2022 Readings

My reading year in review: 75 books that ranged from gems to middling, with highlights including Hossenfelder on physics and beauty, Ameisen on ML in practice, Delany’s Babel-17, and Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries.

I read 75 books this year (over 22,000 pages), and a few days still remain. Looking back over the full list, I’m both surprised at how many were only of middling reward. I think the key is to take one’s sweet time on the true gems and speed through the should-have-been-a-blog-post dross. Out of the gems, the following stand out:

• Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. We’re told so often about how mathematics and physics is beautiful, how it makes sense and that finding those kinds of beauty-centric explanations is what we should be aiming for, so I was surprised and invigorated by a book about how the opposite might well be the case. It’s a few years old and I’m sure it’s part of a wider argument and debate in the field, but without knowing much more it certainly opened my mind.
• Emmanuel Ameisen’s Building Machine Learning Powered Applications: Going from Idea to Product was one of the first things I read as I transitioned into a new field and I often return to it. Lots of hard-won wisdom about the ‘whole game’ of machine learning in the real world, and a story economically-told.
• I didn’t read as much science fiction as I’d planned this year, but of the ones that I did, Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 blew my mind. It’s a classic for a reason, but still amazing to think that it was first published in 1966!
• For strong emotions and characters that keep you rooting for them, look no further than Shobha Rao’s Girls Burn Brighter. Not a light read by any means, but a strong showing from start to finish.
• I devoured the eight currently-available parts of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries over the course of a few weeks. They’re all fast-paced and once you’ve read the first the general conceit of the series wears off, but the character is so incredibly enjoyable. Come for the smart science fiction, stay for the strong character development. Definitely my favourite find of the year.
• Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence was a recommendation from a friend and it was a sharply sobering read in a discipline where ML boosterism is all too common. Nothing in there was particularly news, per se, but the picture as a whole raised important questions. Moreover, the balance between fine-grained detail and the big-picture worked well in this book.
• I reread Chanel Miller’s Know My Name this year. Still as devastating and powerful as when I first read it, and a searing indictment of the criminal process for cases of sexual assault in the United Status. Required reading.
• Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a late entry this year, was my first Dostoevsky and I’m still thinking about quite a few of the scenes, weeks after putting the book down. In particular, the last time Raskolnikov meets with his mother.
• Some books are unexpected gifts, like Sarah Polley’s collection of stories-almost-not-told entitled Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory. Each essay is unexpected, brave and deftly constructed. I’ve watched most of what she’s been involved in since The Sweet Hereafter and this book certainly didn’t disappoint.
• Finally, I read through the two books written by David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me and Never Finished and something about his take on suffering and the lessons it has to teach resonates a lot with me. I’ll be returning to these to sort through his experience at a later date.