Vida Sioson

Book 7 of 24 of A Year of Books. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Read: March 2018.

The thing that drives me into reading these types of books is obsession. Obsession of the writer, the scientists, and the discoverers all throughout our time who studied every nook and cranny of the universe they can possibly find. In the context of the size of everything, it isn’t much. But in relation to our tiny human minds… It’s a lot more than we can ever know or remember or even understand.

While there are a million interesting/amazing/funny things in the book, here are a few points I believe we need some reminding of once in a while:

• It takes a huge amount of luck – more luck than we can ever imagine – for any living thing to be alive. So the fact that we woke up today, the fact that we even exist means we are so (damned) lucky.

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you can make it. Getting here wasn’t easy I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

We are awfully lucky to be here… To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better.

Continue reading “Book 7 of 24: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson”

Book 6 of 24 of A Year of Books. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Listened to: March 2018.

I signed up to Audible’s 30-day free trial to listen to the Ready Player One audiobook. Normally I like actual reading more. It allows me to speed up and slow down my pace depending on my level of interest. But this book got me hooked. I ended up listening to it in the car, in the elevator, in bed before I sleep… Practically everywhere.

It’s a light and easy, young adult, science fiction read. Probably not an original concept, but the existence of a virtual life outside of real life interests me a lot. I used to play a lot of games when I was younger and it brought back a lot of good feelings, when I used to spend hours and hours on the computer killing bad guys and collecting items in RPG games.

Book 5 of 24 of A Year of Books. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. Read: March 2018.

Last night – which is a Friday night – I spent after hours talking about Haruki Murakami’s memoir while sipping red wine in our office common area. It was our second Book Club session. Nothing formal. Just a place where questions like “How did you find the book?” end up with topics around sport, determination, culture differences, the difficulties of being a creative professional, suicide, amassing huge amounts of wealth, retirement, and most importantly, how to get a husband that has lots of money so you can quit your job and be a “philantrophist”. (I mean…)

Imagine a Facebook group about books – but in person! Imagine the Good Reads review section – but with actual people conversing with each other about their learnings, lives, funny thoughts, misunderstandings and whatnot.

On the one end, there are our conversations on the web; our ability to interact with people around the world with witty 140-character or three-sentence comments; hit like, follow, love… There is some magic in that. On the other end, there are our conversations in real life; small pockets of time we allocate specifically to listen, and at certain times, speak, mostly about things you don’t usually talk about IRL. It’s getting all the rarer these days, but that’s what a Book Club is. Continue reading “Book 5 of 24: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”

Book 3 of 24 of A Year of Books. You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Read: February 2018.

We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence. “What is a person?” If I knew the answer to that, I might be able to program an artificial person in a computer. But I can’t. Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.

Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget falls within the gray area between a tech and a philosophy reading. The basic premise is that we have to continuously question whether the design of the technologies we create (and use) stretches our capabilities as human beings, or reduces them. Continue reading “Book 3 of 24: You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier”