Kevin's Social Blog: 2019

Ordered by most recently listened to, first.

Audiobooks

Queue:

The Path to Power : The Years of Lyndon Johnson III (1982) - Robert A. Caro
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III (2002) - Robert A. Caro
Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones (2018) - James Clear

How Google Works (2014) - Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

The plural of anecdote is data
Minimum of 7 direct reports
Hippo (highest paid person's opinion) and tenure-ocracy

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (2015) - Lee Hyeon-seo
Our Homesick Songs (2018) - Emma Hooper

"Molly became ill with sea-fever from looking at nothing but water for so long...." Is this a thing?

Trinity: A Novel (2018) - Louisa Hall
IQ (2016) - Joe Ide
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010) - Elif Batuman
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019) - Casey Cep

On her drinking: "The daughter of one of the driest men in Monroe County, whose oldest sister wouldn't even consume caffeine, had grown into a woman who couldn't say no to scotch or vodka, or failing that, to whatever happened to be on hand."
The two lions outside the New York Public Library have names: Patience and Fortitude
The only good thing about Introductions is that in some cases they delay the dose to come.

In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth (2019) - Jack Goldsmith

The Grapevine: The first Grapevine magazine was published in July 1938. It's currently published by The Society Of Former Special Agents Of The FBI
Hoffa allergic to dyes, which explains why he wore white socks

The Bluest Eye (1970) - Toni Morrison

"And you look like the north side of a southbound mule"

Beloved (1987) - Toni Morrison
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010) - Nicholas Carr

Private reading vs. vocal reading
Intelligent and public minded

The Nickel Boys (2019) - Colson Whitehead
Sula (1973) - Toni Morrison

Kentucky wonders

Song of Solomon (1977) - Toni Morrison
Exhalation: Stories (2019) - Ted Chiang

A wonderfully written book
"And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself."
"The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all."

High School (2019) - Tegan Quin and Sara Quin

While playing the NES Super Mario: "Isn't is weird he's collecting mushrooms? ... Mario is stoned, too." I ... had never considered that angle

Acid for the Children (2019) - Flea
The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future (2018) - Andrew Yang
American Spy: A Novel (2019) - Lauren Wilkinson

Partially complete
"You want a drink? / Yeah, I could do with a little taste on the place."
Cajun coonass
Mules combination of wary and intelligence

An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up from My American Dream (2018) - Julián Castro

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) - Daniel H. Pink

Periodic tracking via pager (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons (2019) - Ben Folds

Ccreative visualization: Being crazy saps energy
What's been good for the music, hasn't always been so good for the life - Phone In A Pool
Fudgies: a not-so-endearing term for tourists from Sourthern Michigan vacationing in Northern Michigan. The word was coined by Mackinac Island locals who made their living selling their homemade fudge to tourists and then mocking them for buying it
The literal translation for cul de sac was "the ass or bottom of the bag"

Last Witnesses: An oral history of the children of World War II (2019) - Svetlana Alexievich

Open mouth so not deafened
Important work

Inland (2019) - Téa Obreht
Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide (2019) - Tony Horwitz

Mothman legend (Point Pleasant, West Virginia
Freedonia Marx brothers
Always get travelers insurance

How to Read the Air (2010) - Dinaw Mengestu

"And do you know why? Because it's easier and cheaper to starve people to death than shoot them."
"... before a family secret or past can be revealed there has to be a family to begin with, and what we were was something closer to a jazz trio than a family--a performance group that got together every now and then to play a few familiar notes before dispersing back to their real, private lives."

The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California (2019) - Mark Arax

Incredible book; bravo
Cuties: "The Cutie wasn't one piece of fruit but three varieties of mandarins: the Clemenule, the Tango and the Murcott. Each variety had its own flavor and ripened at a different time. But by marketing all three as one brand, Resnick and Evans covered multiple seasons. They made consumers believe, through tens of millions of dollars in advertising, that a spring Cutie was the same fruit as a winter Cutie. If the November Cutie was drier, the shopper assumed it was happenstance. If the March Cutie was sweeter and jucier, the shopper figured it was the way the fruit was supposed to be."
"Sadly, by the looks of things, this orchard won't be able to ride out the drought." / "This is a guy on his uppers ... he may lose his place." / "Uppers?" / "Yeah, he lost his lower teeth from grinding. Now all he's got left are the uppers."
"Breeding, though, is only half the trick of altering the taste and durability of the table grape. The other half of the revolution ... is ... pumping calcium into the tissues of both varieties to boost their natural flavors and enhance their ability to ward off fungal disease."
Ghastly description of community banding together to clear jackrabbits from land

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (2018) - Christopher Andrew

Napoleon natively spoke Corsican, not French
Coffee houses sedition

D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II (2019) - Sarah Rose
Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) - Daniel Kahneman

Poor reduced loss
Premortem
3 features of the weather wine
Perverse nasty reward
What you see is all there is

Seriously... I'm Kidding (2011) - Ellen DeGeneres

I got you a hug
Little endorphin Annie
Funficult
Coy pond

A Politics of Love: A Handbook for a New American Revolution (2019) - Marianne Williamson
Becoming Superman: My Journey From Poverty to Hollywood (2019) - J. Michael Straczynski

Reactive attachment disorder (RAD)
Contrasts civil rights horror with Hollywood films
At their core all bullies are cowards
Depth perception issues when driving
"He was so over the top that suddenly I got it: style was the pacing and flow of one word to another to create a melody that would carry the images, characters, and narrative straight to the brain, a specific, practiced rhythm that could be slowed or quickened depending on the mood or purpose of the story. Voice was who the writer actually was beneath it all: their attitude, point of view, and personality. A writer might move between a variety of styles—hard-boiled noir, gothic, baroque—but the same intelligence informed the story at every step. Literary styles can pass in and out of favor, or be shared by different writers (as Lovecraft borrowed stylistic tools from Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen), but a writer’s voice is distinctly his or her own; it’s a one-off. Style was the clothes; voice was the body."
Jefferson coat boy
Chains and stakes
Harlan water bed
UC Davis vet donation

Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (2017) - Paul Hawken

The seaweed, Asparagopsis taxiformis, helps cows burp less, produce more milk

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive (2019) - Stephanie Land

"I cringed, but part of the training video had proved to be incredibly useful: every space, every room, every floor, took on a gridlike map laid over it. Merry Maids instructed their cleaners to work in one direction: from left to right, top to bottom. Whenever I cleaned anything from then on, I could never get the video out of my mind, starting in the upper left corner, working my way across and down until the job was complete."

No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir (2019) - Ani DiFranco

Experimentation leads to unpredictable results and is not the path to surefire success but it is a path to discovery and discovery is way more fun
Melodrama of the burning of the Trico factory fire on Christmas night
Father: Eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired
On the guitar: In fact, I might even say it's a percussion instrument first
"Oh yeah, that was my 'r' period"
The act of sharing songs with people while looking straight into their eyes, that was what compelled me
I was simply requesting that they dump all the high end on the guitar EQ and pump the low end until it was somewhere in the vicinity of massive...My scene was to literally low-pass the guitar, starting the roll-off at about 6 kHz, and then crank up the bottom at 100, 80, even down to 60 kHz (a sub-harmonic frequency usually reserved for bass and kick drums)
Poet Sekou Sundiata
Those who sit furthest from the center of power, see it clearest
"...dairy was not a thing that my skin can deal with"
Would you want to be judged solely on your worst moment? No. Then that is not the way you should judge others. That is the wisdom of the defense attorney
Pete Seeger: unassuming power came from a calm sense of purpose and a palpable lack of fear
Bob Dylan: Bob felt like a man who lived in fear that someone would discover and expose him as a fraud,” she writes. “I am not saying he is a fraud. On the contrary, I believe his art to be a great gift. I’m just saying there is a difference between open and closed. The man forced to guard his legend carefully in order that he always have something to hide behind, no matter how brilliant he is, is not as powerful to me as the man who stands out in the open, naked and unarmed.”
First California gig: UCSC KAZU radio show
Wire recording instrument
"Exhaustion, I discovered, is not the worst thing to walk out on stage with. Exhaustion is like a drug that serves to cancel the usual routines of stage fright and self-consciousness. Like grief or depression, it cuts right through everything and changes your overarching perspective on the world, rendering things that rendering things that used to matter, meaningless."
Cat girl: Her charm built as I became increasingly impressed by her level of restraint until one night, at some bar, it was I who finally approached her. I was something like a cat myself, which is to say, if you pulled me onto your lap, I would most likely squirm and jump down, but if you sat there long enough with the right energy, \I would eventually jump into your lap and then it was on.
"...the mythical hero's journey... The point of the story, if any, is not to come through the victor but to come through changed."
Maceo Parker (American funk and soul jazz saxophonist)
."..Wesley's on Planet live album, Groove, was Maceo one of Parker, our favorite Pee Wee records Ellis, to and spin Fred in the van...It's the kind of live album that transports you right to where the party's at, which for long drives is quite a blessing."
Life on Planet Groove
Adam Lomax (American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century)
Telegram from Dr. Martin Luther King to Pete Seeger: "Hope is like a teacup held aloft while swimming across an ocean of trouble. Who amongst us can possibly make it shore to shore? Swimming with just one arm? None of us. That's why it's a relay. Think of it! Some swim through storms."
"Whatever the thing is that you are resisting the most, whatever thing will be the most painful, that is the thing you must do"
PMS and creativity: should have a more meaningful term attached to it. To me PMS feels like a window. Yes. Grief is a window and through it you see things. I will hereby refer to this time of my cycle when I can't sleep for days on end and I'm full of turmoil and darkness (but also great vision) as: The Window.

This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class (2017) - Elizabeth Warren

One breath rule: a manager was allowed "one breath" before he passed the information up the line to his own manager
Labor Omnia Vincit: Hard Work Conquers All - inscription at the AFL-CIO headquarters

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006) - Carol Dweck

Fixed vs growth mindset
Yet: "'OMG, I can't do that.' They knew how to take tests and get A's, but they didn't know how to do this--yet. They forget the yet."
Somebody nobody syndrome
Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.c., reported that the ancient Persians used a version of Sloan's techniques to prevent groupthink. Whenever a group reached a decision while sober, they later reconsidered it while intoxicated.
There's a French expression that reads, "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner." To understand all is to forgive all.
Praise effort not the person
She then explained how every note has to have a beautiful beginning, middle, and end, leading into the next note. And he thought, “Wow! If I can do it there, I can do it everywhere."
“I never felt judged again. Never. Every time I get that critique, I tell myself, ‘Oh, that’s their job,’ and I get to work immediately on my job.”
Alex Rodriguez, one of the best players in baseball, is not infected with success. “You never stay the same,” he says, “You either go one way or the other.”
“What mistake did you make that taught you something?”

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (2017) - Jaron Lanier

Pixel: means "picture element"
John Cage
Ivan Sutherland's (earlier) "Best Computer Demo of All Time"/"Best Demo Ever" vs. Doug Englebart's "aThe Mother of All Demos"
No great way to integrate science and politics: lesson from anti-nuclear activism
Dodge Dart stories
Drumming with Feynman
Santa Cruz lifestyle
Hackers: creation; Crackers: destruction
Hackers vs. suits: do not trust suits
Highest input/output: tongue (output), optic nerve (input)
Timothy Leary smuggling
Unaesthetic silicon valley
Octagonal building (?) join
Falling asleep waking up in vr

Wise Guy: Lessons from a Life (2019) - Guy Kawasaki

Laugh out lessons
Ménière's disease
Surfboard tradeoffs: Speed, stability, maneuverability
Pursue joy
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006) - Carol Dweck (available via Overdrive/Libby)
If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit (1938) - Brenda Ueland (recommended via Overdrive/Libby)
Leave better than found it
Almost ended up a salary man
Integration
~~Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) - Daniel H. Pink (available via Overdrive/Libby)~~
Canva
Sales: Marketing, finance, or engineering arguments ... each may resonate differently

In Pieces (2018) - Sally Field

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” - Carl Jung
"Or rats' feet over broken glass." - The Hollow Men, by T S Eliot, as descriptive of how she felt growing up in her household
Rick Field worked with Feynman for eight years
"I just wanted you to know, Sally, you're first-rate." Martin Ritt
What's the worst time for an actor? Both working and not working

The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms (2019) - Naoko Abe

Famous photo: Chiran high school girls waving farewell with cherry blossom branches to a taking-off kamikaze pilot
Cherry ideology, as part of nationalist right
Yama-zakura: Yama (mountain) + sakura (cherry trees)
Thousands of yama-zakura planted along the Tamagawa Josui canal (Koganei)
"To keep the cherries alive, Ingram usually placed them in moistened moss inside a shallow lidless box. Once they had sprouted, he would sprinkle the new foliage using an old hairbrush twice a day, dipping the bristles in water and then shaking them over the plants to imitate anything from a drizzle to a thunderstorm."
Farmers planted rice when cherries bloom

Leonardo da Vinci (2017) - Walter Isaacson
Nine Perfect Strangers (2018) - Liane Moriarty

"Do you know the only difference between fear and excitement is the exhalation?" asked Napoleon. "When you’re afraid you hold the air in the top part of the lungs. You need to exhale. Like this. Ahhhhh." He put his hand to his chest and demonstrated with a long, slow breath out. "Like that sound people make after a firework explodes. Ahhhhh."
A master who lived as a hermit on a mountain was asked by a man, “What is the way?” and the master said, “What a fine mountain this is.” The man felt frustrated. He said, “I am not asking you about the mountain, but about the way!” The master said, “So long as you cannot go beyond the mountain, my son, you cannot reach the way.”
Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you're starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it.

We're Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True (2017) - Gabrielle Union

"I flashed to the advice my mom had given my older sister and me for how to handle anyone who wanted to mug us or worse. 'You know what you do, right? ... You say ‘Shit, shit bastard!’ That’s what you do.' Shit, shit bastard. She thought a woman spewing out a string of nonsense swears would shock an assailant into confused submission. To this day my sisters and I will just text those words to each other, or leave 'Shit, shit bastard' on each other’s voice mails."
"Issues of colorism run so deep in the African American community, but more and more I see it spring up on social media as #teamlightskin versus #teamdarkskin."
"She asked me again, pointedly this time. Like a drill sergeant. 'What makes you happy?' I had nothing."
"We always internalize the things that happen to other people in terms of how it will affect us."

Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime (2014) - Ron Stallworth

NORAD visit

Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War (2018) - Molly Crabapple

Mark Twain: "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear."
"In the Middle East, whenever an institution included the word security in its name, it meant mafioso-style thuggery and violence, just as the presence of the word democratic in a political party's name always indicated tyranny."
"As the poet Nizar Qabbani pointed out, birds don't need visas."
"What could unite Syrians, I wondered? Repression seemed the only practical answer. But weren't these divisions vestiges of repression in the first place?"
"'Syrians have become soil.' At the time, it sounded to me like a meaningless sentence, until I figured it out later; she probably meant that we were already dead."

Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World (2014) - Kirsten Gillibrand

Tina nickname
You need 50 percent plus one to like you
Lots of colorful language: Ef 'em, etc.
"Now this older congressman was saying, 'Most members of Congress--their children do not even speak to them, or they hate them.' ... 'You are the only one who can protect your family here, and that means putting them first when when you schedule your time. You're going to have to stand in front of your twenty-two-year-old scheduler, whose job it is to schedule every minute of your day, and protect your family. Nobody else will. You don't want to wake up years from now and find your family is gone.' To this day, that was the single most important piece of advice I have been given about serving in Congress."
Kirsten was involved with Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court recommendation
How senators vote: in-person, colored cardboard card, or anonymously via a hotel key-like card followed by a button push
Kirsten on softball team with Tulsi Gabbard

Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance (2018) - Bernie Sanders
United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good (2016) - Cory Booker

What would I do if I could not fail?
His mom: "How are you looking at the world and what it has in store for you--with fear or faith? ... fear cuts off possibilities, faith expands them; fear locks doors, faith opens them; fear hides, but faith takes risks."
Ms. Jones saw that too many children were being lost because of sexual, physical, or emotional trauma, because of a lack of structure, engagement, discipline, and love.
"You need to understand something," [Ms. Jones] said. "The world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you."
On Faulkner: "The murder of children "no matter for what reason or what color" should be an assault on the conscience of our country, a unifying national tragedy. But does this carnage now pass as if it is routine? Not worthy of our notice?"
"To the applause of the crowd, we cut down sneakers hanging from an overhead wire--a perceived symbol that drugs were being sold."
"Son, there are two ways to go through life, as a thermometer or a thermostat. Don't be a thermometer, just reflecting what's around you, going up or down with your surroundings. Be a thermostat and set the temperature."
Natasha the waitress' talk with a girl, at the request of the girl's grandmother
"This is environmental irresponsibility in a nutshell: stealing from the future and calling it profit in the present. We are all now paying for past theft in ways most Americans don't realize."

Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future (2019) - Pete Buttigieg

Dyngus Day: boys and girls throw water over girls and spank them with pussy willow branches on Easter Monday, and girls do the same to boys
John Rawls' definition of justice: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world (Veil of ignorance)
Four things to think about when chasing assignments at McKinsey: 1) Geography; 2) Industry; 3) Function; and 4) People (the most important)
Husband attended UW-Eau Claire
"...Arlington is not just for honoring the individuals lost there; it is a place to seek some reason why they should be under the headstones while the rest of us walk around on the grass."

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? (2017) - Alan Alda

"Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better" - Samuel Beckett (on Alan's desk)
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people - Victor Borge
Don Hewitt: Tell me a story (60 Minutes) ... not a treatise, not an analysis, but a story
Lemon slices underarm as deodorant
Oxytocin from eye gaze
Carl Rogers and empathy
Meditation definition: focus on breathing for 20 minutes

Robin (2018) - David Itzkoff

Jonathan Winters: always carried in wallet quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Humor is the mistress of sorrow"
[Robin Williams] had the worst b.o.
Copacabana shows
He's not Russian! He's nuts!
Madam can you see inside my mind? - Jonathan Winters joke
Zak's eulogy: "Eater of cold chicken breast, drinker of espresso, lover of bumper stickers." :)
[With Jeff Bridges]: "We both looked straight ahead, covered in pigeon shit."
"Fuck it" - Zak picking up a line from Robin after getting cut off in traffic and repeating it all day long
"Get fucked, Cronauer" (contemporary response to Cronauer's radio announcement of 'Good Morning Vietnam')

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (2016) - Michael Lewis

When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of. ... [T]ry not to tear it down but make sense of it.
"... [A] lot of women were walking around with shaved heads--punishment for having slept with a German"

Sex and the City (1997) - Candace Bushnell

Most men's self image is them at 14

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win (2015) - by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Uneven book ... 90 minutes to get to part 1
Lead, lead, leadership, leading, leaders, leading, lead ... did I mention lead?
Best part: sober, vivid depictions of military conflict
The leader does make or break teams; wish they would have spent more time detailing specifics ... seemed like the end was a list of zen koans
Lead upward and downward
OK, I laughed at "... some officers had patches made up for their uniforms to jokingly designate themselves 'PowerPoint Rangers, 3,000 hours"
"...adding a phrase we used when facing anything particularly challenging or miserable: 'Good times'"
Prioritize and Execute principle: verbalized with the direction, "Relax, look around, make a call"
It's about the bigger strategic mission, the enemy is out there, not in here within the corporation
"You know whose fault it is: me"

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took On Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime (2019) - Julian Guthrie

Lovely book
I have a strong work ethic no matter what going on in my life (how to: respond to pregnancy questions)
Focusing on the horizon best way to avoid seasick
Sonya ❤️ grateful dead
Working mom guilty about everything and hyper efficient
Sand Hill Rd
Male vcs hire male founders who hire male employees etc

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep (2017) - Matthew Walker

REM works on integration
You cannot sleep back what was previously lost
This blew my mind: "Many of the explanations for why we sleep circle around a common, and perhaps erroneous, idea: sleep is the state we must enter in order to fix that which has been upset by wake. But what if we turned this argument on its head? What if sleep is so useful—so physiologically beneficial to every aspect of our being—that the real question is: Why did life ever bother to wake up? Considering how biologically damaging the state of wakefulness can often be, that is the true evolutionary puzzle here, not sleep. Adopt this perspective, and we can pose a very different theory: sleep was the first state of life on this planet, and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged. It may be a preposterous hypothesis, and one that nobody is taking seriously or exploring, but personally I do not think it to be entirely unreasonable."
NREM
Driving drowsy can't be overcome by will
"Slow rocking [of a bed suspended by ropes] increased the depth of deep sleep, boosted the quality of slow brainwaves, and more than doubled the number of sleep spindles."
“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep.” –E. Joseph Cossman
Lowering the levels of noradrenaline in the brains of PTSD patients during sleep so sleep can do trauma therapy work
Edison dreaming and would drop ball bearings to wake up
Alien abductions: sleep paralysis disorder
Go to pub in morning so alcohol doesn't interfere with sleep lol
Medical students shift lengths based on cocaine guy

The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage and a Girl Saved by Bees (2019) - Meredith May

This book reminded me of Lisa Brennan-Jobs' autobiography Small Fry, in the coldness of Meredith's abused maternal lineage
Her grandfather must have been a lovely person; the book exudes warmth with his interactions
Banana smell bee call backup
Abuse grounded her mother into victimhood
Insatiable need for her mother to protect herself

African Samurai: The True Story of a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan (2019) - Geoffrey Girard and Thomas Lockley

Courtesy is the ornament of Japan

There There (2018) - Tommy Orange

This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that's how you know you're on board the ship that serves hors d'oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who've never even heard of the words hors d'oeuvres or fluff.

Working (2019) - Robert A. Caro

Power doesn't always corrupt, and you can see it in the case of, for example, Al Smith or Sam Rayburn. There, power cleanses. But what power always does is reveal, because when you're climbing, you have to conceal from people what it is you're really willing to do, what it is you want to do. But once you get enough power, once you're there, where you wanted to be all along, they you can see what the protagonist wanted to do all along, because now he's doing it.
Caro would write "SU" during interviews, to remind himself to "Shut Up"
But you're never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don't stop thinking with your fingers (Caro on how his all-nighter didn't fool Professor Blackmur)

The Island of Sea Women (2019) - Lisa See

Really enjoyed this book
Crows
Mugwort helps prevent goggle fogging
Haenyeo (also spelled haenyo) are female divers in the Korean province of Jeju
Jeju proverbs

When a girl is born, there is a party. When a boy is born, there is a kick to the hip
After bracken is picked nine times, it will sprout again (alternative: fall down eight times, stand up nine)
We were as close as a pair of chopsticks

Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (2019) - Annie Jacobsen
The Longevity Diet: Discover the New Science Behind Stem Cell Activation and Regeneration to Slow Aging, Fight Disease, and Optimize Weight (2016) - Valter Longo

"I've only ever had one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it," she said when she turned 110

Conversations with Friends (2017) - Sally Rooney
Me, Myself, They (2019) - Joshua M. Ferguson
The Magicians (2009) - Lev Grossman
Circe (2018) - Madeline Miller

I do not think being frightened would help
"...to harvest was beneath the moon, when dew and darkness concentrated sap."

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (2017) - Balli Kaur Jaswal

Beards represent identity in Sikh culture
Woman without a husband is a bow without an arrow

The Truths We Hold : An American Journey (2019) - Kamala Harris

Okra could be soul food or Indian food, depending on what spices you chose
Uncle Freddy the place, clean immediately
Onion goggles

NW (2012) - Zadie Smith

Disappearing Earth (2019) - Julia Phillips
Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) - Delia Owens

Birds sing mostly at dawn because air cooler and songs travel father
Woke up on the right side of the dirt

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) - Timothy Snyder

One of the points of reflection on the past is to prepare is to act in the present
Hamilton cabal quotation
Camus death instead of submission quotation

Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living (2018) - Karen Auvinen

I don't know who I am without my dog
Anything you do deeply is lonely
Hare Krishna tied together 3 days during marriage ceremony
"It's about texture, not color, darling. We can fix that." (re: garden)
Finnish stoicism
Nothing as happy as a husky in snow
Memory is the only way home
Let love rise between the cracks

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (2018) - Jon Meacham

Emma Lazarus: "...I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
FDR was an Episcopalian

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America (2018) - Alissa Quart

Co-parenting
Co-operative apps
Precariat
Super basements (also mega basements)
Money only helps if social rank improves
PrecariCorps
Dolly Parton was asked in a 2014 Billboard interview, what she thought of Sandberg’s book, she responded: “I’ve leaned over. I’ve leaned forward. I don’t know what ‘leaned in’ is.”

Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains (2018) - Helen Thomson

Claustrum: "In a single case-study, consciousness was shown to be disrupted when there was stimulation to the extreme capsule of the brain – is in close proximity to the claustrum – such that upon termination of stimulation, consciousness was regained." : O
Better to think of Top vs. Bottom brain, not left vs. right
Red as a color may reflect fertility in females and testosterone in males

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World (2018) - Stephen L. Brusatte

Trex smart as chimps (?)
Trex started in Mongolia
Cats fighting dinosaurs (i.e., birds)
Land masses moving as fast as fingernails grow
What if love represents a form of evolution

The House of Broken Angels (2018) - Luís Alberto Urrea

Men do good deeds only to atone for their sins
We're all terminal
Roadrunner
Health: Preparation H under chin and eyes at bedtime
"If you teach a woman to feel like a work of art, you will make love to her every night" OK.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) - Elizabeth Kolbert

Camels often sit down carefully perhaps their joints creak
Rainforest: Never grab anything if you don't know what it is
DNA neanderthal
New Pangaea
Obligate species: Species that almost always occur in in the same place in the same environmental conditions
Chytridiomycosis: an infectious disease in amphibians, caused by the chytrid fungi

Waiting For Godot (1953) - Samuel Beckett

All are born mad some remain so

All You Can Ever Know (2018) - Nicole Chung

Chopsticks tusks
Survivor cut and move on

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History (2015) - Brian Kilmeade

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military (2018) - Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Asteroid movers (interesting to contemplate bureaucracy around it)
3d print Antikythera mechanism (?)

Everything Trump Touches Dies (2018) - Rick Wilson

Laughed out loud

My Beloved World (2013) - Sonia Sotomayor

Tab soda
Smoking
Diabetes (type 1)
Death reminds us of our mortality: Memento Mori

The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health (2016) - Justin Sonnenburg, Erica Sonnenburg

Alcoholic neuropathy
MACs: Microbiota Accessible Carbohydrates
American Gut Project
Humans at our core have the digestive tube and everything else serves that

French Exit: A Novel (2018) - Patrick deWitt

Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness (2018) - Melissa Dahl
Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners (2018) - Gretchen Anthony
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle (2019) - Emily Nagoski, Amelia Nagoski

Work then rest
Don't light yourself on fire to keep others warm
Trees take the shape of the environment they grew in (in discussions of including underrepresented people)
Headwinds tailwinds: people often don't recognize tailwinds
Foop (?)
Wellness State of action
Handle Stress and stressors differently
If no exercise, tense all parts of the body for 10 seconds then release

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (2014) - Cary Elwes

Andre the Giant
Chip buttie: French fries covered in melted butter on a bun (UK)
"Strangest of all, he had also become a fan of sheepdog trials, which were on television almost as often as the darts competitions in Sheffield."

Kitchen Confidential (2000) - Anthony Bourdain
The Last Black Unicorn (2017) - Tiffany Haddish

Unexpectedly great; really great to hear this in her voice

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018) - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Uneven book, filled with personal barbs
Linguistics migration

Fascism: A Warning (2018) - Madeleine Albright

Charlie Chaplin: The Great Dictator

Lagom: The Swedish Art of Balanced Living (2017) - Linnea Dunne
The Female Persuasion (2018) - Meg Wolitzer

"Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world."

Full Disclosure (2018) - Stormy Daniels

Trump: Old Spice and Pert Plus 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner
"F* them" - defiant response to people who abuse her

The World As It Is (2018) - Ben Rhodes

A President who works for all citizens

You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir (2018) - Parker Posey
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (2010) - Anthony Bourdain

Drugstore Cowboy film resonated with him
Fergus Henderson

Ready Player One (2011) - Ernest Cline

Catnip for nerds

The Woman Who Smashed Codes. A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies (2017) - Jason Fagone

"Teddy Roosevelt’s love of Bacon’s writings encouraged him to create America’s system of national parks."
Fantastic; lots of declassified info shared

How to Change Your Mind What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018) - Michael Pollan

Holotropic heading
Mushroom hat

Becoming (2018) - Michelle Obama

Copper pot

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) - Yuval Noah Harari

Brain without self-doubt
Donation of Constantine document (forged)
80 billion connections

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It (2016) - Christopher Voss

Listened to this book multiple times; unique in that way
Tahl Raz co-writer; recommended
Limbic emotions, reptile brain, amygdala: labeling bathes fears in sunlight, neocortex
Ackerman bargaining
Best way to ride a horse is in the direction it's going
You bake with the flour you have
Assertive (respect, be heard), analytic, collaborative
Yes is nothing without how
Get to no
Calibrated questions, labeling, mirror
Tactical empathy and "that's right"

Girl, Wash Your Face (2018) - Rachel Hollis

Someone else's opinion is none of your business

21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) - Yuval Noah Harari
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014) - Peter Thiel
The Book of Essie (2018) - Meghan MacLean Weir

"Well, didn't you just beat the Devil around the stump"

Educated: A Memoir (2018) - Tara Westover

This book reminds me, in part, of Grant Wood's 1930 painting American Gothic
Ignorance and horror
"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies" - Cervantes
"You may as well take a broom and start sweeping dirt off the mountain"
"I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: 'It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.' The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations. / Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman."

Unsheltered (2018) - Barbara Kingsolver

Stipulation houses

Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens (2018) - Barbara Oakley

Shallow breathing comes from freezing to escape attention of enemies
Visual spatial memory much larger than other types
Neuron length: some as long as arm
Pomodoro and Forest app
Notetaking: third page reserved, later summarize key points in that space
Hikers and race cars
Best to get good sleep in advance of tests

My Squirrel Days (2018) - Ellie Kemper

Redheads must love each other
Waldo the stuffed walrus
Proud of breaking down boxes
Lost part to Retta, whose autobiography I've also listened to

Florida (2018) - Lauren Groff

Favorite short story: "Above and Below", about a woman slipping into homelessness
Middlemarch, by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Fist over mouth to allow easier breathing in heavy rain

A Murder of Quality (1962) - John le Carré

Abridged, sadly; audio acting was superb, however

The Card (1911) - Arnold Bennett

Water and mustard as an emetic
"Similarly with the greeting of a young woman who was once to you the jewel of the world. You simply said, "Good-afternoon, how are you?" And she said the same. And you shook hands. And there you were, still alive!"

As I Lay Dying (1930) - William Faulkner
Little Fires Everywhere (2017) - Celeste Ng

Plot parallels to the film "Chocolate"
Appreciated the humanizing insights into all the viewpoints of the townspeople

The Cooking Gene (2017) - Michael W. Twitty

This book hits hard and keeps going; amazing
"Michael, what the hell?!"
Roux: Bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes
"White man in the woodpile": this and its crass predecessor were new to me
Plantation kitchens as place of violent abuses of power over women
Disruption of slaves forced to rear mulatto children after losing their own communities
Sorghum harvest: intoxicating smells, tastes
"Plantation" owners determined by > 20 slaves; otherwise small farmer with "human capital"
West Africa is birth place of everything to the West
Enjoyed seeing his perspective across the generations
"If a human is known as they say among the Mende–by the language they cry in–they can also be known by the tastes that make them cry." (via; accessed 02/14/2019)

Whiskey in a Teacup (2018) - Reese Witherspoon

“A lot of key moments in life are like that: You can be nervous as all get out. Just drink a beer and do it anyway.”
Place settings: FORKS, OK
Hattie B's is known for the hot chicken
Book recommendations:

To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) - Harper Lee
The Secret History (1992) - Donna Tartt
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980) - Eudora Welty
Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) - Jesmyn Ward
The Member of the Wedding (1946) - Carson McCullers
The Complete Stories (2007) - Flannery O'Connor
The Moviegoer (1961) - Walker Percy
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) - Maya Angelou
Blood Meridian (1985) - Cormac McCarthy
As I Lay Dying (1930) - William Faulkner
All Over But the Shoutin' (1999) - Rick Bragg
Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena (2004) - Julia Reed

The Library Book (2018) - Susan Orlean

Heartwarming description of community members working together to rescue books
"Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen" (roughly, "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.") - German poet Heinrich Heine

Everything's Trash, But It's Okay (2018) - Phoebe Robinson

Really liked this book--laughed out loud multiple times and probably my favorite book in some time
Zaddy
What's good (2015)
Phoebe's U2 book title
Workaholism: running from death

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography (2018) - Eric Idle

George Harrison's house at Friar Park: "caves, grottoes, underground passages, a multitude of garden gnomes, and an Alpine rock garden with a scale model of the Matterhorn"
Beatles sneaky chord: I "... got my guitar out, and it didn't take very long at all. ... It took me maybe twenty minutes to sort out the basic shape of the song using major sixths and minor sevenths and the very useful diminished chord, which George Harrison told me the Beatles called "the sneaky chord." The verse also appeared very quickly: Am7/# (sneaky)/G/Gmaj6/Am7/# (sneaky)/G and the words flowed quite simply."
There are two kinds of people and i don't care for either
Hawking "too pedantic" skit
Wedding night advice from Mike Nichols to Tania, Eric's wife: "Act surprised"
"You have to embrace your fellow time travelers, even as they slip away"

Binti (2015) - Nnedi Okorafor

Did not expect the plot twist. Boom.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (2018) - Paul Scharre

Patriot missile failures
Aegis guided missile cruiser
Human enhancing AI

A Beautiful Mind: a Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994 (1998) - Sylvia Nasar

"Nash did things from scratch without using standard techniques. He was always trying to extract problems ... [from conversations with others]. He had not the patience to [study them]." - Lars Hörmander

Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging (2018) - Alex Wagner

Treat DNA testing services like entertainment (e.g., like crystal ball reading)
This surprised me with a more sober, expansive, and ultimately human view of the lives and times of our ancestors

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics (2015) - Tim Marshall

"China is a civilization pretending to be a state." - Lucian Pye
Tibet, the "water tower" of China; e.g.: "Tibetan glaciers and springs are the source of almost all of Asia’s major rivers: the Yellow River, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween, the Ganges, the Indus, the Irrawaddy and the Yarlung Tsangpo (which becomes the Brahmaputra downstream). Tibetans to refer to the plateau as the “Land of Snows” and the Chinese to call it the “Water Tower” of Asia." Source: http://tibet.org/tibet3rdpole.org/?p=402 (accessed 01/23/2019)
Etymology of the word "arctic": Greek arktikos, from arktos ‘bear, Ursa Major, pole star’
“India is not a nation, nor a country. It is a subcontinent of nationalities”
Helmut Kohl: "For those who didn't live through this themselves and who especially now in the crisis are asking what benefits Europe's unity brings, the answer despite the unprecedented European period of peace lasting more than 65 years and despite the problems and difficulties we must still overcome is: peace."

The Mars Room (2018) - Rachel Kushner

San Francisco references and insights by an insider
Loosely based on the Central California Women's Facility

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) - Ottessa Moshfegh

Back-to-back books with characters named "Tuttle"
Didn't resonate with me

A House for Mr Biswas (1961) - V. S. Naipaul

Very witty in parts
A touching conclusion
"For Shama and her sisters and women like them, ambition, if the word could be used, was a series of negatives: not to be unmarried, not to be childless, not to be an undutiful daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow."

In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History (2018) - Mitch Landrieu

Mitch once asked Jimmy Carter who was the greatest person he had worked with: Anwar Sadat

Red Clocks (2018) - Leni Zumas

Repressions of women in multiple layers: government, cultural, and the home

City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris (2017) - Holly Tucker

Kept reminding myself this was non-fiction

The Dry (2016) - Jane Harper

The townspeople confrontational scenes felt real and charged

The Idiot (2017) - Elif Batuman

Endearing; really enjoyed it
Peppermints are good for acid indigestion

Tin Man (2017) - Sarah Winman

The final imagery of the three of them seeming happy in the photograph seemed poignant

So Close to Being the Sh*T, Y'all Don't Even Know (2018) - Retta

This was sort of like Carmen Maria Machado's book, "Her Body and Other Parties", or Lauren Graham's book, "Talking as Fast as I Can", where I don't have the context of having a connection with Retta through the show Parks and Recreation (with Machado, it was her extended story about Law and Order SVU; with Graham, Gilmore Girls), so it didn't resonate as well
This basically represents my failing for not watching their shows and choosing her book, not Retta's
Enjoyed the behind-the-scenes details

Using the Libby app (via Overdrive).

E-Books

None

Print

The Room: The Definitive Guide (2014) - Ryan Finnigan
How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems (2019) - Randall Munroe
How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time (2019) - Will McCallum

Suggestions

2018-01-08: David Finkel's The Good Soldiers (via)

Note: ebook only (Overdrive)

Bookshop Santa Cruz

Winter 2020 reading list

Dominicana: A Novel (2019) - Angie Cruz
~~Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019) - Casey Cep~~
~~IQ (An IQ Novel #1) (2017) - Joe Ide~~
~~Our Homesick Songs (2019) - Emma Hooper~~
~~Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living (2018) - Karen Auvinen~~
The Bear and the Nightingale: A Novel (Winternight Trilogy #1) (2017) - Katherine Arden
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century (2019) - Kirk Wallace Johnson
~~Trinity: A Novel (2019) - Louisa Hall~~

Winter 2019 reading list

~~City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris (2017) - Holly Tucker~~
~~The Library Book (2018) - Susan Orlean~~
~~The Cooking Gene (2017) - Michael W. Twitty~~
~~Red Clocks (2018) - Leni Zumas~~
~~The Dry (2016) - Jane Harper~~
~~Tin Man (2017) - Sarah Winman~~
~~Binti (2015) - Nnedi Okorafor~~
Everything Matters!: A Novel (2010) - Ron Currie

President Obama's reading list

Circa Dec 2019 (via):

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power () - Shoshana Zuboff
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company () - William Dalrymple
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee () - Casey Cep
Girl, Woman, Other () - Bernardine Evaristo
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present () - David Treuer
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy () - Jenny Odell
Lost Children Archive () - Valeria Luiselli
Lot: Stories () - Bryan Washington
Normal People () - Sally Rooney
The Orphan Master's Son () - Adam Johnson
The Yellow House () - Sarah M. Broom
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland () - Patrick Radden Keefe
Solitary () - Albert Woodfox
The Topeka School () - Ben Lerner
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion () - Jia Tolentino
Trust Exercise () - Susan Choi
We Live in Water: Stories () - Jess Walter
A Different Way to Win: Dan Rooney's Story from the Super Bowl to the Rooney Rule () - Jim Rooney
The Sixth Man () - Andre Iguodala

Circa Aug 2019 (via):

~~Toni Morrison: Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else~~
~~The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead~~
~~Exhalation by Ted Chiang~~
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women
~~American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson~~
~~The Shallows by Nicholas Carr~~
~~Lab Girl by Hope Jahren~~
~~Inland by Téa Obreht~~
~~How to Read the Air, by Dinaw Mengestu~~
~~Maid by Stephanie Land~~

Circa Dec 2018:

~~Becoming by Michelle Obama (Overdrive)~~
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (Overdrive)
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Overdrive)
The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die by Keith Payne (Overdrive)
~~Educated by Tara Westover (Overdrive)~~
Factfulness by Hans Rosling

Note: ebook only (Overdrive)

~~Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging by Alex Wagner (Overdrive)~~
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Note: ebook only (Overdrive)

~~A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (Overdrive: Recommended 01/01/2019)~~
How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Overdrive)
~~In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu (Overdrive)~~
~~Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (Overdrive)~~
The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

Note: recommended 01/01/2019 (Northern California Public Library)

The Return by Hisham Matar

Note: ebook only (Overdrive)

~~Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (read)~~
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Overdrive)
Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen

Note: ebook only (Overdrive)

~~The World As It Is by Ben Rhodes (Overdrive)~~
American Prison by Shane Bauer (Overdrive)
Arthur Ashe: A Life by Raymond Arsenault (Overdrive)
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (Overdrive)
Feel Free by Zadie Smith (Overdrive)
~~Florida by Lauren Groff (Overdrive)~~
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight (Overdrive)
Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar (Overdrive)
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (Overdrive)
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark (Overdrive)
~~There There by Tommy Orange (Overdrive)~~
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Overdrive)

Josh Marshall 2018 Holiday recommendations:

Eric H. Cline: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Turning Points in Ancient History)
Only History of Ancient Greece available

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization by Paul Kriwaczek

Note: ebook only (Overdrive)

Barry Cunliffe: By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia

Nothing as of 01/01/2019

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

Note: ebook only (Overdrive)

David Anthony: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

Recommended 12/31/2018

Roger Crowley: Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World

City of Fortune and Conquerers recommendable as audiobooks

David Abulafia: The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

Nothing as of 07/18/2018

James Romm: Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the Bloody Fight for His Empire

ebook only (Overdrive) as of 07/18/2018

Peter Heather:

The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians
Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe
The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders
Note: ebook only; audiobook not recommendable (Overdrive) as of 07/18/2018

Hugh Thomas: Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico

Nothing available as of 07/18/2018

Lionel Casson: Libraries in the Ancient World

Unavailable in any format (Overdrive)
Life in Ancient Rome recommendable as Audiobook (Overdrive)

Josh Marshall 1066 Norman Conquest Discussion:

Short History of the Normans (2016) - Leonie V. Hicks
The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England (2013) - Marc Morris
The Norman Conquest: England after William the Conqueror (Critical Issues in World and International History) (2007) - Hugh M. Thomas
Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 (2011) - Robin Fleming
William, King and Conqueror (2013) - Mark Hagger
Conquest and Colonisation: The Normans in Britain, 1066-1100 (1994) - Brian Golding
The Normans in Europe (2000) - Elisabeth van Houts
William the Conqueror (The English Monarchs Series) (2016) - David Bates

Bill Gates - 5 books I loved in 2018

~~Educated, by Tara Westover (Overdrive)~~
~~Army of None, by Paul Scharre (Recommended 01/01/2019)~~
~~Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou (read)~~
~~21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by Yuval Noah Harari (Overdrive)~~
The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, by Andy Puddicombe

Unavailable in any format (Overdrive)

Ask A Manager 2018 recommendations

This Is How It Always Is, by Laurie Frankel (Overdrive)
Fraud, by David Rakoff

ebook only (Overdrive) as of 01/01/2019

The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin (Overdrive)
Tepper Isn’t Going Out, by Calvin Trillin

ebook only (Overdrive) as of 01/01/2019

~~The Power, by Naomi Alderman (read)~~
Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

Recommended 01/01/2019 (Northern California Public Library)

~~Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, by Melissa Dahl (Overdrive)~~
Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday (Overdrive)
~~Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng (Overdrive)~~
Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, by Cheryl Mendelson

ebook only (Overdrive) as of 01/01/2019

The Newlyweds, by Nell Freudenberger

Recommended 01/01/2019 (Northern California Public Library)

The Amateur Marriage, by Anne Tyler (Overdrive)
The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (Overdrive)

ebook only (Overdrive) as of 01/01/2019

A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle (Overdrive)
Would You Rather? by Katie Heaney (Overdrive)
~~The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer (Overdrive)~~
Then She Was Gone, by Lisa Jewell (Overdrive)
Hey Ladies! by Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss (Overdrive)

ebook only (Overdrive) as of 01/01/2019

~~Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work, by me (read)~~
My Ex-Life, by Stephen McCauley (Overdrive)
Calypso, by David Sedaris (Overdrive)
~~The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner (Overdrive)~~
Tell the Machine Goodnight, by Katie Williams (Overdrive)
~~Less, by Andrew Sean Greer (read)~~
~~My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Overdrive)~~
Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory (Overdrive)
~~The Book of Essie, by Meghan MacLean Weir (Overdrive)~~

Recommended 01/01/2019 (Northern California Public Library)

~~Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan (read)~~
~~French Exit, by Patrick deWitt (Overdrive)~~
Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong (Overdrive)

ebook only (Overdrive) as of 01/01/2019

Room, by Emma Donoghue (Overdrive)
~~Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney (Overdrive)~~
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green (Overdrive)
~~All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung (Overdrive)~~
Family Trust, by Kathy Wang (Overdrive)
~~The Idiot, by Elif Batuman (Overdrive)~~
~~Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners, by Gretchen Anthony (Overdrive)~~
Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist, by Tim Federle (Overdrive)

Unavailable in any format (Overdrive)

~~Nine Perfect Strangers, by Liane Moriarty (Overdrive)~~
99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown (Overdrive)

Unavailable in any format (Overdrive)

HackerNews

Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?
Top 20:

~~Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon by Valley John Carreyrou (read)~~
~~Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep by Matthew Walker (Overdrive)~~
~~The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Overdrive)~~
~~Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight (read)~~
~~How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan (Overdrive)~~
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World by Hans Rosling (Overdrive)