Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Category: Books

  • A lot of editing effort is pending

    Reworked the ebook manuscripts for Forbidden Stones and Jupiter Darkly into the right format. It still needs to be edited from start to finish. Both are novella length works at the moment. 

    I downloaded and installed the Artifact application after listening to Casey Newton talk about the application during Code 2023. 

    Posted a quick update on LinkedIn, “Machine learning election models: We are quickly approaching 3 years of my weekly machine learning and other artificial intelligence posts on Substack every Friday. Things are changing so rapidly in the AI/ML space that writing research notes each week has been a very rewarding journey. This last week I spent some time taking a look at machine learning election modeling.”

    Locked in 54 pages of a new book on feedback. It needs to be edited line by line before release. 

    3 manuscripts need to be line by line edited before release into an ebook at the moment.

  • 5 science fiction series I have enjoyed reading

    I’m going to go ahead and share this list of 5 science fiction series that I have enjoyed reading. I have been working on this list for a bit. Depending on how you count the books some of the series have more or maybe less, but I have provided links over to Good Reads so you can see the more exhaustive listing of all the books in the series. You may have a different listing of your favorite 5 science fiction series. That is totally ok by me. Feel free to share other high quality series that I should check out. You have a good indication based on the below list the types of things I enjoy reading. 

    • Dune (6 original books) happens to be my all time favorite series. This is probably the set of books I have read the most. The first 6 original books are my favorite set of the Dune universe, but I have read every other book in the series up to now. 
    • Expanse (9 books) I’m sure you have heard about the books by James S. A. Corey. They quickly became a new addition to my list. It is rare that during the course of reading a book series I cannot wait to find out what happens next and push on past my bedtime, but a few moments in this series had my complete attention. 
    • Ender saga (12 books) I’m a fan of both the regular saga and the shadow series of books about Ender and Bean. Considerations about the author aside, I have enjoyed the series of books and have read them more than one time as a complete work. 
    • Foundation (7 books) Yes, you can watch this series on Apple TV these days and I don’t think it resembles the books. It’s an adaptation for sure. I think the regular foundation series holds up pretty well all things considered.  
    • Kovacs (3 books) The most adult series on my list is also a more recent set of books by Richard K. Morgan about the life and times of Takeshi Kovacs. Just to be clear on this one I would read another round of books about Takeshi. I think some room exists for more adventures somewhere in the universe of Takeshi Kovacs. 

    Postscript: My affinity for one of these series of books is not an endorsement of any author as a human being or anything like that. Why that would be an expectation of things like a book list is beyond my understanding. Assuming the author is capable of producing world class and renowned prose that is readable, epic, and otherwise delightful I’m willing to be glad that they did. We can always debate or consider other parts of a person’s life and beliefs along the way. To me a book is what is contained on the pages from start to finish. I’m willing to judge that book and decide if I want to read it and enjoy the content contained within the pages.

  • Thinking about good adventure books

    Instead of working on a Substack post right now I’m just listening to the WAN show and drinking a glass of water. That is how this day is starting off. I spent a few minutes looking up all time great adventure books to find a good one. Most of the time I read non-fiction books so I have not really gotten that far into many other books. Recently, I read the entire The Expanse series which is the first modern series I have consumed outside of the derivative Dune books beyond the original series. So many books are getting published right now that it is hard to know what to read next. So many people read that Ready Player One book a few years back that I picked it up and thought it was great. A lot of people recommended The Expanse series so I gave it a shot and it turned out to be delightful in terms of being a space opera with reasonable technology. Obviously, I would have preferred that many novels be devoted to extending the Firefly universe, but you cannot always get the things you want. 

    To just be clear about my point here, I’m thinking about good adventure books. Trying to figure out what audiobook to read next is a bit of a time consuming thing. To be clear I don’t mind paying the audiobook price where the royalty goes to the publisher and author. They did some work and I plan to enjoy listening to it or sometimes reading it. I’m just not in favor of buying audiobooks that are disappointing. Most of the time I’ll be listening to a podcast and they will recommend some books to read. I’ll open up Google Books and buy the audiobook to listen to in that hour before bed. The vast majority of those books are basically modern history. Finding really good science fiction series has been a bit harder.

    I’m open to recommendations for a good read. Generally, I prefer epic space journeys.