What Are You Reading? Mar 16, 2011

Nothing this week

Now reading
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the dark ages by Chris Wickham. A really good history of Europe and western Asia, from 400 to 1000 AD.
This one is more or less on hold. I need to pay more attention to it to keep track of all the unfamiliar names. Right now, I am not in the mood for this sort of book.

The Great SF stories volume 1: 1939 ed. by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg. I have this whole series on my shelf and I think I will re-read them

Best Writing on Mathematics 2010 by Mircea Picci. A collection of articles about mathematics. Most of them are really great. Math lovers will want this one. (This book has disappeared on my shelves; I gotta find it)

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases ed. by Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky. A collection of now classic works on how people reason under uncertainty.

Washington: A life which I am reading on my new Kindle 2 (my old Kindle broke). So far, it's living up to the hugely favorable reviews, although the beginning was a bit repetitive about some aspects of Washington's personality.

Dark Fire by CJ Sansom. The second in the Matthew Shardlake series. I like this one too. (spoiler alert). In Dissolution, Shardlake has been disillusioned with Cromwell (that's Thomas, not Oliver), having learned that he did a lot of foul things. But now he is drafted by Cromwell again.

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. Subtitle is "tales of music and the brain" and that describes it well. Written with Sacks' typical clarity and humanity.

Charming Proofs. A book of beautiful (or charming) proofs in mathematics, nearly all of which require no advanced math.

The Confusion by Neal Stephenson. The second volume of the Baroque Cycle, which starts with Quicksilver.

Just started
A reread of Shibumi by Trevanian. A very strange novel, mostly because of its voice, which is extremely sardonic. It's the story of Nicholai Hel, born prior to WWII of a White Russia mother and a German father in China, raised in wartime Japan, and now living in th Basque country as the world's foremost (and most interseting) assassin.

Hel is a master of go and caving and a martial art called naked-kill. He lives with a concubine, he's arrogant yet simple. And his enemy is the Mother Company, a (fictional?) consortium of the world's largest energy companies.

Trevanian makes nasty fun of everyone, but somehow (at least for me) carries it all off.