Rating: 8.0/10. The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge Book about biology of trees and forests, containing scientific details of their evolution, lifecycle, and classification. Compared to “The Hidden Life of Trees,” this one is more scientific and denser, but is still written…
Author: Bai Li
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
Rating: 7.7/10. This novel is a well known piece of Nova Scotia’s literature, about the Scottish people on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. It starts with the narrator, a successful dentist, visiting his older brother Calum in Toronto: Calum is an alcoholic living in a sketchy part of town and feeling lost from his…
Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
Rating: 7.6/10. Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug Book published in 2014 about web usability and design. It’s fairly short, covering the basics and addressing many of the most common problems and issues with design, as well as the fundamentals of usability testing. The goal of…
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
Rating: 8.0/10. A history of the cod and its overfishing, one of the most catastrophic crashes of species caused by human activity. Previously, cod was so abundant that it was said you could almost walk across the water standing on the fish. However, after centuries of overfishing, the population has been reduced to near nonexistence…
Applied English Phonology by Mehmet Yavas
Rating: 8.2/10. Intro textbook on English phonology, starts with a general overview of the theory of phonetics and phonology, but mostly focuses on the specific patterns of consonants, vowels, stress, and intonation patterns of English, including several of its dialects. It also describes models of difficulties faced by second language speakers attempting to learn English…
The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics by Richard C. Koo
Rating: 7.6/10. The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession by Richard C. Koo Book by a macroeconomist about Japan’s long recession (the Lost Decades), which began in 1990 and lasted for about 15 years. When the book was written in 2009, Japan was beginning to recover. There were no obvious structural problems…
The War Below by Ernest Scheyder
Rating: 7.5/10. The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives The War Below by Ernest Scheyder Book by a journalist about the struggles between mining companies and those who oppose mining projects, mostly in the US. Lithium and a variety of other minerals, such as rare earth metals, are essential…
Efficient Linux at the Command Line by Daniel J. Barrett
Rating: 7.4/10. Efficient Linux at the Command Line: Boost Your Command-Line Skills by Daniel J. Barrett Book on the more advanced aspects of the bash shell and bash scripting, including how child processes work with local and environment variables, different ways of executing commands with output substitution, why changing directories in a shell script doesn’t…
In the Footsteps of Du Fu by Michael Wood
Rating: 8.1/10. An introductory book to Du Fu, a poet who lived during the Tang Dynasty and is considered one of the greatest in China’s history. He was known as the ‘Poet Historian,’ with poems that chronicle many of the situations of poor people and daily life in an era full of warfare. The book…
Building Browser Extensions by Matt Frisbie
Rating: 7.7/10. Building Browser Extensions: Create Modern Extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge by Matt Frisbie Book about browser extensions, covering the basics of extensions primarily for Chrome but also for other browsers. It explores different parts of extensions and how they can interact with each other, as well as the sandbox model, various…
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
Rating: 8.1/10. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from A Secret World by Peter Wohlleben Book about forests and trees, made up of about 30 short chapters, it was originally written in German; each chapter describes some aspects of trees and it’s written in plain and non-technical language….
Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil
Rating: 7.8/10. Book examining many aspects of life throughout history, with a focus on energy use. Energy may be considered a kind of universal currency that determines the quality of life across very different periods, from prehistoric societies to agriculture, the industrial revolution, and today. As civilization has advanced, we’ve gotten better at harnessing new…