Fei Fei Li | Sonya Christian's Blog

Happy New Year!

I wish you all the best for the coming year.

Good morning California.
It is January 4, 2025.
A good day to be a Community College Champion

Every new year, I’ve post some of the the books I read the past year.

Here is a list of few of the books I read in 2024:

The Worlds I see
By: Fei-Fei Li

The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century’s defining moments from the inside. It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is—and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart.

*****

AI for the Rest of Us
By Phaedra Boinodiris and Beth Rudden

AI is a way for us to understand and grasp knowledge, information and put data into context. It is being used globally to make all kinds of decisions that directly impact our lives and yet most understand very little about it. We start with the definition that data is an artifact of human experience. We need the widest variance of humans, irrespective of your role and skillset, developing AI so that everyone’s story is a part of the models we are building.

*****

Something Lost Something Gained
By: Hillary Clinton

From canoeing with an ex-Nazi trying to deprogram white supremacists to sweltering with salt farmers in the desert trying to adapt to the climate crisis in India, Hillary brings us to the front lines of our biggest challenges. For the first time, Hillary shares the story of her operation to evacuate Afghan women to safety in the harrowing final days of America’s longest war. But we also meet the brave women dissidents defying dictators around the world, gain new personal insights about her old adversary Vladimir Putin, and learn the best ways that worried parents can protect kids from toxic technology. We also hear her fervent and persuasive warning to all American voters. In the end, Something Lost, Something Gained is a testament to the idea that the personal is political, and the political is personal, providing a blueprint for what each of us can do to make our lives better.

*****

Swann’s Way
By Marcel Proust

Swann’s Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. The work is a portal to Proust’s novel and an introduction to its unforgettable first-person narrator-protagonist. Immersed in themes of time, memory, identity, art, sensation, love, and jealousy, the narrator embarks on the story of his life and the paths he takes towards fulfilling his vocation as a writer. Principally focused on the narrator’s childhood, this volume lays the foundation of Proust’s extraordinary literary edifice.

*****

Algorithms of Oppression
By Safiya Noble

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

*****

Why We’re Polarized
By Ezra Klein

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together. Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

*****

Sitting Pretty: A view from my ordinary, resilient broken body
By: Rebekah Taussig

Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.

*****

The Bird Hotel
By: Joyce Maynard

After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano. The Bird Hotel tells the story of this young American who, after suffering tragedy, restores and runs La Llorona. Along the way we meet a rich assortment of characters who live in the village or come to stay at the hotel. With a mystery at its center and filled with warmth, drama, romance, humor, pop culture, and a little magical realism, The Bird Hotel has all the hallmarks of a Joyce Maynard novel that have made her a leading voice of her generation.

*****

I also wanted to share this article I found about reading in Alabama. Great to see how library use increased in the state in 2024.

Alabamians flocked to public libraries in 2024. Here were the most popular titles

And from pervious years:

2023 Books
»Read my January 6, 2024 Blog – Happy New Year 2024. Seize Every moment of every day.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
I Love Learning; I Hate School by Susan D. Blum
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
How to Know a Person by David Brooks

2022 Books
» Read my January 8, 2023 Blog – Rain bathing California in glee

Cry of the Kalahari by Mark and Delia Owens
The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs
by Madeleine Albright
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Distance Between Us: A Memoir by Reyna Grande
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa Yoko Ogawa
The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang
The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now by Thich Nhat Hanh
Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs
by Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker