Red Plenty

A few that haven’t been mentioned: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is a historical fiction story about the mathematicians and engineers who tried to optimize the Soviet economy. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende is much deeper and more interesting than any of the theatrical versions. Reminiscent of the Matrix sequels, the Childlike Empress threatens to crash Fantastica with a stack overflow (via infinite recursion) to force Bastian to give her a name. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin goes into much more detail than the film (Oppenheimer).

Red Plenty, a novel that is loosely about the invention of linear programming in the Soviet Union (a branch of mathematics, only somewhat related to computer programming). Good description of what the process of scientific invention feels like in the first part of the book. (if you want more depth on the mathematics of linear programming, Understanding and Using Linear Programming is a very readable (and short) textbook that only requires basic linear algebra knowledge). Moneyball, people have been recommending this to me for years but I never read it because I find baseball so boring. I'm glad I finally read it. It's not really a book about baseball it's about finding and exploiting unappreciated edges. Who We Are and How We Got Here, makes a lot of the recent genetic research on human origins understandable. Especially relevant this year due to Svante Paabo's nobel prize. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, possibly better than the movie (which I love). Reads a bit like a script. The dialog is very good and contains many "scenes" that aren't in the movie.…

A couple people recommended Red Plenty on one of these threads, and I took the recommendation and agree, it's great. Earnest Soviet economists try to solve the Russian economy with mathematical models running on computers. The story is told in a series of anecdotes, kind of similar to Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. There are diversions along the way about Soviet cars, the probability of getting lung cancer from any given cigarette, academic freedom, etc.

Francis Spufford is a brilliant English author who should be more widely known. For the HN crowd I would heartily recommend "Red Plenty" (2010). It's a semi-fictional novel about that brief moment in time around 1959 when the Soviets really thought that the dream of Communism was within reach. The characters (most of them real people) include mathematicians, biologists, party officials, computer designers... There's probably no other novel that could afford to spend so many pages on discussing linear optimization and centralized economic planning without sacrificing the emotional narrative. I can't recommend it enough.

1. Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) - Fascinating fictionalised account of the history of the USSR. Gets a little tedious at times but worth it. 2. Anils Ghost (Michael Ondaatje) - Drama with a war background. Nice read. 3. Financial intelligence for Entrepreneurs - Very useful now that I have a small company of my own. 4. How to Speak How to listen (Mortimer Adler) - Worth it. I enjoy public speaking and this was well written and quite useful. 2016's been a bad year for me as far as books go.