For those who are new ... we discuss books. I list what I'm reading, and people comment with what they're reading. Sometimes I post a special edition on a particular genre or topic.
Just the usual diary this week.
cfk has Bookflurries on Wednesday nights, with links to lots of other diaries about books and reading on daily Kos .
sarahnity has Books by kossacks on Tuesdays.
Just finished
The gone away world by Nick Harkaway. A combination of a coming of age novel, an apocalyptic SF novel, an adventure novel and a martial arts novel, all mixed together, with lots of humor added. A lot of fun. Full review
Finding our Tongues: Mothers, infants and the evolution of language by Dean Falk. Wonderfully written and engaging, this is scholarly writing at its best. Speech - and language generally - is the quintessential human activity. While there are arguments about whether other primates can really learn a language, or how much language some other species have, there's no doubt that no animal uses language to the extent that we do. How did this happen? Falk believes it's because human mothers have to put their babies down once in a while; and the babies don't like it.
Full review.
Now reading
Year's Best Science Fiction by Gardner Dozois. In my opinion, the best of the annual anthologies. I am going through this slowly, but I want to finish it before next summer!
Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris. All about cognitive dissonance and how we justify our own actions. Excellent book about how we all fool ourselves and how memory works (and doesn't). A lot of information on cognitive dissonance and other topics, very clearly presented.
The annotated Alan Turing by Charles Petzold. This is a brilliant idea. Petzold has taken Alan Turing's classic paper on computability and provided extensive, paragraph by paragraph commentary on it, making it comprehensible for a lot more people (like me). This sort of thing should be done more often.
The Pursuit of Glory: Five revolutions that made modern Europe: 1648 - 1815 by Tim Blanning. To quote the NY Times Book Review: "History writing at its glorious best". Blanning is a highly knowledgeable guide to this period, but, more than that, he has a talent for pointing out the odd fact and making it fit into a bigger picture. He makes observations that strike you as obvious - once you've read them - and draws you into the narrative. Anyone with interest in this period should read this book
Ideas: A history of thought and invention from fire to Freud by Peter Watson. We've started this book in Let's Read a Book Together. We have only read the intro and prologue (chapter 1 this week) so you have time to catch up.
Society without God by Phil Zuckerman. How life is lived in two of the least religious countries on Earth: Denmark and Sweden. Just started this book, but it demolishes the argument that societies without God would be hellish, crime-ridden or whatever.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes A comic thriller set in Pakistan when Zia Al Haq was PM there, and Reagan was POTUS here. Funny stuff.
And some technical books for work.