feat: Host my book reviews

content/hobbies/reading/index.md → content/hobbies/reading/_index.md

@@ -8,10 +8,14 @@ lastmod: 2024-01-01
 {{<lead>}}I start every day with coffee and a book.{{</lead>}}
 
 I read as a way to continually learn.
-As a student, this allowed me to diversify my areas of study, and after finishing my many years of formal education, I read to resist from stagnation.
+As a student, this allowed me to diversify my areas of study, and after finishing my (many) years of formal education, I read to resist stagnation.
 Importantly, to learn does not require only reading non-fiction.
 I believe there is plenty to be learned by great fiction.
 
+Below I have links to my book reviews, organized by the year in which I read the book:
+
+- [2024]({{< relref "reviews/2024.md" >}})
+
 You can see what I have read on either Goodreads or The StoryGraph by following the links below.
 
 {{< button href="https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/144433284-josh" target="_blank" >}}
@@ -44,7 +48,7 @@ I would recommend this book to anyone, but particularly for young boys as it rea
 His unique expertise and background provides tremendous insight into humanity through this particularly tragic experience.
 This book provides a sobering analysis of the brutal realities of the most fundamental features of human nature and is a must read for anyone seeking to better understand themselves and others.
 
-#### [*The Old MAn and the Sea*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2165.The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea) by Ernest Hemingway
+#### [*The Old Man and the Sea*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2165.The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea) by Ernest Hemingway
 
 <img src="./assets/old-man-sea.jpg" alt="The Old Man and the Sea cover image." style="height:300px"/>
 

content/hobbies/reading/reviews/2023.md

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+---
+title: "Book Reviews 2024"
+summary: "My reviews of book I read in 2024."
+date: 2024-01-01
+lastmod: 2024-01-01
+---
+
+Here is some text.

content/hobbies/reading/reviews/2024.md

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+---
+title: "2024 Book Reviews"
+summary: "My reviews of book I read in 2024."
+date: 2024-01-01
+lastmod: 2024-01-01
+---
+
+
+## Fourth Wing
+
+**Rebecca Yarros**
+
+My girl friend requested I read this book.
+I have no comments.
+
+## The Signal and the Noise
+
+**Nate Silver** <br>
+Rating: 3.75 / 5
+
+Through a series of detailed vignettes, Nate Silver provides a nuanced view of interpreting the world and gaining a better understanding of truth by discerning signal from noise.
+He recommends a probabilistic paradigm founded in Bayesian statistics to learn by perpetually updating beliefs as new information is received.
+
+Each chapter is a deep dive into a different field where forecasting and prediction are essential, providing different windows into the key aspects of this skill.
+While interesting, some of the chapters feel a bit long and diverge into tangents that seem irrelevant to forecasting/prediction.
+Still, with Silver’s experience, expertise, and knowledge, these passages were still valuable and informative, if off topic.
+Silver’s writing style is easy to read and his explanations follow.
+
+## Mornings on Horseback
+
+**David McCullogh** <br>
+Rating: 4 / 5
+
+Mornings on Horseback is a biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s early life, finishing well before his presidency.
+It is tremendously thorough, and the author is forthright when information is uncertain or conflicting, presenting all reputable sides and then providing his opinion.
+It describes T.R.’s childhood and young adult years, but also a lot of background on his parents, their heritage, and his siblings, representing a full picture of the future president.
+The author also presents the story with details about the contemporary world, putting T.R.’s story in the proper light of those days.
+This is a dense book and a slow read for all save the most avid fans of T.R.
+Still, it is well written and information-rich, making it a good option for those interested in understanding this unique president and his lasting impact on America.
+
+## For Blood and Money
+
+**Nathan Vardi**
+Rating: 4 / 5
+
+For Blood and Money brings the reader on a very realistic journey through the convoluted research, trial, production, and marketing process for a modern day small molecule drug (I look forward to the sequel on gene and cell therapies).
+Working for a pharmaceutical company, I can attest to how complicated it is to get from discovery to the clinic – rarely is the route straight, more often swapping hands multiple times, falling into patent disputes, plans changing because of a company' strategic "realignments," etc.
+This is a quick read as the author doesn't delve into the full backstory of every character and generously summarizes the research process.
+Personally, I am more interested in the history of the science portion of the tale, but this book focuses predominately on the Wall Street aspects (which makes sense given that is the author's journalistic beat).
+I would mostly recommend For Blood and Money to anyone new to pharmaceuticals or interested in modern-day clinical trial process or drug marketing, but it's an easy read, fast-paced, so if you're interested, it's probably worth a shot.
+
+## Bottle of Lies
+
+**Katherine Eban** <br>
+Rating: 3.75 / 5
+
+*Bottle of Lies* unravels some of the most dangerous and pervasive fraud that plagues drug manufacturing.
+At the time of reading, I’ve been working at a US pharmaceuticals company for 1.5 years and can attest to the caution and precision that is required to maintain good research and manufacturing processes.
+Reading this book, I became acutely aware about how critical maintaining a culture that observes and values those processes is to the entire industry.
+There are some many opportunities for fraud and deceit, only exasperated by the limited oversight the U.S. agencies have in foreign countries.
+Eban does a great job of walking the reader through the complexity of this industry, both the biomedical field and the regulatory structure and systems.
+The narrative style she employs, revealing the story in a manner similar to how it unfolded in real time, highlights for the reader the complexity and scale of the issue – it starts with a trickle, but as there is more investigation, it’s really a massive flood.
+
+## Beyond Order
+
+**Jordan Peterson** <br>
+Rating: 4.25 / 5
+
+This self-help book follows Peterson’s *12 Rules for Life*; I recommend starting there as it lays the foundation for the rules Peterson provides here.
+In the first of the duology, Peterson provides guidance on how to get control of oneself and one’s life.
+In *Beyond Order*, Peterson describes how to interact and manage with chaos.
+He addresses where it might come from, its different forms, how society has built of rules and institutions to deal with it, and how it’s a normal part of life not to be underestimates.
+It's a dense book written in Peterson’s signature style of allusion and allegory.
+I recommend reading this one chapter at a time, best pairing it with a novel to allow time for each lesson to sink in (I paired it with *All the Light We Cannot See*).
+
+<a style="float: left; padding-right: 15px"><img border="0" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451445646l/18143977._SX98_.jpg"/></a>
+
+## All the Light We Cannot See
+
+**Anthony Doerr** <br>
+Rating: 4.25 / 5
+
+I don’t read many novels, so my reviews and critiques are likely simple compared to the more avid fiction reader.
+That said, I breezed through this book; the style of writing, the plot, clever intricacies of the theme of light, made this book hard to put down.
+It’s a complicated mixture of heart-warming and inspiring moments, surrounded and almost consumed by darkness, despair, and hopelessness.
+Great novel with an interesting style and flair.
+
+<a style="float: left; padding-right: 15px"><img border="0" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1692883158l/197773418._SX98_.jpg"/></a>
+
+## Slow Productivity
+
+**Cal Newport** <br>
+Rating: 4.5 / 5
+
+Another classic Cal Newport productivity and self-help book.
+Paired with *Deep Work*, this system prescribed by Newport can be transformational.
+The three principles he lays out in the “Slow Productivity” system resonated with me and I have already been putting them into practice at work and in my hobbies to great success.
+The main pitch is that employing this system leads to a more natural, sustainable work style without a loss (instead, likely an increase) in production of high-quality results.
+
+To finish, if you listen to Newport’s podcast, you probably don’t need to read this book.
+That said, if you are that avid of a listener, then you’ll also likely value having the book as a go-to reference.
+I recommend supporting his work by picking up a copy.
+It’s a quick read and good to have everything in one place.
+
+## The Rust Programming Language
+
+**Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols** <br>
+Rating: 3.75 / 5
+
+*The* manual on the Rust language. Good place to start if you are coming from higher-level programming languages (in my case, Python).
+There are some key principles around memory management and object ownership that are critical to understand to even write Rust code that compiles.
+
+<a style="float: left; padding-right: 15px"><img border="0" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388760745l/33935._SX98_.jpg"/></a>
+
+## Bully for Brontosaurus
+
+**Stephen Jay Gould** <br>
+Rating: 4.25 / 5
+
+*Bully for Brontosaurus* is a collection of some of Gould’s short essays on natural history organized into a few different topics.
+As expected, they were thoroughly researched, informative, and well written.
+Gould has a novelist’s style of writing, but an esteemed academic’s devotion to accuracy that makes his essays and books perfect for any biologists who enjoy reading.
+I also appreciate his intellectual fairness to people who have come before us and lived in a different time.
+He judges their reasoning, but doesn’t scrutinize their morality through the lens of modern times.
+*Bully for Brontosaurus* is both a great place to start reading Gould’s work and a continuation of one’s collection.
+
+<a style="float: left; padding-right: 15px"><img border="0" alt="The Gene: An Intimate History" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1452452965l/27276428._SX98_.jpg" /></a>
+
+## The Gene
+
+**Siddhartha Mukherjee** <br>
+Rating: 3 / 5
+
+To start, my credentials: I’m a geneticist with a PhD in computational genetics, specifically  cancer genetics, and I now work in gene therapy research for a pharmaceutical company.
+Also I have read and enjoyed *The Emperor of All Maladies*.
+
+*A priori* I really wanted to enjoy this book.
+The first 300 pages or so were exactly as expected: detailing the story of the advancements in genetics, weaving a narrative between the key insights and revolutions.
+It had the same feel as in *Emperor of All Maladies*.
+
+This was followed by about 100 or so pages on social issues with weak, cherry-picked, evidence to support vague claims.
+This included a lot of opinion and personal stories.
+There was this feel of half-baked philosophical musings – there were silly analogies and pseudo-sophisticated sentences (i.e. they sounded nice and with a semi-poetic structure), but they didn’t hold up to simple scrutiny.
+I read through a chapter of this and then began skimming and skipping where I could see the content was of limited value or interest.
+
+Finally, the last 50 or so pages touched on gene editing, though the rich history of basic research and technology development was skipped with a limited discussion of the discovery and development of CRISPR.
+In general, this section felt lazily written, as if either the author was hitting the editor's page limit or he didn't want to have to wade through several decades of dense research (genetics and biological research in general moves much faster and with greater volume than it did in Darwin's time).
+
+In summary, the first 2/3 of the book are solid, the remainder is shaky and can be skipped.
+Throughout, there is a lot of fluff, a distracting number of poor analogies and quips, and odd repetitions of information and ideas (as if sections were moved around after all the editing and proofreading was complete).
+(Comparatively, *Emperor of All Maladies* was more thorough and better written and maintained its intensity throughout the entire book.)