Happy new year!
For those who are new ... we discuss books. I list what I'm reading, and people comment with what they're reading. Sometimes, on Sundays, I post a special edition on a particular genre or topic.
If you like to trade books, try bookmooch
I've written some book reviews on Associated Content
Book reviews on AC
Just finished
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. A full review will be available soon
Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik. Volume 3 of the Temeraire series. Temeraire and Lawrence are off to China, and then back to England with lots of adventures
[Quite enough of Calvin Trillin www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781400069828-0] Collection of essays from the last 40 years by the inimitable Mr. Trillin. Funny and sensible. Food, politics and deadline poems
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.
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.
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.
Just started