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.
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I've written some book reviews on Yahoo Voices:
Book reviews on Yahoo
Readers and Book lovers schedule
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule
Just finished
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. How the discovery of an ancient book helped create the modern world. Fascinating. There is a thread running from Epicurus through Lucretius then Poggio then Holmbach and Diderot and on to the modern day with Hitchens and Dawkins. Reading the Swerve leads naturally into reading A Wicked Company (see below).
Now reading
On politics: A history of political thought from Herodotus to the present by Alan Ryan. What the subtitle says - a history of political thought. But he should add the adjective "Western" or something as he doesn't discuss other traditions or writings.
The Year's Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois. My favorite of the annual collections of SF.
A Wicked Company by Philipp Blom. About the radicals of the European enlightenment, especially Holbach and Diderot. Interesting. These two were the ideological ancestors of atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens, more than 200 years ago.
Leibniz: An intellectual biography by Maria Rosa Antognazza. Leibniz was co-inventor of calculus (with Isaac Newton) but he also made contributions to law, philosophy, physics, economics, chemistry, geology, medicine, linguistics, history and more. This book is good, but fairly dense.
Just started
The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. The philosopher writes about why he thinks a lot of people are unhappy when it is not justified by their external circumstances. Written in 1930, this is partly interesting as a time capsule and partly as advice (quite a bit of which remains valid, 80 years later).
Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie. How the performance of Bach has changed over the centuries.
I play bridge and I decided to start listing bridge books I am reading
Bidding, probability and information by Robert MacKinnon. Appeals to both the bridge player and the statistician in me. Not very well written, unfortunately, and aimed at better bridge players than me, but still interesting.
Card Play Technique by Victor Mollo and Nico Gardner. One of the classics of bridge literature. Subtitled "The art of being lucky". Very well written, intended for that huge class of bridge players called "intermediate".
Introduction to Defender's Play by Eddie Kantar. Very good basic treatment of defense at bridge by one of the game's best writers and players.