At the end of 2010 i set a goal for myself to finish 12 books in 2011. I’m happy to say that i did meet that goal. Here’s my lineup, courtesy of goodreads.com:

And because you probably can’t read the titles, here’s the list (in order of when i finished them, from the most recent on down):

1. Marley and Me by John Grogan
2. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
3. The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
4. I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire
5. Lying by Sam Harris
6. French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano
7. Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes
8. Bossypants by Tina Fey
9. Naked by David Sedaris
10. Letters To A Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens (may he rest in peace)
11. Remaking Eden by Lee M. Silver
12. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and some other guy

I grabbed Marley and Me at a used bookstore in California when i finished Water For Elephants too quickly. I thought the former was a little too much of a writer-writing-about-being-a-writer type of memoir (you remember how i hate those, don’t you?) but i was suffering a pretty bad bout of puppy fever when i picked it up, so it entertained me. Water For Elephants was a really good piece of fiction—and by “good” i mean “entertaining.” DO NOT watch the movie until you’ve read the book! The movie will ruin the book for you, much moreso than other movies ruin other books. I can’t tell you anything more than that without giving too much away. Also, the movie is pretty much just bad all around, whether you read the book or not.

I Don’t was very dull. Lying was very intriguing and very short. Naked started off quite funny and quickly turned very weird. Remaking Eden was interesting if a little slow and sometimes far-fetched. It makes some really good points about why the “life begins at conception” argument is scientifically incorrect. I wish i could remember them.

Letters to a Young Contrarian was a little over my head, but it deepend my admiration for Hitchens. The book really made me feel like he was a champion of truth, and that that’s a very worthy thing to be even if it means ruffling a lot of feathers. He was still alive when i read it, and now that i’m reading his memoir, he is gone.

I expected Bossypants to go one of two ways: very funny, or very intimate. It was neither. It leaned more to the funny side, but i kind of felt like she was just addressing the major questions that she gets asked all the time (Why do you have that scar? How did you get a job writing for SNL?) rather than trying to communicate an original idea. I still liked it and i’m still a huge fan of hers, i just think her talent for writing is put to better use on scripts.

So, for 2012 i’ve made it my goal to read 13 books (although 15 would make for a nicer layout in that goodreads screenshot, hm?). I think i’ll try not to read more than one memoir this year, and this time i mean it. I want to read more about UI and other sciency things. And in keeping with last year, i probably won’t read more than one novel.

Any recommendations? Come be my friend on Goodreads so i can see what you’re reading!

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I’ve recently become interested in a field of study called User Experience; it’s kind of a mashup of psychology and design, which is right up my alley and highly applicable to and important in the realm of web development, which (as you may know) is my profession. I don’t know why i’ve never really learned anything about User Experience (or UX, as it’s called), but i think reading about it might give me renewed passion for what i do. So, i’ve started a to-read list of some UX books, and i began my research with The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz, which turned out to be more applicable to my everyday life than to my career.

I expected this book to be primarily about consumer culture and how the overwhelming array of choices in any given retail environment actually scares off customers. I thought it was a book about UX, but it actually only touched on the consumer aspects of overwhelming choice. It focused more on people and how too many choices tend to make many of us miserable; it turned out to be more like what i wanted Blink and How We Decide to be. It explained how there are two types of people when it comes to making decisions: maximizers, who agonize over choosing the best thing and often keep looking once they’ve made a decision, and satisficers, who start a search with a set of criteria and stop searching once they’ve found something that meets those criteria. I’m definitely a maximizer. And as it turns out, maximizers are more prone to depression, regret, and dissatisfaction with their decisions.

Schwartz’s central argument in the book is that the increased number of choices that modern people face for just about every aspect of life actually leads us to be less satisfied in life—even though we have it better in almost every objective way than any previous generation of humans ever has—because most of us tend to be maximizers. I saw so much of myself in this book; this is why planning the wedding was so difficult for me, this is why i constantly compare my physical appearance to others, this is why i still don’t know what i want to be when i grow up. The world is too wide-open; i have too much freedom, i’ve been encouraged to want perfection and i blame myself when i don’t think i’ve achieved it. If i were a satisficer, life would be so much more—well, satisfying. Which is not to say that i don’t feel extremely privileged and grateful for the wonderful life that i do have. I just don’t focus on that gratitude as much as i should.

I thought this was a really insightful, useful book. My only criticism is that it almost felt more like a self-help than a science book. I think it could’ve been backed up by more research. I do think i was in need of the help it offered, though. I need to go shopping for boots soon, and when i do i now know to get my expectations sorted out beforehand, not set them too high, and only look at a couple of different shops. Wish me luck.

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I’m finding that i only really remember the books i write reactions to, while everything else i read fades pretty quickly from my memory. Thus, my triumphant return to book reviews. I hope you enjoy.

I recently read a couple of books about—well, fat. And they were both good, to different degrees and for different reasons. The first was Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes, and the second was French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano. While the former was well-researched, well-argued and smart, i thought the latter was anecdotal, nonscientific and a little bit boastful, but still for the most part worth reading. And, in fact, i felt i was able to glean the best advice from Guiliano’s book having read Taubes first and knowing where the text was probably flat-out incorrect.

I really think everyone ought to read Why We Get Fat. Everyone in America, especially, including the dietitians, personal trainers and doctors out there (hear me, family? ). If you disagree with Taubes, that’s perfectly fine. But you might want to do some research of your own to decide whether you disagree because you’ve been told otherwise, or because you can find evidence that contradicts the stuff he’s found.

Basically, Taubes argues that what we all know about weight management—that you must balance calories in/calories out, that saturated fat causes heart disease, etc.—is almost certainly wrong. I first heard about Taubes when i read his article for the New York Times entitled Is Sugar Toxic?, and i realized that he wasn’t just restating the obvious nutritional advice that we’ve all heard a thousand times, but was actually doing real research on the subject. So i sat up and paid attention, and i wasn’t too happy to learn what i did from his book. Meat is one of the best foods for us. Carbs, especially highly-processed ones like sugar and white flour, are almost certainly the worst. And while the book is very focused and sticks nearly exclusively to explaining the question raised by its title, it is quickly mentioned toward the end of the book (with no less convincing evidence) that carbs are probably also what cause many cancers, heart disease and diabetes. So even though i’m not a fat person, i feel like i should cut that crap out of my diet as much as possible for the rest of my life.

Have i started to do so? Absolutely not. Nathan and i have probably consumed more doughnuts since i read that book than ever before in our lives. But we’re thinking really hard about it.

French Women Don’t Get Fat was a different animal entirely. Guiliano cites nary a source nor study in her text, though she does refer to a whopping three individuals for whom her method has made a little bit of difference, in addition to her own fat-to-skinny tale. The basics of her philosophy are: enjoy what you eat as much as possible but eat moderate portions, especially of treats like bread (carbs), chocolate (carbs), desserts (carbs), fruit juices (carbs) and alcohol (carbs); walk a lot; and drink a lot of water.

Interestingly, there’s a lot of overlap between her approach to staying in shape and Taubes’s, despite the fact that Guiliano dismisses the low-carb approach to food as “ridiculous” and thinks that to practice that way of eating is to “risk heart disease” (not true). Everything that she says to eat in especially small amounts is a high-carb food (with the exception of meat). She and Taubes both advocate drinking a lot of water and eating plenty of greens. Both authors recommend eating plenty of soup as well, and limiting the intake of alcohol (especially beer, *sniff*) to a very low amount. Both advocate eating large meals and disdain snacking, and neither of them sees the point of intensive exercise as a method for weight loss when the result of it is almost always an increased appetite and calorie intake.

But from reading Why We Get Fat i can tell Guiliano that walking twenty minutes each day is not going to help anyone lose weight, either. It’s certainly not a bad idea and nothing ill is going to result from it, but it’s the diet that’s going to reduce a person’s waistline, not the evening stroll. She claims that those few extra burned calories “really add up,” but as Taubes points out, that can’t possibly be true unless everyone whose weight doesn’t fluctuate at all is consuming a very perfect number of calories every single day. Consider that if a person ate just twenty extra calories each day, it would take only a couple of decades for those calories to add up to an extra fifty pounds if the calorie balance imperative is true. Conversely, if a person were undereating by just twenty calories each day, she would steadily waste away over the years.

The body handles different types of calories in different ways. I’m not going to attempt to re-hash the science in Taubes’s book, because i didn’t take notes and i’d probably get it slightly wrong. But it made perfect sense to me. You should read the book, especially if you think what i’m saying is a bunch of bull.

And i think there’s a lot of truth, too, to the French idea that while Americans enjoy gorging on huge portions of food, we might actually enjoy it more if we stopped thinking of it as “sinful” and took the time to really think about and taste what we’re eating. I also thought Guiliano’s advice to cook a lot, avoid processed foods and try to eat a lot of local, seasonal produce was sage advice that would do a lot for our country. If only it were as cheap and easy to shop a farmer’s market as it is to hit up Subway, eh?

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The first book i finished this year was Stephen Hawking’s new collaborative work The Grand Design. Hawking piqued a lot of people’s interest by ending his bestseller A Brief History of Time with the poetic assertion that a unifying theory of physics would allow us to “know the mind of God.” In his new book, it is revealed that Hawking, as a scientist, actually sees no place for God in the creation of the universe.

The book was interesting by default, but it was a little bit hard to follow. For the most part i understood it, thanks to all the YouTube videos i’ve watched about quantum physics and the multiverse theory. There were just a couple of brief points in the book at which i felt that i was in totally over my head, and this is coming from someone who, admittedly, never even took high school physics. It seemed, though, that the argument against a creator wasn’t all that clearly spelled out. The book was more of a discussion of the current state of physics and how it’s trying to find a unifying theory, possibly to no avail. It’s the idea that time began when our universe—which may be one of an infinite number of universes—began, at the big bang, that shoves God out of the picture; but that point is only lightly touched upon in the book.

So i wouldn’t call this another atheist text by any means. It’s really more of an overview of quantum physics; it doesn’t seem to be meant as an argument for the nonexistence of God, and i think it was just played up by the publisher in that respect as a way of selling more copies. I’ve found that people of faith don’t base their belief in God on what scientists have discovered about the nature of the universe, anyway, no matter how famous or intelligent those scientists may be. I recommend this book to people like me who have watched those YouTube vids and would like to know a little more about the physics behind all the crazy-sounding findings in physics without getting too deep into the nitty-gritty science. And if you have faith, i doubt this book will shake it much.

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This year i finished ten books, which is actually one fewer than i read last year if you count the two Hitchhiker’s Guide books that i re-read in 2009. My goal for next year will be to finish twelve; one book per month shouldn’t be that hard to do.

I wrote about several of the books i read this year, but a few of the ones that i neglected share a common theme so i’ll write about them now. The theme is the human brain; two can be categorized as “psychology” but the third is more of a neuroanatomy sort of book. I picked up Why We Love as part of the “research” i did this year on love & marriage. Helen Fisher is the leading expert on attraction and love in terms of the human mind. I should have written down what i took away from the book when it was fresh in my mind, but i think it boils down to this: opposites similar people attract; love is a real thing with measurable effects on the brain, much like a drug; and love can last but it changes from passionate to companionate love after a time, due to the possibility that humans evolved the ability to love in order to want to raise babies together and once those babies are independent enough, the parents’ connection is no longer really needed. Why We Love is definitely worth a read. Here’s a TED talk by Helen Fisher that i highly recommend:

The second brain book that i read this year was The Pursuit of Happiness by David G. Myers. I picked the book up partly because i really enjoyed Myers’ Psychology textbook back in college, and partly because a friend had recommended it to me. Or so i thought—i think i may have actually gotten it confused with Stumbling on Happiness or some other book by a similar name. It’s an interesting look at the things that correspond to happiness in people, but any good psychologist knows that correlation does not equal causation. Myers emphasized the fact that people of faith are in general happier without exploring the possibility that there may be another factor involved. It turns out that Myers is a big advocate of faith, but personally i’m less interested in whether faith is good for me than what the truth actually is about God. It did make me think twice about trying to convince people of God’s nonexistence though, which is part of why i’ve written—and said—a lot less about atheism this year.

The last brain book that i read this year was My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Taylor is a neuroanatomist who just happened to suffer a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain, and of course recognized acutely as it was happening what exactly was going in inside her head. I had been eyeing this book for quite a while but hesitated to pick it up after watching her TED talk about the experience, due to the fact that her perspective of it waned queerly nonscientific. The book reflects the TED talk pretty closely, but it was fascinating to get the play-by-play of the events of the day of the stroke and the days that followed. It’s amazing how delicate yet resilient the human brain is, and how compartmentalized it actually is. I did find it odd that Taylor knew for a fact that her euphoric post-stroke feelings were due to the incapacitation of the left hemisphere of her brain and yet she believes that she was in fact having a metaphysical experience; as though her brain had to be severely damaged in order that she might experience the true nature of the universe. Of course you’re going to have a pretty different experience of reality when half your brain is practically destroyed, right? Isn’t that a given…?

Anyway, it was a really interesting book and worth a read. I can’t say that the books i selected to read this year were very entertaining ones, but i can’t decide if that’s really a quality i want to seek out in my reading material. I tend to go for the “things that make you go ‘hmmm,’” if you know what i mean. Movies, on the other hand, i expect to thrill me, and i’m always a little disappointed when they don’t.

EDIT 12/30: Damn it, i totally forgot to include What Shamu Taught Me About Love And Marriage in this post; another book about psychology and relationships. That one was pretty delightful.

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