141–150 of 165 posts
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What is your opinion on The Guns of August? I'm still looking for a good book on World War I.
I liked it a lot, it is really good. I would definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to learn about WW I. Also highly recommended is Dan Carlin's 6 part podcast series Blueprint for Armageddon Here is the link to episode I http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepri...
I'll skip some mentioned already by others. Books I really enjoyed this year: The Wright Brothers, David McCullough - wonderful book on the Wright Brothers, easy to read, shows that persistence and logic thinking pays out. 5/5 The autobiography of Malcom X, Malcolm X - Nice bio, a bit repetitive sometimes. 3/5 Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand - Although the book has more than 1200 pages it really kept me going. I read this b…
Atlas Shrugged needs to come with a warning label. "If you are male and between the ages of 13 and 21 this book should be considered harmful and potentially dangerous. If you are high achieving academically but socially awkward you should not read this book as it may exacerbate anti-social personality disorders."
If you fail to understand these characteristics are not necessarily tied to either of the groups, yes the warning label is appropriate. If you do understand this - and I hope some males between the ages of 13 and 21 do - this book can help you improve your attitude towards work. After reading Atlas Shrugged I must say I'm more eager to get things done and ignore pessimistic people who think things simply cannot be done because it is a lot of work.
It definitely helped me.
2. A book that shows I am destined to be a successful entrepreneur.
3. How to recover from a childhood of being bullied.
Dune by Frank Herbert- I'm one of the few people on Earth who enjoys the David Lynch adaptation so I finally had to get around to reading the book. Kind of awkward stylistically and structurally but a lot of fun. Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen - It's seemed to me that there are political philosophies that focus on economic needs and those that focus on personal freedom. This is the best I've read at uniting th…
agree on Taleb Antifragile and it is an awesome book but oh man what an angry person to follow on twitter or facebook. he is really becoming annoying and breeds the same character in his followers which is quite a shame considering the potential of his ideas.
Here is my list from 2015: 1. Mark Derby: England my England 2. Bill Messenger: Elements of Jazz [great courses] 3. David Mamet: GlenGary Glen Ross 4. Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Pluto Files 5. Elizabeth Vandiver: The Illiad by Homer [great courses] 6. Elizabeth Vandiver: The Odyssey by Homer [great courses] 7. Elizabeth Vandiver: The Aeneid by Virgil [great courses] 8. Robert Greenberg: Great Masters: Liszt - His Life…
I'm a big fan of Ponniyin Selvan, how do Parthiban Kanavu and Sivagamiyin Sabatham compare to it?
Here's the 52 I finished this year: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2015
The Memory Book - Fantastic, maybe not always practical unless you have a lot of practice, but extremely useful to at least understand some of the strategies to memorizing strings Understanding Weatherfax - for an attempted (and failed) circumnavigation Sail Power Kon Tiki Shogun Art of the Sailor Business Adventures Metamorphoses (by Ovid, not Kafka) Guns, Germs, Steel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time -…
Could you expand a bit on your inclusion of 'Elements of Statistical Learning'? That book is essentially the holy grail of ML understanding and I find it difficult to believe you were able to grasp any meaningful proportion of it in what must have been a very condensed span of reading/study time. But maybe you're some kind of genius, in which case pardon me.
The Memory Book - Fantastic, maybe not always practical unless you have a lot of practice, but extremely useful to at least understand some of the strategies to memorizing strings Understanding Weatherfax - for an attempted (and failed) circumnavigation Sail Power Kon Tiki Shogun Art of the Sailor Business Adventures Metamorphoses (by Ovid, not Kafka) Guns, Germs, Steel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time -…
Also going to read Infinite Jest while I'm traveling the next few weeks.
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you found The Martian bland ?! That's...I am...speechless. It is an amazing book. The characters are superbly fleshed out and Andy Weir's humour is par excellence. The calculations were not tedious at all. LOL - if you stuck on Mars, calculations are you best friend. I think the author has actually dumbed it down quite a lot TBH.
I also found it bland; it became repetitive and dull. Problem, exposition of solution, repeat. The character interaction, by the nature of the plot, was pretty minimal and almost all the problems were technical - there was very little inter-character conflict or character development. At the end of the novel, everyone was pretty much the same as they were at the beginning. The journey was entirely physical, and the d…
Some of the books I enjoyed the most and found most helpful: - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain - Helped me better understand myself and others, highly recommend - The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey - Advice on mastering the mental part of doing anything, not just tennis - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo - actually maybe the most importan…
Books I'm glad I've read: The Inner Game of Tennis Impro by Keith Johnstone Seeing Like a State The Timeless Way of Building Linear and Geometric Algebra by Alan Macdonald Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (read this one thrice) The Tao of Pooh Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd The Drama of the Gifted Child Interaction Ritual What Do You Say After You Say Hello? Of niche use: Mathematics: its…
If you liked the Tao of Pooh, you may enjoy The Te of Piglet