Category: books

Navigating Simple English in “Project Hail Mary” | May 10 2026, 15:30

I’ve read about a quarter of Project Hail Mary so far. The English is very simple, easy to read, captivating; the movie so far follows the book closely, but still, it makes reading quite interesting. However, I generally find it hard to read fiction because I keep getting distracted to google stuff. I reached the phrase “..I used the bathroom (or “head” I guess, because I was on the ship)…” and it got me thinking, it’s interesting to learn that the toilet is called differently on a ship not just in Russian. And why “head”? Turns out that “galley” in Danish and German is “head”. Interestingly, galleys are also found on airplanes, and historically, galleys were used only by sailors; officers did not use them.

The text is very childish, and understandably so – the main character is a physics teacher at a school after all. All these motherfluffer and dang it, gosh darn it, fudge, holy moly, for cripes’ sake instead of for Christ’s sake, there’s even bull-puckey instead of bullshit. “To go wee” is how they say “to pee” in the book. I recall, the day before yesterday we entered a mattress store, and the consultant, while discussing the topic “if one of you goes to the toilet, the other won’t even notice that the first one got up” – well, because the mattresses are so soft – actively used the verb “to pee”. So what? 🙂

Update: when the physics teacher encounters an alien ship on page 120, the chapter ends with holy fucking shit! That’s what all the rest was leading to;)

Occasionally, there are quite funny expressions that can even be used in life 🙂 For instance, the main character asks, “Who pooped in your Rice Krispies?” which is the idiom “to poop in someone’s cereal” – “who messed up your meal”.

In conclusion, if you’re choosing your first book to read in English – this one is at the top of my list. Even something seemingly simple like “Harry Potter” is more sophisticated, in my opinion. Here, there’s a lot of dialogue, school level but almost slang-free vocabulary, and a pretty interesting plot. Plus, it’s real science fiction, where the author educates the reader about the scientific method, how the world works, etc., all from the viewpoint of the hero, a physics teacher, who shares various facts and thoughts on how physics works, relating it to the plot in his interactions with other characters or thoughts to himself (rather than directly to the reader). It’s middle school level so far, but maybe it’ll get more complex later on.

Exploring Word Clusters in Religious Texts from Gutenberg’s Library | May 02 2026, 03:28

It’s interesting that if you take 8000 books from the Gutenberg library and construct a graph for each based on word connections to see how “friendly” words are—if word A often appears with B, and B with C, then how often does A appear with C? There’s a metric for this—the average clustering coefficient. Then, simply sort the books by decreasing this coefficient, about 70 percent of the top will be religious books—bibles, the Book of Mormon, the Quran. Well, some of them are duplicates in a sense, because a Bible in different formats remains the Bible. But clearly, its different parts are grouped together, meaning, they definitely share commonality in these triangular words.

But what unites all the books in this top— is that they were written many years ago or, as in the case of The Night Land, written relatively recently in the same style as many years ago.

By the way, among these books shines An Introductorie for to Lerne to Read, To Pronounce, and to Speke French Trewly. This is a French language textbook, written in English during the Tudor times (around the 1530s). Soverayn lorde kyng Henry the Eight. It was written by Gilles Du Guez—a French teacher at the English court. This particular textbook was compiled for Princess Mary (the future Queen Mary I, known as “Bloody Mary”), the daughter of Henry VIII. Check out a page from the textbook. Very cool English 🙂 …ye must pronounce it letyng your lippes jointe close, so that there be but a lyttell hole in the middes.

So, I delved into this textbook. It mentions a fruit called “openarses.” As you understand, this is “open arses” in English. In Tudor England, they called a medlar an openarse. If you Google what a medlar looks like, you’ll have no questions why it’s called openarses 😉

In the anatomical section (MEMBRES LONGYNG TO MANNES BODY), the author mentions next to the eyes and ears “the nether beerde” (literally— “the lower beard”).

From Wooden Puppet to Beloved Boy: The Evolution of Pinocchio’s Tale | May 01 2026, 16:52

It turned out that initially Carlo Collodi, who wrote “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” did not intend to turn his hero from a wooden puppet into a real boy. Pinocchio was destined to be hanged by the Cat and the Fox on an oak tree—as a lesson to all children who lie and disobey their elders.

The author was persuaded to continue Pinocchio’s adventures by the editor of the “Children’s Newspaper,” who said that otherwise it would be their last publication. The readers were so outraged by the death of the hero that the editorial office was inundated with letters demanding a continuation.

Eventually, after a few months, the author was forced to “resurrect” the puppet. This is how the Blue Fairy appeared in the story, who saved Pinocchio from the noose, and the grim parable gradually turned into the familiar fairy tale with a happy ending.

When Pinocchio was already hanging on the oak tree and gasping for air, a Beautiful Girl with Azure Hair appeared at the window of a nearby little house. At that moment she is described not as a kind fairy, but rather as a ghost or spirit (she says that everyone in this house died, and she too is waiting for her coffin).

Seeing the puppet dangling from the tree, she took pity and organized a whole rescue team. The fairy clapped her hands three times. A giant Falcon arrived. She ordered him to fly to the Great Oak, gnaw through the rope with his beak, and carefully lower Pinocchio onto the grass. Then she summoned her servant—a poodle named Medoro. He was dressed in festive livery, with a cocked hat and a curly wig. Medoro was sent for Pinocchio in a luxurious carriage drawn by a hundred pairs of white mice. When the puppet was brought to the castle, he was neither alive nor dead. To decide what to do next, the Fairy summoned “luminaries” of medicine. By Pinocchio’s bed came the Crow, the Owl, and the Talking Cricket (the same one that Pinocchio “killed” at the beginning of the book, but he returned as a spirit).

Harsh.

Essentially, the hero owes his happy ending not to the author’s mercy, but to commercial success and public pressure.

Navigating Nabokov: A Companion Glossary for “Lolita” | April 08 2026, 11:24

I have finally finished the book The Reader’s Glossary – essentially a 5200-word dictionary for “Lolita” by Nabokov, but organized not alphabetically, like regular dictionaries, but in order of the occurrence of complex words, divided by chapters and indicating the context of the word or phrase. The website – readersglossary dot com (see the first comment). It is expected to be used, among other things, as a companion book while reading the original. Yes, it’s twice as thick 🙂

The dictionary turned out quite thick – 600-700 pages. It is available in four languages – Russian, English, French, and German. Moreover, the translations (RU, FR, DE) or clarifications (in ENG) are not abstract but contextual, taking into account how Nabokov himself translated the fragment from English (“Lolita” was first written in English, then translated into Russian).

On my website, there are huge fragments of these dictionaries RU, FR, DE, EN available for review (each about 1/3 of the total volume).

There is also a full-fledged interactive dictionary on the site, where you can enter a word and see its translation or explanation. The dictionary mainly contains complex words, but we know that complexity has its own definition for everyone, so all words are divided into three categories and highlighted with different frames. Probably for a well-read Anglophone, the first category (dotted) is completely useless (about 50% of the dictionary), for the less-read, maybe 20% are useless. But I decided not to cut it further, because the book is not only for Anglophones but also for those for whom English is a second language, and there those dotted frames are very handy.

Overall, I did this “for myself and friends,” just for fun, not as a commercial project. Therefore, I am quite sober in understanding that it has a super niche audience, and if even once a week someone finds it useful, it’s already nice.

Although it was something like a hobby, the book took a lot of time. To achieve what I did, I developed a dozen applications/scripts, a couple of which have their own interactive UI, in which I spent many hours over two months of work. And of course, I learned a lot in the process, which is actually the main fun of it.

So, come to the website – readersglossary dot com. Link in the comments

P.S. In Russian – only as a PDF for now. Amazon doesn’t allow selling books in Russian, only in a small number of European languages in addition to English. The French and German versions of the dictionary will be released on Amazon about a week from now.

Nikolai Nosov’s Anticipated Instagram: Art Templates and Avatars | April 07 2026, 13:04

As early as 1954, Nosov predicted the emergence of Instagram

P.S. It’s just not very clear why there are different templates for different eye and hair colors.

Navigating the Lexical Complexity of Nabokov’s “Lolita” | April 02 2026, 15:56

I’ve finished the first version of a dictionary-style book on Nabokov’s “Lolita”. The chart shows how the complexity of vocabulary is distributed across the pages of the book. The lower chart averages 25 sentences, displaying the number of complex words on the vertical axis, with colors indicating their complexity/rarity (purple – the most complex, red – less complex, yellow – even less so). But I have already removed two levels, and overall, for a foreigner, all five levels are challenging. In the book, level 3 is marked with a dashed line, level 4 with a simple frame, and level 5 with a double frame. Currently, there are 5794 words, of which 541 are fifth level, 1070 are fourth, 1883 are third, 1393 are second, and 54 are first (the simplest ones). Considering that the first version ended up being 1148 pages, the dictionary will need to be significantly streamlined by removing what can be dispensed with. This mainly pertains to the first and second levels, and some from the third and fourth. The rarity of words is calculated in three ways: through LLM, and through two lists of word frequencies in the English language corpus (300K words).

Not all words are complex. For instance, in the sentence “With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.” someone well-acquainted with English might not know the words ebb, abet, drabness, while everything else is familiar, but lower the requirements for the reader, and the dictionary might not be very useful for such cases.

Or consider the sentence:

Homo pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and forms; the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki’s viatric appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly as the name of the famous college arching across the front of his sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings.

My browser even highlights four words here.

I have definitions of words in English, German, French, and Russian. I’ve encountered the issue that different words from the text are considered complex in different languages, yet they are unified for me. So, I’ll have to mark, for example, French words in the English text separately, so they are not included in the French version, since there, the reader knows, for instance, what quel mot means.

Overall, this weekend I’ll be manually removing about half, and then I can make the cover and list it on Amazon.

Exploring Multilingual Vocabulary in Nabokov’s Works with Apple Books | March 15 2026, 23:20

Man, it’s really convenient. Just sitting here reading.

The usage pattern is as follows: I hold the phone in my hands. There, in apple books, this and that book. You see an unfamiliar word – it will likely be in the word list of the chapter. The definition takes into account the translation by Nabokov himself. Then you look a couple words ahead, put the phone down, continue reading. You encounter those words, and they are still in your short-term memory, and hooray, you understand. During a break, you load the next couple of words into your brain. You have to hold the phone and flip through, each page contains 4-5 definitions.

Now, every word has definitions in English (interpretation), French, and German. Consequently, I can publish four books.

Overall, my level of English matches what my app predicts about which words will be challenging. But someday I’ll need the same for French, and it will require an assessment of the difficulty level for each word because even some basic words will be unclear to me. I’m not sure that a book with basic words will be handy. With rare ones – definitely handy.

Crafting Nabokov’s Dictionary: A Multilingual Lexical Journey | March 15 2026, 18:30

I’m reading Nabokov and decided to take a break to create a convenient app “Nabokov’s Dictionary” and am considering selling it on Amazon as a book. Essentially, it looks like this (see screenshot) – definitions of complex words in English, Russian, German, and French, in the same order they appear in the original book.

Would you buy such a book?

To accurately make their definitions, I also wrote an aligner – a program that matches sentences and paragraphs in English with their translations (Nabokovian) into Russian. And when a word’s definition is created, it uses not only the knowledge of LLM but also the Russian translation by the author. It’s worth separately discussing how the algorithm works (I invented it myself because everything I found online did not work as I needed). It first finds long sentences and matches the longest sentences with their pair through cosine similarity of embedding vectors created through the multilingual e5 model. These sentences become anchors. Then, assuming that for long sentences the error is almost excluded, the longest sentence between anchors is found, and everything repeats recursively. There are many situations where a sentence in Russian has no equivalent in English and vice versa, where a sentence is split into two, or conversely two are merged into one. The algorithm handles this as best as it can. The result is quite a good quality of alignment. To such an extent, that errors in alignment can hardly be found (but they are likely still there). Either way, it is only needed for the context for translating words, even if there are rare errors, it’s not a big deal.

Would you buy such a book?

Haunting Tales of Hotel Room 441 | October 16 2025, 12:27

I am starting to like my hotel. I am in room 446

Items we have read report that if you do stay at this hotel, avoid the fourth floor, or at least Room 441. That is where a lady from the other side lurks at the end of the bed, kicking the feet of guests who attempt to sleep there. And those guests are attempting to sleep there because they want to have the haunted experience. Don’t ask. Ever read Stephen King’s horror short story 1408”? The Congress Plaza is said to be its inspiration and a portion of the source that has brought Mr. King’s net worth to $500 million.”

Items we have read report that if you do stay at this hotel, avoid the fourth floor, or at least Room 441. That is where a lady from the other side lurks at the end of the bed, kicking the feet of guests who attempt to sleep there. And those guests are attempting to sleep there because they want to have the hauted experience. Don’t ask. Ever read Stephen King’s horror short story 1408”? The Congress Plaza is said to be its inspiration and a portion of the source that has brought Mr, King’s net worth to $500 million.”