Mystery – Arturo Sangalli

2.) Sass for Web Designers – Dan Cederholm

3.) ArcGIS Web Development – Rene Rubalcava

February

4.) The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts – Joshua Hammer

5.) The Story of the Nations: The Byzantine Empire – C.W.C. Oman

6.) Gallipoli – John Masefield

7.) Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs

8.) The Return of Tarzan – Edgar Rice Burroughs

March

9.) War Stories from the Future – August Cole et al.

10.) Aftermath (Star Wars: Aftermath #1) – Chuck Wendig

11.) The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals – Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling

12.) The Rift: A New Africa Emerges – Alex Perry

13.) Machina – Sebastian Marshall

14.) The Horse and His Boy (Book 3 Chronicles of Narnia) – C. S. Lewis

15.) Bloodline (Star Wars) – Claudia Gray

April

16.) The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It – Kelly McGonigal

17.) The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results – Gary Keller, Jay Papasan

18.) The Bobby Gold Stories – Anthony Bourdain

19.) Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers – Simon Winchester

May

20.) Nexus (Nexus #1) – Ramez Naam

21.) The Judas Gate (Sean Dillon Book 18) – Jack Higgins

22.) Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction 1st Edition – Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck

23.) The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials) – Peter Drucker

24.) Crux: Nexus Arc Book 2 – Ramez Naam

25.) Kierkegaard for Beginners (Writers & Readers Documentary Comic Book) – Donald D. Palmer

June

26.) Agile for Dummies: IBM Limited Edition – Scott W. Ambler

27.) A Devil is Waiting (Sean Dillon #19) – Jack Higgins

July

28.) The Once and Future King – T. H. Whyte

29.) Thrawn (Star Wars) – Timothy Zahn

30.) When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order – Martin Jacques

31.) Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom: Book 1 – David Wingrove

32.) The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books #5) – Pico Iyer

August

33.) Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World – Alec Ryrie

34.) Celtic Design: The Dragon and the Griffin: The Viking Impact – Aidan Meehan

35.) Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School #1) – Gail Carriger

36.) The Sunrise Lands (Emberverse #4) – S. M. Stirling

September

37.) The Scourge of God (Emberverse #5) – S. M. Stirling

38.) The Sword of the Lady (Emberverse #6) – S. M. Stirling

39.) Aftermath: Life Debt (Star Wars: Aftermath #2) – Chuck Wendig

40.) The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months – Brian P. Moran, Michael Lennington

October

41.) The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels

42.) The High King of Montival (Emberverse #7) – S. M. Stirling

43.) Feminist Theology – Natalie K. Watson

44.) Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction – Edward Craig

November

45.) Answering the Contemplative Call: First Steps on the Mystical Path – Carl McColman

46.) A Beginner’s Guide to Philosophy – Dominique Janicaud, Simon Critchley (Foreword)

47.) Armageddon’s Children (The Genesis of Shannara, Book 1) – Terry Brooks

48.) Socrates: The Great Philosophers (The Great Philosophers Series) – Anthony Gottlieb

49.) Sisterhood of Dune: Book One of the Schools of Dune Trilogy – Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

December

50.) The Elves of Cintra (The Genesis of Shannara, Book 2) – Terry Brooks

51.) Speculator (High Ground Series Book 1) – Doug Casey

52.) Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time (Pragmatic Life) – Staffan Noteberg

Books I read in 2016

Last year was my lowest year in ten years for amount of books read.  To be honest, I was working through textbooks and FreeCodeCamp learning to code, which took away from my reading time.  Still, there were a lot of interesting books on this year’s list!

January

1.) 4th Generation Warfare Handbook – William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiele

2.) The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom – Candida Moss

 

February

3.) Robopocalypse: A Novel (Robopocalypse #1) – Daniel H. Wilson

4.) Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft – by Elizabeth Bear and Greg Bear et al.

5.) Algebra: Sets, Symbols, and the Language of Thought (The History of Mathematics) Revised Edition – John Tabak, Ph.D.

 

March

6.) Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure – Andreas Kluth

7.) White Needle: 5 (Shadow Squadron #5) – Carl Bowen

8.) Phantom Sun: 6 (Shadow Squadron #6) – Carl Bowen

9.) Uncertainty in Games (Playful Thinking series) – Greg Costikyan

10.) The Magician’s Nephew (Narnia Chronicles) – C. S. Lewis

11.) Gorilla Mindset – Mike Cernovich

12.) Foundation’s Fear (Second Foundation Trilogy #1) – Gregory Benford

 

April

13.) Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions #180) – Raymond Wacks

14.) Sociology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions #12) – Steve Bruce

 

May

15.) The Circle – Dave Eggers

16.) Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War – P. W. Singer and August Cole

 

June

16.) Will I Ever Be Free of You?: How to Navigate a High-Conflict Divorce from a Narcissist and Heal Your Family – Karyl McBride, Ph.D.

17.) The Cartel Hit (Mack Bolan the Executioner #438) – Mike Linaker, Don Pendleton (Series Creator)

18.) Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport

19.) The Tournament – Matthew Reilly

20.) Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again – Jeffrey E. Young and Janet S. Klosko

21.) Scarecrow Returns – Matthew Reilly

22.) Progression – Sebastian Marshall

 

July

23.) Abyss Deep (Star Corpsman #2) – by Ian Douglas

24.) Express in Action: Node Applications with Express and Its Companion Tools – Evan Hahn

25.) Your Many Faces: The First Step to Being Loved – Virginia Satir

26.) Bitcoin for the Befuddled – Conrad Barski and Chris Wilmer

27.) Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money – Nathaniel Popper

 

August

28.) Star Wars: The Rise of the Empire – John Jackson Miller et al.

29.) Re-read GIS for Dummies – Michael N. DeMers

30.) The Blood of Gods (Emperor #5) –  Conn Iggulden

 

September

31.) Battlefront: Twilight Company (Star Wars canon) –  Alexander Freed

 

October

32.) Head First Mobile Web – Lyza Danger Gardner and Jason Grigsby

33.) The Water Knife – Paolo Bacigalupi

 

November

34.) Public Health 101: Healthy People – Healthy Populations – Richard Riegelman, Brenda Kirkwood

35.) Soil: Digging into Earth’s Vital Resource (Exploring Science: Earth Science) – Darlene R. Stille

36.) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism – Stephen Graham

37.) Planet of Slums – Mike Davis

38.) Proxima – Stephen Baxter

 

December

39.) There Will Be War Volume X – Jerry Pournelle, Editor

40.) JavaScript: The Good Parts – Douglas Crockford

41.) Smashing Node.js: JavaScript Everywhere 2nd Edition – Guillermo Rauch

42.) Foundation and Chaos (Second Foundation Trilogy #2) – Greg Bear

What I’m Reading – October 2016

The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb by Neal Bascomb. So when I was a kid, Where Eagles Dare by Alistair MacLean was one of my favorite books (still is).  This is kind of like the real life version.  A commando team went into Norway during the War and took out the Nazi facilities that were racing to make their own Atomic bomb.  It doesn’t get more high-stakes than that and the fact that it’s all a true story makes it even more interesting.

Head First Mobile Web by Lyza Danger Gardner, Jason Grigsby.  I am continuing to work on my programming skills.  Mobile is an area I haven’t explored much so this is more of a way to let me see what’s involved.  It seems just figuring out what device the user has is tough, much less tailoring the experience for their specific needs!  Still, more people in the world have cell phones than working toilets, so mobile is the wave of the future.

The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free by Alex Perry.  Speaking of those billions of cell phone users, Africa is one area where the usage of cell phones has exploeded due to the lack of infrastructure.  Most of what we see on the news is famine, war, and pestilence and yet, there is another Africa, wired and high-tech, out there.  This book tries to show both sides, using the Great Rift Valley as a metaphor of the two Africas.

Books I Read in 2015

I’m a little late on this one – Usually I put it up in January, but never late than never!

It seems like I read less this year than in previous years, but a lot of what I was doing was working through coding exercises.  Also, we moved in the middle of the year, and a whole lot of bad stuff happened too.  At one point I was working two jobs.  So, life happening plus less time to read combined with working through coding textbooks meant this year was anemic when it came to books.  Still, I hope you find some value in the list below. There are books on history, international affairs, religion, mathematics, epidemiology, and of course, many fiction books.

January

1.) An Introduction to Sets, Groups, and Matrices – Alexander Balfour

2.) Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic – David Quammet

3.) Vengeance (Rogue Warrior #12) – Richard Marcinko

4.) On War: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003 – 2009 – William S. Lind

5.) Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life – John Miller and Scott Page

6.) Man 2.0: Unlock the Secret to Burn Fat Faster, Build More Muscle, Have Better Sex, and Become the Best Version of Yourself – John Romaniello and Adam Bornstein

February

7.) Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician – Anthony Everitt

8.) The Aden Effect: A Connor Stark Novel – Claude Berube

9.)  GIS for Dummies – Michael N. DeMers

10.) Follow That Map! A First Book of Mapping Skills – Scot Ritchie

11.) There Will Be War Volume 1 (Castalia House ebook version) – Jerry Pournelle, Editor

12.) Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks – Ken Jennings

13.) With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North – Carol Reardon

14.) Blowback (Vanessa Pierson #1) – Valerie Plame and Sarah Lovett

15.) Men of War: There Will Be War Volume II (Castalia House ebook version) – Jerry Pournelle, Editor

16.) The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate – Scott D. Sagan & Kenneth N. Waltz

17.) The Art of War: A History of Military Strategy (Castalia House ebook version) – Martin van Creveld

March

18.)  When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself – Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert

19.)  El Borak and Other Desert Adventures – Robert E. Howard

20.)  Javascript: A Beginner’s Guide (4th Edn) – John Pollock

21.) There Will Be War: Volume III Blood and Iron (Castalia House ebook version) – Jerry Pournelle, Editor

22.) WordPress 24-Hour Trainer (with DVD ROM) – George Plumley

23.) GIS: A Visual Approach – Bruce E. Davis

April

24.) The Killing Ground (Sean Dillon #14) – Jack Higgins

25.) Rough Justice (Sean Dillon #15) – Jack Higgins

26.) Five Marks of a Methodist: The Fruit of a Living Faith – Steve Harper

27.) A Darker Place (Sean Dillon #16) – Jack Higgins

May

28.) Wesley for Armchair Theologians – William J. Abraham

29.) The Wolf at the Door (Sean Dillon #17) – Jack Higgins

30.) Cities of Tomorrow and the City to Come: A Theology of Urban Life – Noah J. Toly

31.) Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate – Rose George

June

32.) Full Force and Effect (Jack Ryan #10) – Mark Greaney (Tom Clancy)

33.) How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?: Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus – Larry W. Hurtado

July

34.) There Will Be War Volume IV: Day of the Tyrant  (Castalia House ebook version) – Jerry Pournelle, Editor

35.) Why Homer Matters – Adam Nicolson

36.) How to Cook Like a Man: A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession – Daniel Duane

37.) Immanuel’s Veins (Books of History Chronicles) – Ted Dekker

38.) Saint (Books of History Chronicles: Paradise) – Ted Dekker

39.) Founders (The Coming Collapse) – James Wesley, Rawles

40.) Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur – Edited by Noah Radford and Andrew Trabulsi

August

41.) Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically – Beth Felker Jones

42.) The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Future of Christianity Trilogy) 3rd Edition – Philip Jenkins

September

43.) How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem – Rod Dreher

October

44. The Martian – Andy Weir

November

45.) Treasure of Khan (Dirk Pitt #19) – Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler

December

45.) 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History) – Eric H. Cline

46.) Finding Zero – Amir D. Aczel

47.) Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure – Cedric Villani

48.) End of the Earth: Voyaging to Antarctica – Peter Matthiessen

U.S. Strategy and the New Medievalism

I’ve noted before that I’ve done some work with the Matthew Ridgway Center for International Security Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Phil Williams, a noted scholar on transnational security threats, was the director, and was also a visiting scholar at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, and for them he wrote several monographs.  One in particular that caught my eye was “From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy“.  At the time (two years ago) I toyed around with the possibility of a book-length expansion on this, going as far as working up a table of contents and listing some extra things that the book could cover that the monograph did not.

Real life intervened, as it often does, and I found myself back at work as an engineer, so I never got much further with the book.  Still, I think Dr. Williams’ paper deserves more consideration, and I’d still like to explore some of the ideas in the monograph in further detail.  Given the Arab Spring, Ukraine, and Syria, as well as the situation in the South China Sea, I think Dr. Williams foresaw a lot of things in this publication.  At the end of it, he gives some recommendations which are interesting in light of the cutbacks to the U.S. military that we are seeing.

I’ll explore different areas over the next few weeks – I’m aiming for one blog post per week.  For today, here is a synopsis of the monograph taken from the SSI website.  I encourage you to download and read it.

“Security and stability in the 21st century have little to do with traditional power politics, military conflict between states, and issues of grand strategy. Instead they revolve around the disruptive consequences of globalization, declining governance, inequality, urbanization, and nonstate violent actors. The author explores the implications of these issues for the United States. He proposes a rejection of “stateocentric” assumptions and an embrace of the notion of the New Middle Ages characterized, among other things, by competing structures, fragmented authority, and the rise of “no-go” zones. He also suggests that the world could tip into a New Dark Age. He identifies three major options for the United States in responding to such a development. The author argues that for interventions to have any chance of success the United States will have to move to a trans-agency approach. But even this might not be sufficient to stanch the chaos and prevent the continuing decline of the Westphalian state.”

My Books Read in the Last Year

Another year, another book list.  I read less book this year than last, but over two thousand more pages!  Here’s the list:

January

1.) Jesus Through Middle-Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels – Kenneth E. Bailey

2.) Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

3.) Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy – Colin S. Gray

4.) Debt: The First 5000 Years – Peter Graeber

5.) Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat – Hans Christian von Baeyer

6.) What’s Your Angle, Pythagoras? A Math Adventure – Julie Ellis

7.) Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography – Hew Strachan

8.) Tanks in the Cities: Breaking the Mold – Kendall D. Gott

February

9.) The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World – David Berlinski

10.) The New Science of Strong Materials: or Why You Don’t Fall Through the Floor – J. E. Gordon
11.) Connected: 24 Hours in the Global Economy – Daniel Altman

12.) Nature’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos – Peter M. Hoffmann

March

13.) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – Eliezer Yudkowsky

14.) The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters – Rose George

15.) A Magic Broken – Vox Day (Novella)

16.) What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be) – John McWhorter

17.) Shadow of the Hegemon (Ender Wiggin Saga) – Orson Scott Card

18.) Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology – Rosemary Radford Ruether

19.) Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale – Ian Morgan Cron

20.) Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation – Elaine Pagels

21.) The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work – W. Daniel Hillis

April

22.) The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses – C. S. Lewis

23.) Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English – John McWhorter

24.) The Last Stand of Fox Company – Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

25.) The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate – Robert D. Kaplan

26.) The Faith and the Power: The Inspiring Story of the First Christians and How They Survived the Madness of Rome – James D. Snyder

27.) Liberation Theologies: The Global Pursuit of Justice – Alfred T. Hennelly, S.J.

28.) Human Security in a Borderless World – Derek S. Reveron and Kathleen A. Mahoney-Norris

29.) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos – M. Mitchell Waldrop

30.) The Lessons of St. Francis: How to Bring Simplicity and Spirituality into Your Daily Life – John Michael Talbot

31.) The Mathematics of Life – Ian Stewart

May

32.) The Artist and the Mathematician: The story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician who never existed – Amir D. Aczel

33.) Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon’s Children #1) – Alastair Reynolds

34.) The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines & Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy – Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

35.) Beyond Geometry: A New Mathematics of Space and Form – John Tabak

36.) The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood – James Gleick

37.) Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image – Toby Lester

38.) The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL – Eric Greitens

39.) Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives – Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler

40.) Worm: The First Digital World War – Mark Bowden

June

41.) African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design – Ron Eglash

42.) Schaum’s Easy Outlines Differential Equations – Richard Bronson

43.) Understanding Global Conflict and Cooperation: An Introduction to Theory and History (8th Edn) – Joseph S. Nye, jr and David A. Welch

44.) Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

45.) Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War – Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss

46.) How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth – Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart

47.) It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City Life for the (Not So) Simple Life) – Keith Stewart

July

48.) Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World – Christopher Steiner

49.) The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? – Jared Diamond

50.) Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence – Joseph J. Ellis

51.) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty – Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

52.) Elements of Biblical Exegesis: A Basic Guide for Students and Ministers (Revised and Expanded Edition) – Michael J. Gorman

53.) What the Numbers Say: A Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical World – Derrick Niederman and David Boyum

August

54.) Beginning Programming – Adrian and Kathie Kingsley-Hughes

55.) Sure Fire (Rich & Jade #1) – Jack Higgins with Justin Richards

56.) Just My Type: A Book About Fonts – Simon Garfield

57.) HTML: Your visual Blueprint(tm) for designing Web pages with HTML, CSS, and XHTML – Paul Whitehead, James H. Russell

58.) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information – Edward R. Tufte

59.) Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency – Col. Gian Gentile

60.) Head First HTML and CSS – Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman

61.) Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation – Parker J. Palmer

62.) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right – Atul Gawande

September

63.) Star Wars: Scoundrels – Timothy Zahn

64.) Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation – Michael Pollan

65.) The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity – Steven Strogatz

66.) Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think – Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier

October

67.) The Tao of Programming – Geoffrey James

November

68.) The Myriad: Tour of the Merrimack #1 – R. M. Meluch

69.) Caliphate – Tom Kratman

70.) Kris Longknife: Mutineer (Kris Longknife #1) – Mike Shepherd

71.) Shadow Puppets (Ender’s Shadow series) – Orson Scott Card

72.) Starting Out With Visual Basic 2012 – Tony Gaddis and Kip Irvine

December

73.) Pursuing Justice: The Call to Live & Die for Bigger Things – Ken Wytsma with D. R. Jacobsen

74.) The City: A Global History – Joel Kotkin

75.) Starting Out with Java: From Control Structures through Data Structures – Tony Gaddis and Godfrey Muganda

76.) The Hunted: Tom Clancy’s Endwar #2 – David Michaels

77.) The Humanity of God – Karl Barth

78.) Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla – David Kilcullen

79.) Theology: A Very Short Introduction – David F. Ford

Books I Read in 2012

It’s that time of year again.  My reading was down a little this year due to the fact that I was working full time and reading some longer books.

January

 

1.) Christ Empowered Living: Celebrating Your Significance in God – Selwyn Hughes

2.) Regeneration (Species Imperative #3) – Julie Czerneda

3.) Chaos: A Graphic Guide (Introducing Series) – Zaiuddin Sardar and Iwona Abrams

4.) Catching Fire (The Hunger Games#2) – Suzanne Collins

5.) Astrobiology: A Brief Introduction – Kevin W. Plaxco and Michael Gross

6.) Thinking in Systems: A Primer – Donella H. Meadows

7.) Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3) – Suzanne Collins

8.) Life in Space: Astrobiology for Everyone – Lucas John Mix

9.) War – Sebastian Junger

 

February

 

10.) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – C. S. Lewis

11.) The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy – Sasha Issenberg

12.) Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics – John Derbyshire

 

March

 

13.) Stuff: The Materials the World is Made Of – Ivan Amato

14.) Success through Failure: The Paradox of Design – Henry Petroski

15.) One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way – by Robert Maurer, Ph. D.

16.) Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration – Paul Gilster

17.) The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade – Pietra Rivoli

 

April

 

18.) Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking – Charles Siefe

19.) Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis – Lauren F. Winner

 

 

May

 

20.) The Silver Chair (Narnia) – C. S. Lewis

21) Caesar’s Legion:  The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar’s Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome – Stephen Dando-Collins

22) Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think – Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

23) The Detachment (A John Rain novel) – Barry Eisler

24) Fifty Shades of Grey – E. L. James

25) Fifty Shades Darker – E. L. James

26) Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next – Greg Lindsay and John D. Kasarda

 

June

 

27) Private Dancer – Stephen Leather

28) Fifty Shades Freed – E. L. James

29) Dubai Dreams: Inside the Kingdom of Bling – Raymond Barrett

30) A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy – Miyamoto Musashi

31) Dubai: Gilded Cage – Syed Ali

32) Amped – Daniel H. Wilson

 

July

 

33) China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa – Serge Michel, Michel Beuret, Paolo Woods

34) All Fall Down – Vern McGeorge

35) City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism – Jim Krane

36) Looking for trouble: Adventures in a Broken World – Ralph Peters

37) When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405-33 – Louise Levathes

38) Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration – Clint Willis, ed.

39) Night Without End – Alistair Maclean

 

August

 

40) Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil – John Ghazvinian

41) Birds of Prey: The Battle Within – Gail Simone et al (Comic Book Graphic Novel)

42) Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent – Garrett Hardin

43) The Twelfth Imam – Joel C. Rosenberg

44) Batman: Battle for the Cowl – Tony S. Daniel et al (Comic Book Graphic Novel)

45) Batman: The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul –  Grant Morrison et al (Comic Book Graphic Novel)

46) Birds of Prey: Metropolis or Dust – Sean McKeever et al (Comic Book Graphic Novel)

47) Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil – Nicholas Shaxson

48) Implosion: Can America Recover From Its Economic & Spiritual Challenges in Time? – Joel C. Rosenberg

49) Knocking on Heaven’s Door:  How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World – Lisa Randall

 

 September

 

50) Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West – Tom Holland

51) The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love – Kristin Kimball

52) Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise – Michele Owens

53) Inch and Miles: The Journey to Success – By John R. Wooden et al.

54) Epicenter: Why the Current Rumblings in the Middle East Will Change Your Life – Joel C. Rosenberg

55) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food – by Barbara Kingsolver

 

October

 

56) Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future – Ian Morris

57) Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus – Robert D. Kaplan

58) Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens – Nicholas Shaxson

59) Fractions and Decimals Made Easy (Making Math Easy) (with Jacob) – Rebecca Wingard-Nelson

60) Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Prodigy (Robot City #4) – Arthur Byron Cover

61) Fraction Fun – (with Jacob) David A. Adler

62) The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization – Jonathan Lyons

63) Working With Fractions – (with Jacob) David A. Adler

64) Hopping On the Number Line (Little World Math Concepts) (with Jacob) – Nancy Allen

65) Estimation (A Young Math Book) (with Jacob) – Charles F. Linn

66) Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam – John A. Nagl

67) What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East – Bernard Lewis

 

November

 

68) Pump Six and Other Stories – Paolo Bacigalupi

69) The Great Divorce – C.S. LewiS

70) Philosophical Tales: Being an Alternative History Revealing the Characters, the Plots, and the Hidden Scenes That Make Up the True Story of Philosophy – Martin Cohen

71) Contemporary Security Studies, 2nd Edition – Allan Collins, editor

72) What Do Muslims Believe: The Roots and Realities of Modern Islam – Ziauddin Sardar

73) Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church – James K. A. Smith

74) Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books – Azar Nafisi

75) Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World – Olivier L. de Weck, Daniel Roos, and Christopher L. Magee

76) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order – Steven Strogatz

77) Red Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson

78) Celtic Vision: Prayers, Blessings, Songs, and Invocations from the Gaelic Tradition – Esther de Waal (editor)

79) Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics and Why They Matter – John L. Casti

 

December

 

80) Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire – Isaac Asimov

81) Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, Security and Post-Conflict Development – Megan H. MacKenzie

82) Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes – Charles Hartshorne

83) The Teeth of the Tiger – Tom Clancy

84) Exit Plan – Larry Bond

85) e: The Story of a Number – Eli Maor

86) Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic – Tom Holland

Mini-Reviews: Ralph Peters and More on linguistics

A couple of mini-reviews…

 

 

I don’t what it is about books on linguistics but I have had a terrible time finding books that do what they purport to do.  For example, it seems my quest for a good history of the English language continues.  In The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Bill Bryson takes the English language and describes it ad nauseum – he covers all the major periods of history but not in a coherent fashion.  Instead, this book reads more like a collection of entries on various facets of the language.  He provides plenty – and I mean plenty – of examples of different ways that words were formed, where they came from, and the differences across regions. He covers everything from naming conventions to pronunciation differences to swear words, and he covers the difference between British English and American English.  It’s great if you’re looking to win a trivia contest, but not so good for tracking the history of the language.

 

 

 

RALPH PETERS: LOOKING FOR TROUBLE

This weekend I read Ralph Peters’s book Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World.  In the tradition of Robert D. Kaplan, he combines travel writing with political commentary.  The major part of the book is given over to his travels through the former Soviet Union in the mid-90s, and includes insight into Georgia,Azerbaijan, and Armenia.  His prose is beautifully written, and his insights into the situations there, although influenced by hindsight, are thought-provoking.  Later he recounts his involvement in the drug war in South and Central America as well as Thailand.  The book ends in 1998, when he retires from the army and becomes a civilian.  I’m hoping there will be a sequel.  Peters is a commentator on Fox news, and it should be noted that he has very strong opinions about things.  Overall, I think it’s worth a read for anyone interested in travel, COIN, or international security.

(Peters review originally posted at http://macengr.tumblr.com/ on 17 July 2012)

My Books Read in the Last Year

I read quite a bit last year, with an emphasis on linguistics, Counterinsurgency, complexity, and mathematics.  Fiction, as always was scattered throughout the year.  Lots of good links below; I encourage you to check them out, along with the reviews I did of several of them…

January
1) Your Child’s Growing Mind: A Guide to Learning and Brain Development from Birth to Adolescence – Jane M. Healey, Ph.D
2) Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple) – Jeffrey Kluger
3) The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
4) A New Kind of Science – Stephen Wolfram
5) Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power – Robert D. Kaplan
6) The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity – Richard Florida (My review here)
7) Language: The Big Picture – Peter Sharpe (my review here)
8) Understanding Physics: Volume 1: Motion, Sound, and Heat (Understanding Physics) – Isaac Asimov
9) Seven Firefights in Vietnam – John A. Cash, et al.  (My review here)

February
10) Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages – Guy Deutscher (My review here)
11) Chaos Theory Tamed – Garnett P. Williams
12) Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity – John Gribbin (My review here)
13) The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa: With E. D. Swinton’s “The Defence of Duffer’s Drift” – Michael Burgoyne and Albert Marckwardt (My review here)
14) The Age of the Unthinkable , Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It – Joshua Cooper Ramo
15) The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) – Graham Greene
16) Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq – Patrick Cockburn
17) Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life – Len Fisher
18) Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language – Seth Lerer (My review here)
19) Migration: Species Imperative #2 – Julie Czerneda
20) Euler’s Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology – David S. Richeson
21) Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means – Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (My review here)
22) Chicago Blues – Edited by Libby Fischer Hellmann

March
23) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – Dan Pink
24) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why – Richard E. Nisbett
25) Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey From NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer – Mireya Mayor (My review here)
26) A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines – Anthony Bourdain
27) Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World – Liaquat Ahamed (My review here)
28) Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions – Lisa Randall
29) The Mother Tongue – English And How It Got That Way – Bill Bryson
30) Raising Musical Kids: A Guide for Parents – Robert A. Cutietta

April
31) Thought Contagion – Aaron Lynch (My review here)
32) Prince Caspian (Chronicles of Narnia 2) – C.S. Lewis
33) Memories of My Melancholy Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
34) Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition) – Duncan J. Watts
35) The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention – Guy Deutscher
36) Hardwired – Walter Jon Williams
37) The Next Decade: Where We’ve Been . . . and Where We’re Going – George Friedman

May
38) Almost Human: Making Robots Think – Lee Gutkind
39) Understanding Physics: Volume 2: Light, Magnetism and Electricity – Isaac Asimov
40) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) – Robert B. Cialdini
41) Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do – Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
42) The Secret Servant (Gabriel Allon) – Daniel Silva
43) Pittsburgh Noir (Akashic Noir) – Edited by Kathleen George
44) Freedom (TM) – Daniel Suarez
45) Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots – Gareth Branwyn
46) The Traveler (Fourth Realm Trilogy, Book 1) – John Twelve Hawks
47) Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back – Douglas Rushkoff
48) Running Out of Water: The Looming Crisis and Solutions to Conserve Our Most Precious Resource – Peter Rogers and Susan Leal
49) Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants – Dennis Okholm

June
50) Counterinsurgency – David Kilcullen
51) Hunter’s Run – George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, Daniel Abraham
52) The Killing Ground (Sean Dillon) – Jack Higgins
53) One Shot (Jack Reacher, No. 9) – Lee Child
54) The Hard Way (Jack Reacher, No. 10) – Lee Child
55) Why Things Break: Understanding the World By the Way It Comes Apart – Mark E. Eberhart

July
56) Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One – Ian Douglas
57) Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and the Peloponnese – Robert D. Kaplan
58) The Post-American World: Release 2.0 – Fareed Zakaria
59) Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer – Novella Carpenter
60) The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization – Bryan Ward-Perkins
61) The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century – Thomas X. Hammes
62) Four Colors Suffice: How the Map Problem Was Solved – Robin Wilson
63) How to Build Your Own Spaceship: The Science of Personal Space Travel – Piers Bizony
64) The X in Sex: How the X Chromosome Controls Our Lives – David Bainbridge
65) The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World – Peter Schwartz

August
66) The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine – Francis S. Collins
67) The Scar – China Mieville
68) The Profession: A Thriller – Steven Pressfield (My review here)
69) Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature – Marcus du Sautoy
70) The Five Chinese Brothers (Paperstar) – Claire Hutchet Bishop and Kurt Wiese
71) Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America – Matt Taibbi
72) How to Talk to Your Child About Sex: It’s Best to Start Early, but It’s Never Too Late — A Step-by-Step Guide for Parents – Linda and Richard Eyre
73) The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris – David McCullough
74) Havoc – Jack DuBrul
75) Sundiver (The Uplift Saga, Book 1) – David Brin
76) Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy – Steven Metz

September
77) The Rest of the Robots – Isaac Asimov
78) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things – William McDonough and Michael Braungart
79) 7th Sigma – Steven Gould
80) 50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know – Tony Crilly
81) The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life – Thomas W. Malone
82) Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier – Edward Glaeser
83) Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself – Dan Pink

October
84) The Future of Management – Gary Hamel with Bill Breen
85) 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith – Sonia Arrison
86) The Riemann Hypothesis: The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics – Karl Sabbagh
87) Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) – David Foster Wallace
88) The Final Warning (Maximum Ride, Book 4) – James Patterson
89) Re-read Where Eagles Dare – Alistair MacLean
90) The Caryatids – Bruce Sterling

November
91) Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality – Jonathan Weiner
92) Mathematical Mysteries: The Beauty and Magic of Numbers (Helix Books) – Calvin C. Clawson
93) The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity – Amir D. Aczel
94) Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes – Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson
95) Reamde: A Novel – Neal Stephenson
96) The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe – Donal O’Shea

December
97) Euclid’s Window : The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace – Leonard Mlodinow
98) Millennium Problems – Keith Devlin
99) The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
100) Godel’s Proof (Revised Edition) – Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman
101) Moscow Rules (Gabriel Allon #8) – Daniel Silva
102) The Bourne Legacy – Eric van Lustbader
103) Beautiful Outlaw: Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus – John Eldredge
104) Count Down: The Race for Beautiful Solutions at the International Mathematical Olympiad – Steve Olson
105) The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets – Alan Boss