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Success! Hippo has read 30 of 12 books.
In this omnibus collection that features three standalone graphic novels, the Boom’r Band teaches Beanish their musical secrets, and the …
"The iconic inhabitants of Larry Marder's unique Beanworld universe are introduced in this complete collection …
After finishing the smaller Beanworld collection, it wasn't enough so I dived in and started the entire omnibus!
I had never heard of this series before, but discovered it in Mike Carey's recommendations of "The Best Fantasy Graphic Novels":
fivebooks.com/best-books/best-fantasy-graphic-novels-mike-carey/
It certainly lives up to its promise! It's not fantasy in the sense of swords and dragons; rather it's set in a different ecological world entirely. It's a fun story, but also loaded with deep themes like the cycle of life and how even seeming adversaries are all necessary parts of the ecosystem 🍃
How humanity brought about the climate crisis by departing from its evolutionary trajectory 15,000 years …
Decided to read it after reading an interview of the author in the MIT Press Reader:
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt/
The ideas in this are great, the central one being that Darwin's idea was not "survival of the fittest" as is commonly believed but the less catchy "survival of the good enough to survive without being killed, while maybe by accident happening to be able to do the same even when conditions change". The book itself seemed a bit boring and repetitive to me though, but that might be because I'm already familiar with the general arc of human evolution so everything described there didn't teach me anything new. I'd say the interview is more fun and humorous than the book, so it was good I started with that and was primed to pick on the same themes in the book itself 🧠
In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins …
I had read this a cople of years back (during the pandemic) but seemed to have forgotten a lot of it, so I read it again today! I remember reviewing it in Snipette after the earlier reading 🖋️
A book set in the context of the Sri Lankan civil war, recommended to me by @ravi@toot.io. I'll wait to read it until I have my hands on his hard copy 😉
I picked this up expecting to just have a fun time reading an old computer manual. But then I realised that:
(a) it's written by Frank Herbert—yes, THE Frank Herbert who wrote Dune!
(b) it's not just instruction manual but also a guide on how to think about computers, including busting myths about computers being too complicated; myths which businessmen have intentionally perpetuated to prevent the common public from getting to interested (you get the idea)
(c) being written by Frank Herbert, it's of course got a lot of philosophy and interesting anecdotes and metaphors
(d) because of all that it's not at all outdated and most of it is still relevant today!
Maybe I should sit down one day and properly learn BASIC...
What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power?
In THE POWER, the …
Stumbled upon this author via a Guardian article about phones making music inaccessible to children! (Alderman was quoted there because she'd written an article about the danger of overdigitalisation in general).
www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/22/phone-kids-losing-their-love-for-music
It's a fun read, the disturbing thing being all this would be pretty run-of-the-mill if the genders were flipped. As it stands, there is a certain schadenfreude in watching things play out ;)
I won't spoil it by saying more but oncce I started reading the prologue/preface/whatever that was it left me intrigued!
@verglas@books.theunseen.city ouch, that doesn't sound like a well-designed book. But maybe the extensive reference list will throw up interesting things that you actually can read? ;)
In Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, activist Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's former finance minister …
Finished reading this in one sitting! A great introduction to the economy, not least because it references Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ;)
Actually, it references a lot of other well-known texts as well, such as the Iliad, the legend of icarus, and the story of Faust and the Devil. And then explains how the economy works through the lens of those stories! I was hooked in the beginning when Varoufakis tries to answer his daughter's question of "Why do we have inequality?" and realises a better way to answer that may be with another question: Why didn't the Aborigines in Australia invade England?
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college …
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. …
Finally got around to reading this—and what a read! Those who think of Frankenstein's monster as just an evil creature created by man should definitely read this to get the full nuanced view. Thanks to @rhea@snipetteville.in for going on about Shelley till I eventually picked up her book!
At a café in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an American stranger. As …
This has been vaguely on my to-read list for a while, and I finally went through it—in one sitting! Incidentally, the story in the book also takes place in one sitting, albeit in a monologue covering many other incidents in the past.
A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned …
I stumbled upon this book when I was learning about accounting in order to get my personal finances in order. While I came in expecting to read mainly about the methods used by the merchants and sailors, the introductory quote itself hinted at much more.
After going into the origins of accounting and how it spread across Europe—the suspicious gaze of the Church notwithstanding—Jane Gleeson-White goes on to describe how accounting changed the way people think about wealth: of themselves, of their nations, and even of the planet! It's not just the simple act of bookkeeping, but also the idea of measuring wealth: tabulating everything into a standard form, and then using that to draw conclusions.
The main problem today is, of course, that what doesn't get entered into account books is ignored (as exemplified in Kennedy's famous speech about GDP). This is an argument I've heard in many books, …
I stumbled upon this book when I was learning about accounting in order to get my personal finances in order. While I came in expecting to read mainly about the methods used by the merchants and sailors, the introductory quote itself hinted at much more.
After going into the origins of accounting and how it spread across Europe—the suspicious gaze of the Church notwithstanding—Jane Gleeson-White goes on to describe how accounting changed the way people think about wealth: of themselves, of their nations, and even of the planet! It's not just the simple act of bookkeeping, but also the idea of measuring wealth: tabulating everything into a standard form, and then using that to draw conclusions.
The main problem today is, of course, that what doesn't get entered into account books is ignored (as exemplified in Kennedy's famous speech about GDP). This is an argument I've heard in many books, but refreshingly, this book didn't dwell on the same points as everyone else, instead skipping on to different aspects of the problem.
A lot of science and history is also touched upon, again through the accounting lens—including how accounting helped finance Darwin's famous expedition, and how the idea of counting and quantifying things helped propel the development of modern scientific methods. One interesting tidbit I didn't know was that Karl Marx was also very interested in what accountants were doing, and his knowledge of accountancy helped form his theories of capitalism! Going even further, it has been suggested that without accounting, the capitalist world we know may not have been developed.
Like many history books, this one looks at things through a predominantly Western lens. While there is mention of how numerical notation and accounting technology came from places like India via the Middle East, all the focus is on what happened in Italy and other parts of the Western World. Perhaps we can't fault it because it is after all a book on double-entry bookkeeping: specifically, the method that developed by the merchants of Venice. It would be nice, though, to see how accounting methods developed in other places, independently at first, and then presumably being "standardised" to European practices as that part of the world gained dominance.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that the book does go into detail on the origin of double-entry bookkeeping itself, as well as how Luca Pacioli took advantage of the printing press to popularise the technique. There are also quotes from early accounting texts, and what's striking is that the method has remained largely unchanged to this very day!
As I mentioned, I was learning about accounting before reading this book. All the "Credit" and "Debit" and different kinds of accounts were confusing me though; reading about the origins in this book and actually imagining how merchants and other people were using it at that time helped me understand where everything was coming from. I wouldn't say I'm completely clear on when to use "credit" or "debit" records yet, but at least I'm now comfortable enough that I'm sure I can figure it out if I sit down and think it through for a bit. And in the meantime, I do know that Robinson Crusoe sat and figured out his own version of double-entry bookkeeping too 😉
Finished this too; I guess it was the aftershock of reading "Double Entry" lol
