Recent Books -- Rabbi I, Darkness Outside Us, Cronin, Time, Big Things, Owls of the Eastern Ice
15 May 2023
- Friday The Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman. Decided to try this classic series. Interesting peek into the community, but the story wasn’t compelling.
- The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer. Should like it but didn’t like main character and didn’t want to learn any more about him.
- The Twelve and THe City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. OK I didn’t think I would finish this series but the story was compelling, and the third book really elevated the series.
- The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. The first third was great, knocking down our perception of time. Then he lost me with his “blurring” analogy which just didn’t resonate.
- How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Initially I reacted poorly to this book, the author is a fan of extensive planning ala “waterfall” software projects, and I have seen too much of that. But he is a little more nuanced, he embraces the iterative model of software development, his notion of “planning” embraces a lot of the early iteration and trial in software development, he would even include early product releases as planning. He also discusses the idea that an exhaustive plan can be an impediment to getting great projects done – if we all realized the true costs and time requirements of some projects, we would never start them, they would never get done. Overall a mostly balanced discussion and he has a lot of data to back his views.
- Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan C. Slaght. Quite the tale of a naturalist’s adventures in the far east of Russia. I didn’t realize how undeveloped this part of Russia is. Makes the Olympic Peninsula seem cosmopolitan.
