Pun Salad

Just in case you're interested in what I found informative, interesting, thought-provoking, etc. last year. The cover images are Amazon paid links, and clicking on them will take you there, where I get a cut if you purchase, thanks in advance. Clicking on the book's title will whisk you to my blog posting for a fuller discussion.

I am restricting the list to books I rated with five stars at Goodreads. Nota Bene: Goodreads ratings are subjective; they do not necessarily reflect a book's cosmic quality, just my gut reaction. And perhaps also my mood at the time, grumpy or generous. In other words, don't take this too seriously.

The complete list of books I read in 2023, including fiction, is here.

In order read:

	Astounding — John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee. A detailed look at four writers from my science fiction-geek youth. Warts and all.
	The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan. One of two Nobel prizewinners on this list. Bob's meandering takes on songs he liked over the decades. Vastly entertaining.
	What If? 2 — Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. Well, the subtitle says it all. Illustrated in Munroe's comic style. Funny and interesting.
	QED — The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman. The other Nobelist on the list. Based on Feynman's four-lecture series on quantum electrodynamics, the interplay of photons with matter. Click over to my report to read his classic observation on the "understandability" of quantum theory.
	Psych — The Story of the Human Mind by Paul Bloom. A book based on the author's introductory psychology class at Yale. And (guess what) it's nevertheless interesting. A good overview of what shrinks know, and what they don't.
	Wild Problems — A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us by Russ Roberts. A very wise book that debunks the notion that all problems can be "solved" by simply summing up the pros, subtracting the cons, and getting a utilitarian result.
	Highly Irregular — Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't RhymeAnd Other Oddities of the English Language by Arika Okrent. A hugely entertaining look at why English is so darn weird. Short answer: blame geography for making Britain so easy and fun to invade over the millennia.
	Leon Russell — The Master of Space and Time's Journey Through Rock & Roll History by Bill Janovitz. Sex, drugs, and rock&roll, in spades. But also genius and talent.
	Classified — The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America by David E. Bernstein. The sad (but also infuriating) story of how Uncle Stupid got into the game of racially-pigeonholing people. And why we're stuck with it. Short answer: too many powerful people depend on this divisive practice.
	Grunt — The Curious Science of Humans at War by Mary Roach. One of the best, and funniest, popular science/history writers in America. She has an eye for the gross.
	In the Land of Invented Languages — Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language by Arika Okrent. Another book on this list by her, and it's just as good. She looks at efforts over the centuries to design languages free of the well-known misfeatures of natural languages. And why their popular success never happened.
	Fewer, Richer, Greener — Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance by Laurence B. Siegel. He argues that the future can be bright, if we don't screw it up. very readable and fun.
	The Man from the Future — The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. He was missing from that Oppenheimer movie, and he never got a Nobel, but nonetheless an utter genius and a true polymath.
	The Myth of Left and Right — How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America by Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis. They argue that the well-known political spectrum is essentially meaningless and even somewhat harmful to sober discussion. Since reading the book, I've tried to be more careful and accurate about labeling people with directional adjectives. Hasn't stopped anyone else though, I'm pretty sure.
	Free Agents — How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell. A neuroscientist defends the concept. At least at the level of "the capacity for conscious, rational, control of our actions."
	Minds Wide Shut — How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. There are a lot of books out there on why we are so close-minded but (nonetheless) insistently argumentative, at the top of our lungs. The authors blame "fundamentalism", which they carefully define.
	The Canceling of the American Mind — Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott. A very good book about "cancel culture", its history, its current manifestations, and (possible) remedies.

Another "wish I had liked it better" from Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings. It's about various myths, fictions, beliefs, etc. about what happens to you after you kick the bucket. The gimmick is that it's sort-of patterned after those checklist travel books, most directly 1,000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz.

The travel-book gimmick is a mixed bag, mainly consisting of semi-humorous "tips" on what (or what not) to do or see during your visit: food, personalities, sights, etc. This gimmick doesn't seem to be consistently maintained throughout. Ken's brand of snarky humor pervades, and I didn't find it all that amusing on the printed page. I note that he narrates the audiobook, and, who knows, it might work better there.

It's broken up into seven broad sections, classifications of the afterlife's source:

Mythology: legends and speculations from the Inuit, the Chinese, Egyptians, Native Americans. … These ancient folks had very active imaginations. (Or, who knows, one of these might actually be true, which would probably be a big surprise to nearly everyone finding themselves there.)

Religion: How this is distinguished from "mythology" is anyone's guess. Maybe popularity? Anyway, here we have things like The Book of the Dead from Tibet, Catholicism's Limbo (now deprecated), Buddhism's Nirvana, … Given the fact that nobody really reports back from the afterlife, I was impressed by the very active imaginations involved in these diegeses. To the extent that I wondered what hallucinogens the originators were taking. Unsurprisingly, Ken mentions that The Book of the Dead was recommended by Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley as "a guide to LSD trips."

Books: Here we have more obviously fictive descriptions: C. S. Lewis's Narnia, Milton's Paradise Lost, Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven, … Since I read this over the Christmas season, I looked for Dickens' A Christmas Carol, but nope. And (a nice surprise for me) Philip José Farmer's Riverworld books. Never mind that I kind of lost interest around book four.

Movies: Some real obvious choices here: Field of Dreams. the Bill & Ted movies, The Sixth Sense, Coco. And (yes, it's that time of year) It's a Wonderful Life.

Television: More easy choices: The Simpsons, The Good Place. And one surprising one: My Mother the Car. Does anyone remember that show besides Ken and me?

Music and Theater: songs from Paul Simon, the Righteous Brothers, and the Talking Heads; Cats, Carousel, …

Miscellaneous: Speculations from the comics, DC and Marvel; and everything else that didn't fit in above.

Ken's treatment of these scenarios is mostly perfunctory, probably necessary if you're trying to fit 100 of them into 275 pages. (And there's a lot of whitespace.) All in all, this probably worked better as a book proposal.