gwcoffey's reviews
520 reviews

Hestia Strikes a Match by Christine Grillo

4.0

I feel like this line captures the vibe of this whole book:

I barely knew how to receive the sweetness of it.

This is a plainly written, funny, self-aware, and relatable book that looks askance at every good thing in a world that seems increasingly overrun by Very Bad Things.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

5.0

I’ve of course read this before. Like most people I read it in school. And then at least twice again since then. Most recently I listened to the audiobook. It was read beautifully by Selma Blair.

I don’t think I need to explain why this book is worth reading. Every human being should read it more than once. Anne has such a clear, authentic voice, and her story is devastatingly sad in that it is so full of hope and promise cut short by something so crass as political hatred.

When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?

I hope so, oh, I hope so very much, because writing allows me to record everything, all my thoughts, ideals and fantasies.

She got it but it isn’t enough. Anne deserved so much more.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

4.0

I have an affinity for stories like this. Before there was some huge multi-billion dollar industry operated out of boardrooms with massive glitzy ad campaigns and fortune 500 branding deals, there were a few wild, passionate, brilliant people in a dingy room somewhere doing the seemingly impossible. I’m a big fan, for instance, of folklore.org, a website that tells the stories behind the creation of the Macintosh computer.

Masters of Doom is folklore.org for the PC gaming universe. I had a vague sense of the broad strokes here, but as someone who was never a gamer (and was a Mac user during the time this all unfolded) I didn’t know any of the details. Of course I know John Carmack. Even back in the early 2000s I read his .plan file like almost everybody else. And I’ve always had respect for his brilliance and deep hacker ethic. So it was a joy to learn more about his life, and the outsized role he played in the birth of modern gaming. And honestly, if you had asked me who John Romero was, I probably would have said the name sounds familiar.

This was a thorough, engaging book, and Wil Wheaton voicing the audiobook was an inspired choice.

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

4.0

This is a beautifully imagined, wholly original love letter to Lagos, Nigeria in the form of a science fiction alien invasion story. But not the kind of alien invasion you’re probably imagining. Lagoon asks more questions that it answer (in a good way!) and it is shot through with pride and hope for Okorafor’s Nigerian home-away-from-home.

What is that sweet taste I feel with my feet? It is patriotism, loyalty. Not to the country of Nigeria but to the city of Lagos. Finally. Maybe it will flow and spread like a flood of clean water. What a story that would be.

I think what I liked best is the heavy dose of Nigerian culture coursing through the book. Not only do we get glimpses of places, foods, names, and myths, but Okorafor sets loads of dialog in the Naijá language, also known as Nigerian Pidgin. This can be confusing for an english speaker, but you can sort of make a lot of it out given its similarity to English. And it is handled well, so it doesn’t interfere with understanding of the story at all. And it is a delight. (Pro tip: there’s a dictionary at the end of the book defining a few key words.)

And a hat tip to Okorafor for giving me this in-story mnemonic for remembering how to pronounce Lagos correctly: “…if there is one city that rhymes with ‘chaos,’ it is Lagos.”

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

4.0

So much better than I expected. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing certainly is an interesting breakdown of some big and important hacks, and a clearly written primer on “cyber” security. But it is also by far the most level-headed, convincingly argued, thoughtful take on digital security policy I’ve ever seen.

I’m not a security expert. But I regularly take the advice of people who are, and I’ve been building software systems on the open internet for almost 30 years, so I have a pretty solid grounding in the fundamentals here. In Fancy Bear, Shapiro reshaped my thinking on policy topics. And he did it through five stories of hacking, by weaving much more fundamental ideas into the narrative so convincingly that the conclusions feel inevitable. An extraordinary read.

(Aside: I wish I had read this one in print. Alas, the audiobook performance has more little inflection errors than I can forgive. And listening to someone who doesn’t know programming read short code snippets aloud is a little grating.)

Iwoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon by Steve Wozniak

4.0

This autobiography is co-authored by Gina Smith, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m sure Smith did major work to make this into a cohesive story. But she also left Wozniak’s distinctive voice entirely intact. Every page reads like Wozniak talks, and if you’ve ever heard him interviewed you know what this means: childlike wonder and a total lack of pretension, shot through with delightful dorkiness. It makes iWoz a breeze and a joy to read.

Isaac Newton by James Gleick

4.0

This is more than a Biography (although it is a good one of those). It is an engrossing investigation into the state of and process of modern science in what was arguably its earliest days. This quote from John Maynard Keynes near the end of the book struck me:

Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

Gleick is a master of this kind of writing. Isaac Newton is unsurprisingly excellent.

The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements by David Berlinski

5.0

I listened to this in audio and loved it so much I had to immediately read it in print as well. It’s a wonderful book. You might imagine a book about geometry would be boring. (I would never imagine that, but I’m led to believe I’m an outlier here…) But Berlinski is such a masterful writer, that his words are as pleasurable to read as they are interesting. I suspect only a small percentage of the world is particularly interested in how Euclid fits in to the history of mathematics. And a smaller percentage still has the mathematical expertise to write so deeply about it. But I would not have guessed anyone on earth who ticked both those boxes would also write with such style. Take, for instance:

“What is, is,” Parmenides says, and as for what is not, “it is not.”

It is difficult to imagine an objection being framed. Did anyone in the fifth century BC propose that what is, is not, or that what is not, is? Yet from the premise that nothing is, after all, nothing, Parmenides drew the conclusion that there is no void between atoms, because it makes no sense to say of a void that it is.

Indeed.

This is not a biography (how could it be?) And it is not Euclid fan-fiction. But it does have a reverence for Euclid and what he accomplished, while at the same time probing what, exactly, that accomplishment is.

The quest for unity will continue, and, of course, it will always fail. And this, too, we know. Whatever the form of unity mathematicians acquire, the world’s diversity will in time overwhelm them, as it overwhelms us all.

This reminded me of a favorite passage from Blood Meridian:

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.

All I can say to both of these is: Amen.

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

2.0

Alan Turing was a remarkable and accomplished man who was cruelly used by society, and I appreciated learning more details about his life. That said, for my tastes this biogrophy is a little over-long and dry. When it finally did open up in the last chapter and began to have an opinion, I found it unconvincing.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

4.0

My kid Isabel loved this book as a teenager, although I’m not sure they ever really told me. We did watch the film together at the time, on Isabel’s recommendation. But it didn’t resonate with me much. (I think this has as much to do with my hangup on Emma Watson’s acting in general as anything else, but I digress…) Recently we had dinner together, and they told me how much this book meant to them at the time. I honestly felt a little sorry that I hadn’t picked up on this, so we could have shared that experience together. I’m not sure if I was being a dolt, or if Isabel was keeping this one close to their heart.

At any rate they recently asked me if I would read it and I of course said yes.

I can see why this book resonated. It is very good. I love a first-person narrative. I love an epistolary novel. And I love a distinctive voice. This book is all three, and it makes it deeply engaging and a breeze to read. I stayed up too late finishing, work be darned. Charlie’s hyper-simplistic unpretentious language makes his powerful thoughts stand out all the more, which is quite a feat. He’s a philosopher who writes like a 15-year-old boy, and it totally works.

I think the most striking thing about this story is how modern the boy-girl dynamics feel. Somehow I wouldn’t have guessed even a very good book written in 1999 would say something like this:

She said I was the most sensitive boy she’d ever met, which I didn’t understand because really all I did was not interrupt her.

Let alone

tell a story of sexual abuse that doesn’t focus on girls.

But all that aside, to me this is most fundamentally a book about what it feels like to be a watcher, a listener, an observer of the social universe. This is something that I can identify with, and I found it entirely authentic. And this book goes way deeper than I was prepared for. Like near the end, when Sam gets frank with Charlie:

You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things.

It cuts deep.

Thank you Isabel for encouraging me to pick this one up.