craig robert martin

Review: Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

2026-08-25T18:01:07.449-07:00

Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare by Edward Fishman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: The Wind Knows My Name

2026-08-25T17:49:01.998-07:00

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

2026-08-24T22:22:23.663-07:00

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Review: The Welch Labs Illustrated Guide to AI

2026-07-30T01:25:14.295-07:00

The Welch Labs Illustrated Guide to AI by Stephen Welch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This a beautifully conceived and put together text book. I was blown away with the quality of the videos on YT and hence not surprised that the author has managed to put together such a high quality production in physical form. The book is heavy - in terms of weight - which meant it took some time and cost some dollars to ship to Singapore, but it was a joy to find it waiting outside my house. The book is hefty - in that it covers 70 years of machine learning from Rosenblatt’s perceptron to attention models and diffusion.

When I started building neural networks in 1990 there were few accessible textbooks. I had to bribe one computer-scientist author with a bottle of wine to explain how to implement some of self organising algorithms.

This has it all. Diagrams, models, beautiful illustrations and code.

It also has some exercises, and the author has left wide margins for the reader to annotate on… no way… it is too beautiful for that.

Decus Et Tutamen.

I loved the book and gave it Five Stars.

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Review: Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry

2026-07-27T00:53:16.999-07:00

Great Ideas Miracles and Idolatry by Voltaire
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Review: Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History

2026-07-20T16:40:00.838-07:00

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: Solaris

2026-07-12T00:53:48.112-07:00

Solaris by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: Ulysses

2026-07-12T00:37:13.828-07:00

Ulysses by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read Ulysses almost thirty-five years ago, when I was roughly the same age as Stephen Dedalus - one of the first characters we meet in the book. I was backpacking across Indonesia on the cheap with a friend, eating Gado-Gado and Nasi Goreng, and climbing volcanoes.

In Sumatra, where I first opened the pages of the book, a cramped day-long mini-bus odyssey across the equatorial jungle cost a few dollars, accommodation a dollar, lunch just 25 cents. In truth, I enjoyed the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of Indonesia more than I enjoyed the book back then, and I recall swapping the finished book with some satisfaction at one of the many travellers' shops for a couple of Julian Barnes’s novels. ‘Look, it’s almost 1000 pages; that must be worth two books.’

Ulysses is this year’s family project - we intend to visit Dublin on Bloomsday, the long summer day when the book's protagonist journeys around Dublin. Returning to Ulysses as part of the trip preparation, I am now sixteen years older than the main character, Leopold Bloom, and it definitely feels like reading a different book. Despite being written at a time when Freud was revealing the subconscious, I was struck by how closely Joyce anticipates modern ideas about cognition. Perception is reconstructed from fragmentary sensory input; emotion colours interpretation; memory constantly reshapes the present. Bloom’s mind in particular feels uncannily real: associative, curious, drifting yet tethered to practical concerns.

Thursday 16th June 1904 starts with the youthful Stephen: the brooding intellectual, restless, proud, wrestling with theology, literature and identity, and then pivots centre stage to Bloom.

‘Stephen said…there is a saying of Goethe's.. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life’

After sharing his breakfast with the cat: fried kidney, 'which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine', the forty-year-old Bloom defecates, before setting off on his mind-wandering around Dublin. Selling advertising, attending a funeral, helping a blind man cross the street, worrying about his wife’s likely infidelity, and caring for a drunken Stephen long after others would have walked away. Bloom emerges as the moral eye in the storm: patient, curious, and humane. He is not flawless. He is voyeuristic, passive at times, occasionally melancholic, but his overall decency endures.

The book's ambitious stylistic range remains astonishing. Thoughts wander. Memories intrude. Snatches of song, advertisements, biblical cadences, scraps of Shakespeare or Burns float into consciousness without invitation.

‘greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise’

As Borges noted in reviewing the book in 1925: conjecture, suspicion, fleeting thought, memories, lazy thinking, and the carefully conceived enjoy equal privilege in this book; a single point of view is noticeably absent. In writing Ulysses, he said: 'Joyce is as bold as the prow of a ship, and as universal as a mariner's compass'.

Reality emerges from competing mental models constantly trying to interpret the world. Each episode adopts its own rhetorical form from parody, musical composition, theatrical hallucination, scholastic catechism, and streams of consciousness. It’s a literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, pushing the medium itself to its limits. Few writers followed Joyce down this path; perhaps the experiment was simply too complete and too complex. It could also have done with some editing, since it was published in parts and subject to Joyce’s own seven-year Odyssey.

Two chapters near the end of the day crystallise the novel’s emotional core, much needed after the complex vortex of "Circe". In "Ithaca," Bloom is finally home, and his ‘examined life’ is exposed through a scientific catechism of questions and answers, as though his life were a philosophical experiment. The tone is logical, analytical, almost like a school investigation sheet dissecting an ordinary life. Then Joyce pivots completely in “Penelope.” Here, his wife Molly’s unpunctuated monologue dissolves structure into pure vitality: memory, sexuality, irritation, nostalgia, and longing. If Bloom represents patient curiosity and Stephen represents intellectual striving, Molly embodies life itself. She is sensual, contradictory, and unapologetic.

We learn about Molly’s childhood in Gibraltar, where she stood on the rock of empire and gazed across the unknown African continent, giving her imagination a horizon wider than Dublin’s streets. Her monologue moves from childhood awakening to adult frustration with Bloom, revealing a marriage complicated by grief. The death of their infant son, Rudy, cast a long shadow over both of them. In earlier chapters, in the confoundingly difficult Circe episode, Bloom sees Rudy in a vision as an eleven-year-old boy in a life that never happened. In some ways, Stephen becomes a faint echo of the son Bloom might have raised.

In the end, the book remains deeply humane. People quarrel, flirt, drink, gossip, fart, and stumble through their day. Poverty and disappointment are real, yet life continues with a surprising softness and humour. Joyce never moralises. No character is without flaws, yet each searches for some version of Ithaca, a place of return, reconciliation, and rest.

And after hundreds of pages of exhausting intellectual play and psychological excavation, the novel closes with Molly’s famous affirmation:

Yes.

Not a philosophical conclusion, but a simple acceptance of life itself. Storms pass. The mind wanders and questions endlessly. But somewhere beneath it all remains the possibility of saying yes to love, yes to memory, and yes to the strange persistence of ordinary life.

Re-reading Ulysses after many years, I realised that Joyce was not only writing about Dublin on a single day in 1904. He was writing about the restless, searching nature of consciousness itself.

Some of the episodes are magnificent; some are torturous. As Borges again notes: 'Joyce... unfolds his hero's single day into many days upon the reader. (I haven't said many naps).'The book is far too long, and Joyce at times stands at the centre of a large canvas, flicking blobs of words in all directions. 'He is a millionaire of words and styles,' according to the great Argentinian labyrinth builder.

Of course, it is a masterpiece, but it is a difficult, exhilarating, and at times an exhausting read. I gave it Four Stars.

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Review: Ulysses

2026-07-12T00:30:37.462-07:00

Ulysses by James Joyce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read Ulysses almost thirty-five years ago, when I was roughly the same age as Stephen Dedalus - one of the first characters we meet in the book. I was backpacking across Indonesia on the cheap with a friend, eating Gado-Gado and Nasi Goreng, and climbing volcanoes. In Sumatra, where I first opened the pages of the book, a cramped day-long mini-bus odyssey across the equatorial jungle cost a few dollars, accommodation a dollar, lunch just 25 cents. In truth, I enjoyed the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of Indonesia more than I enjoyed the book back then, and I recall swapping the finished book with some satisfaction at one of the many travellers' shops for a couple of Julian Barnes’s novels. ‘Look, it’s almost 1000 pages, that must be worth two books.’

Ulysses is this year’s family project - we intend to visit Dublin on Bloomsday, the long summer day when the book's protagonist journeys around Dublin. Returning to Ulysses as part of the trip preparation, I am now sixteen years older than the main character Leopold Bloom, and it definitely feels like reading a different book. Despite being written at a time when Freud was revealing the subconscious, I was struck by how closely Joyce anticipates modern ideas about cognition. Perception is reconstructed from fragmentary sensory input; emotion colours interpretation; memory constantly reshapes the present. Bloom’s mind in particular feels uncannily real: associative, curious, drifting yet tethered to practical concerns.

Thursday 16th June 1904 starts with the youthful Stephen: the brooding intellectual, restless, proud, wrestling with theology, literature and identity, and then pivots centre stage to Bloom.

‘Stephen said…there is a saying of Goethe's.. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life’

After sharing his breakfast with the cat: fried kidney, 'which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine', the forty-year-old Bloom defecates, before setting off on his mind-wandering around Dublin. Selling advertising, attending a funeral, helping a blind man cross the street, worrying about his wife’s likely infidelity, and caring for a drunken Stephen long after others would have walked away. Bloom emerges as the moral eye in the storm: patient, curious, and humane. He is not flawless. He is voyeuristic, passive at times, occasionally melancholic, but his overall decency endures.

The book's ambitious stylistic range remains astonishing. Thoughts wander. Memories intrude. Snatches of song, advertisements, biblical cadences, scraps of Shakespeare or Burns float into consciousness without invitation.

‘greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise’

As Borges noted in reviewing the book in 1925: conjecture, suspicion, fleeting thought, memories, lazy thinking, and the carefully conceived enoy equal privilege in this book; a single point of view is noticeably absent. In writing Ulysses, Joyce is as bold as the prow of a ship, and as universal as a mariner's compass

Reality emerges from competing mental models constantly trying to interpret the world. Each episode adopts its own rhetorical form from parody, musical composition, theatrical hallucination, scholastic catechism, and streams of consciousness. It’s a literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, pushing the medium itself to its limits. Few writers followed Joyce down this path; perhaps the experiment was simply too complete and too complex. It could also have done with some editing, since it was published in parts and subject to Joyce’s own seven-year Odyssey.

Two chapters near the end of the day crystallise the novel’s emotional core, much needed after the complex vortex of "Circe". In "Ithaca," Bloom is finally home, and his ‘examined life’ is exposed through a scientific catechism of questions and answers, as though his life were a philosophical experiment. The tone is logical, analytical, almost like a school investigation sheet dissecting an ordinary life. Then Joyce pivots completely in “Penelope.” Here, his wife Molly’s unpunctuated monologue dissolves structure into pure vitality: memory, sexuality, irritation, nostalgia, and longing. If Bloom represents patient curiosity and Stephen represents intellectual striving, Molly embodies life itself. She is sensual, contradictory, and unapologetic.

We learn about Molly’s childhood in Gibraltar, where she stood on the rock of empire and gazed across the unknown African continent, giving her imagination a horizon wider than Dublin’s streets. Her monologue moves from childhood awakening to adult frustration with Bloom, revealing a marriage complicated by grief. The death of their infant son, Rudy, cast a long shadow over both of them. In earlier chapters, the confoundingly difficult Circe episode, Bloom sees Rudy in a vision as an eleven-year-old boy in a life that never happened. In some ways, Stephen becomes a faint echo of the son Bloom might have raised.

In the end, the book remains deeply humane. People quarrel, flirt, drink, gossip, fart, and stumble through their day. Poverty and disappointment are real, yet life continues with a surprising softness and humour. Joyce never moralises. No character is without flaws, yet each searches for some version of Ithaca, a place of return, reconciliation, and rest.

And after hundreds of pages of exhausting intellectual play and psychological excavation, the novel closes with Molly’s famous affirmation:

Yes.

Not a philosophical conclusion, but a simple acceptance of life itself. Storms pass. The mind wanders and questions endlessly. But somewhere beneath it all remains the possibility of saying yes to love, yes to memory, and yes to the strange persistence of ordinary life.

Re-reading Ulysses after many years, I realised that Joyce was not only writing about Dublin on a single day in 1904. He was writing about the restless, searching nature of consciousness itself.

Some of the episodes are magnificent, some are torturous. The book is far too long, and Joyce at times stands at the centre of a large canvas, flicking blobs of words in all directions. Of course, it is a masterpiece, but it is a difficult, exhilarating, and exhausting read at times. I gave it Four Stars.

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Review: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

2026-07-04T01:31:44.052-07:00

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am always a bit wary of the 'Top-Selling' books; I know.. I have an underlying streak of 'Road-less-travelled' that could be misread as a Frosty arrogance. It's not, I promise. Atomic Habits is an excellent book. I listened to the audio version, and it had lots of practical tips and protocols (yay - just like Huberman). The book doesn't replace [book:The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business|12609433, but augments it.

'Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate more attention to other tasks.. its only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity'

I would definitely recommend the book, and also the audiobook (read by the author James Clear) is excellent.
I gave it five stars.

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Review: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

2026-07-04T01:29:42.748-07:00

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Review: Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses

2026-06-28T19:44:37.400-07:00

Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses by Terence Killeen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An excellent guide to a notoriously difficult classic. I re-read Ulysses earlier this year ahead of a family holiday in Dublin, timed to coincide with Bloomsday - the day the book is set in.

Killeen provides an easy and enjoyable way to distil the essence of Joyce’s masterpiece. His systematic approach to each episode (chapter) with a good and clear description of the Homeric parallels, should appeal to the novice Joycean (me) as well as more learned students of literature. I enjoyed walking through this book, as much as I did walking the scenes for real this June. We started off at the Martello tower - and after lunching in Sandymount, progressed through to Davy Byrnes for a glass of Burgundy. The book, of course, carries on to 2am, which is past my bedtime.

I have read Ulysses twice, in full chronological order, and collapsed exhausted at the end. A bit like travelling across Europe on an Inter-rail pass in my youth. Having now read the guide, I think I will dip into each episode again someday, as each episode is like a country that can be explored one at a time.

I liked the book a lot and gave it Five Stars.

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Review: The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life

2026-06-02T17:02:00.541-07:00

The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life by Morgan Housel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Review: The Last Days of Budapest: The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II

2026-05-11T19:48:20.913-07:00

The Last Days of Budapest: The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II by Adam LeBor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Review: The Songlines

2026-05-11T01:37:12.178-07:00

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a delightful book, reminding me how great a travel writer Chatwin was.
I have followed his footsteps in the mountains of Lijiang and the wind-swept ports of Chilean Patagonia. I have filled Moleskine after Moleskine of fragments during the past 20 years, but none like the delicate observations recorded in Songlines.

I started using Moleskine notebooks in 2005 in homage to Chatwin.

In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: 'moleskine', in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Áncienne Comédie. The pages were squared and the endpapers held in place with an elastic band. I had numbered them in series. I wrote my name and address on the front page, offering a reward to the finder. To lose a passport was the least of one's worries: to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.
In twenty-odd years of travel, I lost only two. One vanished on an Afghan bus. The other was filched by the Brazilian secret police, who, with a certain clairvoyance, imagined that some lines I had written - about the words of a Baroque Christ - were a description, in code, of their own work on political prisoners.

‘I’d like to order a hundred,' I said to Madame. ‘A hundred will last me a lifetime’

I gave the book five stars.

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Review: The Forty Rules of Love

2026-05-10T22:12:34.306-07:00

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: The Songlines

2026-05-09T00:39:17.864-07:00

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Review: Permutation City

2026-04-26T18:43:08.049-07:00

Permutation City by Greg Egan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was an excellent recommendation from my son. Written in 1992, it is prescient of the modern day, and the crevasse we are attempting to cross in the world of AI.

The book covers many philosophical points of consciousness and embodiment. People can make digital ‘copies’ of themselves and allow their alter egos to live on in a digital world that has all the depth and colour of our world, yet is a captive to physical constraints of computing power.

Copies can think, and exhibit all that one might ascribe to a conscious being. They can also work and manipulate virtual worlds, and those become sophisticated universes of their own.

At times the book’s chronology is confusing, and intentionally blurs the lines between the present, the parallel present, and the far future.

It is an engaging read, and a worthy addition to the sci-fi canon. I gave it five stars.

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Review: Around the World in 80 Trains: A 45,000-Mile Adventure

2026-04-26T18:39:28.558-07:00

Around the World in 80 Trains: A 45,000-Mile Adventure by Monisha Rajesh
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I almost gave this one star. The writer is very dismissive of her fellow travellers and of many of the places she goes. I suggest she reads some Paul Theroux or Bruce Chatwin and learns the craft of travel writing. One star was coming even before she dismissed Singapore in a poorly thought-through sentence: 'a starchy, characterless city with the superficial appeal of Dubai, and the same brutal levels of heat', yet gave pages to the (interesting) account of North Korea.

In places, the writing is poor, yet there is some humour, which raised the review to two stars.

I was angry about the Singapore comment for much of the book. She refers to a chap she met in London who had been interned at Changi during WW2, and uses his recollections and reflections a few times to add some historical context to the section on the death railway. She could have gone to the prison museum at Changi; she could have questioned the modern mix of cultures and the attraction to all things Japanese despite the war years, but she fails to scratch beneath the ‘Dubai’ surface she paints.

Her character portraits are thin, dismissive, cliched and racist - which is weird for a female writer of Indian heritage, travelling with her half-Malaysian fiancée.

Also, for a book about 80 trains, we get very little about the trains. Instead, we get a hack's perspective on the world. Her views on Japan after two weeks. Her views on Russia, Siberia and much of Mongolia and China after a week or two.

She missed an opportunity. The book could have been better. She rushed the journey, jumped to conclusions, and produced a juvenile account of train travel. She missed the connection.

I gave it two stars, and it could have been just one. Rant over.

Read Paul Theroux instead, or watch Michael Portillo or Michael Palin.

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Review: The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

2026-04-14T22:44:42.306-07:00

The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Review: The Penelopiad

2026-04-05T21:07:07.350-07:00

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Review: The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan

2026-03-14T02:20:56.235-07:00

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: Ulysses

2026-03-11T20:27:28.544-07:00

Ulysses by James Joyce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Review: The Order of Time

2026-02-28T01:18:46.044-08:00

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Review: Up at the Villa

2026-02-25T18:06:15.273-08:00

Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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