For the time being at least, WAYR will be posted on Wednesday mornings.
For those who are new ... we discuss books. I list what I'm reading, and people comment with what they're reading. Sometimes a 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
Feynman's Rainbow: A search for beauty in physics and life by Leonard Mlodinow. In 1981, Mlodinow gets his PhD from Berkeley and lands a dream job at Caltech. He's not sure he belongs, so he takes his worries to a man down the hall - Richard Feynman. This is the story of what happens over the next year or so. Wonderful, and very accessible (no formulas). Full review.
Now reading
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. As noted above, we will be reading this in Let's Read a Book Together on Sunday. This is an attempt to answer the question: Why do the Eurasians and their descendants have all the stuff, while the people of the Americas, Africa, and Australia have very little?
Year's Best Science Fiction by Gardner Dozois. In my opinion, the best of the annual anthologies.
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).
Nation. Boy meets girl. Only, in this story, the girl is from a society that is a lot like Victorian England, and the boy is from a society that is a lot like an island in the Pacific. And they are thrown (almost literally) together by a tsunami. Absolutely wonderful. It's billed as a "young adult" novel, but that's silly. Unless "young" means "not dead yet".
1632 A small town in West Virginia is transported to the middle of Germany in 1632, in the middle of the 30 years war. Great fun. Flint is no great prose stylist, but the plot moves along, and it appears he gets the history right.
And some technical books for work.