Rating: 8.2/10. Ch1: Basic notions The lexicon is the set of words in a language, abstract object stores in our mind; a dictionary is a concrete object (printed book or electronic) that describes the lexicon. Dictionaries do not always store everything in the lexicon, either intentionally or unintentionally. A vocabulary can refer to either a…
Category: Type
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 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 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 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…
To Live (活着) by Yu Hua
Rating: 8.5/10. A very tragic novel — the protagonist is an old man telling the story of his life when he was young. In the beginning, he was born into a rich family, he gambled all day. He lost all his family’s property gambling and they had to move into a small hut. At this…
Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction by James V. Stone
Rating: 8.0/10. Ch1: What is Information? Information is quantified using bits, not to be confused with binary digit. A binary digit contains at most one bit of information, but may contain less (if it’s not equally likely to be 0 and 1). Ch2: Entropy of Discrete Variables Definition of entropy H(x) for discrete random variables….
Designing Voice User Interfaces by Cathy Pearl
Rating: 7.3/10. Voice user interfaces like Siri and Alexa have improved in some ways, but in many other ways are similar to IVR phone systems from the 1970s. This book goes through various things to look out for while designing them. For example: Be as brief as possible and use visual mode to display lots…
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
Rating: 8.5/10. First novel by Tanya Tagaq, an Inuit throat singer. She tells the story of an Inuit girl in the 1970s, growing up in Nunavut in the high arctic. At first, she is a girl, and various problems like bullying, drugs, sexual assault on young girls are common. She matures and learns to fight…
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
Rating: 7.0/10. Modern day Japanese romance novel, between a 38 year old woman Tsukiko and a former high school teacher thirty years older than her. She’s an office worker and doesn’t really have friends, and he is also lonely since his wife died. They start out as acquaintances and run into each other a lot…
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon
Rating: 6.3/10. Novel originally written in Icelandic by author Sjon and translated into English, takes place in medieval Iceland (in the 1600s). Back then, Iceland was poor and in a remote corner of the world, people starved during the winter. The main character, Jonas, is a talented naturalist that explores the world through science. However,…
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Rating: 7.9/10. Classic novella by Joseph Conrad about a man’s journey down the Congo River into the heart of Africa, in a steamboat. He wants to explore the Congo because it’s one of the last blank spaces on the map, and sets off in a French boat. He goes up the river to find a…