So, What Are You Reading?

I am working through Wuthering Heights now by Emily Bronte. Has anyone seen the new movie? I took myself on a date for Valentine's Day and went to see it with popcorn and a very large box of tissues. It was so good!

 

Just finished Family of Spies by Christine Kuehn. Very good. Reading Five Banners by John Feinstein right now.

 

Although I read Carrie many years ago, I haven’t read much Stephen King. I did read 400 pages of It, but I was bored to death and tossed the book across the room when he kept describing the swamp monster and wouldn’t get to the point. The book almost dented the wall.

Which King book should I try? I have The Shining and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption on my shelves. I also believe I have Misery.

 

Well, I thought I would read my dissertation chair's first book. Politics as Usual-Michael Davis...

 

Why Programs Fail: A guide to systematic debugging (2006) by Andreas Zeller

Delivers what it promises, a review of debugging techniques both manual and automated. Code provided in C.

My one criticism is that much of the book focuses on a suite of specific software programs used with C at the time, but it also includes extensive reading lists on the theory of debugging.

Next up, finish Clean Code.

 

When the New Deal Was Young and Gay- Charles Hurd

 

Enhancing Doctoral Dissertations Ethically with AI: A Comprehensive Guide by Kimberlee K. C. Everson

She alters the dyad between candidate and advisor by suggesting a third party has become a full partner: Artificial Intelligence. She calls this the dissertation triad. This is helpful since I've developed the dissertation tetrad by introducing a fourth player.

 

Clean Code (2009) by Robert Martin. A comprehensive review of how to write readable, maintainable, testable software code. I liked it. I'm looking forward to reading his book on clean architecture in the future.

 

Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong, 30th Anniversary Edition (2012). He discusses how people in nonliterate cultures have no way, beyond memorization, to retain and transmit important knowledge: They know what they can recall. He describes how literacy, especially writing, restructures consciousness and made things like scientific inquiry possible. He also points out that people in literate cultures would have extreme difficulty imagining what a primary oral culture is like-- no reading, no writing, where knowledge is based on sound rather than on visual words on a page.

 

I am attempting to read as many Hugo and Nebula Best Novel Award winners as possible, in descending order. I have purchased and plan to read in the next 6 weeks

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Dungeon Crawler Carl) - I don't know why I really like this, but I do
The Tainted Cup
Death of the Author - An african futurist exploration of power
Babel Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution: An Historic Fantasy of Dark Academia
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon
Translation State

 

Hey, everyone! I’m reading the saddest book. There’s a chance I may be getting certified to teach middle school history to enhance my credentials. I’ve been brushing up on my knowledge of World War II. Has anyone ever read The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan? I cannot begin to tell you how it’s been haunting me. I saw a picture of Omaha Beach as it appears today, those waves flowing so easily and peacefully. It’s like nothing horrific ever happened there so many years ago. You must read this book!

 

It's going to take me a long time to get through it, but I have started Programming from the Ground Up by Jonathan Bartlett. The book assumes no knowledge of programming and teaches x86 assembly language. I'm interested in doing some more advanced programming, either writing device drivers or building a simple operating system. This will involve some Assembly and C, so it's a good time to brush up.

 

Constructing Grounded Theory by Kathy Charmaz, 3rd Edition. I used the first edition in my research at Leicester--I built a grounded theory about the Chief Learning Officer. I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to need to use those techniques again....

 

South vs South - Freehling

 

Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand (2000)

What I expected was a deep dive into the technology behind Creatures, one of the first artifical intelligence programs/video games, and a cherished part of my childhood. Instead, the design and technology is relegated to a single chapter, while the remainder of the book discusses the nature of life itself, the adaptive mechanisms that may have given birth to it, and how to translate these things into the digital world. A lot more biology, chemistry and philosophy and only a small amount of technology.

Grand focuses in particular on the need to design first-order systems based on the laws and rules of the system being modeled: don't build a flight simulator by designing a flying plane, and then programming stalling, accelerating, etc. Instead, program the physics of flight into the program and let the physics determine the behavior of the plane. Similarly, Creatures is designed with a virtual brain dictating their behavior so that much of the functionality emerged from the design of the brain and the interaction with its environment, rather than needing to program in specific elements.

Here is a great video describing the technology of Creatures: The AI of "Creatures.

 

Safe For Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution 1913-1923- Lloyd Gardner.

 

-The heat will kill you first- by journalist Jeff Goodell. Serious reading for the heat wave we're enduring now.

I've recently started using the NYPL's Libby app to read both the ebook and audiobook versions of books. I read/listen to a chapter in one version then the next chapter in the other.