Rating: 5.0/10. Book about Einstein’s theory of general relativity; I got bored after reading about 90 pages. Given that the author is a theoretical physics professor, I expected a more satisfying explanation of general relativity. Instead, this book is entirely about the history of general relativity, with descriptions of various scientists’ personalities. It overlaps substantially…
Author: Bai Li
A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma by David Eimer
Rating: 7.5/10. David Eimer’s second book, after “The Emperor Far Away”, describes all the corners of Burma / Myanmar. This country is seldom visited, is ruled by an oppressive military junta, and is far less developed compared to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia like Thailand and Vietnam. The Burmese people migrated there from Yunnan around…
1587: A Year of No Significance (万历十五年) by Ray Huang
Rating: 7.8/10. In the year 1587, nothing really major happened in China, but in a lot of ways, this year marks the point of no return for the Ming dynasty. Even though there’s still another 50 years until the dynasty collapses, it’s already clear by this point that the bureaucracy and institutions are no longer…
Understanding Syntax by Maggie Tallerman
Rating: 8.5/10. Overall impression: this book gives a well-rounded overview of syntax, good for an introduction and avoids most of the more theoretical issues. It’s split about 50/50 between English constructions and examples in other languages. This is a good balance, using English examples is easier to “ground” the theory to reality, while there are…
The Second Kind of Impossible by Paul Steinhardt
Rating: 8.5/10. A scientific adventure that starts out in theoretical physics but ends up in geology. The author is a physicist, who hypothesizes the existence of a new type of matter called a quasicrystal, which has no translational symmetry but only rotational symmetry, and is made up of atoms in a Penrose tiling. You can…
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Rating: 8.8/10. Summary Classic American novel by John Steinbeck, set in the Great Depression. It follows the story of the Joad family, originally they owned a farm in Oklahoma, but after crop failures in the dust bowl, they lost their farm. Hearing of greener pastures out west in California, they pack up all their belongings…
The First Emperor by Sima Qian
Rating: 7.7/10. Translation of a few sections of the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) by Sima Qian. The whole Shiji is very long, so this work only translates the sections relating to the Qin dynasty. Sima Qian is a historian in the Han dynasty court, but his role was to collect anecdotes about historical…
Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler
Rating: 7.2/10. A bunch of stories about China that personify the country’s rapid development into the modern age. The author Peter Hessler is an American journalist for the New Yorker magazine, who speaks Chinese fluently and spent a lot of time in China. There are various story arcs and the book switches back and forth…
The Plague (La Peste) by Albert Camus
Rating: 8.0/10. Novel by philosopher Albert Camus, set in Oran, a town in Algeria, in the 1940s. Very relevant reading in the time of COVID-19: the novel tells of an epidemic of bubonic plague that hits Oran. The style is more philosophical rather than plot driven, and describes the reactions of society and how various…
The Beautiful Cure by Daniel M. Davis
Rating: 8.0/10. Vaccines have been around for a long time, but the immune system hasn’t really been understood until very recently. For example, smallpox vaccine is only effective with an “adjuvant”, nobody understood why, theory is it is needed to activate the immune system to treat it as a threat. The immune system has the…
Eight Amazing Engineering Stories by Bill Hammack
Rating: 7.3/10. Short pieces about material science and engineering, picked it up when somebody recommended this book over the “Stuff Matters” book as a more technical tour of material science. The author is famous for the Engineering Guy YouTube channel. The book goes through a bunch of topics: digital cameras, smartphone accelerometers, atomic clocks, uranium…
The Saga of the Volsung translated by Jackson Crawford
Rating: 7.5/10. One of the most famous of the Icelandic Sagas: it was written in the 1200s in medieval Iceland, but describes existing folklore of the Viking culture that were familiar to everyone in the society. The events are perhaps based off real people but would have taken place several hundred years prior, in continental…