Topi Kettunen

What I Read in April 2024

Haven’t written one of these in couple of months since I’ve mainly spent my time reading various papers - mainly computer science related - and not so much literature, but I finally got back to the saddle so here’s the latest reviews.

William Strunk Jr.: The Elements of Style (reread)

English is not my native language – even though I mainly write in it for this site – so grammatical and other style rulings when it comes to writing is something that I always struggle. While I would consider these rules to be relatively easy, I tend to always forgot them since they’re still so different from the rules of my native language, Finnish.

The Elements of Style is a short book is comprised of these sort of elementary rules for writing English. Due to the length of this book, I have read this many times and every once in a while, I tend to come back to it. It was quite a useful read for me since I have had a few month break from writing altogether so it was beneficial for waking the old habit.

Kimmo Svinhufvud: Kokonaisvaltainen kirjoittaminen (reread)

On similar theme as above, this focuses mainly on writing style in Finnish.

Stephen King: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

This book has been on my reading list for some time just out of sheer curiosity. I’ve always enjoyed Stephen King’s writing and I know how proficient he is at writing. Especially considering how much he publishes yearly. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a wonderful book that gives a glimpse to the life of writer and how one becomes one.

Writing has always interested me, and especially lives of remarkable writers. What sort of life events might’ve affected their style and stories. So it’s wonderful to hear such life stories written by the writer themselves.

Andrew Appel: Modern Compiler Implementation in ML (reread)

If you’ve followed my blog, I have spent some of my free time hacking my own programming language and compiler. Appel’s book on implementing compiler has been a standard that every once in a while I tend to go back to refresh some memories. Wonderful book.

George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo

I’ve been a big fan of George Saunders’ works for long time, especially his short stories. Lincoln in the Bardo was his first novel released in 2017 and I have had it on my reading list for a long time and I finally got into reading it. Thankfully I did so since it was such a pleasurable read.

Novel tells the story of aftermath of passing of Lincoln’s side and it was written in quite weird style. The style the novel was written is might definitely not so easily approachable for every reader and it started like that for me as well. Once you get into it, it start to open up. Definitely well written – even despite the unusual style – and worth a read.