Consider a book-Books worth reading

  This is weird. I know mark twain for his classics, huck fin, tom sawer, and a lot of really good western shorts, a bit like 19th century Saturday night live. This isn't anything like his other books. Today it would be considered historical fiction, but as far as I can tell it's more history than fiction. It's reminiscent of G.A. Henty's works, only more complete. It was interesting to hear about context and background for The Maid of Orléans as well as highlight her exploits and get a feel for who she was, but the most interesting thing was to hear her story, often latched onto by feminists, from the mouth of a 19th-century western writer. The narrative of the oppressed women by the hands of the patriarchy takes a serious blow from someone who had no intention of debunking it (we can be sure because the narrative had not yet been proposed).  Not to say the twain was free of "Sexism" he definitely sees a difference between men and women. Sometimes he makes ar

  Disappointed might be the best way to describe my feelings about this book. I love Brandon Sanderson's writing and have praised him as a master of meaningful fiction comparable to Tolkein, but this book, while good, and certainly worth the read, falls short of what it promised to be. Let me start with the good. Sanderson did a characteristically good job with world-building. The internal logic is tight; cause and effect are connectable and the broken/created rules are extraordinarily explicit in a way that allows your mind to sleuth the fictional world of Roshare as if it were real. The characters are well written as personalities, and it makes switching between them a refreshing change of pace. Similarly, the plot arch is paced reasonably well, it's easy to get sucked into. Finally, Sanderson's signature "magic science" is thoroughly developed in this book, if you like imagining a new set of the laws of physics, this will work well for you. My complaints: The o

  This is a tough one for me because I agree with many of Levin's conclusions but the evidence he presents for them is meandering at best. Essentially Levin is arguing that America has ceased to be a democratic republic and is instead some variation of a dystopian society. The approach is refreshing. Many dystopian novels (1984, Fahrenheit 451, etc.) focus on what life  could be like given a set of political and social structures. Those structures are rarely given much attention. Levin, on the other hand, focuses on what those structures are and argues that The United States of America has solidly embraced the most fundamental of them already, thus placing the USA on a path inevitably leading to the dystopian world other authors describe. Levin's reading of Locke and Montesquieu is accurate and concise. Having read both of them in some degree of completeness I can say with some certainty that their viewpoints are well represented in the first half of Ameritopia. I especially en

I've tried reading this one a few times, but in the past, I've always started on with the paper version. Something about paper and a book about learning/memory just seemed to mesh in my mind. However, per my classic fault, I never finished the paper version, I had to get the audiobook. I loved that the book was thoroughly grounded in good empirical research, it was also formatted in an intriguing way. The takeaways from the book can be boiled down into two categories: myths of learning and tools for learning The corrected myths are these: 1."wrote memory" is absolutely necessary for both problem solving and creativity. While some skepticism is due for the middle age practice of memorizing names and dates free of context, it is also true that one cannot analyze data without data in one's mind. Similarly, you can't creatively synthesize novelty without a base of mental material. Knowing subject matter is fundamental to competently working within it. 2.Repetitio