Reading Statistics

• Total pages read: 18031
• Avg. pages per month: 1502.58
• Avg. pages per week: 346.75
• Avg. pages per day: 49.40
• Longest book: A Pattern Language, 1166 pages
• Shortest book: Brunelleschi’s Dome, 165 pages
• Longest time to read a book: A Pattern Language, 48 days
• Shortest time to read a book: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, 1 days

In addition to the average number of pages, I also computed the distribution of the number of pages read each month. For this I assume that I read at a constant (i.e. the same number of pages per day). This is clearly not true, but it still shows the basic trends.

Finally, I’ve plotted a histogram of the lengths of the books I read. As one would expect, the largest buckets are between 200 and 400 pages.

Here is the complete list of books I read in 2009. The rows highlighted in yellow are books I reread this year, and those highlighted in green are books I listened to in audiobook form. In the later case I used Amazon for the number of pages. Of course, the number of pages is approximate, and I make no claims to consistency about things like handling front and end matter or different editions.

Update: I’ve added stars to those books that I particularly like.

• Omaha, NE*
• Asilomar, CA
• Ithaca, NY*
• Fairfax, VA*
• Mountain View, CA*
• Providence, RI
• Lyon, France
• Paris, France
• Memphis, TN

• Decoding the Universe, Charles Seife
• Postsingular, Rudy Rucker
• I’m Just Here for the Food, Alton Brown
• Blankets, Craig Thompson
• The Constant Gardener, John le Carre
• A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain
• The Practice of Programming, Brain Kernighan and Rob Pike
• Glut, Alex Wright
• Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
• Deep Economy, Bill McKibben
• Mistress of the Art of Death, Ariana Franklin
• Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson
• Oath of Fealty, Larry Niven and Jack Pournelle
• Farewell my Subaru, Doug Fine
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
• Suburban Nation, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
• Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
• The Architecture of Happiness, Alan de Botton
• Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins
• Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
• The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
• Black Hole, Charles Burns
• Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, eds.
• Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
• Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
• The Most Beautiful House in the World, Witold Rybczynski
• Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross
• WorldChanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century, Alex Steffen ed.
• A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan
• The Poisonwod Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
• The Edifice Complex, Deyan Sudjic
• Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks
• Anathem, Neal Stephenson
• The Option of Urbanism, Christopher Leinberger
• The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, David Bajo
• The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross
• The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
• Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Live of a Critic in Discuise, Ruth Reichl
• The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought the Down, Colin Woodard

• Omaha, NE*
• Ithaca, NY*
• Fairfax, VA*
• Vancouver, BC, Canada
• Niagara Falls, ON, Canada
• Toronto, ON, Canada
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Memphis, TN

We’ve officially decided to stay in the same house next year. There are some drawbacks (mostly temperature related), but we generally like the place and none of us really wants to deal with moving again. It’s also nice to be in a house as opposed to an apartment. I think we are going to try and plant a vegetable garden in the spring.

Summer

I’m definitely going to be in Ithaca for the summer, continuing to work on the games project. There were a couple of weeks there when I was trying to deal with applying for internships, but I think it will work out better to be at Cornell. It will be nice to have some good quality research time, and I’m looking forward to the chance to explore Ithaca and its environs in more hospitable weather.

Courses

Logic is pretty tough, but I suppose I should have expected as much from a grad level math course. I think I’ll make it through the course just fine, but I’m going to have to revisit my decision to minor in math. I like learning math, and I can certainly find other math courses I would like to take, but I’ll have to balance that with the extra work and stress that they tend to create.

Databases is also tough at the moment, though the work isn’t as intense. We’re starting with some very theoretical material, which is interesting but dense. Still, I’m enjoying the opportunity to work through some of the foundational material in my research area.

I’m Just Here for the Food, Alton Brown

I wouldn’t say that I’m much of a cookbook reader, but then this isn’t exactly a cookbook. Alton likes to discuss the science behind food, and he spends a lot of time debunking common misconceptions or coming up with creative ways of doing things. He covers searing, grilling, roasting, frying, boiling, braising, brining, and microwaving, as well as some details on sauces and eggs. Most of the techniques and recipes in the book are fairly complicated, but I like the fact that he provides a rational for every step. I probably won’t build a fire pit in the back yard — but at least I know why such a thing would be desirable. If you are interested in food, this is a fun read.

Bioshock

I finally broke down over break and installed Windows on my laptop using Apple’s Boot Camp. Ostensibly it’s to facilitate the C# development I need to do for my research, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered the gaming possibilities afforded by a dual-boot system. I’m not much of a gamer anymore, but I enjoy it from time to time, and Mac gaming situation has gotten progressively worse since the Intel transition.

I picked up Bioshock on sale for $25 on the strength of its reviews (and Wired’s piece), and I can heartily recommend it to fans of dystopian science fiction.

The game is set in the 1960s in an alternate reality where genetic modification has become commonplace. As the result of a plane crash, your character finds himself in the undersea city of Rapture, a sort

of Objectivist haven that allows people to pursue their interests without legal or ethical interference. Of course, things haven’t gone quite as planned, and you find the city in ruin and populated by twisted monsters addicted to genetic material.

Though the gameplay is fairly standard first person shooter fare, the setting and story are very well done. The voice acting is superb, and lends a great deal to the luscious art deco decor (think Batman’s Gotham City). The story seems to lag a bit midway through the game, but I’m hoping that it will pick back up.

All and all, it’s nice to see a game (an FPS, no less) with a sophisticated story that raises interesting ethical questions and is still fun to play.

Futurama, Season One

Like the Simpsons, Futurama was a formative show for many of my peers (it also shares writers with the Simpsons, and both were created by Matt Groening)

I was even more intrigued when I read a Wired article calling Futurama “The Geekiest Show on TV” and revealing that the writing staff contains a number of self-professed math geeks, many with PhDs in the sciences. As a self-respecting math geek myself, I had to check it out.

I got the first season, and I must admit that my reaction is mixed. Despite Wired’s proclamation, I’ve been somewhat disappointed with the “geekiness” of the show. I think my expectations were just too high. I was expecting xkcd, and got, well, the Simpsons. There are certainly some clever jokes, but there are also a lot of physical gags and thinly veiled scatological references.

I was pretty much ready to write the show off after watching the first half of the season, but I’m glad I didn’t. Once I stopped looking for references I started to appreciate the whimsy of the show. In some sense I had forgotten how to watch cartoons, and it took half a season to remember.

Futurama isn’t exactly a children’s show, but it does remind me of watching cartoons as a kid. Cartoon shows have a certain kind of creative freedom that other shows don’t, and it’s just kind of neat to see what the writers and illustrators come up with. A lot of the science fiction I’ve read/seen/played recently has either been dystopic or set in the near future, and it’s good fun to see a vision of the far future with flying cars and transport tubes and all the other stuff that the Jetsons promised us.

I’m not sure I’m going to rush out and buy the second season, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I pick it up somewhere along the way.

Blankets, Craig Thompson

I’ve long been intrigued by graphic novels, but I’ve read very few. I did read Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which tops pretty much every top 10 list I’ve seen, but I found it too preoccupied with the Cold War paranoia of the 1980s to really draw me in.

I decided it was time for me to try again, and this time I chose Blankets, another critical favorite. It’s a semi-autobiographical work about growing up in a religious family in rural Wisconsin that manages to touch on many of the coming-of-age themes. I sense it may be very generational in its appeal, but it’s beautifully written and illustrated, and it does a good job of portraying many of the trials (both real and imagined) of growing up.

(The sculpture above is by Claes Oldenburg — the same artist who did Spoonbridge and Cherry in Minneapolis. It’s the sculpture garden at the National Gallery.) 

Classes start tomorrow. This semester I’m planning on taking

• Logic
• Database Systems

 Hope it goes well.