What Are You Reading? Sept 28, 2011

Just finished
A re-read of Babel17 by Samuel Delaney. This is my favorite of Delaney's books. It's us (humans) vs. the invaders in a far future world. Victory hinges on decipherment of a language code named Babel 17. And that depends on the genius poet linguist Rydra Wong. Delaney shows us a far future and does it by showing rather than telling. Great stuff.

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.

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.

Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell. Darrow was a great man, but he was not without flaws. This book covers the heroism and the flaws, and also captures the times in which Darrow lived (with not inconsequential parallels to the present)

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.

Just started
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