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…
Category: Type
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…
Journey by James A. Michener
Rating: 8.0/10. Fairly short novel set around 1896 during the Klondike Gold Rush, focusing on a group of English aristocrats who venture into Dawson City, not through any of the conventional routes, but through one of the most difficult routes overland from Edmonton and down the Mackenzie River. It is led by Lord Luton and…
The Bookseller of Inverness by SG Maclean
Rating: 7.5/10. A historical mystery novel set in the 1750s after the Battle of Culloden in the Scottish town of Inverness. The story takes place a few years after the battle where the Jacobites, the people of Scotland who supported the former Scottish King James, were defeated by the British, leading to depression in the…
Trust by Hernan Diaz
Rating: 7.9/10. Novel set in 1920s New York focused on a wealthy finance family, and it’s broken up into four parts telling the story from different perspectives. The first part is a novel “Bonds” and we start off with the story of Benjamin Rask, who is a young man from an aristocratic family and turns…
Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias
Rating: 7.0/10. Novel that is a work of Latin American magical realism by Guatemalan author and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Miguel Ángel Asturias. It is challenging to pinpoint exactly what is happening or what the book is about. Broadly speaking, it depicts the struggles between the indigenous Maya people and the maize-growers from a…