Non-recent books II: Things OTHER than domestic psych thrillers
This was going to be a separate heading in yesterday's post, but yesterday's post got too long.
Non-fiction
Nabokov's Favourite Word is Mauve - Ben Blatt
This fascinating book applies the same kind of data analysis insights as in Dataclysm or Everybody Lies to the world of books. Two of my favourite things!
The title comes from the way every author will have a signature set of words they overuse relative to authors in general. Nabokov obviously doesn't use "mauve" more than any other word, and he most likely doesn't even overuse it to an extent that you'd notice as a human reader; but the extent to which he uses it more than most people do is greater than for any other word (obviously excluding things like characters' names).
The book also covers the way you can use this kind of "signature" analysis to identify authorship: the pseudonymous KennethRobert Galbraith matched J. K. Rowling better than he did any other famous author, and the anonymous Federalist Papers matched one of the Founding Fathers better than the others.
There are other really interesting analyses, like what words are most disproportionately used by female versus male authors, or, separately, in describing male versus female characters; or the inverse correlation between amount of -ly adverbs and perceived literary quality; or the way the font size of an author's name on their book covers increases as they become more famous.
The Hacker's Diet - John Walker
A pleasingly analytical take on nutrition and weight control. The premise is that a) it is basically about calories in versus calories out, but b) there are some complicating factors.
A couple of insights that were new to me: 1) your weight has a set point that is quite "sticky" - which is obvious in hindsight, because otherwise you'd gain or lose massive amounts of weight if you didn't exactly match input to output - so if you want to lose (or gain) weight you have to under- (or over-) eat by quite a lot for a few days to move out of the stable equilibrium, but once you've done that and begun to lose (or gain) you only need to under- (or over-) eat slightly to continue the trend, and then once you've reached your target weight you can go back to consuming as much as you expend in order to maintain a stable weight; and 2) the amount by which your weight fluctuates each day (due to drinking water, urinating, sweating, etc) dwarfs the daily change in your "true" weight, so just recording your weight will give you data that's noisy to the point of uselessness, so you should record rolling averages instead.
I haven't actually done either of these things, but if I ever move from "I'd ideally like to lose a little weight, but not as much as I like sweets" to "I really need to lose weight" then this book will probably be my starting point.
He also has some interesting things to say about exercise: it's not that helpful for losing weight unless you do an insane amount of it (eating less is more important for losing weight), but it's still really valuable for making you stronger and fitter and likely to live longer (he does some time cost-benefit calculations about how many years of life and health you're likely to get as a return on your couple-of-hours-a-week investment); and it's good to do a quantifiable form of exercise so you can easily see improvement (and see how much you regress if you take a break), which is motivational.
That sounds like I haven't read much non-fiction :( I do read quite a lot of it as online articles, and I have a few more nonfiction books which I've started and got stalled with and plan to blog about when I finish them.
Fiction
Artemis - Andy Weir
By the author of the thoroughly excellent The Martian. While The Martian followed a single astronaut on an early mission to Mars, this is set on the Moon at a much later stage in its exploration, with a fairly well-settled colony, with its own culture and economy, which is understandably a bit Wild West-like. The protagonist is not far from being a female version of Mark Watney, and applies the same maverick ingenuity to social engineering as he did to physical engineering (although she's no slouch at physical engineering either). It lacks Watney's enjoyable and unique narrative voice, but it's still very enjoyable, and I fond the ending very moving.
Lexicon
Sci-fi thriller about a group of people who can control minds by figuring out which of a hundred or so psychographics a person belongs to and then using the powerful influence words that are tailored to that psychographic. It felt like a plausible extrapolation of real things in psychology, linguistics, and behavioural science. It was a bit hard to follow in places, but overall I liked it a lot.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope - Claire North
Like the author's other books, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and Touch, this has a fascinating and original premise. In this case, the protagonist is cursed with the property of being forgettable (it also has its pluses, but it's mostly a curse). It begins with her family gradually forgetting her in her teens, and eventually no one can remember meeting her.
Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this as much as the previous two, and ended up giving up on it. It was quite dense and hard to wade through, and not very compelling.
Non-fiction
Nabokov's Favourite Word is Mauve - Ben Blatt
This fascinating book applies the same kind of data analysis insights as in Dataclysm or Everybody Lies to the world of books. Two of my favourite things!
The title comes from the way every author will have a signature set of words they overuse relative to authors in general. Nabokov obviously doesn't use "mauve" more than any other word, and he most likely doesn't even overuse it to an extent that you'd notice as a human reader; but the extent to which he uses it more than most people do is greater than for any other word (obviously excluding things like characters' names).
The book also covers the way you can use this kind of "signature" analysis to identify authorship: the pseudonymous KennethRobert Galbraith matched J. K. Rowling better than he did any other famous author, and the anonymous Federalist Papers matched one of the Founding Fathers better than the others.
There are other really interesting analyses, like what words are most disproportionately used by female versus male authors, or, separately, in describing male versus female characters; or the inverse correlation between amount of -ly adverbs and perceived literary quality; or the way the font size of an author's name on their book covers increases as they become more famous.
The Hacker's Diet - John Walker
A pleasingly analytical take on nutrition and weight control. The premise is that a) it is basically about calories in versus calories out, but b) there are some complicating factors.
A couple of insights that were new to me: 1) your weight has a set point that is quite "sticky" - which is obvious in hindsight, because otherwise you'd gain or lose massive amounts of weight if you didn't exactly match input to output - so if you want to lose (or gain) weight you have to under- (or over-) eat by quite a lot for a few days to move out of the stable equilibrium, but once you've done that and begun to lose (or gain) you only need to under- (or over-) eat slightly to continue the trend, and then once you've reached your target weight you can go back to consuming as much as you expend in order to maintain a stable weight; and 2) the amount by which your weight fluctuates each day (due to drinking water, urinating, sweating, etc) dwarfs the daily change in your "true" weight, so just recording your weight will give you data that's noisy to the point of uselessness, so you should record rolling averages instead.
I haven't actually done either of these things, but if I ever move from "I'd ideally like to lose a little weight, but not as much as I like sweets" to "I really need to lose weight" then this book will probably be my starting point.
He also has some interesting things to say about exercise: it's not that helpful for losing weight unless you do an insane amount of it (eating less is more important for losing weight), but it's still really valuable for making you stronger and fitter and likely to live longer (he does some time cost-benefit calculations about how many years of life and health you're likely to get as a return on your couple-of-hours-a-week investment); and it's good to do a quantifiable form of exercise so you can easily see improvement (and see how much you regress if you take a break), which is motivational.
That sounds like I haven't read much non-fiction :( I do read quite a lot of it as online articles, and I have a few more nonfiction books which I've started and got stalled with and plan to blog about when I finish them.
Fiction
Artemis - Andy Weir
By the author of the thoroughly excellent The Martian. While The Martian followed a single astronaut on an early mission to Mars, this is set on the Moon at a much later stage in its exploration, with a fairly well-settled colony, with its own culture and economy, which is understandably a bit Wild West-like. The protagonist is not far from being a female version of Mark Watney, and applies the same maverick ingenuity to social engineering as he did to physical engineering (although she's no slouch at physical engineering either). It lacks Watney's enjoyable and unique narrative voice, but it's still very enjoyable, and I fond the ending very moving.
Lexicon
Sci-fi thriller about a group of people who can control minds by figuring out which of a hundred or so psychographics a person belongs to and then using the powerful influence words that are tailored to that psychographic. It felt like a plausible extrapolation of real things in psychology, linguistics, and behavioural science. It was a bit hard to follow in places, but overall I liked it a lot.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope - Claire North
Like the author's other books, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and Touch, this has a fascinating and original premise. In this case, the protagonist is cursed with the property of being forgettable (it also has its pluses, but it's mostly a curse). It begins with her family gradually forgetting her in her teens, and eventually no one can remember meeting her.
Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this as much as the previous two, and ended up giving up on it. It was quite dense and hard to wade through, and not very compelling.