These are links to Amazon. I work for an actual bookstore, so Amazon is my mortal enemy. I reccomend you buy books from your local bookstore. Coming soon I'll have some reviews...

What I'm Reading Currently:

• Pedro Rosa Mendes Bay of Tigers I am plowing through this book because I had it sitting on my shelf, and I wanted to know more about Angola for some reason. I have stopped liking it because it's not a textbook. At times he is poetic, but always he is disjointed. The jacket brags about it as literature. Portugese journalist takes a trip through Africa and tells us about it. He meets people and tells something about their stories, but I don't think I've understood what's going on there. Like bits of conversation about a technical subject overheard at a party, I've got only the most shallow idea of the big picture.
• David Foster Wallace Everything & More I forgot to mention this one. One time Christina wanted to read books about infinity, and she asked me if I thought this one was good. I didn't know - it seemed a little involved, despite his valiant attempts to explain why mathematicians do what they do. Still, when I saw it as a remaindered paperback, I decided the price was right. I started reading last month, and stalled. This was before I started the Istanbul books. Now that I'm not sure what to read next, I picked this up again. Convergence of series anyone?
• Lee Smolin The Trouble With Physics Did I mention that I get lots of free books before they even go on sale? This is yet another one. I guess I can't complain too much about $100 textbooks full of pictures that show people using computers. This one comes out September 19th. I stalled a bit, but now I'm back at it. I read several histories of 20th Century particle physics. "Inward Bound" is one of the first I read. In high school I was trying to decide between studying Physics and Engineering. I chose Engineering, and perhaps that was a mistake. My problems would have surfaced either way, and I'm dysfunctional enough that maybe cloistered science would have prevented a few of the practical lessons that I have learned along the way. There's no way to go back and try it over. I was always terribly fascinated with the physics of accelerators from the 50's & 60's.
• Textbooks. Not much to say there.
• David Christian Maps of Time

Some guy on the bus saw me reading Maps of Time and asked me how it was. He said he looked at a few pages in a store. He also told me he "studies metaphysics". What does that even mean? I muttered a few things about the contents and how it was a lot of book for the money, and we didn't say anything else. At some point I promise to develop this theme further: Was I ever one of these people? In high school I probably was. A dreamy wanderer interested in ideas. Not skilled enough to be a poet. I definately told at least one person that I "studied metaphysics". I read a lot of popular 'physics vs. eastern' religion books. The Dancing Wu Li Masters comes to mind. I'm liable to find myself first against the wall when the revolution comes.

& Recently Finished:

• John Fasman The Geographer's Library - Okay, I've stalled a little on this one for now. I don't have much further to go, but I started working on Oxford Murders.
• Guillermo Martinez The Oxford Murders - Elizabeth at work blogged a review of this book, and I had to find a copy so that I could make a typographical reproduction of a series of symbols. Trying to construct the symbols in Photoshop drew me instantly to the solution of the puzzle. The sales rep is pushing the book, and I can see Elizabeth has mixed feelings about it. It's got mathematicians solving murders! See Pythagoras and Fermat's Last Theorem. Fast Read, now I'm returning to The Georgrapher's Library.

October 4, 2006

• Amartya Sen Argumentative Indian

August 6, 2006

• Roger Crowley 1459 I got Istanbul fever, so I picked this up.
• Orhan Pamuk Istanbul: Memories & the City I waited to get this book in paperback. It's a wonderful read. The chapters are small and there are a lot of photos. I read "Snow" and I've tried to read "Black Book" but that's all. There were a couple other Turkey books I read in recent years. That gave me some clue as to how some of the letters in Turkish are pronounced.
• Robert Aunger The Electric Meme Part of the grand theme of pulling old books off the shelf to read. But, that's only if you consider 2002 to be a long time ago. I've been working through this one very slowly because - well, I'm taking a database class for one, and it's not a book that you can read without concentrating. He talks about the qualities of a replicator, then considers cases of things that get duplicated and tries to decide if they count. There's a lot of Social Darwinism floating around out there in the world, and most people don't even know what Darwin said in the first place. Species evolve. Memetics is born from asking if ideas evolve too. And it's not so easy to make the comparison because ideas are transmitted a bit differently from genes. It turns out that the details have a lot of bearing on whether something can evolve the way Darwin described. I still have a few pages to go on this one, but I'm largely done and my attention is scattered around on other things. I'm liable to go back and reread this one. I want to be better equiped to make a clear argument.
• Constance Reid Hilbert Digging up old books again - This time it's a biography of David Hilbert. It's a quick read, except that it has me thinking so much about mathematics that I can't focus. Now that I'm finished, I should say that this book ends on a very depressing note... But how can it be avoided? Hilbert somehow outlived most of the people who knew him. His son had mental problems, he died at 80 in Nazi Germany during WWII. If you're into mathematics, there is a note of hope - because you know that great ideas live on. But I would hasten to add that it depends on a society that places value on those intellectual achievements. Nazi germany being a particularly bad example of how things might go. And I guess in the end Hilbert was too senile to understand what was happening to the world.
• Julian Barnes Arthur & George I'll be done with this today, unless something seriously distracts me. It's a fascinating read. I've never read any other books by Barnes. There is an interleaving of stories that seems to have become so popular. Why is that, anyway? Is it really a new phenomenon. My guess is that people actually get bored following one thread. I also think daily about multiprocessing on computers, and how my PC fragments tasks to work on more than one program at once. I noticed a lot of television shows in the past ten years have felt the need to braid in several stories even during half hour episodes. Why not just tell a straight story? It seemed experimental to me at first, but now it suggests an entire culture of short attention spans. As much as I appreciate network affects, and the connectedness of life, I still want longer runs of linear narrative. I worry that I'm actually losing the ability to follow anything for a reasonable ammount of time.

July 2, 2006

• Edmundo Paz Soldan Turing's Delerium Because everybody reads novels about Bolivian Hackers when they should be studying for final exams, right?!?! And it's not out for a couple of weeks, so I can't really trade it in for store credit at the book shop. It's an enjoyable read, but I'd still rather be reading a cryptology textbook, and it reminds me of that fact daily. I'm a scatterbrain.
• Alan Cooper The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Back to the category of useful business books that have been sitting on my shelf unread for years. I picked up this remainder copy at an outlet mall in Ohio when I was visiting my family several years ago. In an entire store of clearance books, and schmaltzy calendars, I found a treasure. And once again, it relates directly to the Project Management class. If I had only read the book earlier, maybe I would be better prepared for my current difficulties. But then again maybe not. More on that theme later.
• Tom DeMarco Slack This has been sitting on my shelf since 2001! I thought it might give me some insight into my job, and some ideas about the future of my career. I've got a handful of other business/mangagment books that might also help. When I started taking business classes in night school, I completely forgot about this book. Or - I saw it out of the corner of my eye every other day, and wondered when I would ever get time to read it. It's not a long book, and it's broken in to small chapters, so it makes good bus reading. This book suddenly became very relevant to me five weeks ago when my Project Managemnt class started. This is one of my fundamental complaints with college education, and with the common attitude of why people learn. I get sick of all the lip service done to education and "building human capitol". I was just about to fall for the ruse. It's a wonderful thing if you really mean it, but if it's all cynical aggrandizement, then you can count me out. What's the book about? - I'm glad you asked: If you put too much pressure on a knowledge-worker organization; if you make things too efficient, you begin to decrease performance. So, don't fall for the trap of working too hard - it won't produce results. Workers will leave, you'll be spending too much time retraining new employees in "domain knowledge". Now I really do understand my job much better.

June 1, 2006

• Sarah Chayes The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban - You're going to have a hard time finding this book - it's not out until August 17th! You should look at her Photos of Kandahar until the book comes out. She rambles a bit. But it's a good look at a particular time in our meddling with Afghanistan.
• Zachary M. Schrag The Great Society Subway : A History of the Washington Metro Somebody said (my friend Leah, who I can no longer describe as a 'coworker') That book isn't that great. Okay: I'll say I didn't get what I was hoping for. I knew it tool a long time to build it, and I was wrong about what the first stations were. I guess I really wanted to feel transported to the time 30 years ago when it was brand new, but what I got was a lot more detail about the early planning struggles, and I was totally ignorant of that. Since they ran so late building it, the opening day was anticlimactic in many ways, and Schrag glosses over it. I'm tired of reading at that point, and he's tired of writing, apparently. So it's boring and wonky, and even then I felt robbed of a coherent viewpoint. Yet somehow I'm still glad I read it. I got a lot more out of the unbuilt freeways that I remember as dotted lines on maps that were already out of date when I saw them as a kid. Of course, Metro was a massive project that took way to long and way too much to build, but it was in may ways the perfect expression of a moment in time when the people in charge agreed that it could be a model system that others would envy. And that it would distinguish itself from other subways with its purity of purpose and boldness of design. You should look at this, (the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science) because Schrag mentions an MIT book by Kevin Lynch from 1960 called "The Image of the City". Remind me to dig up the book I have on direction finding by that Norwegian(?) guy.
• David Kidd Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China
• Benoit Mandelbrot The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
• J. G. Ballard Super-Cannes
• Albert Pope Ladders A startling take on all those downtown pedestrian bridges and hotel atria I used to love so much as a kid. Note also the big brother issue with seemingly common areas becoming privately held spaces.
• Scott Westerfeld
  
  • Uglies My girlfriend spent some time as the children's book buyer at Olsson's. In that time she got a lot of good childrens books, and some of them went to me, including some in Japanese. I read this first book of the trilogy a while ago when it was the only one published, and then I wanted more...
  • Pretties Book 2 of the trilogy. Even though I probably won't read the many other books Westerfeld has written, this series is fresh. It's the kind of thing only a subversive high school teacher would have had us read. It can be enjoyed as pure entertainment, but meanwhile heavy issues are always beneath the surface, and I liked the treatment.
  • Specials I had it in my hands, but didn't have enough time to read it before giving it to Christina. So this isn't really in the recently finished category. Oh well.
• Melissa Holbrook Pierson The Place You Love Is Gone I, too, suffer from this feeling that you can never go home again because somebody came along and srewed it up. And I also love to stumble onto ruins. Today I found an old bridge embankment next to the W&OD trail in Vienna, VA. The year on it was in the 1880s, but not fully legible. It took an angle that matched Electric Avenue, just past a short stretch of woods. Electric trains to Fairfax?

last updated 2 years ago #