Favorites - Books
A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers
Just a nice chill read. I haven't read fiction in a while and in a time and place where everything seems to be competing to be the biggest and bestest it feels special for a story to be small and content.
This philosophy seeps into the world as it appears humanity has moved past cancerous industrial growth and into true sustainability.
I'm not saying it will rock your world necessarily. I just think it's a nice time and you should try it.
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Probably one of my favorite books I read as a teen. So much so I read it several times which makes it all the more sad that I lost my heavily annotated copy.
There's too much to say about this book but in adolescence my two primary struggles were with depressive tendencies and fear of wasted potential. At the time, advice ranged from "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" by my elders and "fake it till you make it" by my peers. They weren't much help in addressing my problems. Much to my delight, a woman from nearly a century prior gave a contrasting perspective that resonated with me.
Plath approached my biggest fears many times in this book with a perspective that didn't coddle me with false hope. Perhaps at times it was too self-pitying but it at least gave me the comfort of feeling understood and not alone.
The Cuckoo's Egg - Cliff Stoll
Already wrote a bit about it on Goodreads
Sincerely good book just on its narrative about one of the first known cyber attacks in the late years of the cold war. Also great for learning the origins for some cybersecurity concepts and the real human stories that invented them.
I couldn't agree more!
A Mind for Numbers - Barbara Oakley
One of my favorite poorly titled books. It's more about general cognition than math or engineering but it's still a great read and helped me lock in a lot of concepts I learned from psychology classes and other reading i.e. Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman.
It even introduced new concepts to me like the idea of focused vs diffuse thinking. I still think about this often when I'm feeling burnt out and looking to go on a walk or something "I need to use some diffuse thinking right now".