Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 2

The Thrill of a Tall Stack of Books to Read

There is something both exciting and comforting about having a large stack of books you are eager to read. Here is the “stack” in no particular order:

The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini by Joe Posnanski This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality by John Gribbin St. Thomas Aquinas by G. K. Chesterton The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller by Gregg Herken Novelist as Vocation by Haruki Murakami Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling by Thomas Hager Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg by David C. Cassidy On the Wild Side by Martin Gardner The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie by Richard Dawkins The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener by Martin Gardner The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938-1995 by Martin Gartner

In addition to these there are some books “coming soon” that I am eagerly awaiting:

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson (coming 11/18/25) John Williams: A Composer’s Life by Tim Greiving (coming 10/7/25) Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue (coming 3/17/26) When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life by Steven Pinker (coming 9/23/25) Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, The Untold Story by Jeffrey Kluger (coming 11/11/25) The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of Wind by Simon Winchester (coming 11/18/25) History Matters by David McCullough, edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson (coming 9/16/25)

What’s in your stack?

A Few More Minor Blog Updates

Just a quick note to say I have made a few minor updates to the new minimalist theme here. When I introduced the theme last week, I knew it wasn’t 100% complete, and I also knew I would be making tweaks along the way as I road-tested it, so to speak. The comment section was one area I neglected. That has now been fixed. You may notice a few minor changes in the comments:

Each comment is numbered. This harks back to the old days of blogs when people could refer to an earlier comment by its number (e.g. “Jamie @ 17: I completely disagree!”)Styling, which I had neglected, now works in comments. Bulleted lists, quotes, links, etc. Also, you can use Markdown in comments and it should for the most part render correctly.The comment header for each comment has been updated to display {commenter name} on {date} hopefully making it easier to identify who wrote the comment.Comments are separated by a thin gray line.

One additional update I am working on is a complete refresh of the taxonomy (categories, tags, and series). All of these elements have grown organically with the blog over the last 20 years. I am now working on consolidating and standardizing them so that they are much more useful than they have been. I have a staging site for this blog to test these changes before I push them to production. More on the taxonomy refresh when it is complete.

Going forward, I am putting updates I make to the blog and theme in this Blog Updates page. You can check there to see recent changes. Major changes I’ll still announce here.

Also, thanks to everyone who has given me feedback. I very much appreciate it. Keep it coming!

The Joy of Ex-Lib Books

Among my favorite types of books in my collection are ex-lib books—or as I like to think of them, retired library books. I received one in the mail recently, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling by Thomas Hager, and handling it reminded me of why I love this form of book.

For one thing, they are generally hefty. I don’t know if the books sold to libraries are manufactured to be more durable than the average book, but they feel durable. Quite a few of the Isaac Asimov books I’ve collected over the years are ex-lib books and they all have that same heft to them1.

Ex-lib books frequently come with a protective coating over the dust jacket. This offers two pleasant conveniences. First, it keeps the dust jacket from sliding off when reading the book2. Second, it makes a delightfully crunchy sound when opening and closing the book. That sound, to me, is the sound of reading.

Used books have a history. This is part of the joy of collecting used books. They frequently tell stories and those stories are sometimes just as interesting as the text itself. Almost all ex-lib books have some kind of provenance to them. Opening to the back of my new Pauling biography, I can see that it once belonged to the Vance Granville Community College in North Carolina. It is even stamped with a birthday of sorts, January 26, 19963.

Unlike many used books, ex-lib books tend to be well-kept. There’s rarely writing or highlighting in the book, which is sometimes a disappointment, but at the same time, it is nice to know that people respect library books enough to leave them intact for the next reader.

I’ve never counted how many ex-lib books I have on my shelves. But there are more on the way. Today, in fact, I am expecting Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg by David C. Cassidy. Like its title, its arrival is uncertain. It was supposed to arrive yesterday, and now is scheduled to arrive today. I can track its position, but not its momentum. But soon enough, the wave function will collapse and the book will be in my hands.

Of course, in Asimov’s case, the heft may be due to the volume of writing that went into it. Although Words from History is not a particularly long book, the ex-lib edition I have is still quite hefty. ︎When I read a non-ex-lib book, I reluctantly remove the dust jacket to avoid this inconvenience. Of course, this creates a new inconvenience when I am reading in public: people approaching to ask what I am reading. If the dust jacket was in place, they would see for themselves. ︎On that date, I was deep into the second book on the list of books I’ve read since January 1, 1996. ︎

Book Ratings, Revisited

I’m terrible when it comes to book ratings. I used to use them, but these days I’ve given up on them completely. I think of a 0-to-5 star rating as a bell curve where 3 stars fall right in the middle of the curve. If you get 3 stars, you are meeting expectations. Zero- and 5-star ratings are outliers, several standard deviations from the mean, and thus should be more rare than a 3-star rating. However, there are so many fingers on the scale1 of these rating systems that I really have to take them with a grain of salt.

That doesn’t mean I don’t look at the way others rate books, and collective ratings in places like Amazon often puzzle me because they sometimes diverge far from what I would rate a book, if I still used these systems.

Yesterday, for instance, I started reading Martin Gardner’s2 autobiography Undiluted Hocus-Pocus. It wasn’t long before I decided that I really loved it. And yet, I noticed on Audible it has a rating of 3.9 stars and on Goodreads it has 3.4 stars, both well below what I would rate it thus far.

An interesting question occurred to me while I was in the shower pondering this discrepancy3: Can an individual’s book rating for a given book be predicted based on the graph of all other books a reader has read without knowing how those books were rated? Granted, if the reader has read very few books, this might not work well. But could a network of books—with nodes being category and directed edges being the order in which the books were read—be used to make a reasonable prediction of the book at hand?

I suspect this is to some extent how outlets like Amazon produce “Based on your reading…” recommendations. But all Amazon knows is that I purchased a book. It doesn’t know if I’ve read the book4, let alone what order I’ve read it in. Order can be important. For me, at least, the butterfly effect of reading—flitting from one book to another as each book slightly (or dramatically) alters the choice of the next book—means that the order I read books in has great significance. So I wonder: if you knew the category and order of books read, and you had enough data, could you make a reasonable prediction of a rating of a given book based on that information?

Probably not, I suspect, because interest in a book does not necessarily correlate with enjoyment. That just leaves me back at my original question: why do some book ratings diverge so much from my own experience with a book? With so many fingers on the ratings scale, it is probably a meaningless question.

My own “rating” system is a little simpler. If I really like a book I’ll note it as “recommended.” When friends ask about what books I’d recommend in a given subject area, I have an easy way of offering suggestions without worrying about a rating. But what does “recommended” mean? To me, a book I’d recommend is a book I myself would enjoy reading again.

On the low end of the scale, trolls will have entire campaigns to give books (or authors) they object to 1-star reviews never even having read the book. Meanwhile, on the higher end of the scale, authors will ask for high reviews because higher reviews means better visibility in the system. In either case, the score becomes a pawn of potential sales, and one which, for that reason, can’t necessarily be trusted as a measure of quality. ︎I must be on some kind of Gardner kick right now because I am also reading is book Science: Good, Bad and Bogus . ︎Showers are great places for pondering. ︎Sometimes a book I buy will sit unread on my bookshelves for years, helping shape my anti-library. ︎

The Commodore VIC-20 on the Bike Path

On a recent walk, I saw in the distance a Commodore Vic-20, perched on a rock at the side of the bike path.

I was first introduced to the VIC-20 in my 5th grade math class (ca. 1982). Our math teacher rolled it into the classroom along with a television set and we used it to play Hangman1. From that moment, I desperately wanted one. I would dream that I got one, only to wake up disappointed that it was just a dream. Finally, sometime in 1984, I think, I did get one. This blog is one of the results of my early experience with computers, the VIC-20 specifically.

Seeing it there on the bike path ahead, I was reminded of that scene in Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams, when Arthur Dent is running down a mountain in some distant world:

And suddenly he tripped again and was hurled forward by his considerable momentum. But just at the moment he was about to hit the ground astoundingly hard he saw lying directly in front of him a small navy blue tote bag that he knew for a fact he had lost in the baggage retrieval system at the Athens airport some ten years previously in his personal time scale, and in his astonishment he missed the ground completely2 and bobbed off into the air with his brain singing.

I did not go bobbing off into the air, but I thought that if it was a VIC-20 and it was in reasonably good shape and if it had been casually abandoned…

As I got closer it began to look like the VIC-20 was damaged. It looked as if there was a long crack along its surface. That was disappointing, but still an interesting find. I walked closer.

I should note here that I am not nor have I ever have been a user of contact lenses. I wear glasses, progressive3 lenses, pretty much all of the time. My vision isn’t terrible. But I wear the glasses. Except on my morning walks when I take a break from the tyranny of the screen and the lens and allow my eyes to go uncovered, naked to the world.

The VIC-20 began to look thinner than I remembered, and less beige. Indeed, the VIC-20 began to look less like a VIC-20 and more like an elongated pizza box–which, it turned out as I finally stood before it, was exactly what it was. A pizza box from a local pizza joint not far from where I stood on the path.

For a moment, I felt the same reaction that I felt upon waking from the dream that I had gotten a VIC-20 back when I didn’t have one. Standing there, I remembered all of the code I’d run through it, all of the code I’d typed in carefully from computer magazines. Copying code, yes, but learning at the same time–and learning to type as well. I remembered the standard ukase the computer would respond with to my typing infelicities: SYNTAX ERROR.

I was also reminded of the time, a few years before, that I’d had to fast ahead of a medical procedures. Circumstances made it a long fast, something like 36 hours. The morning of the procedure, I walked my youngest daughter to school. All I could think about was food. Coming down the stairs, I saw one of the staff carrying three boxes of donuts and I lamented that the gods would tease me so. But then, suddenly, the teacher wasn’t holding three boxes of donuts, she was holding three large binders.

The VIC-20 on the bike path was just a mirage, like boxes of donuts. My stomach grumbled at that point and I continued on my walk, determined to get something to eat.

For the Atari, this was originally written in Assembly language. On the VIC-20, it must have been a BASIC port. ︎According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the secret to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss–a process often aided by an unexpected distraction. ︎What we used to call “bifocals”, or in my case, “trifocals”. ︎

A New Minimalist Blog Theme

Sometimes, when I am close to finishing an old notebook, I get eager to start scribbling in a new one. There is something so encouraging about a blank notebook, so many possibilities. It is a fresh start. So it is for blog themes. I’ve been using the same theme on my blog now for over a decade. I felt it was time for a change. And since we’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of the blog, what better time than the present!

So much that I see out there today is busy. I decided I wanted something different. Something more minimal that focused on the text. Welcome to my new minimal theme.

Post Snippets. The home and archive pages now show the first part of a post rather than the entire post. I went back and forth on this one. On the one hand, I didn’t like the idea of an extra click getting in the way of reading. On the other hand, it makes it easer to skim through options without scrolling long distances. I’ve added in a “read time” to help judge the length of the post from the snippet1.Enhanced Search. To balance the previous change, I’ve souped up the search capabilities by using Jetpack’s Instant Search capability. This brings a much richer search experience with better relevance and filtering than before.Minimalist Style. I’ve cleaned up the post formatting to give it a minimalist feel, text in the center of the page, wide margins that draw attention to the text. I’ve also removed some of the noise that I found distracting.

There are still some changes underway, but this is now far enough along where I feel comfortable releasing it into the world.

Change can be tough, especially if you are used to seeing the same thing day after day. Hopefully this change is a plus for most readers. If nothing else, I like it!

Thanks and appreciation go out to Robert Breen for his review of these changes before I pushed them to production. ︎

Upcoming Site Changes

Just a heads-up for folks–I’m working on a new custom theme for the blog. I’ve been using the same theme for years now and I’ve gotten a little tired of it. I’m aiming for something more simple, minimalist, that emphasizes the text–pretty much the opposite of what many sites these days are doing, but it makes me happy.

One side-effect of this change: if you run a search on the blog right now, you’ll see it is using JetPack’s search capabilities, which are vastly better than the default WordPress search.

Wanted to put the notice here in case you come to the site and it looks different and you think you are in the wrong place. You are not. And I’ll post more about the new theme once it is in production.

Ozzy

I spent a lot of time in 5th grade drawing pictures of Ozzy Osbourne concerts: two dimensional pencil sketches looking at the stage with stick-figure band members. The most careful, detailed part is the sketches was the big OZZY that hung over the stage with connected Z’s.

Blizzard of Ozz was my entry into a genre of music that I have enjoyed ever since and which has served has the background to AP physics homework in high school and marathon coding sessions ever since

R.I.P. Ozzy

Los Angeles, No Times

When I used to come to Santa Monica for work, I’d stop in at a local AM/PM to pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Times. I read that paper growing up and particularly enjoyed Al Martinez columns. It was always nice to come back and read the paper early in the morning.

This morning, while the family still slept, I walked over to the same AM/PM to pick up a copy of the LA Times. I’d been looking forward to taking it to the beach and reading through it with the sound of the waves in the background.

I couldn’t find the paper so I asked the fellow behind the counter where it was. “We stopped getting it three or four years ago,” he told me. “No one was buying it.” I left empty-handed but still sat at the beach once again saddened by the edition of newspapers. And towns. Santa Monica is much different than it used to be. The bowling alley around the corner from the office is now an empty field, and the great little Mexican restaurant next to it is now an MMA shop.

On the other hand, what used to be a large parking lot is now a turf sports field.

I might have known about these changes if they were reported in the LA Times. But apparently no one is buying it. Today, even me.

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The Silence Before the Sun

The world is a noisy place and it is hard to tune out the orchestra of modern life. So I seek quiet places. I returned to one such place over the holiday weekend, at a resort in West Virginia. The resort itself is noisy and chaotic as resorts often are. But it is surrounded by a state park, and early each morning before the revelers stirred and just as the sun was about to wink above the hill, I took a hike out to a quiet place on the far side of the lake. There, I could stand for fifteen or twenty minutes listening to a layer of the world beneath our civilization. Birds sang, insects chittered, the breeze stirred the grass, but even the lake was quiet.

Those twenty minutes of quiet recharge me more than any other meditation, more than a good night’s sleep, more than a holiday weekend at a resort. Sometimes, when I need a quiet place, I’ll imagine standing in the midst of the Great Plains a thousand years ago, with nothing but the sound of the wind in the grass. The brief time at the lakeside was as close as I had come to that fantasy of a quiet place.

About / Contact | Bibliography | What I Have Read Since 1996 | Curated Index to the Blog

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