<h2>Reading notes: The Sorrows of Young Werther</h2>
<ol>
<li>I note with embarrassment that this is the first German novel I've ever finished. (If memory serves.)</li>
<li>Of every novel I've ever read, this might be the hardest to read as intended, or as its original audience would have read it. In 2023, Werther is hard to see sympathetically.</li>
<li>It's also hard not to read him as adolescent, in a way that's probably anachronistic. (Consider: "My days are as happy as those reserved by God for his elect; and, whatever be my fate hereafter, I can never say that I have not tasted joy,—the purest joy of life.") And thinking of Werther as adolescent is where I come closest to liking him.</li>
<li>My favorite passages are where the narrator gives general remarks about human nature. (Consider: "In this world one is seldom reduced to make a selection between two alternatives.") This is rarely what I like best in a good book.</li>
<li>These days I'm often thinking about which "classic" books are more and less often read relative to their fame. War and Peace is famously long and challenging, but I'm rarely surprised to discover that someone I know has read it. I can't remember the last time someone of my acquaintance talked about reading any Goethe, or specifically The Sorrows of Young Werther. The book that makes me most curious in this regard is Balzac's The Human Comedy. It's quite famous and quite influential--just read what Rodin said about him!--yet I cannot name a single person whom I'm confident has read it. (I read the first bit of it, and it was both wonderful and accessible.)</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: The Sorrows of Young Werther

<h2>Reading notes: Cruciverbalism</h2>
This feels like a book I would have checked out of the games section of the library as a 12-year-old (in 1995), in the best way. It is not available electronically. This sort of extremely opinionated book about a sport, game, or puzzle can often be very good.
<ol>
<li>The lists of crosswordese are useful enough, but the Wikipedia lists are better for serious students.</li>
<li>The anti-Eugene-Maleska rant (really, a throughline) is a highlight, and also a window into the history of the New York Times.</li>
<li>Now that I've read that editors look for clues that seem hard but are actually easy, it seems obvious. (And it enriches the solving experience to know that "fake-hard" clues exist and to guess which ones they are.)</li>
</ol>
Recommended.

Reading notes: Cruciverbalism

<h2>Reading notes: My Losing Season</h2>
Here are two metrics for how much a book captures my imagination:
<ol>
<li>How much do I think about it when I'm not reading it?</li>
<li>How eagerly do I abandon other leisure activities for it?</li>
</ol>
My Losing Season gets high marks on both of those. I thought about it all day. I looked for reasons to read just one more chapter. I broke my NYT crossword consecutive-days streak to read more of it.
If there is such a thing as a nonfiction bildungsroman, this is a remarkably successful one. Relatedly, it is one of the best books about masculinity I've ever read (though it is never presented as such).
The last portion of the book, to my ear, simply doesn't belong in it. It is a fine essay about reuniting with team members and a coach; I would have read it happily. But the end of Conroy's season is so powerful that these extra reminiscences are, by contrast, flat and even self-indulgent. I do want to know what middle-aged Conroy thinks about Vietnam; I didn't want to read about it then, when I cared so much about the world of the 22-year-old Conroy. This is an easy <a href="100-books.html">top-100</a> book for me and probably would have been in the top 25 or 50 had it ended sooner.

Reading notes: My Losing Season

<h2>Reading notes: Super-Infinite</h2>
Other reviews of this wonderful book summarize it well. You don't need to know or remember your John Donne to get a lot out of it. It's largely a portrait of London c. 1600, in all its glory and strangeness and brutality.
A few notes:
<ol>
<li>Rundell is fully convincing in arguing that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book">commonplace book</a> is an important way into understanding Donne. I'd say that the history of the commonplace book is generally underrated.</li>
<li>More generally, this is a good material history. Having a sense of the actual physical transmission (or not) of the various works vivifies them. In Donne's case this is unusually interesting. It takes a lot of work, at least for me, to overcome the impression high-school anthologies give of a well-defined, pristine corpus for every major author.</li>
<li>Biographers often speculate about human nature in asides, but for me this book is sui generis. The combination of detailed analysis of Donne, British and European history, and broader psychological discussions is striking and fresh.</li>
<li>Donne once wrote of something that it was "nature's great masterpiece" and "the only harmless great thing." What do you think he was talking about?</li>
<li>Here's a great few sentences: "But his poetry never describes her clothes, or her body. Donne's metaphors are vivid, wild, evocative, and potent, but they're strikingly unspecific. It never occurred to him to tell us if she was curved at the hip, or jutted at the collar bone, or was taller than him: presumably it was not what was important. The hunger, and the body itself, were what mattered."</li>
<li>And, finally, a great observation from Donne: "I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither; and when they are there, I ignore God and his angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door..."</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: Super-Infinite

<h2>Reading notes: Crossroads</h2>
<ol>
<li>Crossroads is set in the '70s, but is only lightly sprinkled with period references. Almost all the diction would fit into any of Franzen's worlds.</li>
<li>The characters largely sit around wondering whether they're good people; what their badness consists in, if they're bad; and how to find God. This is Franzen as an American Dostoevsky. (Certainly this stuff isn't what ties the novel specifically to the '70s.)</li>
<li>The manifestations of those topics, though--good, evil, self-doubt, God--involve: relevations about "social justice" (a phrase that appears three times) and the systematic mistreatment of women by men and of non-whites by whites.</li>
<li>Those issues are politicized in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHCNXHzMRuc">the Callard sense</a>: "action and speech in that area must be interpreted against the backdrop of some standing debate." A 2022 reader could not read a book set in or around 2022 without immediately interpreting a remark like, e.g., "the Crossroads-encouraged inflation of emotional scrapes into ambulance-worthy traumas" in light of contemporary debates.</li>
<li>Here are two things that distinguish fiction from other forms of communication: First, there's a presumption that things happen for reasons. Those politicized subjects are presumably necessary in Franzen's project. Second, one's raw aesthetic reactions matter more than they do in other contexts. There are settings where we can say "I know this is politicized, but let's try to just talk about X here." A novel is usually not one of them.</li>
<li>But part of what produces that raw aesthetic reaction--that is, the reaction we have when we see a politicized topic and interpret it against the backdrop of a standing debate--is our understanding of the world in which the topic is being presented. So by setting the book in the '70s, Franzen opens up some of distance between those topics and our current debates.</li>
<li>Yet those topics remain thoroughly politicized for us, despite being less or differently politized in the world of the book. It's only some distance that gets opened up. How much distance that is depends on many things, surely including the reader.</li>
<li>The novel exhibits Franzen's full awareness that these issues are politicized and that some episodes in the book, in which characters do things that are presumptively OK in the world of the book, are only that way because the novel is set fifty years ago. In a climactic scene, someone says something like: "This is OK; it's the seventies." It's hard for the reader not to feel called upon at that moment to compare our world to the novel's.</li>
<li>I suspect it's wrong to read Franzen either as longing for a world where the old norms applied or as creating distance between our world and the novel's only to give us a perch from which to feel superior. For me, at least, there was room for a fresh and valuable look at various human depravities and struggles...</li>
<li>...including the struggles of religious faith, which are different for the characters (as opposed to us) because they're living in a more religious world.</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: Crossroads

<h2>Reading notes: The Remains of the Day</h2>
Very mild and general spoilers ahead. I have read no other reviews or commentary about the book, so you might find these notes either obvious or badly misguided.
<ol>
<li>The use of the second person is masterful. When commentators discuss second-person fiction, they tend to say that it's rare, give Jay McInerney a B or B+ for Bright Lights, Big City, and move on. Although much of this book is in the first person, the second-personal elements are significant and closely connected to the central aesthetic and moral moments of the novel.</li>
<li>The narrator who is gradually revealed as unreliable is a more familiar device. It is executed brilliantly and, again, intensifies the book's moral climaxes. We begin with the overwhelming sense of order and decency; this is gradually undermined; and eventually the reader must import skepticism into scenes with no overt signs of misbehavior or absurdity. This effect is powerful once it occurs.</li>
<li>Another way to read this book is as a challenge to the reader: how good are your values, and how much integrity do you have? (See the previous point.) The reader can often be thought to stand to the narrator as the narrator, a butler, stands to the head of the house he serves. This is a familiar device, but used to much more powerful effect than usual.</li>
<li>Some important influences here seem to include the tradition of the detective novel (is it true that "the butler did it"?) and some American traditions. It brings to mind various other meditative novels about car trips (I have a hard time not comparing it to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and the end seems to owe much to The Great Gatsby.</li>
</ol>
Very highly recommended. An easy inclusion in the <a href="100-books.html">top 100</a>.

Reading notes: The Remains of the Day

<h2>Reading notes: Of Boys and Men</h2>
Recommended.
<ol>
<li>It is a book about men, but only a shortsighted reader would miss the lessons about (specifically) Black men, Black women, the middle and lower classes generally, and so on. I have long suspected that intersectionality and related concepts would be used by groups concerned with men's interests. This is the first sustained effort I've read in that direction (in book form, at least).</li>
<li>And this is, in its way, one of the most compelling discussions of income and wealth inequality I've seen. Many of Reeves' arguments can be seen as versions of: "The disproportionate money and power that flows to a small and mostly male group masks big problems with men, which are problems for everyone."</li>
<li>There are many and diverse citations. Evaluating them would be a major project. Reeves certainly presents a lot of reasonable-seeming evidence for his views, but might not always present the strongest evidence against those views.</li>
<li>One particularly interesting body of evidence Reeves collects is that various kinds of interventions help women more than they help men. This has <a href="https://conversableeconomist.com/2022/10/07/why-do-so-many-interventions-help-women-but-not-men/">drawn some blogosophere attention</a>. One explanation here is that non-male groups suffer discrimination that makes certain kinds of interventions particularly effective for them (again, I don't think one can read this book properly without thinking about how much we're doing wrong with respect to other groups). I hope more work is done to figure out how robust this phenomenon is and what its causes are.</li>
<li>Some of Reeves' policy proposals seem interesting: e.g., to work to get men into "HEAL" (health, education, administration, and literacy) jobs. Others seem like political and practical non-starters to such a degree that it's hard even to begin to contemplate their full impact: e.g., to fund an extra year of pre-K for (only) boys so that they can be redshirted. (This is to compensate for the features of male brain development that Reeves argues make boys less well suited to academic success if age is held constant.)</li>
<li>I expect a lot of low-quality commentary on this book. It's not that long, but <a href="on-actually-reading-the-book.html">most people won't read it</a>.</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: Of Boys and Men

<h2>Reading notes: There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather</h2>
I found this book valuable enough to finish. Valuable enough for me; it's hard to recommend it.
<ol>
<li>The central message of the book is that, along many dimentions, Sweden is different from, and preferable to, America. You don't have to believe this to benefit from the book, but there might be limits to how much of this you want to read.</li>
<li>The book cover promises "a Scandinavian mom's secrets," but there's less of that than simple reporting of what Scandinavia is like. If I had to choose a genre for this book, I'd pick autoethnography, not advice. The bulk of the book is description and interviews.</li>
<li>"Simple reporting" of parenting cultures I haven't experienced is, however, broadening and valuable. Bringing up Bebe is a favorite parenting book (and in my <a href="100-books.html">top 100</a>). I'd like to read more books like this.</li>
<li>There are many references to studies and books, but these are peppered in the text in an unsatisfying way. They're unlikely to convince you if you don't already like McGurk's point of view. (This is standard enough in pop-science and parenting books, but enough hours spent with writers who are better at this--Janet Lansbury, Jamie Glowacki, Emily Oster--will make you <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Expecting-Better-Conventional-Pregnancy-Wisdom/dp/B08SJDP2CW/">expect better</a>.) The discussions of sleep safety and of hygiene-related tradeoffs are two areas where a more rigorous and balanced scientific treatment would have been particularly valuable.</li>
<li>Some passages haunt me. I have spent many hours fussing over the details of baby food composition, environmental tradeoffs in diapering, and so on, but I would complete the prompt "I know exactly what I want for this child" very differently from McGurk:<blockquote>
I know exactly what I want for this child. Natural childbirth--check. Cloth diapers in gender-neutral diapers--check. Homemade, organic baby food--check.
</blockquote>
</li>
<li>A valuable complement to McGurk's view of Scandinavian parenting culture is volume six of Knausgaard. But that's also a tough thing to recommend or <a href="on-actually-reading-the-book.html">to expect someone to have read</a>.</li>
</ol>
So: I have my complaints, but I'm glad I finished this book. If nothing else, I'm more eager to take my kids outside in light rain.

Reading notes: There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather

<h2>Reading notes: The Baseball 100</h2>
This is my new favorite baseball book ever. (Literally.)
It's about the players. It's also sort of about the rankings, and sort of not. Posnanski mostly ignores methodological issues until ~90% of the way through the book. His explanations for the rankings, when they come, are steady and reasonable, but also involve a lot of shrugging his shoulders. This all reminds me of the economic/philosophical problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility: there's basically no way to do it right, but not doing it at all is also obviously not right. The Baseball 100 gets this balance basically right, even (or perhaps especially) when the ratings look most like a cop-out.
So, for example, Jackie Robinson is in 42nd place; he wore number 42. How much more can be said? By career MLB WAR, he's 103rd or so among position players. By other standards, he's an easy #1. The more I think about Posnanski's approach, the more I like it: Put him in the top half, write a beautiful and insightful portrait, make it clear you're honoring the number, and get on to #41. 
A major success of the book is keeping the reader's attention on the portraits. There's a lot here about family culture and some local culture, but not many sweeping claims about American culture (no "Wade Boggs was a product of the sixties"). Posnanski earns your interest and focus by making the people in the book pop, and he doesn't cash it out for a cheap or boring point about politics or culture. (Of how many recent books could that be said?)
Two themes run through the book: parental influence and the shame of baseball's segregated past. As for the former: Posnanski writes beautifully about childhood. As for the latter: what else can he do? In a book that's at all about rankings, not talking about segregation a lot would be like talking about 2020 college football without talking about COVID a lot.
If anything, I think Posnanski's "take the best guesses you can with all the evidence you have" approach should have taken him even farther. Charlie Gehringer really comes ahead of Martin Dihigo, Cristobal Torriente, and Turkey Stearnes?
This book made me think often of Chuck Klosterman's But What if We're Wrong?, which is the best treatment I've seen of the strangeness of cultural influence. Besides the top 100 themselves, there are anecdotes involving so many long-ago MVPs and statistical standouts. Many of those players' names ring loud bells in my head and, I'm pretty sure, others'. They've kept their portions of fame. Many others are absolute blanks to me. I have no real idea what accounts for this. Posnanski, like Klosterman, does a great job laying out mysteries of influence, not just in cases like Arky Vaughan (why is such a great player so obscure?) but also in cases like Roger Clemens: Why isn't it a bigger deal that he threw a bat at Mike Piazza in the World Series? How exactly will Clemens be remembered?
Posnanski's answers aren't always satisfying, but maybe there aren't answers to be found; maybe influence is just that deeply arbitrary. What's more important is that Posnanski has the ability to paint portraits so well and freshly that he's in a position to see those questions in the first place.

Reading notes: The Baseball 100

<h2>Reading notes: The End of Solitude</h2>
Read William Deresiewicz if you care about English prose, argument, higher education, politics vis-a-vis education, or anything else he happens to be writing about.
Misc. notes:
<ol>
<li>These really are essays. They cohere; they have arguments. It's a joy to read someone who is, fundamentally, not a take-generation machine or some other sort of content monster. I'd group him with <a href="on-reading-the-diff.html">Byrne Hobart</a> or Ian Mueller, whom Stephen Menn described as a "sporadic" <a href="https://www.philosophie.hu-berlin.de/de/lehrbereiche/antike/mitarbeiter/menn/ian-mueller.pdf">in the Diogenes Laertius sense</a>. Deresiewicz has his commitments and beliefs, but fundamentally he is an extremely active reader and intellect who synthesizes his intellectual life for the rest of us. Reading folks like this is one of the great intellectual joys in my life. It's heartening that there are (I think) more and more of them around these days.</li>
<li>The essays I'd read before (in most cases, roughly 10 years ago) feel very different here in 2022. Most obviously, COVID has given new urgency and relevance to questions of what solitude is, how to do it properly, and whether we can have too much of it. So many people have found themselves surprised by what it's like to be alone, physically or otherwise. The End of Solitude is, so far, the most important COVID book (both "book that came out during COVID" and "book about COVID-related subjects") I've read, for having the most to say about these issues. (In case you're curious, #2 on that list is <a href="reading-notes-the-last-days-of-roger-federer.html">The Last Days of Roger Federer</a>.) </li>
<li>Deresiewicz writes from anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal commitments. I'd say that mainstream leftist politics (even those strains that get branded as "extremist") have moved pretty far away from Deresiewicz's views in the last decade--however much they use "capitalist" and "neoliberal" as slurs. Sustained critiques of capitalism and neoliberalism that don't rest on identity politics or certain other prominent political stances are less common than they used to be, and this is the best in recent memory. (Deresiewicz does, however, have some things to say about identity politics itself: across various essays, he critiques it as the consolidation and exercise of a certain strain of elite power. Like it or not, he has a lot of argument and evidence behind the view.)</li>
<li>I am in the position of, on the one hand, seeing Deresiewicz as a breath of fresh air and, on the other, reading page after page about how so many of my values, goals, and ideals are delusional and/or evil. If you are similarly situation but prefer not to read many dozens of pages about how misguided you are, may I recommend <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Austen-Education-Novels-Friendship-ebook/dp/B004IYIUQA">A Jane Austen Education</a>? What I actually recommend is reading it anyway, but one can't be scolded into a deep engagement with the best arguments against one's life structure and value system. That requires ethical development and the liberal arts--which brings us back to The End of Solitude.</li>
<li>There's a lot more than the headline topics in the book. Two unexpected joys were "Hunting the Whale," about the novel and recent books about the novel, and "A Jew in the Northwest," about being a Jew in the Pacific Northwest (including notes on Malamud and Leslie Fielder).</li>
<li>One metric I use to reflect on my reading is how much of my mental life a book takes up when I'm in the middle of a book but not at the moment reading it. The End of Solitude scores very high here.</li>
<li>As I write this, it's my <a href="2022-favorites.html">second-favorite book</a> of the year. I imagine Deresiewicz wincing at my tendency to rank what I read, but I'll <a href="on-ranking-things.html">stand by the habit</a>.</li>
</ol>
Finally, a few striking passages:
<blockquote>
Youth, now, is nothing more than a preliminary form of adulthood, and the quiet desperation of middle age has been imported backward into adolescence.
</blockquote>
And:
<blockquote>
Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators tend to be so ready to accede to their demands).
</blockquote>
And:
<blockquote>
To put it another way, Portland does not seem to have any grown-ups. Sure, there are people in their forties and fifties and seventies, but there isn’t anyone who represents the past, and the weight of the past, like my old-timers and Italian grandmothers. There isn’t anything that represents the past.
</blockquote>
And:
<blockquote>
Elite mass culture hardly even anymore pretends to be interested in art—in art, that is, as opposed to entertainment, high art as opposed to kitsch. Art is too hard, too subtle, too complex, too time-consuming, altogether too recalcitrant. The professional would rather watch Netflix; the “cultural critic” would rather pontificate about the TikTok trend. Rosenberg didn’t think that kitsch was even worth bothering to attack. Now it rules the world.
</blockquote>
Highly, highly recommended.

Reading notes: The End of Solitude

<h2>Reading notes: Lonesome Dove</h2>
This is the best thing I've read in 2022, which is shaping up to be the best reading year of my adult life. Easy <a href="100-books.html">top 100</a> book: probably #25 or so, though I'm historically bad at predicting the staying power of a book I just read.
I have very little original to say about the book, except that it is more evidence about <a href="on-long-books.html">the value of long books</a>.
Very highly recommended.

Reading notes: Lonesome Dove

<h2>Reading notes: The Last Days of Roger Federer</h2>
<ol>
<li>Not my favorite book written during COVID--that's The Baseball 100--but my favorite COVID book (so far).</li>
<li>The central narrative decision here was to organize the book loosely. It's a lifetime of aesthetic-philosophical reflection, as it relates to various kinds of endings, organized in a meandering but satisfying way. The decision was a good one.</li>
<li>If this were a top-150 book for me (it narrowly misses, I think), I'd have to revise my <a href="books-i-like-more-than-other-people-do.html">books I like more than other people do list</a>: it would come in #3. It is not easy to come in lower than both Joyce and Franzen on Goodreads.</li>
<li>Nonetheless, I think this is an underrated book format. When people spend (most of) a lifetime building up human capital, I want them to share it. When I look back on good conversations, I rarely regret that they weren't more tightly focused. So too with this sort of semi-memoir.</li>
<li>A lot of writing about Nietzsche is inaccessible to me (or at least I don't want to access it). The reflections here, however, are useful and memorable--and fun.</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: The Last Days of Roger Federer

<h2>Reading notes: The Three-Body Problem</h2>
<ol>
<li>It's pretty rare to feel compelled to go read the thing everyone was talking about 7 years ago. But I was, and it paid off.</li>
<li>This is my favorite science fiction novel ever. (Note that I am not a science fiction guy, and this still won't make the <a href="100-books.html">top 100</a>.)</li>
<li>There's almost no humor in the book (unless I'm just missing something, which could easily be the case, given how little I know about sci-fi and about Chinese literature).</li>
<li>Besides the overall "what the heck is going on" question, the narrative generally resolves one mystery while presenting another. This seems to owe something to the structure of video game narratives.</li>
<li>Of all the fiction I've read during my software carrer, this is the book with the most overlap in readership among my colleagues.</li>
<li>It's the most recommendable book I've read this year.</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: The Three-Body Problem

<h2>Reading notes: A Widow For One Year</h2>
Revealed preference matters. Whatever I say about what I do and do not like and value, I have read four John Irving novels. That puts him #2 by novel count (I've read five of Jane Austen's) and almost certainly #1 by page count. And I don't regret reading any of those 700,000 or so words.
I am unlikely to say much that's new about the book. But:
<ol>
<li>Googling suggests that the connection between A Widow for One Year and The Great Gatsby is insufficiently appreciated (contemplating the stars in the orbit of Manhattan, carrying a torch for a really long time, etc.). It's a good question which presents the more optimistic picture of torch-carrying.</li>
<li>The author's interview that came with my edition was illuminating. This is partly for the notes about how he works (diligently, and spending huge amounts of time outlining the book before literally writing it) and for how he embraces his reputation as a sentimentalist. I was reminded of <a href="https://shows.cadence13.com/podcast/themomentwithbriankoppelman/episodes/e82c888f-0a34-40df-a419-db26b59f49d7">Josh Groban's interview with Brian Koppelman</a>, where he discussed the advantages of not being "cool" (or aspiring to coolness, at least) in a creative profession.</li>
<li>It's not quite a <Link href="/100-books.html">top-100</Link> book for me, but close (probably #120 or so as I write this). The other three Irving novels all still make the cut.</li>
<li>Irving seems to have gone from medium-famous to very obscure, but that could be a function of my intellectual context more than anything else. (Computer people are way less into long, sentimental American novels than the average reader.) I remember an Owen Meany question on Jeopardy! just a couple years ago.</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: A Widow For One Year

<h2>Reading notes: Talent</h2>
Even more than usual, this is a set of reflections and not a comprehensive review. (Although I've made a point of not reading other reviews before writing mine, I imagine it's well- and thoroughly reviewed elsewhere.)
<ol>
<li>Like Tyler's books generally, this one is stylistically a little ragged--in good ways. It's pleasantly straightforward, and always reminding you that this is primarily a record of things Tyler wants to communicate and only secondarily a literary artifact. Good writing from academics often (not always!) has this feature: the reader is constantly, subtly reminded that the real project is accumulation of human capital in the writer, and that the articles and books are all downstream of that. In a book about talent, I find it to be a subtle, constant reminder of what the authors have done to cultivate their own talent.</li>
<li>Reading this book is strenuous and emotionally challenging--again, in a good way. How do I stack up? What could I be doing to cultivate talent better? It's a book about the assessment of talent and not, directly, its cultivation, but the two subjects are too closely linked for the active reader not to be considering both on every page. An important skill in reading this book properly is not letting your self-judgments and development plans distract you from the lessons about finding and cultivating talent.</li>
<li>The Groucho Marx effect is important: very often you need to be asking why the person wants your company. This is another way into seeing the value of being distinctive and focusing on comparative advantage as a writer. Suppose someone writes to me (I like it when this happens!) about a piece I wrote. Why were they reading, and why are they writing to, me instead of anyone else in the world? If you aren't doing something distinctive, the answer might not be flattering.</li>
<li>I've seen a lot of companies handle Groucho Marx reasoning badly specifically in software. The market for programmers is still very hot (yes, even now), and I have seen many American companies deal badly with the reality that just about anyone they can hire is someone who cannot get one of the X highest-tier programming jobs in America. This tends to be exacerbated by the facts that (i) the absolute compensation they are offering is still quite high and (ii) fully facing this reality tends not to reflect well on the interviewer, either. Hiring programmers is all about making necessary tradeoffs. There are certainly teams of "the X+1th-best-available" programmers working at very high levels and happily producing output as efficiently as teams from the most prestigious firms. But (I conjecture) this tends to be a story of managing, deploying, and retaining talent rather than finding eight programmers who all hate remote work and/or don't know that Google is hiring and prefer your firm to every other local firm.</li>
<li>Relatedly, for a lot of companies, I suspect that a big part of the search for software engineering talent is figuring out how to do things without using software engineers.</li>
<li>I don't remember any discussion of laws governing interviews in the book. I don't think the authors recommend anything illegal, but it's easy to imagine an HR department wincing at it. The gap between the Cowen/Gross picture of talent search and the reality of job interviews might have more to do with regulatory mindsets than they discuss (though I'm sure they're aware of this).</li>
<li>There are a lot of programming jobs where what the authors call a "multiplicative model" is probably correct. Consider (i) implementation accuracy, (ii) implementation efficiency, (iii) dependency management, (iv) persistence management, (v) debugging more straightforwardly logical errors, (vi) debugging data- and persistence-related errors, (vii) documentation, (viii) API construction, (ix) migration management, and (x) team communication. Many software jobs require at least 8 of these. Some require all 10. They're somewhat correlated, but less than many people think.</li>
<li>The discussion of cultivating talent is excellent, and something I spent the first half of the book itching to hear about. There's much more to say about this at the organizational level. Cowen and Gross discuss at some length (i) identifying talent generally, (ii) identifying talent that fits a specific need, and (iii) making organizational room for specific kinds of underappreciated talent. For human capital that grows exponentially, however (and that's the case the authors want you to shoot for), a lot of the person's ultimate output will reflect their growth after they join you. (Whether or not we're talking about hiring for a job or other kinds of talent search.) So there's a lot to be said about figuring out what kinds of talent you're best at nurturing.</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: Talent

<h2>Reading notes: A Philosophy of Software Design</h2>
Aspects of the book that have stuck with me include:
<ol>
<li>His firm belief that interfaces should be small; <a href="https://www.pathsensitive.com/2018/10/book-review-philosophy-of-software.html">it's not clear he's right about this</a>.</li>
<li>Many elegant examples, both from his teaching and his engineering.</li>
<li>The wonderful treatment of information leakage, including some subcategorization of the problem. (Very roughly, leakage can be divided into leakage through an interface and "back-door" leakage. Interface-based leakages can be divided into those that result from oversized interfaces and those from inadequate defaults. Back-door leakages can be divided into those resulting from the use of structural information in several places, those resulting from there being too many objects; and those resulting from other causes.)</li>
</ol>
The sections below cover important topics from the book in slightly more detail:
<h4>Design it twice</h4>
Because designing systems is hard, Ousterhout recommends considering at least two designs before choosing one; see chapter 11.
Note that this is analogous to <a href="https://www.pokernews.com/strategy/take-a-cue-from-pool-consider-your-options-poker-23665.html">standard advice in cue sports</a>.
We can decompose this advice into (i) caring enough about getting the design right to put in a bit of extra effort and (ii) learning about something--in this case, a design--by asking "if this is wrong, how is it wrong?"
Re: (1), when you're reading a book about software design, it's easy to care about getting design right. But in industry, there are so many reasons to lose sight of it. A few of these are: the pressure of short-term bug fixes, the assumption that a system will naturally optimize itself over time, the difficulty of communicating about system design, and the fact that educations in software often neglect the sort of design in question.
Re: (2), for generality and power, that question has to be one of the most effective cognitive tools there is. (Its converse, "what follows from this if this is right?," is at least as powerful and is a core of <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/MENPAT-3">the method of analysis</a>.)
<h4>Investment rate</h4>
Ousterhout recommends spending "about 10-20% of your total development time" on investments such as reconsidering class designs, improving documentation, and fixing bugs more deeply than is required to close a ticket. See sections 3.2-3.4.
This is a nice example of compounding returns paying off more quickly than we might suspect--and, therefore, of the more general phenomenon that people aren't good at estimating the effects of exponential growth.
I suspect that the right number is closer to 20%--actually, I suspect that the right number is higher than that. My investment rate even for "throwaway" projects is at least 10-15%, and surely investment gets more valuable when project time is measured in weeks and years instead of hours.
Although some software engineers truly don't believe that these investments are worth it, many suffer from lack of discipline either at the personal or organizational level. Here as elsewhere, modest improvements in discipline and culture can matter more than large improvements in engineering skill, narrowly construed.
<h4>Pass-through methods</h4>
A method that invokes another method, has a similar signature to it, and does not add much functionality to it. Ousterhout discusses the problem and argues that it is a red flag (see below) in section 7.1.
I don't have much to add to Ousterhout's excellent discussion except a speculative diagnosis: constructing layers of abstraction that are only subtly different is sometimes intended (and interpreted) as a sign of care and sophistication. (My code review reference contains a brief discussion of this, under "This layer of indirection...") 
<h4>Red flags</h4>
These are discussed throughout the book and summarized in an appendix.
This might be the most valuable aspect of the book; fluency with a set of red flags is a big efficiency boost (especially in code reviews). I hope that other engineers will publish on the subject.
<h4>Temporal decomposition</h4>
The mistake in which "the structure of a system corresponds to the time order in which operations occur;" see section 5.3.
This mistake is vastly more common and more severe than acknowledged; if anything, Ousterhout doesn't do enough to emphasize it. (But by mentioning it at all, he does more than most.)
Related: if what you need to be reasoning about is a dependency graph, don't confuse it with a data flow diagram. (Do not confuse the dependency relation with the data-that-used-to-be-here-is-now-there relation.)
This bias extends beyond software. Perhaps some biographies should go through the life chronologically, but far too many of them do.

Reading notes: A Philosophy of Software Design

<h2>Reading notes: From Front Porch to Back Seat</h2>
This is an extremely successful book about American social history. Bailey synthesizes a lot of primary material and discusses it roughly as you'd expect a trained historian to. But the book is extremely readable and sensible, and she has a keen eye for distinctions (e.g., of class as defined by culture as opposed to by money or occupation).
It's striking how dated the book feels, even given how quickly discussions of gender, race, and class go stale. Bailey's introductions to and contextualizations of these issues would have been considered fully considerate and broad-minded when they were published, but contemporary American readers will be struck by, e.g., the lack of focus on race and certain gender issues.
And it's also striking to have written the previous paragraph about a book published only nine years ago.
One of the successes of From Front Porch to Back Seat is its treatment of mass culture: The courtship culture of the '50s and '60s (it is argued) was the first that could have been reflectively understood as such by its participants. Focal experience is an underrated idea, and Bailey's treatment rings true. That said, I would have preferred more nuts-and-bolts exposition of what dating in the '50s and '60s was like (on the model of her wonderful discussions of the '20s and '30s).
I highlighted 78 passages in this book despite trying not to highlight too much. Highly recommended.

Reading notes: From Front Porch to Back Seat

<h2>Reading notes: How to Change</h2>
Recommended. Behavior change is one of the most practically important subjects, and this is its best summary I know of. She also did <a href="https://www.econtalk.org/katy-milkman-on-how-to-change/">an excellent interview</a> with Russ Roberts.
The book is too wordy for me, and generally conforms too closely to the airport-bookstore-pop-science genre. But it's better written than most, and others will enjoy the structure more than I did. And despite being too long, it's very short. Again, recommended.
Misc. notes:
<ol>
<li>Triggers seem to be underrated as a self-improvement tool. See the "Cue-based planning" in How to Change; <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v4nNuJBZWPkMkgQRb/making-intentions-concrete-trigger-action-planning">this blog post</a> has more detail.</li>
<li>How to Change doesn't talk much about memory, but I do wonder about the possible connection between spaced-repetition drilling (e.g., with Anki) and trigger-based behavior change. <a href="https://guzey.com/things/software/anki/">This post</a> is provocative. (Hat tip to an anonymous reader.)</li>
<li>A hard part of reading this book is resisting the temptation to passively nod through the sections with material you've heard about before--in my case, the value of breaking goals into small chunks. I should do more to make goals small, yet it took some effort to really focus on that section because the idea seemed so familiar. A lot of the book felt like that.</li>
<li>The "Want some advice?" section recommends advice-giving in at least two ways: as more beneficial generally (for oneself) than advice-getting and as a good way to take a third-personal perspective on one's problems. I'd love to see more philosophical work on the relationship between the third-person perspective, advice-giving, and beneficial effects (or, at least, durable effects) on the person adopting that perspective.</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: How to Change

<h2>Reading notes: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big</h2>
Barry Greenstein once wrote that you should pay special attention to poker players who make obvious mistakes but still win: that means they're doing something very right. That comment changed my life. Absorbing it has, for example, made me vastly more likely to read books by Scott Adams.
What I can't stop thinking about is how this book, despite vast differences in tone, shares so much content with, e.g., Katy Milkman's How to Change ("modifying your environment and engineering the cues in it will have a much greater effect than one suspects") and any number of coastal-elite exercise fora ("do everything you can to generate positive energy in your life; the rest will follow").
Other miscellaneous notes:
<ol>
<li>Adams writes: "One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task." This is essential, and I'd add that matching the available time to the task is important too. (<a href="12-rules.html">Have defaults</a>.)</li>
<li>He advocates making all your other choices to maximize your "personal energy." Strategies like this are underrated, and remind me of successful companies that prioritize speed. (Dan Luu is also <a href="https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/">excellent</a> on this subject.) Investing is a useful analogy: your retirement account looks a lot better with bigger contributions and a mediocre strategy than with smaller contributions, brilliantly managed. (And if you think that compounding intellectual capital and output are underrated--they are!--shouldn't you also care a lot about your total capacity for doing stuff?)</li>
<li>One distillation of the book is as an extended encouragement to think of yourself as a "moist robot" that is extremely sensitive to your environment, immediate stimuli, and social connections. You can think of this as rephrasing James Merrill's remark that if you want to know how you feel, look at the furniture. (If James Merrill were not the poet of The Changing Light at Sandover but someone who describes "the fortified-burrito business" as "a way to do some good for the world that had rewarded me so handsomely.")</li>
<li>Another distillation: it's not really too hard to elevate yourself to the top 1st to 10th percentile in a skill, so why not pick 5-10 essential skills (e.g., conversation) and elevate them? (This is an echo of <a href="https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/">Patrick McKenzie</a> asking: "If I told you I would pay you a hundred thousand dollars if you did five minutes of poetry recital while standing on one foot, would you do it?" His answer is "Of course, so why not learn a bit about salary negotiation, even if you hate it?")</li>
</ol>
P.S.: I can't track down the James Merrill quote; all leads appreciated.

Reading notes: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

<h2>Reading notes: Patterns of Software</h2>
I'll probably never finish Richard Gabriel's Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community. The core of the book (or at least the first 1/3 of it) is a meditation on the career of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander">Christopher Alexander</a> can teach us about software design.
Gabriel's turns of phrase tend not to land with me, partly because the technical discussion doesn't include examples or sufficiently precise argumentation about software. There are enough mechanical errors (at least in my edition) to distract the reader, and the structure of the book (a series of titled, related semi-essays) works against my attempts to synthesize the information.
But I'm glad this book exists. It reminds me of poker literature. When I studied poker most seriously, it was immature as a field of study, with an oral tradition of knowledge-transmission and enthusiastic practitioners. This led to a lot of technical and semi-technical writing that is unconstrained by traditional subgenre boundaries. Such projects don't always succeed or endure, but the practical alternative to this kind of artifact is usually not a polished, impeccably structured book but rather nothing at all.
So, in the case of Richard Gabriel, if someone loves software, loves architecture, and wants to write a long meditation on the connections between the ineffable qualities of great software and the career of Christopher Alexander, I really want that person to write that meditation. My life is better because <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ace-River-Advanced-Poker-Guide/dp/0972044221">Barry Greenstein wrote something that reminds me of Seneca more than anything else</a>, Bob Ciaffone saw fit to publish <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Improve-Your-Poker-Bob-Ciaffone/dp/0966100700">occasionally speculative advice</a> back in 1997--and because poker literature was unsaturated enough to have some room for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Tournament-Poker-Nate-Meyvis-ebook/dp/B017MTTGYC/">my own self-published speculations</a>. It's also better because I picked up this book. I just can't finish it.
Some notes:
<ol>
<li>Gabriel speaks of habitability in software design. Michael Feathers gives an related warning: "Remember, code is your house, and you have to live in it." Feathers is talking about hygiene where Gabriel is discussing something less tangible, and the continuity of the metaphor is striking. It has infiltrated my work: every day I think of myself as living in the software I work on.</li>
<li>Gabriel says that clarity "is just too rare, and it's dangerous too, in a funny way." This is nonobvious and correct (and I want to post it in every building where analytic philosophers work). Aristotle famously warns us to tailor the precision of our descriptions to the underlying subject matter: Don't settle for mere persuasion if you're discussing geometry, but also don't expect geometrical proof if you're talking about the weather. We want clarity in software, but only insofar as it's there to be achieved. Suppose an argument already has as much clarity as it's going to get. If you try to add more, something will go wrong: you'll think you're adding clarity but actually be adding something else, or you really will be adding clarity but about the wrong thing. Either way, the whole suffers. In software, this kind of misguided aim at clarity can lead to extra objects, APIs with too many parameters, and unhelpful type systems. Often the clarity comes in the wrong layer or at the wrong level: <a href="an-argument-from-jimmy-koppel.html">this argument</a> is, again, relevant.</li>
<li>Suppose it's true that "it is rarely possible for a programmer to take an arbitrary class and derive a new, useful, and correct subtype from it, unless that subtype is of a very specific [intended] kind." What would follow from that? Compare Item 18 of Effective Java, where Bloch claims that "inheritance violates encapsulation" and famously advocates for composition over inheritance.</li>
<li>Alexander and his group once gathered 390 requirements for "what ought to be happening near" a ticket booth. I have never worked on a project where the requirements were not much more extensive than my intuition initially suggested. It's safe to assume there are more requirements than you think there are. (Relevant: <a href="https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/thisprojectwillonlytake.html">this case study</a> that recently made the rounds.)</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: Patterns of Software

<h2>Reading notes: The Inner Game of Tennis</h2>
The central thesis of the book--or at least what I most associate it with--is that progress in a skill like tennis comes primarily from improving one's self-observation.
This isn't the way that Gallwey puts it, but: consider self-evaluation as a supply chain. Its inputs are:
<ol>
<li>The willingness to observe oneself;</li>
<li>The ability to observe oneself;</li>
<li>The domain knowledge one applies to what is observed; and</li>
<li>The ability to use the results of that application for self-improvement.</li>
</ol>
I read Gallwey as making the claims that (1) and (2) are badly underrated; (3) is overrated; and (4) will often happen automatically.
Putting observation before analysis has benefited me across disciplines. In poker, I had what I consider my best World Series of Poker ever (as judged by the average quality of my play) not when my analytical skills were at their peak but when I hit my peak ability to "stay in the moment" and simply describe situations to myself as they happened. The correct betting decisions more or less emerged, unsummoned, after that. Computer people <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging">widely acknowledge that</a> simply describing a bug, as precisely as possible, often makes the solution obvious. It's no coincidence that the aforementioned World Series of Poker happened after I'd started seriously training myself as a programmer.
The villain of Inner Game, besides inattention and distraction, is the wrong kind of investment in self-narratives. Here's Galway on abandoning one's preferred style:
<blockquote>
The defensive player learns that he can hit winners; the aggressive one finds that he can also be stylish. I have found that when players break their habitual patterns, they can greatly extend the limits of their own style and explore subdued aspects of their personality.
</blockquote>
We are over-invested in a kind of conceptual learning that is easier to identify oneself with:
<blockquote>
We want to trust Self 1’s conceptual process of learning technique instead of Self 2’s learning from experience. Thinking that it was the obeying of an instruction that produced the good shot, ignoring the role that Self 2 plays, sets us up for disappointment when we give the same instruction yet the same good shot does not occur. Since we think the instruction was correct, the conclusion we come to is that not obeying it led to the error.
</blockquote>
Indeed, often people prefer to fail than to achieve a kind of success that feels insufficiently rooted in oneself:
<blockquote>
Why would one go back to letting Self 1 control the show if the results were so clearly less effective? I had to search myself for the answer. I realized that there was a distinctly different kind of satisfaction gained in the two methods of hitting the ball. When you try hard to hit the ball correctly, and it goes well, you get a certain kind of ego satisfaction. You feel that you are in control, that you are master of the situation. But when you simply allow the serve to serve itself, it doesn’t seem as if you deserve the credit.
</blockquote>
And this ties in to the point that is made so often elsewhere, that when failure is too closely connected to one's sense of self, it's easy to stop trying in order to prevent damage to one's ego:
<blockquote>
By not trying, they always have an alibi: "I may have lost, but it doesn’t count because I really didn’t try." What is not usually admitted is the belief that if they had really tried and lost, then yes, that would count. Such a loss would be a measure of their worth. Clearly this belief is the same as that of the competitor trying to prove himself. Both are Self 1 ego trips...
</blockquote>
I recommend Inner Game not just as a book about improving specific skills but as an insightful study of self-knowledge more generally. It's also short enough that the reward per page is high.

Reading notes: The Inner Game of Tennis

<h2>Reading notes: The Manager's Path</h2>
On the one hand, The Manager's Path is pretty conventional: it reads like a business book and it's structured like a business book. On the other hand, the experience of reading it is totally unlike that of reading most other business books. Fournier is clearly writing from real experience and expertise, and--however thoroughly the book was edited after its first draft--its origins as a <a href="https://nanowrimo.org">Nanowrimo</a> project show in the book's urgency. (In the best way.)
I'm reminded of the poker world, where every so often an expert decides to transcribe a lot of their expertise in book form, usually without much regard for the traditional menu of literary forms. Fournier is a much more disciplined and skilled writer than most poker players, but I'd still put this in that category.
Miscellaneous notes:
<ol>
<li>Fournier recommends budgeting 20% of a team's time for "generic sustaining engineering work." I take this as evidence for <a href="reading-notes-a-philosophy-of-software-design.html">my claim</a> that Ousterhout, if anything, shot too low when he suggested 10%-20% for (roughly) analogous purposes.</li>
<li>She notes that "a common dysfunction of technical teams is not shipping code." This is simple and profound. There are software-team-specific reasons for this, but most fundamentally, an underrated barrier to doing as much as possible is not doing anything. (See #6 <a href="on-productivity.html">here</a>.)</li>
<li>Here's a great sentence: "Think of process as risk management."</li>
<li>Here's a very good clause: "Code review is largely a socialization exercise..."</li>
</ol>
Highly recommended, even if you aren't particularly interested in becoming a software manager.

Reading notes: The Manager's Path

<h2>Reading notes: The Score Takes Care of Itself</h2>
If you're inclined to learn from books about business and about sports management and coaching, this is a good one. (And I think those books are underrated.)
The sections are, happily, very short. This makes the book readable and digestible. It feels a bit like reading a blog. The largest barrier to the book's digestibility is its reliance on less-vivid nouns and general description. When there are examples, they vivify the material--but those examples are rare. I don't associate football coaches with the tendency to avoid specifics, and it's worth speculating why the book reads like this. Conjectures:
<ol>
<li>Some high-performing people have the knack of reasoning about things at a more abstract level than the rest of us (while retaining the ability to act on that reasoning). Perhaps Walsh was one of them.</li>
<li>It's just how the ghostwriter writes.</li>
<li>The politics of football (and of a potential return to the NFL) prevented Walsh from discussing more people by name.</li>
<li>Walsh's grasp of those abstracta is in fact quite poor, and his success has more to do with "X's and O's" and less to do with character, management, and so on than the book describes. I strongly doubt this is the correct explanation here, but it's important to keep in mind when reading autobiographical material. There's a lot of autobiographical poker material, for example, in which success that actually came from doing a few basic things correctly is attributed to a profound understanding of psychological nuance, game theory, and so on.</li>
</ol>
Other notable bits from the book:
<ol>
<li>Walsh claims he might do less strategizing for a Super Bowl, because sticking to fundamentals becomes more important as the pressure and distractions intensify.</li>
<li>Part of his training of coaches was to make them practice coaching on each other.</li>
<li>The Walsh 49ers had a motto of "Commit; explode; recover (if you're wrong)!"; this is remarkably close to certain mottos of agile software development.</li>
</ol>

Reading notes: The Score Takes Care of Itself

<h2>Reading notes: The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles</h2>
This is a tough book to review! First, because it's arguably not a book: it's a bunch of Web pages at sbnation.com, and some of the narrative oomph comes not from words but from animated GIFs, Gmail screenshots, and the like. Second, because I learned about this book on Hacker News in <a href="https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/nobody-will-admit-the-best-novel">a post</a> that characterized it as "the best novel of our generation."
I am not an experimental fiction expert. But here are some things I think.
<ol>
<li>This is a successful and striking work. I expect to remember it for the rest of my life. The premise is effective and Jon Bois is skilled at changing tones and formats in order to both challenge and relieve his readers. It's a work of fiction with a good engine and a skilled driver.</li>
<li>But it's not a particularly great novel, and emphatically not the best novel of our generation.</li>
<li>Sports, and specifically football, taps into feelings that very little else can. (There's a tweet I think about often--unfortunately, I can't find it--that said something like: "Never forget how you felt after the first episode of Friday Night Lights.")</li>
<li>I probably ought to consume more experimental fiction. Jon Bois specifically is pretty well-acknowledged as a good and effective storyteller by now (his reputation reminds me a bit of pre-Nobel Bob Dylan's), but there's a whole world out there I know little of.</li>
</ol>