James E. Somers
New: The Hofstadterian Mood | Exploring the complexity of driving directions | The trouble with "The Big Bang Theory" | Beware short forms
I am an alumnus of the University of Michigan currently working for BookTour. I like to read, write, and write computer code.
On this page I have collected lists of:
This is a list of the books I have read since my first day at college (it's hard to remember anything before then), arranged roughly in the order I read them. I have pruned anything that I didn't read "cover to cover." Below some of these I have provided links to relevant notes, commentary, excerpts, reviews, etc. This is a work in progress, though, and I will be adding much more material in the coming months.
Note: I have hyperlinked the book's title when the full text is available for direct download. I have an excellent scanner, so there are many more to come.
- Neuromancer, William Gibson.
- Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
, J.D. Salinger.
- Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse.
- What is Thought?, Eric Baum.
- Here is a large collection of excerpts from this book, which asks, "How can there be semantics?" and answers, "compression." Lots of good thought about computation, biological development, and machine learning. Baum's style is highly allusive and the book is full of excellent references.
- I learned more from this book than just about any other on the list—with the exception, I think, of Godel, Escher, Bach.
- My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, Hermann Hesse.
- Hesse is a beautiful nonfiction writer and it's a shame that his essays are not more widely read. One called "Concerning the Soul" struck me in particular. Here is a note about it.
- Naomi, Junichiro Tanizaki.
- The U.S. Constitution.
- Demian, Hermann Hesse.
- The Mind's I, Douglas Hofstadter and Dan Dennett.
- An insanely great compendium on the philosophy of mind; Hofstadter and Dennett take turns providing commentary for each of the selected essays/stories.
-
Highlights:
- "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which Turing proposes his eponymous test.
- "The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation."
- "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (especially Hofstadter's response).
- Thomas Nagel's classic, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
- Permutation City, Greg Egan.
- Swingers (screenplay), Jon Favreau.
- This is my favorite movie. Thus the the top five are: (1) Swingers, (2) Independence Day, (3) Hackers, (4) American Psycho, (5) The Rock.
- If you're a fan of the movie it is worth reading the screenplay—fascinating to see what they changed, left out, ad-libbed, etc.
- The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Yukichi Fukuzawa.
- The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, Ford Madox Ford.
- Here is a paper I wrote about the book, which I hated until the second half—and then loved it.
- The Iliad, Homer.
- Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Language Will, and Political Power, John Searle.
- This is really just two lectures written up and bound together. The first of these, on free will, is much better—it clears ground in the debate by using the language of "causally sufficient conditions" (do a, b, c, and d taken together make X inevitable?) to lay out two hypotheses: (1) that there are causally sufficient conditions for our conscious choices and free will is an illusion per William James's hard determinism, or (2) there are not, and the "gaps" we feel between a proposal and our decision, in which we deliberate, are real—things are actually "up in the air." As to where that indeterminacy comes from, he offers, somewhat lamely, "quantum mechanics."
- I appreciated the above ground-clearing because that is how I had mentally conceived of the debate. A more sophisticated reader disagreed, though, and planed Searle in this brief review .
- I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter.
- A "softer" and less satisfying version of much of Hofstadter's earlier writing. It may be a good introduction to his ideas for people who don't have time for GEB or find it too technical.
- The best pages of this book (from the first chapter) are available in Amazon's "Look Inside" reader.
- The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
- The link above points to the raw text online but this print edition has tons of excellent annotations, commentary, and criticism, which are pretty much necessary for a poem this difficult. Read it many times.
- I wrote a paper about Part V ("What the Thunder Said").
- Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, Richard P. Feynman
- I have written about Feynman here and admire him to the point of reverence. See this wonderful series of videos, "Fun to Imagine," in which he explains (a) why mirrors seem to reverse left-and-right but not up-and-down, (b) how trains stay on the tracks, and (c) how rubber bands work. Fantastic stuff.
- Other Feynman videos worth watching: The Last Journey of a Genius, about his adventure to Tannu Tuva. Warning: a real tear-jerker. Also, of course, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
- Here's a great short piece on Feynman's involvement with a massively-parallel supercomputer known as "The Connection Machine."
- The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins.
- Could be called "How Not to Be Embarrassed by Your Atheism" or "How to Be an Asshole to Religious People." Many good arguments in here but none that will help you convince believers.
- Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi.
- Awesome book with many cryptic, wise-sounding koans. Very quotable and contains the classic "was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was a man?" (Answer: the first one.)
- His philosophy, for all its fancy–simple phrasing, seems to boil down to the idea that we delineate and distinguish to our detriment—that we're all up in our heads imposing artificial structure on the world, and that this is bad.
- The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and White, E.B.
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins.
- Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth.
- Three Lives, Gertrude Stein.
- Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse.
- Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll.
- The Analects, Confucius.
- To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
- I loved this book and wrote a paper about it.
- The Animal Mind, James L. Gould
- Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, George Dyson.
- Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Stephen Toulmin.
- Narrative Thought and Narrative Language, Bruce K. Britton and Anthony D. Pelligrini (eds.).
- Life: What a Concept!, Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, and Seth Lloyd.
- Evariste Galois, Laura Rigatelli Toti.
- The Art of War, Sun Tzu.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce.
- I think I understand Stephen Daedalus more than any other fictional character, besides maybe Zero Cool in Hackers. I wrote a paper about a scene in Portrait.
- Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, David Foster Wallace.
- Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche.
- Comeuppance: Costly Altruistic Signaling Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, William Flesch.
- Franny and Zooey, Salinger, J.D.
- excerpts
- This was a hugely important book for me — I often think of people, and especially myself, in terms of the Franny–Zooey dichotomy.
- Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, Richard E. Nisbett and Lee Ross.
- Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut.
- Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut.
- Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter.
- Another insanely great compendium from Hofstadter — a collection of all of his Scientific American columns. "Metamagical Themas" is remarkably an anagram of "Mathematical Games," the title of his predecessor Martin Gardner's column (on recreational mathematics). Crazy!
- I once posted some "innumeracy exercises" based on a chapter of this book.
- Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter.
- The most important book I've read.
- Industrial Society and Its Future, Theodore Kaczynski.
- Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction, Timothy Gowers.
- Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, John H. Holland
- A Mathematician's Apology, G. H. Hardy.
- A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn.
- Making of the Big Lebowski, [??].
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn
- Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe, Michel Foucault
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace.
- Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett.
- Dialogues with Children, Gareth Mathews.
- Remarks on Color, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
- Tao Te Ching, Laozi.
- The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson.
- Hamlet, William Shakespeare.
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte.
- Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, Atul Gawande.
- Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, V. S. Ramachandran
- Dubliners, James Joyce.
- A paper I wrote on the story "A Little Cloud."
- Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X with Alex Haley.
- Nine Stories, Salinger, J.D.
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard P. Feynman.
- 1000 Most Important Words, Norman W. Schur.
- Here is the list of words. A while ago I marked the ones I was uncomfortable with or clueless about.
- The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin.
- Ulysses, James Joyce.
- I wrote a paper on Ithaca, the epic penultimate episode.
- I also kept a "reading journal" as I went along.
- Writing in Unreaderly Times, Kevin Smokler.
- Zingerman's Guide to Giving Great Service, Ari Weinzweig.
- Zingerman's, in Ann Arbor, MI, is arguably the best (and best-run) deli outside of New York. And part of what makes it so special is their highly regarded company culture and especially the way they treat customers. This book is a great guide for doing that yourself, as most of the ideas and advice are less about the restaurant industry than the giving-people-what-they-want industry.
- On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt.
- I Want to Be a Mathematician, Paul R. Halmos
- What an incredible book — I will have it by my bedside wherever I live.
- Halmos was a beautiful writer and a hard worker. Here's what he had to say on the subject:
Archimedes taught us that a small quantity added to itself often enough becomes a large quantity (or, in proverbial terms, every little bit helps). When it comes to accomplishing the bulk of the world's work, and, in particular, when it comes to writing a book, I believe that the converse of Archimedes' teaching is also true: the only way to write a large book is to keep writing a small bit of it, steadily every day, with no exception, with no holiday.
Word.
- I wrote an effusive e-mail to the friend who recommended it to me.
- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker.
- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson.
- Godel's Proof, Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman
- Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
- The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved, Mario Livio.
- The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler.
- Anathem, Neal Stephenson.
- A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut.
- Systemantics, John Gall.
- The Dip, Seth Godin.
- Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard.
- Mythologies, Roland Barthes.
- The Stranger, Albert Camus.
- Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams, Richard Michael Fischl and Jeremy Paul.
- Proof, David Auburn.
- Coders at Work, Peter Seibel.
- A book of fifteen interviews with famous hackers and computer scientists. There is lots of wisdom in here: see, for example, my large file of excerpts.
- Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri.
- Six Easy Pieces, Richard Feynman.
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov.
- How Fiction Works, James Wood.
- This Craft of Verse, Jorge Luis Borges.
- Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte.
- The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin.
- Girl With Curious Hair, David Foster Wallace.
- The Best of Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov.
- The Art and Craft of Judging: the Decisions of Judge Learned Hand, Hershel Shanks.
- Junk Mail, Will Self.
- Tinkers, Paul Harding.
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman.
- The Human Stain, Philip Roth.
- Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh.
- Story of My Life, Jay McInerney.
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy.
- Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement, Allan Gibbard.
- Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, eds.
- Disappointing except for "Centering", which was excellent.
- Inside "Jeopardy!": What Really Goes on at TV's Top Quiz Show, Harry Eisenberg.
- Mostly gripes by a senior writer about the way he was treated by Merv Griffin and management. The writing is mediocre and the book could use a copy editor, but there is lots of interesting info about how the show works: how clues are written, researched, vetted, etc., and how individual episodes are produced.
- The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, ed. John Rajchman.
On my computer I keep a folder called "papers," in which I collect PDFs (and rarely .DOCs) of good, print-published academic writing. I have reproduced this folder on the web here. Hopefully the file names are self-explanatory—if not, or if there is some paper you're after but can't find, let me know.
Feeds
I don't subscribe to many, but I am able to read essentially every post from these fine feeds:
Using the Tumblr API, a few PHP and Ruby scripts, a cron task, and a retrofitted Firefox extension, I have stitched together a system that lets me take notes in any of the following ways:
- Highlighting some text in Firefox and pressing ⌥⌘N.
- Typing "n <note>" into my Firefox address bar; I can even format it using Markdown.
- Going to a public (but hopefully secret) URL, either for when I'm away from my home computer or when I need to compose longer notes.
- Pressing three keys on my cell phone.
I realized after many failures with more ambitious systems that if there is any friction in the process at all, I won't stick with it — the operative concept is ease. And this mess of an approach that I've got going now has really worked out. See for yourself:
» To the archives!
Click here to grab the RSS feed.