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. I did not complete this book. 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.

I started reading this book to fulfil a curiosity in how arithmetic operations in floating point (FP) is done. Though it didn’t exactly cover this, I read it all anyway. It’s one of those rare books where it’s the sort you wish existed, but just haven’t found yet.

It should be noted this book was published in 2001, since then there were two new versions, 2008 and 2019, of the standard. I’m not sure to what extent these new standards are implemented in hardware. In any case, I doubt it makes what this book covers irrelevant.

The book covers the IEEE 754-1985 standard in good detail, and touches a little bit of numerical analysis as it relates to FP. It’s perhaps more useful for a programmer than if they reead the standard itself. Peppered throughout are bits of FP history before the standard was introduced in 1985, prior to this it was just a free-for-all. How awful it must have been! This history serves to make us understand the purpose of some feature or decision in the standard, and the problems you would run into otherwise. It is something to behold how nonsensical these problems would be today, mostly of not handling exceptions well and bizarre results in edge cases.

I’ve wondered for some time why in the age of cheap memory, fixed point numbers are not preferred, since they might be faster to compute. But this book really built my understanding of floating point numbers, such that it seems to me that fixed point arithmetic mightn’t be more useful, save for some hypothetical, extremely narrowly defined embedded application.

Chapters 1-7 should be recommended reading for every experienced programmer, as it covers the essentials of floating point arithmetic. It is altogether 47 pages, which isn’t much but I’m sure everyone would gain significantly from these pages. Chapters 8-10 could be skipped, they mostly discuss implementation but this book is fairly aged, so it’s not relevant. Chapters 11-13 are about problems that come up when performing FP arithmetic, touching on numerical analysis a little. This part was good, but it was more difficult and more mathematical.

I believe it is the business of programmers on every level to be familiar with the concepts of how a computer works ‘low-level’ as opposed to an abstract machine their language and it’s environment provide. You can get away with not knowing a lot of it, sure, but you can’t escape the issues of FP arithmetic, no matter how high level your language and environment are.

A must read for anyone who writes. It is full of poignant advice, delivered with great brevity. The advice is nothing like the sort you normally hear everywhere else. I’ve been reading it slowly for a few weeks, though it’s only 90 pages, mulling over every lesson. I’m sure I will return to it, and read some parts of it again.

The examples at the end were excellent. As I read through them, it really helped me recognize the natural sense of something being wrong in a sentence that he talks about. I noticed that these mistakes are extremely common in all of our writing. Then he gives an analysis of the sentence, so you may learn to recognize what’s wrong in sentences by yourself.

My overall experience was very up and down. It was enjoyable and very gripping much of the time, but other times a chapter would leave me confused and a little tired. It’s a very dark book, full of crime, drugs, and violence. I’m not much into books like that.

One of the most admirable parts of Neuromancer is that the style of Gibson is very interesting and enjoyable in it’s own merit. At times, his descriptions are unlike anything else. Completely new, yet very effective, and are undoubtedly his style. There are plenty of those moments, though there is the occasional page that’s just a blank wall. Prose that describes in great detail, yet is unable to create an image. The former is more numerous than the latter,at least.

Be warned that Gibson doesn’t know much about how computers work. The computers and technology in this book is pretty much magic made of conductors and semiconductors. It makes sense in it’s own way, but for someone who understands computers it’s a little jarring to hear Gibson misuse RAM, or his idea of how computer programs work. It was funny when, despite their society being advanced space-farers, Case had someone retrieve information by phreaking his phone line.

Neuromancer was good, but not impressionable. It’s griminess is sometimes senseless and unpleasant. But at some brief and sporadic points in time, it burned brightly. I am glad I read it and will probably revisit some sections of it, but doubt I’ll read it all again.

I did enjoy the book in some parts, the characters were well done. There is a lot about Charlie’s experience that I relate to, but I don’t think just relating to some character necessarily says something about how good a book is. It can, but not always.

The sideline about him reading books and writing essays for his English teacher was weaker than I wish. He doesn’t talk much about the books, nor about his essays on them, except that he likes the books and he wrote the essay. It leaves something to be desired. It’s difficult to believe the exchange between Charlie and his English teacher where he calls Charlie the most gifted writer he’s ever known. It reminds me of MTV Daria; we are told she is this great writer, but we never see her do much writing. I dare say, some parts with Charlie is written by a motiivation of the author to vicariously experience recognition as a great writer. Chbosky has said before that Charlie is semi-autobiographical after all.

It’s revealed right at the end of the second last chapter what was causing Charlie’s PTSD, which he suffers through this entire book. I think it should have had more time to develop. It would completely uproot anyones life what happened to him, but instead we blitz past it to a feel-good callback ending. It’s kind of sappy.

The story was touching at times, but it wasn’t so amazing or impactful as I’d expected. Maybe if I read it a few years ago, I’d have thought differently.

This is a very short book I read because I wanted to get an understanding of what Wiener is like, before I read some larger work of his. The work certainly convinced me he is worth reading some more.

The premise of the book, published in 1967, is to broadly cover the emerging technology of the future, attitudes around these technology, and some pitfalls of them. It instructs on what these technologies are, so it may have been for a general audience.

The highlight for a reader now will be his discussion of the ‘learning machine’, what we now call artificial intelligence. His thoughts are extraordinarily grounded for the time. What I’ve seen of the mid to late twentieth century discourse on artificial intelligence is split between those who think we will make positronic brains, and those who think they will hardly amount to any meaningful capability or importance. Wiener has no fantasy about the capabilities of a learning machine, and no aimless pondering on if it can be conscious, when we hardly have an idea what distinguishes our consciousness, if there is a distinction. He makes a good assessment of what problems they should and should not be used for, and the trouble that could come from their indiscriminate use.

There is a part where he touches on ‘self-replicating machines’. Because of how he uses the word ‘machine’, I struggle to understand if he means physical machines that self-replicate, or biologically-inspired computation. The former, I don’t think exists and probably won’t ever. I don’t think it’s useful. The latter was not yet a field. This is perhaps the only part I would leave out of the book, since it was not particularly interesting, useful, or tied to the rest of the book.

His third essay was good, though it seemed directionless at first, it came altogether to a clear point by the end, which was an interesting idea about copying a system by learning it’s input/output.

I’d like to quote some passages that I found the most interesting. Here, for context, he was discussing atomic warfare and how the concept of failsafes is not sufficient when dealing with such a massive yet ill-understood danger.

As engineering technique becomes more and more able to achieve human purposes, it must become more and more accustomed to formulate human purposes. In the past, a partial and inadequate view of human purpose has been relatively innocuous only because it has been accompanied by technical limitations that made it difficult for us to perform operations involving a careful evaluation of human purpose. This is only one of the many places where human impotence has hitherto shielded us from the full destructive impact of human folly.

Here is a passage that puts nicely a thought I always had.

[Learning machines,] help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.

This book was far more provocative and principled than I expected for the somewhat banal title. It is about a lot more than television too. Jerry Mander talks about the advertising industry, civil rights, democracy, media, perception, propaganda, the power of images, our relationship with technology and scientific progress. It is a grand discussion, in service of a strong point about the danger of television.

The thesis is that the medium of television has deep flaws that are a fundamental and inextractable part of the medium. I’ve considered this myself long ago about film; I believe it is fundamentally flawed because it’s a prohibitively expensive medium accessible only to large teams with funding, and is primarily motivated to make returns. This is not some sinister ‘capitalist plot’, but simply the fact of film. I don’t believe the culture of the world should be manufactured by some wealthy people in California. However, Mander has a deeper and more interesting insight, owing to his career in advertising.

The contemporary reader should instantly recognize the parallels of the important properties of televisions, and modern smartphones. It is a shame to think about the fact that, thanks to movements in software in the late twentieth century and the explosion of availability in the twenty-first, computers could have been the new medium of the public, free from economic limitation and the meddling central authority. Unfortunately, the smartphone has superseded the desktop as the primary device, and has taken us back to locked systems, with efforts to fight this being only the domain of enthusiasts.

The discussion of the physiological effects of television watching was interesting, but most of it is irrelevant now because of how our technology has changed. Television has wider displays, uses constant pixels rather than scanning the screen, doesn’t have that high pitched whirr. It’s still not healthy, but at least most of the points about the physiological effects are not at all relevant today.

The rest of the points made are very strong and principled, and still provide insight into our use of smartphones today, though it is an incomplete picture. As a bonus, it gave me an insight into the fact that people’s feelings of being helplessly drawn to their device, is not a new phenomenon at all. Just as people complain that scrolling TikTok turns them into zombies, people said the same when they watched television. This is valuable for younger people like myself who might assume the problems of smartphones is something never before seen.

I’m not one for sweeping statements, so I really mean it when I say everyone should read this book. You won’t hear me see that about any old book, not even the famous ‘must-reads’ like 1984, Brave New World, or a book I personally love like Don Quixote. I believe this book is supremely important, because the smartphone is the contemporary of television, retaining many of the same negative points plus many more, but holds an even greater social importance than the television could have ever dreamed of.

We learn in schools that fruit grows form the ground. We see pictures of fruit growing. But when we live in cities, confined to the walls and floors of our concrete environments, we don’t actually see the slow process of a blossom appearing on a tree, then becomng a bud that grows into an apple. We learn this, but we can’t really “know” what it means, or that a whole cycle is operating: sky to ground to root through tree to bud ripening into fruit that we can eat. Nor do we see particular value in this knowledge. It remains an idea to us, an abstraction that is difficult to integrate into our consciousness without direct experience of the process.

6) “Television is an addiction and I’m an addict.”
7) “My kids look like zombies when they’re watching.”
8) “TV is destroying my mind.”
9) “My kids walk around like they’re in a dream because of it.”
10) “Television is making people stupid.”
11) “Television is turning my mind to mush.”
12) “If a television is on, I just can’t keep my eyes off it.”

What makes these matters most serious is that human beings have not yet been equipped by evolution to distinguish in our minds between natural images and those which are artificially created and implanted.

Why does banning such a technology seem bizarre? One answer to this question lies with the absolutely erroneous assumption that technologies are “neutral,” benign instruments that may be used well or badly depending upon who controls them. Americans have not grasped the fact that many technologies determine their own use …

Though it was an exceptionally long book, it is sad there is no more to read. I’ve seen no story like this before, and I wonder if I ever will see one like this again. The tales of Don Quixote and his squire were always hilarious and enamouring. This second part was full of many more bizarre stories caused by the meta-fictional elements Cervantes used.

I felt the poetic translations of the second part were generally better than the first part as well, with better metre.

The history of surgery might be fairly niche outside of medical students and professionals, though many people may enjoy stories about the horrors of primordial butchering. This book, published by Routledge and coming at a hefty price, seems to be something like a simple encyclopedia for surgical history, not for the general audience.

The value I see in the history of surgery is that the ideas and culture of a society reflects in their surgical practice. The Greeks surgery was of quite good quality, but after the ancient period, the art of ligation of the artery was lost for a long time. In the medieval period, there was ongoing academic study of medicine that was surprisingly good, except for the taboo against human dissection, which impeded the study of anatomy, hence the importance of anatomists of the Renaissance when regions shook this restriction off. It’s fascinating how in the Enlightenment period, there is a strong culture of the sharing of information across Europe for the sake of medicine.

The first few chapters give a fascinating history of primitive surgery across cultures which developed my appreciation for what they were able to do. The most interesting was trephination or trepanning, practiced across the world, which was surprisingly effective, and in some regions, performed with unexpected precision. There was surprisingly advanced surgical knowledge in India during Europes late medieval period; my favourite part was the description of a procedure for curing cataracts, which I wouldn’t have expected possible in this time.

The first five chapters are fairly accessible for the layman, but afterwards, it will help to have a medical dictionary on hand. I used my Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary. The only chapter that was inaccessible to me despite this was the one on thoracic and vascular surgery; though parts of it were incredibly interesting, other parts were so dense with precise anatomical terms of the heart, that I couldn’t exactly understand some of it.

The final chapter was an unfortunately sour note to end on. The first half (the ‘today’) was alright, but the second half (the ‘tomorrow’) was terrible. It feels written out of a dry obligation to talk about the tech trends of the time (VR, AR, 3D printing, AI), and either didn’t discuss current applications, gave poor examples if there were, or just speculated applications. Is a projector to show veins really the best example of AR? Perhaps I shouldn’t be rhetorical; considering how the largest AR thing was some phone game nobody remembers now, maybe this is the best AR can do for medicine! That aside, one statement bugged me. Though I know it’s a work on medical history, it’s still about history, and if the author is to comment on computing history then I expect the author to be accurate or to refrain. To say off-hand that Turing ‘introduced the idea of digital computing and computer programming’ fails to add anything, and is plain wrong. If we’re talking about the ‘idea’, then most would say these ideas originated from Babbage and Lovelace a century prior. Turing may have contributed to the theory of computation, but computers were practical devices being constructed long before even his birth.

Overall, I think the book was excellent; deeply informative and thought-provoking for me.