Oops, it's February

[sholio]

A few quick notes on nonfiction books I read in January, at least the ones I can currently remember.

Venom: The heroic search for Australia's deadliest snake - Brendan James Murray (reread): I reread this one after telling Rachel and scioscribe about it, and really enjoyed it the second time around as well. The book is about the development of antivenom for the nearly 100% deadly taipan, also including a lot of historical context (and it doesn't shy away from the darker side of Australia's colonial history, and in fact deal with it in some detail, so it contains some heavy material). I found it compulsively readable - I had actually just picked it up to reread the first couple of chapters and end up reading all of it again, having forgotten most of it in the years since I read it the first time. It's a really fascinating book. I didn't know a lot of this, including many of the specific historical details as well as how, exactly, antivenom is made.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas - Natasha Dow Schüll: This was one that I checked out from the library after rachelmanija posted about it - post here. It's a book on the theory behind gambling addiction and the way that casinos gamify this to keep gamblers coming back, even to the point where it destroys their lives. It's a really interesting book with a lot of material I didn't know (even down to the basic theory of Why Gamblers Gamble - that it's not about winning, it's about keeping in a pleasant flow state). I stalled out about a third of the way in because I turned out not to have the attention span for the entire book; it's dense and full of footnotes and math, which I appreciate while also, apparently, not currently having quite enough interest in the topic to take it all onboard. But what I did read was fascinating and thought-provoking!

Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction - Maia Szalavitz: I happened to see this book mentioned online around the time I checked out the other one, and felt that it would make good auxiliary reading - and it did! This one is very compulsively readable; it's part autobiography about the author's heroin addiction, descent to rock bottom, and recovery in the '80s, and part addiction theory. This complemented the other book very well, and also had a lot of information that I found fascinating and new to me about addiction (with the caveat that the author is mostly working off her own experience - but she's very up front about that). But honestly, what fascinated me most about this book was the autobiographical portions dealing with drug addict street culture of the 1980s. I also stalled out on this one around the 70% mark or so, once the autobio parts caught up to the present day, but there are a lot of things that were discussed about addiction and how it's treated (specifically, that a lot of the way we deal with it as a society are backwards, wrong, and aimed more at punishment than help) that I'm going to continue thinking about.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I have got to read Venom and Unbroken Brain. They sound very much up my alley. Does Venom deal with platypus venom at all? It's my uhhh favorite is maybe not the right word but it's the venom I'm most fascinated by.

The gambling book is very dense. I skipped most of the math.

[sholio]

(Wow, typo city. *quietly fixes them*)

Yeah, I think you'd enjoy both of those, and the addiction book especially seems up your alley. I occasionally reminded myself while reading it that it's not a good idea to dive wholeheartedly into support for the first theory you read on a topic you don't know very much about (and most of this is new to me), but she makes an extremely good case for her theories of addiction treatment, I felt.

[philomytha]

Oh, that 'Venom' book sounds fascinating! I suspect I'd enjoy that one too.

[sholio]

It's really enjoyable, with the caveat that parts of it are pretty dark in real-world-historical sorts of ways, and obviously bad things happen to decent people quite a bit, often in the form of snakes. But I'd already read it once, and found myself compulsively reading it all over again. The author does a very good job of drawing you along and making the topic exciting, even when what is actually happening is "people endlessly search the Australian Bush for snakes and don't find any."

[sallymn]

We do have a lot of venomous snakes, thankfully that one is nowhere near here :(

Yes, we are still getting to grips with colonialism...

[sholio]

I mean, obviously the rest of the world is too, I didn't mean to imply it's a uniquely Australian problem! It's just that the book has a lot of that, which might be an enticement for some and a warning-off for others.

The taipan, on the other hand, is definitely a uniquely Australian problem.

[scioscribe]

I really need to read Venom both for edification/entertainment and h/c research purposes.

I've been really drawn to Addiction by Design because the sinister level of aesthetic and experience control casinos use both appalls and fascinates me (I feel like designing a casino would be a really interesting job in the way that designing the Hunger Games would be a really interesting job), but there's no way I'm going to be able to grasp the math. I think what I need is a paper copy of this that I could flip through easily to take in whatever I can actually understand.

[sholio]

Addiction by Design is a heavy, fairly academic book, but I think it's not so much that I bounced off the math per se, as I was more in a mood for a chatty, pop-cultury science book than one that was that dense. The parts that I read were really interesting, and I think you're right that a paper copy would be easier. There are also a lot of diagrams, which are hard to read on a Kindle screen.

[yhlee]

I was intrigued by Addiction by Design when rachelmanija first posted about it but then you mentioned the math and now I am really intrigued lolol.

I've reserved Unbroken Brain at my library - they don't have Addiction by Design but I've asked the library to consider buying it.

(Hi, guess who is trying to cut down on spending this year...)

[sholio]

I think you'd like Addiction by Design; I think it gets into a lot of things you're interested in!

[snowynight]

Gamification is very powerful for building habit/addiction (see: gacha games). This reminds me of the article: How Duolingo Made Me Into a Monster, which the author reflects on the power of gamification of the relatively benign Duolingo.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I am afraid to gamble because I'm afraid it could turn into an addiction. Also why I have never used illegal drugs and been very careful with painkillers! I love a good flow state! And I can get into them in free games, and then I'm in trouble.

(The books sound really interesting, but I tend to start nonfiction books and not finish them because I often find fiction more compelling.)