gwcoffey's reviews
520 reviews

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

5.0

It’s hard to overstate how excellent this book is. I’ve read a lot of Gleick, starting with Chaos when I was 17 years old. That book was formative for me. It made me want to be a writer, and to learn how to explain complex things beautifully.

I am a professional computer programmer, and so I have a decent background in the material covered by this book. I know Shannon’s work. I’ve read extensively about Turing and Babbage. And I’ve tried (and often failed) to find more to read about Lovelace. But still, even though nothing in this book was entirely unknown to me, I found it endlessly fascinating, and honestly even moving. Gleick is such a master of this kind of work. He pulls you in, fills your mind with ideas, and shows you why it matters.

This is a beautiful, informative, masterfully written book.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

3.0

This book came so highly recommended from a friend that I suppose my expectations were out of whack. Didion is a wonderful writer, and there are some real gems in here. But a lot of this lacks currency in 2023, and so I was honestly a little underwhelmed. But I think that’s a me-problem. In the right mindset I think it could do wonders.

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

5.0

This book is a minor miracle. (As I often do with a book this good, I read it in print and listened to the auido-book back to back.) It is just as beautiful and introspective as McCarthy’s best books, with fewer pretensions. (I find it interesting that McCarthy and Richard Powers—both men of immense linguistic ability—toned down the literary pretense as they aged, and perhaps got better for it.)

If you’re a plot person, this book may infuriate you. But I love its bold willingness to refuse to answer any story question, while trying along the way to answer so many things unanswerable.

Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

5.0

Is this the first time McCarthy has given us a female protagonist? I’m not sure. He’s certainly given us brilliant women—think the Dueña in All The Pretty Horses. But if I’m remembering right, every interesting woman he has written has served some story-purpose. She is an object of affection. She is a tool of exposition. While she may be deeply imagined, and even complex, we do not enter into her the way we do McCarthy’s male protagonists.

(Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. But this is a weakness.)

This is what makes Stella Maris so special. Finally, we get to see McCarthy bring us deep into the inner life of a woman. All the classic McCarthyisms are here: the language, the philosophy and science, the oppressive doubt.

This is a sad story about a remarkable woman brought down by her own brilliance. I see in her a person who wants to believe in something tangible. But who, when she picks that thing up, finds only paper and ash. Her yearning and her doubt are haunting and familiar. And the mental illness that is at the root of all this, well, you can’t help but turn that question inward.

It is a brilliant sad powerful work of imagination, unencumbered by traditional plot and made better for it. McCarthy, at 90-something, has earned the right to say just exactly what he wants to say, and I’m so glad he put it in the voice of this brilliant woman.

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund

5.0

This is not so much a book as a collection of images and ideas that somehow, against all odds, condense into something deeply thought-provoking. It’s a quick read, but one you’ll want to revisit and reconsider. The last page is an invitation to go back to the start and think about each page in a new way.

It is full of precise and concise descriptions of phenomena I think every human can probably recognize, but maybe not really put a name to. I especially loved this description of a psychological sensation I have known most of my life:

I have had the experience of looking at the world in a nonallusive manner. This state of mind comes on me suddenly, and I’m aware of my topographic position, and am newly alert to geometry. Suddenly the world seems a purely optical phenomenon—it is reduced to light and its vectors—and I have become the camera, rather than the photographer. Chronology is rendered moot, and the constituent fragments of the world are no longer subservient to my psychology, and self-consciousness, but are startlingly present at hand. There is nothing cold or unnatural in this state of being, but rather something strangely preconscious.

I’ve always called this feeling Jamais Vu but Mendelsund gets at the idea better here with the word my spellchecker keeps complaining about: “nonallusive”. Yes yes yes.

I could quote dozens of passages of equal intrigue, but instead I’ll say this: If you love to read, if you find the idea of “meaning” inscrutable, if you close your eyes, and you’re not quite sure what you see, then pick up a copy of What We See When We Read and dive in.

Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

4.0

Zweig is a genius and this little gem is funny, sweet, and devious. I adore this clueless mischievous little boy.

The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe by Steven Weinberg

4.0

This book was published in 1977 and revised in 1993, so it is definitely a little dated. But the period of time it covers was well understood at the time, so the information is still accurate.

I enjoyed every page. For me it strikes the right balance: not too technical that I can’t keep up, and not so basic that I feel talked down to. And unlike so many slightly-more-in-depth science books, it is very well written.

I loved this passage, after talking about a series of miscommunications, mis-interpretations, and missed opportunities along the way to understanding the early universe.

I have dwelt on this missed opportunity because this seems to me to be the most illuminating sort of history of science. It is understandable that so much of the historiography of science deals with its successes, with serendipitous discoveries, brilliant deductions, or the great magical leaps of a Newton or an Einstein. But I do not think it is possible really to understand the successes of science without understanding how hard it is—how easy it is to be led astray, how difficult it is to know at any time what is the next thing to be done.

Africa Is Not A Country: Breaking Stereotypes of Modern Africa by Dipo Faloyin

5.0

A remarkable book that everyone should read. For folks like me, it is an important history lesson about Africa and the devastating impacts of European imperialism. And for everyone, it is a bright, beautiful, touching love letter to Africa.

And I’ll give an honorable mention to the hilarious and sad send up of Hollywood’s two-dimensional take on Africa.

Regardless of plot: you must start your film with the camera high in the sky, surveying vast rolling grasslands that stretch until they simply cannot stretch any more. Let the camera hang still over the title sequence as our eyes settle on Real Africa. No signs of a modern, technologically advanced civilisation should visually block the view of these rolling plains: no tall buildings, paved roads, or illuminated billboards advertising expensive fragrances.

Land. We should just see land.

The sun should ideally be rising…

And from there it goes and goes, and you will never see so many movies the same way again.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

4.0

I’ve only read a little Gibson, but I love his imaginative future-tech worlds. And I especially love his inventive use of language. I think my favorite example of this is the way the characters in this book use the word “funny”. It has such a distinctive usage in this world, wich is so close to one way we would use it, but then not quite. It becomes a very believable micro-detail in this very-near-but-not-quite-current-future world.

It also makes up for a weak-ish plot with great characterization. I really liked the kind, understated reluctant hero.

I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, Vol. 1 by Marie Bashkirtseff

5.0

Marie Bashkirtsef painted one of my all-time favorite portraits. She also plays a role in one of my all-time favorite memoirs, I Await the Devil’s Coming. So I have had this, her teenage diary, on my TBR list for a long time.

Taken all together it’s a bit of a slog, but it is also at times totally engrossing. Marie is undeniably a natural writer, and she gives us a close portrayal of the life of a girl in the late 1800s in European society. She is dramatic (“I’m condemned to a slow martyrdom.”), funny (“I am the bravest when there’s nothing to be brave about.”), vain (“We were very beautiful, the two of us, my dog and I.”), judgemental (“Here is a woman who will pass her life in church and in bed.”), and sometimes surprisingly self-aware (“I don’t know whether I am truly in love or only amused.”).

The book gets its title from this delightful line about halfway through: “I am going to write instead of reading because I am the most interesting book of all.” Her ambition is on display all through the book (“I was born to be a remarkable woman.”, “I weary of my obscurity.”).

And she is expressive. Who has ever tried to write and not felt this:

I just read my pages from yesterday. Why can we not write as we think? Who will invent the art of reflecting, as in a mirror, all we think and feel? I thought I would find my memories from yesterday again—a picture of what was happening in me—but I found only some paper with ink on it!

Hanging over the whole thing is the reader’s sad awareness that this vibrant girl is destined to die young. It is a remarkable gift she has given us.