Books Read in 2025

A fairly informative book for a student endeavouring to enter embedded systems. Jack Ganssle runs a blog on embedded systems; this book feels a collection of articles he may have written, for the chapters are not ‘connected’ and move around different topics freely. This is not a bad thing, it was a good book.

My favourite chapter was the one about handling bounce. This is the sort of unique problem that makes embedded systems a fascinating software discipline; when you use a button or switch, the metal contacts will experience minute vibrations that will cause the circuit there to ‘bounce’ between connected and disconnected until it settles. He shows the variety of bounce ‘patterns’ in different switches, and discusses multiple techniques for handling bounce, explaining why some techniques fail.

I appreciated the extra recommended reading peppered throughout the book, especially the MISRA-C standard and Computer Approximations. Appendix A “Firmware Standard” serves well as a summary of the books lessons on code.

I was recommended this book a lot, but when I finally read it I was extremely disappointed. It wasn’t mediocre, it was actually bad; it’s a self-aggrandizing display, a pompous show of bad aphorisms. The author makes remark after remark he takes to be fact, but does not try convince us of anything; he merely presents his thoughts and the reader must accept them as they are. I can’t tell what his goal is with this book because obviously it isn’t to teach or convince the reader.

Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man.

This is a very important point in the book, especially how he brings up primitive pre-alphabet societies, but lets turn the statement around; is a spoken conversation not uniform, continuous, and connected? We do progress through conversation linearly through time after all, if anything, text should be less continuous and connected because you can read out of order, or present ideas in parallel using marginal or footnotes. Maybe I am wrong on this and misunderstand what he means, but how should I know? He makes no attempt to address an argument like this. Most of the book rests on this idea so if I fundamentally disagree with it, there is little point reading more of it.

The technology of the railway created the myth of a green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied man’s desire to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, to a rural setting where he could recover his animal and natural self. It was the pastoral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian democracy which was intended to serve as a guide to social policy. It gave us darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol: the lawnmower.

What remains of the configuration of former “cities” will be very much like World’s Fairs—places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence.

The ear favors no particular point of view. […] We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”

Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you.

I feel no need to explain why these quotes are so false.

These wars are happenings, tragic games. It is no longer convenient, or suitable, to use the latest technologies for fighting our wars, because the latest technologies have rendered war meaningless. The hydrogen bomb is history’s exclamation point. It ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence!

Here, I’d like to draw attention to how demonstrably poor this observation is, even while considering that I have the benefit of hindsight. In 1914, “The war to end all wars” was a phrase describing The Great War, retrospectively the First World War. it was similarly thought that the horrors of war were so terrible we may never fight again. Mere decades later, the Second World War came. In 1967 when this book was published, they were halfway through the Vietnam war. If McLuhan were a thinker, he’d consider that in the recent past people made similar observations and they were proven wrong, thus he cannot in good mind say this for sure.

There is the general observation underlying the book that can be put as ‘the tools that you use, or the tools at your disposal, will guide the way you think’, which is an important idea. It does not save this book in any way. It wasn’t a new idea to me anyway.

Overall, this book was a waste of time, albeit not much time because it was a brief read. For you my reader, if anyone recommends this book to you, do yourself a favor; just nod and say “Mmhmm yes, I will certainly get around to having a look at it later”, and then immediately forget it.

I usually give authors two chances. Maybe this was just an off book, maybe I was supposed to be acquainted with McLuhan before reading this. Because his topics are of interest to me, I will probably read another book by him in the future.

Someone I know recommended I read this book to me, though I don’t usually read memoirs or biographies. I trust their taste, so I set onto reading it, and finished it in a couple days.

The chapters were well stuctured, in the first half I felt like each chapter was an individual piece of a larger puzzle, each making some point, altogether constructing the environment of Jennette’s upbringing. I noted her repeated message that the child actors most prized were the ones who are not ‘difficult’ and can listen to directions, which suggests a systemic reason why child actors are at such high risk for abuse. Her account of her journey with eating disorders was very informative for me, I was only aware of the facts of eating disorders, but fortunately never had anyone close to me nor myself struggle with them.

One thing I disliked is the ‘voice’ of the book; her sentences are abnormally short and rarely long, sometimes splitting a single thought over multiple short sentences. It was sometimes distracting and clunky. I noticed this early, and assumed this was like a ‘juvenile voice’ to draw attention to her thinking and feeling as a child, but as this carries on to the adult years I saw it was just how the book was written.

Writing style aside, the book was good. I struggle to say I ‘enjoy’ the book because it is so personal and depressing.

The premise of the book is that it is a ‘history’ of Don Quixote de La Mancha, a man who read so many books about knights and chivalry that he believes are true, that he goes insane and decides he is a knight, and gets into a whole lot of trouble. Along the way we meet many different adventurers who have their own stories to share. As the book was published in two parts, and I have some other fiction pieces I’ve wanted to read, I am pausing inbetween the parts of Don Quixote.

It has not been the easiest read, as the dialogue is very lavish and verbose. It reminds me of the King James Bible in style, with a larger vocabulary. However, do not mistake this as a negative statement from me; it has been an absolute joy to read. I was surprised at how good it’s humor is, it’s a very funny book of misadventures and mishaps, but when it would take up a different story for a while, I was further surprised at how much I enjoyed those as well.

I could only fault the poetry of the book, but I can defend it as well. It’s a translation from Spanish to English, the basis of rhythm in English poetry is the metric foot of varying stress patterns, but as I understand it Spanish poetry is simply based on syllables. With a fundamentally different rhythmic base, I imagine translation is tougher. The author was faced with a conundrum and made what he could of it, preserving the poetic meaning and their rhymes so their structure is clear, but mostly ignoring metre and line length. This is no fault of the book, the fact is that any translation of poetry is always inferior to the original.

I want to reach for the word ‘grand’ to describe this book, yet I feel the word itself doesn’t capture it. Another way I would put it, is that the book captures something that is the essence of what drives life, with all it’s improbabilities and strangeness, the frequent irony we witness day to day is rendered, though in a more fantastical adventure.

I look forward to the next book, especially as I hear Don Quixote will finally meet his revered Dulcinea (the woman whom he is fixated on and imagines to be a princess, but is a simple village girl who is only acquainted with him as neighbor), a prospect that is exploding with ideas.

Labyrinths is a collection of some works of Borges, translated into English by various different people. I wanted to read Borges because I was fond of The Library Of Babel when I was young, and he is very esteemed. Of the collection I read the following:

• Fiction The Garden of Forking Paths — Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote — The Library of Babel — Theme of the Traitor and the Hero — Emma Zunz
• Essays The Fearful Sphere of Pascal — Partial Magic in the Quixote — Avatars of the Tortoise
• Parables Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote — Borges and I

I feel the need to make the ‘critical sandwich’, where your scathing thoughts are wedged between two cheap and palatable slabs of ‘positive feedback’. Often, when you want to critique something you really disliked while being nice, and that is exactly the position I am in here.

I enjoyed The Garden of Forking Paths. The way it flowed reminded me of hypnagogia, and I find dreams and hypnagogia very fascinating; maybe I just have weird dreams, but I usually feel art rarely comes close to rendering the sensation of those states accurately, but Borges did a fine job.

However, everything else just didn’t really hit anything interesting for me. The Library of Babel was interesting but not so grippting as I recall. I was irritated most by the story of Pierre Menard. The premise of the story is silly, but looking beyond that, we are told Menard becomes Cervantes (how? in what sense?) and so writes Don Quixote. Okay. And? I fail to see what is interesting in this. Then, to find any reasoning why Menard’s Quixote is ‘infinitely richer’ than Cervantes, is to deceive yourself for it is wholly unexplained, and I care not to guess on his behalf.

I wasn’t amazed by the prose, nor engaged by the stories. At the very least if the story is driven by some concept, let it be interesting or insightful! But in the stories I read, Borges was neither.

Maybe I was a bit mean, but I really expected to enjoy his work. After each piece I thought “the next one may change my mind” with sincerity; each time I was wrong. My more charitable take would be that I just don’t see what other people see in his work. Maybe again after a few years. Until then, Jorge.

If anyone reading this enjoys Borges and thinks I am wrong, I wouuld be very pleased if you could send me an e-mail to point me to some other work of his, if my selection is a poor sample.

Finally, I wanted to reflect on how interesting it is that our tastes can change so much in time. At the age of twelve I read The Library of Babel and I loved it, at the same time I read Patrick Süskind’s Perfume all the way through and hated it, I thought it was the crappest book I ever read and in my mind permanently carried a regretful sting. But last year, I re-read Perfume, expecting I would hate it even more passionately, but to my delighted surpise I could not put it away! And today I read Borges, and the stories are like a damp towel. At the age of fourteen I read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, the first essay I ever read for my own sake. It was a huge thing for me and really shifted my perspective of English, but then every couple of years I would revisit it, I’ve been astonished to find there was even more packed into those sentences than when I read it previously. I think it is good to revisit these old things, because while they stay the same, you change a lot. It may be a great joy or a great disappointment, either way it is a powerful stimulant for thought.

Though the protagonist is imperfect and he is shown to be hypocritical sometimes, he is admirable in his own way. I think many of us could also relate to having bad experiences with other people when it comes to bureaucracy and power. I personally relate to the struggle of being ineloquent when speaking to others; there is this gulf between what you want to express versus what you do, subsequently how people perceive you versus how you think you should be perceived.

With that I stood up and declared, ‘It is indeed true that I went to the hot spring while on night duty. This was completely wrong. I apologize,’ and sat back down, whereupon everbody burst out laughing again. It seemed they were going to laugh every time I opened my mouth. What a worthless bunch! I’d like to see them stand up and openly admit that they had done something wrong - of course they couldn’t, which is probably why they were laughing.

The ending felt sudden; meeting Kiyo finally, happened before our eyes so quickly it left something to be desired, especially because of how much Botchan comes to see Kiyo differently while they are apart.

Overall, Botchan was enjoyable, fun, and intriguing. I look forward to reading more from Sōseki.