What Are You Reading? November 30, 2011

For those who are new ... we discuss books. I list what I'm reading, and you can comment about what you are reading.

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I've written some book reviews on Associated Content

Book reviews on AC

Just finished

Year's Best Science Fiction ed. by Gardner Dozois. My favorite of the annual collections of SF

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.

(started and finished): Snuff by Terry Pratchett. Good fun with Sam Vimes in the latest Discworld novel. Full review

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

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
Down and out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Science fiction of a medium term future in which no one dies, no one goes hungry, no one goes homeless. The protagoinist lives in Disney World, and is battling to keep things as they are against another group that wants to make it more modern. So far, this is fun and light.

The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four remarkable friends who transformed science and changed the world by Laura Snyder. A group biography of Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell and Richard Jones, four friends who met at Cambridge early in the 19th century, and of how, together, they changed the role of science into something like what it is today.