Bookpost: Slamming the lid on 2021

[roadrunnertwice]

OK, finally: here's the last three book reviews I still hadn't posted from 2021.

Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey — ADHD 2.0

Nov. 24

I got at least two new things from this, and for me that's more than enough to justify the quick read I gave it, but IDK if I'd necessarily recommend it if you've already read at least one other book by these two, and I still rate Delivered from Distraction as the winner of the bunch. They're trying to keep abreast of current best information and best guesses, which is a project I find interesting enough to follow, but I think their overriding concern every time is that there's always SO MANY people encountering legit info about ADHD for the very first time, so they always need to spend a ton of time on the basics.

Anyway, a few of the new bits I gleaned from this one:

• However important you think exercise is, it's probably even more important. Wild! That's something I noticed on my own after reducing my medication use, and it was useful to get some extra parallax on that.

• The stuff about interactions between the brain's Task Positive Network (TPN) and Default Mode Network (DMN) was interesting, BUT: I have a strong feeling that science's understanding of it is in a very early draft, and I think they might be granting it more explanatory power than it deserves at this point. I'm not sure yet.

• I have a variety of conflicting thoughts about their effort to expand the ADHD conversation into this new "Variable Attention Stimulus Trait (VAST)" thing, which as far as I can tell basically boils down to "non-clinical ADHD" or maybe "late-capitalism-induced ADHD". I have tried and failed multiple time to summarize those thoughts. Gonna just leave it be for now.

Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols (and incidental contributors) — The Rust Programming Language

Various points over the last year and change

Readable online

This is one of the better pieces of programming language documentation I've ever read! Does the job, and does it well. Definitely start here if you want to learn Rust.

And if you usually learn better by diving right in and monkeying with existing code... maybe consider skimming the book first anyway. Rust has a small handful of incredibly odd fundamental behaviors that are hard to derive from context alone, and hearing an explanation first really helps, even if the practicalities don't stick on the first read.

Aria Beingessner (and incidental contributors) — Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists

Dec ??

Readable online

I stumbled across this while I was trying to do the 2021 Advent of Code in Rust, and it was incredibly informative! I got a bunch of immediately useful tips out of it (in particular, I feel like mem::replace maybe deserves a mention in the official book, as a safe solution to some sticky type system problems), and it also really helped shore up my foundational knowledge.

Also, it was surprisingly entertaining. If you don't read anything else from this one, do at least pause to enjoy her jeremiad against linked lists from the introduction.

(Small world, apparently the author was one of the main programmers on Homestuck's interactive bits?? Wild.)

2021 Wrap-up and Census

The count last year was a fairly grim picture of the state of my attention span and capacity to dream. I'm putting most of the blame on the ongoing and accumulating stress of living in the final days of a rapidly crumbling civilization. 👍🏼 (Which might or might not be what we factually look back on this period as, in fifty years' time, but the verdict of history is kind of beside the point — that's what the evidence points to as we live this, and that's the identity and nature of the stress it inflicts on us.)

• 6 video games with significant stories
• 2 comics (one of which was an eight-volume manga that I'm counting as one because 🤷🏽)
  • 1 of which was a re-read
• 19 novels
  • 13 by women, 6 by men
  • 15 re-reads, 4 new
• 6 nonfiction or technical books
  • 4 by men, 1 by a woman, and 1 by a mixed-gender team (incidental contributors excluded)
• 1 volume of poetry

So, call it 28 books (excluding the games), more than half of which were re-reads.

The first paragraph of this wrap-up sounds fairly depressive when I read it back, so I want to reassure that I'm doing pretty good, all things considered! It's just that I end up having to allocate my attention and energy a lot differently than I would allocate them if I lived in a healthier world. In particular, I've been having an incredibly difficult time consuming non-re-read fiction these last two and a half years, and that includes video games with significant stories. I can do it, sometimes, but it's much slower and harder than usual. I recently heard another person (and a much more prolific reader than me, to boot) say the same thing; what an odd effect! So a bunch of the energy I would have put into exploring new worlds in my mind has gone into learning skills instead, or just soaking up the time in an anodyne way by playing skill-focused games that are more or less free of story. I don't find myself drawn to doomscrolling to fill the gap, so that's good.