Books 2024
Published 2024-12-26
Some stuff I read this year.
I spent a lot of time reading about writing. This is because it's much easier to read about writing than it is to do the writing.
On Writing Well
This book holds my favorite quote on writing:
If it feels like writing is hard, that's because it is.
This is one of those rare "before and after" books for me. How I approach writing is forever changed. A big reason it landed for me was that those sentences he was picking on looked quite a bit like the sentences I was writing (and continue to write, despite effort). Few things sting quite like seeing some of your own writing habits on display in section described "the work of a hack."
The core of the book is this:
Good writing is lean and confident
Bad writing (my writing) is filled with needless fluff and redundant information. Adjectives that describe nothing. Verbs that do nothing. Needless hedges ("I think...", "a little bit of..."). The book's power is showing it so clearly. Once you can see the problem, fixing it is much easier. This book taught me to see.
Several Short Sentences About Writing
To make short sentences you have to remove every unnecessary word.
Lovely little book. Maybe one of my favorites. It's a book that I'll just pop open every once and awhile to poke through. Every page holds something valuable.
The basic premise is that you have to learn to read the text for exactly what it says – this means you have to unlearn how to "read generously" for what the author means. This is something that sounds trivial, but it's very hard to turn off – especially when reading our own writing. I could feel myself resisting the idea and siding with the poor bastard having his sentences nitpicked to death. However, once you learn to silence that voice, it opens up a new world.
Some minor critiques: the book drags in the middle. It devotes its time to deprogramming "what you've learned in school." The shift in audience is tangible. If you don't find yourself in the group being talked about (I am definitely not over-educated), you've got to sit on the sidelines while he talks to these other people. However, this is a minor blip in an otherwise fantastic book.
How to Write Useful Books
This is a short book packed with useful insights. I wish I had read it years earlier.
The central theme is that books should be measured against a very simple equation: $$ \frac{\text{Value Received}}{\text{Time Spent}} $$ I felt directly attacked by this book. It made me realize that I was falling into the trap of organizing the content around what make it easy for me while writing, rather than what produces value for the reader. This paragraph in particular:
Pg.47 The most common way to ruin your reader's experience is to spend too long on foundations before getting to what people want. It feel natural as an author "let's get this out of the way" but it's grueling as a reader.
Not only did I think that way, one of my early drafts legitimately had "let's get this out of the way" in in the text. That's about as called out as you can be. Delivering value has become the forefront of what's on my mind as I work on Data Oriented Programming in Java. It's a useful gut check for if I'm moving the draft in the right direction.
Good Prose
A pattern I've noticed in many books "about writing" is that the topic exerts an almost irresistible pull on the people writing them to talk about everything other than the craft of writing. Their life story. That one time their editor was a jerk. The challenge of deadlines.
This is one of those books.
This tendency to not talk about writing is what makes books like Several Short Sentences and On Writing Well such high water marks. They devote almost their entire contents to the topic of writing. That is rare.
I ended up abandoning this one around the 2/3 mark, as I've abandoned so many others "book on writing" that fail to stay focused on the topic. The exception here is Stephen King's book "about writing," which is 80% an autobiography. I give that one a pass because I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Essays of E. B. White
It's slice of life. Quiet and simple. I picked this up because E.B. White is repeatedly praised in On Writing Well.
I see why.
There Is No Antimemetics Division
I liked this quite a bit. It's one of books you end up reading more about after you're done. I'm not sure I followed all of it – or it was actually consistent enough to follow. Can you gain "experience" if your memory is constantly being wiped? The book seems to treat the two ideas independently. Like, the experience sticks around even if what led to it was lost. Otherwise, it'd have to be the case that we're watching this person do astounding feats on their first day of work. Either way, it was fun. I'll probably give it another read.
Understanding Variation
I have a bad habit of seeing a glowing recommendation on Hacker News and then instantly buying a copy. This was one of those purchases.
The entire book built around one idea: Control Charts. These charts are what the author calls a time series graph with three lines drawn on it:
- The Average
- The "upper natural process limit" ($\overline{X} + (2.66 \times \overline{R})$ )
- The "lower natural process limit" ($\overline{X} - (2.66 \times \overline{R})$ )
All in all, pretty basic stuff. I think it was written for business people. It goes out of its way to avoid math or basic statistics. But the target audience not being technical is what makes the book useful. The first few chapters are a great example of engineering communication. I've gone back to them several times when I needed to communicate ideas about basic data variation (e.g. "where should we set this alarm value?") without bogging things down in "math".
I wouldn't really recommend it, though. Outside of those first few chapters, the book is just exploring examples of using control charts in "the real world."
Project Hail Mary
This book was fine. I liked the alien guy. It was compelling enough that I kept picking it back up, but there was a constant friction in doing so. There was something about the writing style that vaguely annoyed me. It's hard to articulate. It's very... hammy? Holds-up-spork-y? It feels like it was designed by a committee to maximize appeal to Redditors. Lots of the humor in the book is borderline meme format.
Ira stares at Grace ... Grace stares at Ira ... Ira stares at – ZANY OVER REACTION IN ALL CAPS
Other than that: eh, passible space romp.
Oceanic Collection - Greg Egan
Solid collection of Egan short stories. High points for me were Dark Integers, Crystal Nights, Riding the Crocodile, and Glory. The universes of the latter two are extremely compelling. I picked up a copy of Distress after learning that it explores these ideas further.
The title piece, Oceanic, was unexpectedly the weakest of the bunch. I think if I had read it as a kid in the 90s it would have resonated much more than it did reading it in 2024 as a rapidly aging old man.
Still, with all Egan stuff, worth the read.
The Mist
I read this in one long sitting while stuck in bed with a cold. Weak ending, but fun journey. The atmosphere was great (as it was with Pet Sematary). King has this way of capturing a particular feeling. The initial storm and its aftermath is a good example. There's a very unique feeling after a big storm. You feel it in Florida after hurricanes. It's a slow paced rediscovery of the world. The interest of looking at the damage. The work of cleaning it up. This "feeling," which I have no way of articulating on my own, was beautifully captured in a way that made me extremely nostalgic.
The Troop
Simple, short, and fun. Good spooky season stuff.
A Troup of kids are on an isolated island. A (totally not a) zombie shows up. Things spiral out of control from there. It's a well trodden path (there's only one way these stories can go), but it's really well executed. I didn't quite buy some of the more extreme character traits of the kids towards the end, but a solid October read nonetheless.
The word for world is forest
This was the second biggest pile of trash I read this year. Thankfully, it had the good graces to be brief – unlike Atlas Shrugged (the single biggest pile of trash I read this year).
This book came so highly recommended that I found myself questioning my own dislike of it. Am I jilted and bitter? A sci-fi elitist? Missing some spark of joy? I'd say it's a good kids book (if the kid is dumb), but... it's a story filled with inter-species rape. So, it's definitely aimed at adults. This makes its Captain Planet Saturday Morning Cartoon lack of subtlety all the more confusing.
The book can be summarized with two words: Nobel Savages. That's the story. The Creechies can't even conceive of murder. They handle disputes through art. This is because they are noble. More noble than us. Perhaps, the most noble that is possible. That is until Evil Bad Guy shows up. His character loves being evil and doing rapes. He's not noble like the Creechies. (The book is somehow less subtle than this description.)
Then there's the background premise. The Evil Bad Guys are coming to this planet to set up logging operations. They're sending wood through interstellar space because they can't grow it at home. This is a 40+ year round trip. They have a societal structure and economy that can produce the excess materials and food required to sustain generational deep space travel, but they cannot grow a tree.
The degree to which I disliked this, compared against the praise I see for it, makes me feel like a curmudgeon.
Atlas Shrugged
This was the biggest pile of trash I've ever read. It made me regret that I could read at all. It's frustrating because there's an interesting story in there somewhere. It's just buried under endless indulgences and retreading of the same story beats. 1100 pages in, and we're still no further narratively than where we started 1000 pages ago: the looters saying "it's not my fault!!! I can't be held responsible!!!" while the People of Action boldly respond "I shall take responsibility!"
Finishing this book became solely about not quitting. Stopping would mean Ayn Rand won somehow. I will not be defeated this pile of crap. I needed the moral high ground of saying that I finished it. The whole thing. Including that god awful Galt speech in the 3rd act. "A is A."
I thought this book would be controversial or interesting because of its politics, but the politics are so cartoonish that it's hard to take any of it seriously. The libertarian land it paints is embarrassing. The characters don't even take it seriously – or, maybe they take it so seriously that it wraps back around into parody. Everyone is cosplaying capitalism They pay each other silly amounts of money for everything because god forbid they "ask a man to live for them".
The book ends with the Magical Captains of Industry breaking into the State Science Center, shooting everyone in cold blood (which is fine, because those people had a different ideology than ours), and then flying off into the sunset while high fiving.
0/10 stars.
If there's one thing I'm grateful for in this book, it's for making me realize how irritating it is when people stack redundant information in the same paragraph. I notice it in my own writing. The immediate rephrasing can feel like you're driving the point home, but, in reality, everyone got it the first time. Now they just want you to stop. This realization has shifted how I edit my own work. I no longer carefully refine with a scalpel. I go in there with a hacksaw and chopping off heads.