2021-10-24

Reading books

This post is meant to encourage me to read a bit more (paper books). By the way, I thought I was reading four books simultaneously, but when I put them next to each other it turned out to be seven.

Form left to right (writer-title(year) pages read-total pages):

Daniele Benedettelli - Creating Cool Mindstorms NXT Robots(2008) 24-575
Leo Tolstoj - Oorlog en Vrede(1869, NL translation 1973) 115-462
Dirk De Wachter - De kunst van het ongelukkig zijn(2019) 35-101
Allen/Fonagy/Bateman - Mentaliseren(2008/2019 edition) 30-368
LEGO and philosophy(2017) 56-226
Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, the mole, the fox and the horse(2019)
Michael Collins - Carrying the Fire(1974) - finished

Personal goal: finish at least three more of these before 2022.

I just finished Michael Collins - Carrying the Fire and it took me five weeks, which I consider a bit too long for a 470-ish pages book. It was a very good book though. If you're into space travel, then I would definitely recommend it. It also proves how the Sixties was vastly different to today, for example of the fourteen astronauts selected in 1963, four died during training. Two of the nine also died. Such numbers are unacceptable in 2021, even for 'dangerous' jobs.

The Daniele Benedettelli book is about programming Finite State Machines using Lego robots. I don't know much about programming, but this looks like fun. Thing is I need to build some Lego robots (like this one) to continue this book.

And I probably need to start from page 1 again in War and Peace because of the many characters that I forgot.

Some other books that I read the past three years are:

Celestin-Westreich/Celestin - Observeren en Rapporteren
Dick Swaab - Ons creatieve brein
Dirk De Wachter - Borderline Times
Dirk De Wachter - De wereld van De Wachter
Etienne Vermeersch - Over God
Etienne Vermeersch - Provencaalse gesprekken
Jan Van de Craats - Basisboek wiskunde
Jude Woodward - The US vs China
Paul Verhaeghe - Autoriteit
Paul Verhaeghe - Identiteit
Randall Munroe - Thing Explainer
Randall Munroe - What If
Rebecca Smethurst - Space, 10 things you should now
Robert Bly - De Wildeman
Terry Goodkind - Law of Nines
Terry Goodkind - Severed Souls
Terry Goodkind - The first Confessor
Terry Goodkind - The Omen Machine
Terry Goodkind - The Third Kingdom
Terry Goodkind - Warheart
Thomas D'ansembourg - Stop met aardig zijn

Most of it non-fiction apparently. I really enjoyed 'Borderline Times' and both books of Paul Verhaeghe and Dick Swaab. I couldn't really get into Robert Bly or Thomas D'Ansembourg (but collaborative communication gives me a lot of insight in people).

2 comments:

Paul Cobbaut said...

Personal update; goal achieved in a little over two weeks:

Dirk De Wachter - De kunst van het ongelukkig zijn(2019) FINISHED!
LEGO and philosophy(2017) FINISHED!
Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, the mole, the fox and the horse(2019) FINISHED!

Now reading:
Allen/Fonagy/Bateman - Mentaliseren(2008/2019 edition) 166!-368
Urbanus - En van waar dit allemaal komt 1-511

Paul Cobbaut said...

Personal update 4 January 2021:

Urbanus - En waar dit allemaal van komt: FINISHED
Sid Meier's Memoir - FINISHED
Sabine Hossenfelder - Lost in Math: 43-246