What Are You Reading? Oct 19, 2011

Just finished
God, No! by Penn Jillette. Penn is the "big one" or the one who talks of Penn and Teller. He's a missionary atheist and a libertarian. The book is very funny, very scatalogical, but also (perhaps surprisingly to some) also fairly thoughtful, with a point of view that isn't the same as you see everywhere (for instance, he thinks both theists and atheists have a duty to try to convert people.

This will not please everyone; he hates liberals AND conservatives (he really is a libertarian) but it's interesting stuff

Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill. A mystery set in current Thailand. Jimm Juree was a crime reporter for a bid newspaper. Then, without warning, her mom moves the whole family to the boondocks of southern Thailand. But there's crime everywhere. Funny and interesting.

Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy by John Julius Norwich. It's what the subtitle says. The good, ,the bad, and the ugly of the papacy. Norwich writes very well, and strikes a b nice balance. However, the book is marred because there is too much to cover in the space allotted, and it's impossible to write a history of the papacy that doesn't include a lot of European history. I'm not that familiar with European history between (say) 500 and 1500, and I daresay I am not alone. This makes portions of the book hard to follow, but the more recent the history, the better I like the book and the more I can follow it.

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 Phillippines, 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

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 Affair by Lee Child

The latest Reacher novel is a prequel to all the others, set in 1997 when Reacher is still in the Army. He is sent to Mississippi where there has been a murder near an Army base, and an Army person may be the murderer. The last few Reacher books have been disappointing - with plots that don't hold together and mayhem for no reason. There's certainly mayhem in The Affair, but, like in the earlier books in the series, it's there for a reason. No one's going to call Lee Child a master of English, but the book reads well, the plot is interesting and there's sex and violence.