What Are You Reading? November 23, 2011
Another Wednesday, Another WAYR
Just finished
Nothing this week
Now reading
God's Arbiters:Americans and the Phillippines: 1898-1902 by Susan K. Harris. I am only a few pages into this book, but it looks good. It is an advance copy sent to me by the publisher, with rather fortuitous timing since Cryptonomicon deals a lot with the Philippines, and Mr. Speaker deals with the same time period, and I just finished The War Lovers, which is about the other part of the Spanish American war - the part that was fought in Cuba.
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson. A biography of Joseph Priestly and his times. Really just started, but Johnson writes very well and it's a fascinating period
Year's Best Science Fiction ed. by Gardner Dozois. My favorite of the annual collections of SF
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutch. Deutch has ideas. LOTS of ideas. About everything - science, religion, philosophy, ecology and on and on. Fascinating reading.
Taking Sudoku seriously: The math behind the world's most popular puzzle by Jason Rosenhouse and Laura Taalman
The publishers sent me a reader's copy of this.
At one level, a lot of people say Sudoku is not a math puzzle - because you could just as easily use letters instead of numbers. But the authors know this just means Sudoku is not an arithmetic puzzle, and they also know that arithmetic really doesn't have that much to do with math. Unfortunately, the copy I got is in black and white, which makes certain parts almost meaningless; they will send me a color version in a few months.
The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined by Steven Pinker.
An astonishingly erudite writer, Pinker draws on fields from history to psychology to anthropology to primatology to first show that, at almost every time scale, violence has declined over time; then he explains why this is so.
Just started
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I am re-reading this. SF, set in a future in which mankind is divided into phyles, which are sort of like castes but not quite as set in stone. This is the story of a lower-phyle girl who obtains a book intended for an upper-phile girl. Stephenson is always interesting.
One review copy, others no connection
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I am a statistician, working with a wide variety of clients, mostly researchers in psychology, education, medicine, social sciences and other fields. I also have given talks and written articles on learning... View profile
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8 Comments
Post a CommentSome good choices here. Thanks!
Wonderful! :-) I just finished Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. :-)
You're such an AVID AND VERSATILE READER! These all sound great.
The Beginning of Infinity sounds interesting. Might have to check that one out.
You sure do find a lot of time to read!
Wow, you are industrious reader.
My partially-read books keep stacking up!
I'm still into the easy reading, paperback westerns. They are usually all the same with a change in location. I'd rather write than read most of the time.