{"id":1573,"date":"2015-12-24T13:46:02","date_gmt":"2015-12-24T20:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/?p=1573"},"modified":"2015-12-24T14:47:14","modified_gmt":"2015-12-24T21:47:14","slug":"brother-gifts-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/2015\/12\/brother-gifts-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Brother gifts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Another Christmas Eve is upon us so it must be time to get gifts for my brother. As usual, I&#8217;ll be getting kindle books and, as usual, I don&#8217;t really know what he likes. I know he very much enjoyed\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1kiOTjt\" target=\"_blank\">The Martian<\/a> last year and was pleasantly surprised by <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1mhJ0EH\" target=\"_blank\">Ken Jenning&#8217;s Maphead<\/a> (so was I, actually).<\/p>\n<p>This post makes more sense if you understand that I don&#8217;t really know my brother. Sure we grew up in the same house but had a very Bart and Lisa Simpson vibe: sibling rivalry at its worst. But I do care about\u00a0him\u00a0even though I suck at showing it; I fret about how to show that through books.<\/p>\n<p>There have been some Kindle sales so I bought a few books earlier in the year when they were cheaper and set them to deliver today.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1ZrrJr1\" target=\"_blank\">Statistics Done Wrong\u00a0by Alex Reinhart<\/a>: Statistics are really important in today&#8217;s world. It isn&#8217;t just about scientific significance, reading the newspaper without being able to see how to lie and hide information through stats is critical. I thought this was a good intro book, quite amusing for a topic that is usually a slog.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1ZrrUTa\" target=\"_blank\">The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory<\/a>: This was written in the sixties by Raymond Barrett, a teacher and museum exhibit developer. It is a great book but showed its age (you can&#8217;t go to the local pharmacy and pick up mercury anymore). So\u00a0Windell Oskay\u00a0updated it to reflect modern safety practices and some different resources for trying out the experiments. I was trilled to see this book on sale since it is a pretty amusing read and because I had Windell on Embedded.fm (<a href=\"http:\/\/embedded.fm\/episodes\/124\" target=\"_blank\">124: Please Don&#8217;t Light Yourself On Fire<\/a>) so I could mention my podcast to my brother.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1J72WV4\" target=\"_blank\">The Quantum Story: A history in 40 moments by Jim Baggott<\/a>: I almost always buy books I&#8217;ve already read so I can believe I&#8217;ve done the due diligence to know he&#8217;d like them. But this one was on sale and so I got one for him and one for me. I&#8217;m about half way through and put it down&#8230; it is a good mashup of physics, characters, and history but the short-story-like nature makes it easy to put down and pick up. I&#8217;m glad I got it ($2!) but it isn&#8217;t Maphead.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1J73f2d\" target=\"_blank\">Code Name Verity by\u00a0Elizabeth E. Wein<\/a>: This was the best book I read this year. Don&#8217;t read the summary, don&#8217;t read the reviews about it being sad. Just go read the book. I hope he likes this one though it is a bit of an outlier as far as genre goes.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/22qOkGK\" target=\"_blank\">10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works&#8211;A True Story\u00a0by Dan Harris<\/a>: I picked up this book about meditation earlier in the year, having heard Dan Harris on an NPR show being open about his recreational drug use. It was a good book. I liked many parts of it and was only irritated by a few. It didn&#8217;t make me start meditating but it might have made me more mindful, at least for awhile.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now I have to wade through my ideas to figure out what else to get him.<\/p>\n<p>I think yes to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1J73IBF\" target=\"_blank\">Boneshaker by Cherie Priest<\/a>. It was my introduction to Cherie Priest and still probably my favorite of her books (though <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/22qOUEx\" target=\"_blank\">I Am Princess X<\/a> was fantastic but it is a young adult book targeted at women).<\/p>\n<p>I just started <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/22qPhPb\" target=\"_blank\">The Moth<\/a>, written versions of some of the stories told on <a href=\"http:\/\/themoth.org\/radio\" target=\"_blank\">The Moth Radio Hour<\/a>. I really like the radio show, whatever they are about they are good <em>stories<\/em>. The ones I&#8217;ve read so far share the same level of goodness so I&#8217;ll take a chance that it continues despite the preface, forward, and introduction chapters all being long and less interesting.<\/p>\n<p>In that same vein, I noticed that Terry Gross&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/22qPIcv\" target=\"_blank\">All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists<\/a> is also on special this month. I&#8217;ve been wanting to read that so one for him, one for me.<\/p>\n<p>So that covers all the on-sale things. But I can&#8217;t buy only on-sale gifts. You can return Kindle Gifts and get the credit. And I&#8217;ve told him I don&#8217;t mind him doing that but it seems like all &lt;$4 is odd. Despite the amount of time (and, seriously, all sorts of fretting), I should get a couple books that maybe come out of the normal bin.<\/p>\n<p>I quite liked <a href=\"http:\/\/Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson\" target=\"_blank\">Brandon Sanderson&#8217;s Steelheart<\/a>, a sci-fi\/dystopian\/superhero book. I got him the Mistborn trilogy last year. The packing\u00a0is different enough that if he hated that, he still might like Steelheart (though if he liked that he&#8217;ll probably also like Steelheart).<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t read <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/22qRcn6\" target=\"_blank\">The Peripheral<\/a> by William Gibson but it people have been saying it is the best thing he&#8217;s written since Neuromancer. I&#8217;ll send this as\u00a0a little cyberpunk to balance out the steampunk.<\/p>\n<p>Realistically, this is probably enough books for my brother. Though I asked a friend for suggestions and he suggested <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1NEFBZV\" target=\"_blank\">Microserfs<\/a>, The Peripheral, and Suarez&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/22qRnPf\" target=\"_blank\">Daemon<\/a>. That&#8217;s the second person to suggest Daemon to me in the last two weeks. You know, I think I&#8217;ll just get that one for myself instead of my brother. And given the news that Microserfs was better than <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/22qRIRR\" target=\"_blank\">Ready Player One<\/a>, well, that&#8217;s going high on my wish list.<\/p>\n<p>Clearly I&#8217;ve stopped buying gifts for my brother and devolved into something else.<\/p>\n<p>One more for him because I think it is neat:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1NEGxNG\">Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe<\/a>. The creator of the truly excellent <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/\">xkcd <\/a>comic and the hilarious <a href=\"http:\/\/what-if.xkcd.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">What If blog<\/a> wrote a book explaining complicated things in the most common thousand words. It is a strange blend of &#8220;huh&#8221; and &#8220;neat!&#8221; so I&#8217;m hoping he enjoys it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another Christmas Eve is upon us so it must be time to get gifts for my brother. As usual, I&#8217;ll be getting kindle books and, as usual, I don&#8217;t really know what he likes. I know he very much enjoyed\u00a0The Martian last year and was pleasantly surprised by Ken Jenning&#8217;s Maphead (so was I, actually). [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[70,35,7,40,45],"class_list":["post-1573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-book","tag-family","tag-lists","tag-reviews","tag-socially-awkward"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1573"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1578,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1573\/revisions\/1578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/logicalelegance.com\/journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}