Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity

By David Foster Wallace

Just what the subtitle promises, a history of the concept of infinity from the ancient Greeks to the modern mathematical formalism of infinity. I am in general a huge fan of DFW nonfiction, but I couldn’t connect with this one at all. Only made it about a third of the way through.

Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber

By Mike Isaac

Story of the rise and fall of Travis Kalanick (co-founder of Uber) by New York Time journalist Mike Isaac. The story is bad enough on its own (turns out putting a bunch of young bros in charge of billions of dollars of venture capital with little meaningful oversight turns out exactly as you would expect) without the standard issue print journalist anti-tech polemic. It also seemed a little weird that Isaac, despite heaping on the opprobrium, doesn’t really question the basic business soundness of Uber. Focusing on the various governance and culture issues seems to me, to be honest, like the least interesting thing about the Uber story. How did a company that hemorrhages money by the billion grow so large despite their upside down unit economics.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

By Oliver Morton

Overview of the potential perils and benefits of geoengineering in response to climate change. Morton frames the entire book in the introduction around two fundamental questions:

• Is climate change a serious problem?
• Is it extremely hard to decarbonize in a short period of time?

The book is then addressed to those who answer yes to both (which seems, based on what we know now, to be obviously the correct answers to both questions). After reading I am much less optimistic about the prospects for carbon capture and much more optimistic about the prospects for various forms of solar geoengineering. Still, we're all pretty much fucked.

Girl, Woman, Other

By Bernadine Evariste

Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It’s hard to describe exactly what the genre would be, but it’s structured as a series of vignettes on woman that are all loosely connected to the “central” character, Amma. There isn’t an obvious narrative per se, but the theme which ties together everything is a sort of meditation on intersectionality. Not generally the sort of thing I go for but I really quite enjoyed it.

Stylistically, Evariste walked a really exquisite line with a sort of proto-lyrical syntax that both felt natural and didn't interfere with the actual narrative. I can only imagine how hard that is to do, given how many novels fail at it so miserably.

Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century

By John Higgs

Well-written in the way that works of eccentric British scribblers oftern are but I couldn't shake the though that this is all just pseduo-profound bullshit not meant to be taken seriously.