What Are You Reading? May 19, 2011

Just finished

Nothing this week

Now reading

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. I've now been reading this again, and am impressed. It's still a bit repetitive (how many times do we need to read how big, tall, erect and strong Washington was?) but good. Chernow doesn't skip over the negative stuff, in particular how Washington dealt with slavery.

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

The System of the World by Neal Stephenson; the third and final volume of the huge Baroque Cycle.

The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick. Subtitled: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society and the birth of the modern world. This is popular history of science, and not bad, but not that good, either. Dolnick sort of jumps around the history of science, going back to Pythagoras and forward to Einstein et al., while concentrating on Newton and his contemporaries. He oversimplifies a lot, but if this is your introduction to this sort of material, that might be a good thing.

Daybreak Zero by John Barnes. It's 2025. About 9 months ago, there was an apocalyptic event, involving both nanowar and electomagnetic pulse, wiping out pretty much everything that had been invented in the 20th century. The country formerly known as the United States is struggling to recover. Very well written; the worst of the apocalypse is over, so we don't read of horrors but recovery. But recovery is slow.

Just started
The Burning Wire by Jeffrey Deaver. A thriller in the Lincoln Rhyme series, set in contemporary New York. Rhyme is a fascinating character - the best crime scene analyst in New York City, maybe the world, he was, years ago, injured on the job, and is now a C4 quadriplegic, able to move his head and shoulders and the fingers of one hand. He's wonderfully acerbic; I get the sense Deaver may know a quadriplegic person

In this novel, someone is killing people using the electric grid - basically electrocuting them. Rhyme and his associates have very few clues, and are in a race to stop him (or her) before more people die.