craig robert martin

Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World: An Identification Guide by Paul Stamets My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

A for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Trust by Hernan Diaz My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book has been on my list for a couple of years, and over the summer, I finally snagged a hardback edition at the excellent Spoonbill Books on Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. I liked the book—it was a compressed 'New York' by Rutherfurd Edward with a twist. The writing style was clever and engaging. It was a literary piece of 'detection' unravelling the events leading up to and following the Great Crash in 1929. It reminds me of the need for humility in the face of Mr Market . In a classic example of 'self-serving' cognitive bias, we identify our skills when investments go well and blame market weakness and external issues that led to our losses. It wasn't as good as I was expecting it to be, but it was enjoyable and surprising. I gave the book three stars. View all my reviews

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus My rating: 3 of 5 stars I discovered earlier this year that Albert Camus, alongside George Orwell, was a philosophical and literary influence on Mario Vargas Llosa (see my review of The Call of the Tribe ). He helped move the Peruvian writer/politician from Marxism towards liberalism. Perhaps liberals, like Vargas Llosa and maybe even Albert Camus, are always destined to defeat, like Sisyphus. The Myth of Sisyphus is a collection of writings dealing with philosophy, suicide, and a travelogue of Algiers/Oran in the style of Graham Greene. There is the silence of noon on the Place du Gouvernement. In the shade of the trees surrounding it Arabs sell for five sous glasses of iced lemonade flavoured with orange-flowers. Their cry ‘Cool, cool’, can be heard across the empty square. After their cry silence again falls under the burning sun: in the vendor’s jug the ice moves and I can hear its tinkle." But Vienna sta...

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Trust by Hernan Diaz My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Aeneid Book VI by Virgil My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell My rating: 2 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow by Ted Hughes My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney My rating: 4 of 5 stars Delicious and Delightful Four stars View all my reviews

Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It by Christof Koch My rating: 5 of 5 stars Christof Koch’s latest book gives a good overview of his work in neuroscience spanning several decades. Koch always likes a bet, and talks about settling his 25 year wager with David Chalmers: in June 2023 he handed over a case of fine Madeira wine for failing to have identified the neural correlates of consciousness in the preceding 25 years. He thinks he is closer in the elusive search for the seat of consciousness, with the hunt narrowing towards the back of the neocortex, and reckons the next 25 years or so should see it pinned down further. In terms of ‘how’ consciousness works, he is now a fervent advocate of the ambitious Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Giuilio Tononi, a theory that more than 100 consciouness researchers have branded pseudoscience. The chapter on IIT is, unsurprisingly, the most dense. The rest of the book is ...

The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima My rating: 4 of 5 stars Mishima must have been uncharacteristically cheerful when he wrote this delightful short novel about a fishing island in 1950s Japan. Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. The girl's father thinks he has no prospects and prohibits her from meeting the boy. The boy proves himself a hero, and the father gives his blessing—the end. Shinji has just turned 18, and other than his daily work on a fishing vessel, he has never left town. He falls innocently for the new girl in town, Hatsue, and his interest in her sparks the gossip of their tight-knit community fueled by the jealousy of his peers. Fourteen hundred people live on Song Island, Uta-Jima, within its three-mile coastal universe. The island is steeped in ancient myths and appears to have escaped much of the effects of war and industrialization, with its residents living their lives as if the Meiji Restoration had never happened. The women s...

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins My rating: 3 of 5 stars The book offers an intriguing exploration into an alternate architecture of intelligence, drawing from Hawkin's extensive background in neuroscience and computing (he helped design the Palm Pilot). The book is divided into three parts, each tackling a distinct aspect of brain function and its implications for artificial intelligence and beyond. The book's first part is a compelling dive into the world of cortical columns. It focuses on the importance of the brain's cortex (the crumpled outer layer), which is thought to have evolved later than the older 'reptilian brain', which the author dismisses throughout the book (despite the fact it keeps him and other humans alive). Hawkins suggests that if you spread the brain's 'newer' neocortex out on a table into its 2.5mm thick extra-large pizza size, you would be looking at 150,000 simil...

The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag Montefiore My rating: 5 of 5 stars The World - Simon Sebag Montefiore "A world historian, wrote al-Masudi in ninth-century Baghdad, is like ‘a man who, having found pearls of all kinds and colours, gathers them together into a necklace and makes them into an ornament that its possessor guards with great care’." Simon Sebag Montefiore’s "The World" is an ambitious and exhaustive chronicle that spans the vast expanse of human history, from the dawn of modern human civilization to the recent conflict in Ukraine. While Montefiore himself concedes that "there is such a thing as too much history," this hefty tome is packed with fascinating and delightful historical pearls that make the lengthy read worthwhile. Some of the connections are surprising, and some of the chance events have resulted in the Geo-political map we use today. The book is full of etymology - from how writing de...

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen My rating: 4 of 5 stars Of the many motifs and themes running through this book, two stand out at the beginning: exclusion and friendship. Exclusion quickly turns to friendship, as three Vietnamese boys pledge their loyalty in a blood pact. One boy, our narrator, is an outsider as he is the product of the Church, the French, and Vietnam. He is ‘Bui Do’ - the dust of the earth (a phrase later encapsulated in the heart-wrenching song in Cameron Mackintosh’s Miss Saigon .) The other two boys sympathize and rescue him from bullying at school, and they become fast and firm friends. However, the scars of adolescent unity never seem to heal in the humidity of 1970s Vietnam. Sympathy is a title theme bleached throughout the book, yet it is unclear who the sympathizer is and with whom we should sympathize the most. The defeated French, sipping Ricard and sticking to the old names of Saigon’s streets? The defeated American...