» Friday, 5 March A.D. 2010
book report
I've had a bit more time to read than normal these past two months because I've been traveling for work. Even though I don't feel like I've been reading a book a week (my goal), the list below suggests I'm not doing too badly.
- Daemon by Daniel Suarez
- Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Deriida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church by James K.A. Smith
- The Price of Spring by Daniel Abraham
- The Next Reformation by Carl Raschke
- Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand
- Sidewalks in the Kingdom by Eric O. Jacobsen
- Assorted Sherlock Holmes short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
- Foucault for Beginners by Lydia Alix Fillingham
- Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher
My recommendations from the above list are: Daemon, which is essentially Halting State cranked to 11. The assembly line was an excellent representation of the lure behind MMOs. Whole Earth Discipline was a challenging book, especially if you lean “green.” I understand the positive side of postmodern thought much better after reading The Next Reformation; Who's Afraid of Postmodernism can serve the same purpose, but as it focuses on Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard, it doesn't give one quite as much history or as broad an understanding as The Next Reformation.
Honorable mentions: Unlocking the Clubhouse gave me a lot to think about with raising two little girls and exposing them to technology (which I admittedly haven't done very much of beyond twiddling with iTunes and explaining how to play CDs in the PS2). I appreciated the vision that Cradle to Cradle presented; I wish all books were made out of similar material, both for the pleasantness of heft and for the eco-friendliness. The Price of Spring was just as good as I expected it to be. If you like fantasy and you haven't read Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, you ought to start now.
What didn't make the list above? I tried reading One Market Under God by Thomas Frank, but I only made it about a quarter of the way through before I got sick of his smug know-it-all tone. I've mostly finished Discussion of the Method by Billy Vaughn Koen, which serves much the same purpose for the engineer-ingly bent among us as Gödel, Escher, Bach did for computer scientists. I skimmed through No Easy Answers by Allan Franklin; his descriptions of famous physics experiments were interesting, but past the first one or two, they didn't really draw me in. The description of the Meselson-Stahl experiment that proved how DNA replicated is worth a read, though.
posted by Nate @ 7:08PM