Book recommendations 2020

Summary

2020 has been a rocky year for everyone due to the Covid outbreak. The following are my top 10 books recommendations of the year. The first five are purely non-scientific while the rest are.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling

I had the opportunity to read the entire Harry Potter series his year and Harry Potter and the Goblet of fire is by far my favorite of all the books. From the horror in the last chapters, to the romance and drama of the Yule Ball this book never stopped amazing me. Most interesting was the competition and the constant problem solving at each’s beginnings.

12 years a slave - Solomon Northup

The story of slave is usually told from a third person’s point of view. That is, from an entity neither the slave owners, nor the slaves. An exception to the rules is the slave owners themselves. But who can describe the real face of slavery than the slaves themselves? Sharing one’s opinions against slavery in a world ruled by it, could do nothing but invite trouble. Even if the slaves were permitted to share their opinions about the subject matter, who would listen to them? Can a slave instead write and publish a book relaying their actual conditions? When would they have time for it? Who would preserve such books? Could slaves even read and write in the first place? Solomon Northup was a born-free black man in north USA at the early beginning of the abolishing of slavery. In the book, he narrate being sold as a slave to the south, where he endured 12 years of gruesome treatment, to which he persevered and return back to his family. This book received mass attention in the last 10 years, after the release of a movie adaption of the same name. The latter was the place, from which came to me the idea to purchase and read the book. One more thing to notice, is the peculiar way the book is written: it is neither too complex, nor too simple to read and understand, the points show come across clear and direct. This is a surprising fact, considering the fact that Northup started writing this book merely 3 days after his release.

The adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

After watching the Guy Ritchie’s movies Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and its prequel, i wanted more! The Wikipedia article to these movies referred to the original Sherlock Holmes books, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which i ordered as soon as i could. I must say that every single chapter of the book was a masterpiece after the previous. My favorite remains that of the The Speckled Band. This book offers a continuous streak of creative problem solving problem at same time with enormous and satisfying conclusions.

Sherlock Holmes the complete series - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I consider this book a single book, even though it is a collection of all the original Sherlock Holmes book by the original author.
It starts off with the first book: A study in scarlet which marks the meeting of Holmes and Dr. Watson. A story of such structure, i have never seen: the literal plot twist in the middle of book completely blew me away. The book goes from a disgusting murder detective missing during which you exclaim: “I can wait till this idiot” who did that gets caught, to a love story, to a revenge story, to “Oh i fully understand why you did it man, i would have done the same thing myself”. This book was for some controversial because of how it depicted mormons.
A sign of four was the name of the second book. It presents the meeting of Dr. Watson and his soon-to-become fiance and a masterfully written story about the life of a man sent to India and the backstabbing behaviour of men. Although this book is excellent, it gets overshadowed by the previous one.
The third book is the Adventure of Sherlock Holmes which was mentioned above and contains, instead of a single story narrative, like the previous two, many divided into chapters.
It is then followed by the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes which follows its style. My favorite chapter is the Yellow face followed closely by the Silver Glaze. This book also gets overshadowed by the previous one, unfortunately. I must also say that i adore the old writing style of Sir Doyle.

Becoming - Michelle Obama

Becoming is book i never expected anything from but was really surprised how good it was. My only issue, is the fact that it feels, at the beginning of the book, like talking directly to an american, in common informal english. I never gave to much attention to anything not related to technology and science until this book showed me that sociology and politic could be as interesting. She narrates in her book, a memoir, her origins, how she met Barack Obama, her life in the white house and closely after. Moreover she describes how the socio-economical state of her city changes as african- americans populates Chicago.

Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögel und den Fischen - Konrad Lorenz

In english Solomon’s ring, this book follows the author and his love for animals. It explains that animals are, as many believe, not much different than human beings.

Briefe an eine deutsche Prinzessin über verschiedene Gegenstände aus der Physik und Philosophie - Leonard Euler

This book contains a collection of scientific letters written by the mathematician Leonard Euler to a friend’s daughter. It resumes general concepts about philosophy, math, engineering and physics.

The moral molecule - Paul J. Zak

What makes people act as they do? Paul J. Zak let his readers dive into the world of hormones and human behaviour. How does a person know to do what is morally correct or ethical? How do we differ one from another and what makes us differ one from the other in this regar? This book answers these questions.

The Geometry - Rene Descartes

A book about mathematical shapes and how they can be operated only with a rule and a compass. This book goes through the rigourous theories of analytic and algebraic geometry. It was the first to propose the idea of uniting algebra and geometry into a single subject. Being groundbreaking for its time, it inspired important work by Leibniz and Newton, and thus important in the creation of Calculus.

Numerical Recipes - Third Edition - William H. Press, Saul A. Teukolsky, …

Collected in this books are well written and interesting mathematical algorithms of diverse order in C++. It covers a range of topics that include both classical numerical analysis (interpolation, integration, linear algebra, differential equations and so on), signal processing (Fourier methods, filtering), statistical treatment of data, and a few topic in machine learning (hidden Markov model, Support Vector Machine).