Hippo wants to read The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
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 😉
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Hippo's books
2025 Reading Goal
8% complete! Hippo has read 2 of 24 books.
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Hippo finished reading Without Me You're Nothing by Frank Herbert
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(d) because of all that it's not at all outdated and most of it is still relevant today!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...
Hippo finished reading The Power by Naomi Alderman
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? ;)
Hippo finished reading Talking to My Daughter about the Economy by Yanis Varoufakis
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?
Hippo wants to read The secret history by Donna Tartt
The secret history by Donna Tartt
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college …
Hippo finished reading Frankenstein (Wordsworth Classics) (Wordsworth Classics) by Mary Shelley
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!
Hippo finished reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
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.
Hippo reviewed Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White
A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned …
Putting accounting into context in today's world—and what a context it is!
4 stars
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 😉
Hippo finished reading More than Enough by Mike Piper
Finished this too; I guess it was the aftershock of reading "Double Entry" lol
Hippo finished reading Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White
A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned …
...and I'm done! This was a great read. Apologies for quote-flooding your feed, but Bookwyrm has a way to filter out quotes so I hope you'll be fine 😅
I'll write a proper review in a bit; here finally is one book where I'm all fired to write one! 😛
Hippo quoted Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White
A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned …
Patel tells the story of a group of filmmakers (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan) who decided to treat the corporation like the person it legally is and test its psychological profile. Using the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), they found that the corporation shares many of the characteristics that define psychopaths. That is, corporations break the law if they can, they hide their behaviour, sacrifice long-term welfare for short-term profit, are aggressively litigous, ignore health and safety codes, and cheat their suppliers and workers without remorse.
— Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White (43%)
Psychoanalysing corporations is a cool idea! Would be fun to apply this onto specific corporations and see what the results are 😉
(In the book they mention a few examples like Enron and Monsanto; I haven't read the study though so not sure what was covered there.)
Hippo quoted Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White
A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned …
As John Lanchester says: 'The experience of reading a publicly held company's accounts is not supposed to resemble a first encounter with the later Mallarmé', the notoriously difficult French symbolist poet.
— Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White (39%)
Words as true today as they were on the day it was spoken! 😉
Hippo quoted Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White
A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned …
Content warning Mild spoiler on the direction this book takes, although there can hardly be a spoiler for non-fiction (or can there?)
'Without looking too closely one might already glimpse in double-entry bookkeeping the ideas of gravitation, the circulation of blood and energy conservation.' What Sombart means by this extravagant claim is that through its encouragement of regular record-keeping, mathematical order and the reduction of events to numbers abstracted from time and place, double entry fostered a new view of the world as being subject to quantification—and it was this urge to abstract and quantify natural phenomena that lay at the heart of the scientific revolution.
— Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White (32%)
This is where the book begins to get intense: around here is when it struck me the scale at which accounting has taken over our lives and the way in which we view the world! (Not solely due to this quote, mind you, but through reading the entire set of chapters around this point)
Hippo quoted Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White
A fascinating exploration of how a simple system used to measure and record wealth spawned …
The base word 'capital' evolved from capitale, a late Latin word derived from caput, meaning 'chief' or 'head', and 'property'.
— Double entry by Jane Gleeson-White (32%)
I knew I was remembering this from somewhere! Only thing I messed up was the language of origin of the term 'caput' 😅