Rating: 7.0/10. A fairly short classic novel, winning a Nobel Prize in literature, set in the 1930s in Japan. The novel opens with a train that emerges out of a tunnel into a snow country, or the northern coast of Japan, into an onsen hot springs town. The narrator, Shimamura, is from Tokyo, a wealthy…
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New Penguin Parallel Text Short Stories in Japanese by Michael Emmerich
Rating: 7.8/10. Several short stories with parallel facing text of various time periods – they tend to be rather bleak, and several of them are about suicide. The other ones mostly have themes of loneliness or of people being forgotten about by society. Sound of a Train Whistle in the Night – a short 2-pager,…
The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima
Rating: 8.0/10. A coming-of-age romance novel set in 1950s Japan, on a rural island sooo after WW2. The main character is a boy Shinji, around 18 years old who works as a fisherman, who quickly falls in love with Hatsue, a girl who actually came to the island. They both like each other, but her…
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Rating: 8.3/10. Fairly long classic American novel set in about 1840, about hunting a whale Moby Dick (the whale’s name, which is the title of the book) – it is quite dense but still doable to read with some help from references. It is broken into over 100 very short chapters, ranging from just one…
The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy
Rating: 7.5/10. A minimalistic novel in screenplay format that has only a dialogue between two characters called Black and White. The setting is that White is a depressed, educated professor who just tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train, and he is rescued by Black, a christian ex-convict who takes him…
The Odyssey by Homer translated by Emily Wilson
Rating: 8.8/10. An ancient Greek epic poem by Homer, I got this book after seeing Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie, which is a fairly accurate rendition (at least of the main characters and events). Overall, I found this much more enjoyable and easier to read than the Iliad, the other great Homeric epic poem, due to…
Two Old Women by Velma Wallis
Rating: 7.9/10. A fairly short novella about two old women of the Gwich’in tribe in Northern Alaska, following a folklore tale where the two old women are seen as complaining and the chief decides to leave them behind. The two women are 75 and 80 years old, and rather than sit down and die, they…
Ideas the Created the Future by Harry R. Lewis
Rating: 8.8/10 Anthology of famous and influential computer science papers from the beginning of the field until 1980, in chronological order. Each one is abridged to the most important sections, with a short introduction about its context and influence, but is otherwise relatively sparse in annotations or explanations. Reading the papers in chronological order, we…
The Dancing Girl of Izu by Yasunari Kawabata
Rating: 7.4/10. Collection of short stories by a young Kawabata when he was writing some of his earliest works. The first one is the most famous about first love and romance, and the next few get quite bleak about death and mortality that the author experienced as a child and I gave up reading about…
Bandit Algorithms by Tor Lattimore and Csaba Szepesvári
Rating: 8.5/10. The standard theoretical textbook about bandits, written with a heavy focus on theory over practice, and it’s quite comprehensive, with many proofs as well as notes and literature references. It first covers the vanilla multi-armed bandit case and then covers adversarial bandits, lower bounds, contextual bandits, etc. Some themes that are common throughout…
The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
Rating: 8.3/10. Warning: this review contains major spoilers. A heartwarming novel set from the point of view of a cat called Nana. In the introduction, he used to be a stray cat living in the street, and he is hit by a car and then rescued by a man, Satoru, who takes him in. Throughout…
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Rating: 7.3/10. Fairly short novel of about 200 pages that won the 2024 Booker Prize. It takes place over a period of a few days with six astronauts aboard the International Space Station – four men and two women of different nationalities. Throughout the book, nothing much happens; there is no drama or much of…