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Sunday, November 30, 2008

Books

Hast du mein Buch? Here they are for 2007-2008, going back about a year, not including Ph.D. research

Nonfiction I've read, in no particular order:

1. The Social Life of Information By Brown and Duguid (philosophy of information technology)
2. Deep Survival By Laurence Gonzalez (survival accounts with neuroscience analysis)
3. The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand (historical account of pragmatism in America)
4. The Search By John Bartelle (biography of Google)
5. The End of Faith By Sam Harris (critique of historical religion)
6. The End of History by Francis Fukuyama (political philosophy)

Nonfiction I've read at least half through (and mostly plan to finish):

1. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam (political science)
2. Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (legal issues in technology)
3. A Good Hard Kick in the Ass by Rob Adams (some good hard boring business book)
4. The World is Curved by David Smick (economics)
5. The Necessity of Experience by Edward Reed (philosophy)

Nonfiction I've read before and returned to re-read large chunks again:

1. After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre (political philosophy)
2. Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche (who's Nietzsche?)
3. Consilience by Edward O. Wilson (philosophy of science)
4. The Mind Doesn't Work That Way by Jerry Fodor (philosophy of mind, Artificial Intelligence)
5. Nonzero by Robert Wright (philosophy of history)
6. Blown to Bits by Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster (business, technology)

Nonfiction I've started on, but haven't made much progress on yet (maybe <= 25%):

1. Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi (philosophy of science)
2. Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz (politics, economics)
3. Chances Are by Michael and Ellen Kaplan (probability theory)
4. Linked by Albert - Laszlo Barabasi (technology, science)

Nonfiction I've referenced pretty extensively:

1. Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick (political philosophy)
2. The Portable Nietzsche by Walter Kaufmann (who's Nietzsche?)
3. The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers (philosophy of mind)

Fiction I've read:

By Michael Crichton
1. Next
2. State of Fear
3. Airframe
4. Timeline
5. Prey
Started on:
6. Disclosure (won't likely finish)

Other fiction I've sampled:

7. Short Stories of Hemingway (read, notably, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and a few others)
8. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (a reread)
9. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Books I'm currently reading:

1. Churchill by Roy Jenkins (biography of Winston Churchill)
2. The World is Curved by David Smick (referenced above)
3. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (just started)

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Books, the best I have read - at least the ones I can think of right at this moment.

(All time favs)
1984 - George Orwell
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemmingway

(More technical)
The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose
The Age of Spiritual Machines - Raymond Kurzweil
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas R. Hofstadter
Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
Radical Evolution - Joel Garreau
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

(Sci-Fi)
A Fire Upon Deep - Vernor Vinge
Snow Crash - Neil Stephenson
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
Hyperion - Dan Simmons

(Fantasy)
Dune - Frank Herbert
The Lord of the Rings (series) - J.R.R. Tolken
The Dark Tower (series) - Stephen King

(Spiritual)
The Universe in a single atom - Dalai Lama

(Economic)
The Intelligent Investor - Warren Buffet
The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

Unknown said...

I would like to see a list of your favorite books (all time).

Erik J. Larson said...

eneve,
here's an off the cuff list:

The Stranger By Albert Camus
The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintence by Robert Pirsig
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Death of Ivan LLyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Shogun by James Clavell
The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers
The Creative Class by Richard Florida
The End of Science by James Horgan
The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose

Erik J. Larson said...

Chaos by James Gleick

Childhood
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
Anything Jack London or Jim Kjelgaard wrote
Paddington Bear series by Michael Bond
The 1930s pulp Doc Savage novels
The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
The "Space Trilogy" by CS Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)

Erik J. Larson said...

The list grows:

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (what happened to this guy, this novel was a blast)

Erik J. Larson said...

The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz (mostly just for the Bali cockfighting narrative)
Travels by Michael Crichton (sentimental value, see my post on Crichton at person.crichton)

Finally (yes, really, finally, maybe)

Mark Twains two masterpieces (made me want to float down a river, what grand novels and what a great American author)