{"id":6669,"date":"2017-01-10T08:28:27","date_gmt":"2017-01-10T15:28:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=6669"},"modified":"2018-03-29T13:02:47","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T20:02:47","slug":"what-ive-been-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/10\/what-ive-been-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"What I’ve Been Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s some of the books I\u2019ve read lately:<\/p>\n

Flash Boys<\/a>\"\" – Michael Lewis\u2019s book about high-frequency trading and Wall Street corruption. I\u2019m quite envious of Lewis\u2019s ability to take a complicated story that hinges on weird financial derivatives and somehow make it a page-turner.<\/p>\n

The Undoing Project<\/a>\"\" – Also by Lewis, this one covers Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky\u2019s scientific partnership. I\u2019ve become increasingly fond of well-written biographies as a way of understanding history and science. Seeing how their discoveries were made, and eventually led to a Nobel prize, helps me understand the science more than if it is discussed apart from its discovery.<\/p>\n

The Geography of Thought<\/a>\"\" – I went back and forth on whether I agreed or disagreed with the thesis of this book. The basic idea is that East Asians and Westerners think differently. Part of me feels like this is almost trivially true (after all, I believe people in different professions think differently<\/a>, even when they share all other cultural aspects), but part of me remained unconvinced.<\/p>\n

The generalizations being made felt somewhat cherry-picked. Maybe I\u2019ve been reading too much Andrew Gelman<\/a>, but I found myself wondering how many forking paths and degrees of freedom some of their experiments contained. I left feeling like East\/West thinking differences likely exist, but I\u2019m suspicious that they conform to the story the authors suggest.<\/p>\n

Buddhisms: An Introduction<\/a>\"\" – I\u2019ve been digging into Eastern religions more lately, with an emphasis on Buddhism. One of the challenges I\u2019ve found is that the Buddhism as promoted in the West often seems very different from the Buddhism I see practiced in Asian countries. This book was great as providing a context for how Buddhism started as a religion, its diverging branches and the varieties of beliefs and practices around the world today.<\/p>\n

The Gene: An Intimate History<\/a>\"\" – Another great book. I enjoyed Emperor of All Maladies<\/a>\"\" by Muhkerjee, and this book was even more interesting. It suffered a bit of controversy by a New Yorker article written by Muhkerjee which raised some questions<\/a>, but it has since gotten a lot of coverage and I haven\u2019t seen anyone objecting to the science in the actual book.<\/p>\n

In Other Languages…<\/h2>\n

In addition to reading in English, I\u2019ve also tried to maintain a little reading in some of the languages I speak to keep them up. Here\u2019s two I\u2019ve finished in other languages.<\/p>\n

The Martian<\/a>\"\" (El Marciano) – I read this book in Spanish. Overall I found it enjoyable, if somewhat less dramatic than the movie version. I really hope engineering science fiction becomes a new genre.<\/p>\n

The Three-Body Problem<\/a>\"\" (\u00e4\u00b8\u2030\u00e4\u00bd\u201c) – My first complete book I read in Chinese. I read this in my Pleco<\/a> reader, so I could easily look up words I didn\u2019t know. This kind of assisted reading was very helpful in bridging the gap between graded readers (which are usually boring) and real novels in Chinese (which are usually hard). I\u2019m currently about 2\/3rds the way through Moyan\u2019s Frog<\/a>\"\" (\u00e8\u203a\u2122) which will soon be my first novel read on paper with minimal dictionary assistance.<\/p>\n

For past reading, see my previous lists here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s some of the books I\u2019ve read lately: Flash Boys – Michael Lewis\u2019s book about high-frequency trading and Wall Street corruption. I\u2019m quite envious of Lewis\u2019s ability to take a complicated story that hinges on weird financial derivatives and somehow make it a page-turner. The Undoing Project – Also by Lewis, this one covers Israeli […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3,682],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6669","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-personal-development","7":"category-nc-learning","8":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat I've Been Reading - Scott H Young<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/10\/what-ive-been-reading\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What I've Been Reading - Scott H Young\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Here\u2019s some of the books I\u2019ve read lately: Flash Boys – Michael Lewis\u2019s book about high-frequency trading and Wall Street corruption. 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