Books

People sometimes ask me what books I have read recently and would recommend to others. Here are some that I have read over the summer and enjoyed:

The Thief - My son and I both enjoyed this immensely. It is classified as suitable for ages 9 - 12, but I found it well-written and engaging for myself as well. The sequels Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia are even better.

Magyk and Flyte - Too easily dismissed as Harry Potter wanna-bes, these two "magician-in-training" novels are set in a much more whimsical and amusing world than Potter's England. These have the joie de vivre that most of the Potter books lack.

Tale of Two Cities - one of Dickens' most accessible novels, with a classic icon of literature: the blood-thirsty Madame Defarge, knitting at the foot of the guillotine.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven - a parable-like musing on the big questions of life. A beautiful book.

Labyrinths of Reason - What is knowledge? What is logic? What is paradox? A lucid and accessible discussion of the question of what it means to know something.

Notes From a Big Country - a collection of hilarious articles in which author Bill Bryson explains life in the USA to British readers.

Tell It To the Hand - a very funny discussion of the erosion of public politeness.

Fuzzy Thinking - Fuzzy logic guru Bart Kosko muses on the past, present and future of his field.

The Alchemist - Reminiscent of some of Kalil Gibran's work. Addresses the opportunities and risks of following your dreams. Big issues, set in a simple story of a young Spaniard who dreams of the pyramids.

The Tipping Point - I actually read this before the summer, but I'm recommending it anyway. Interesting study of the way trends get started.

Excession - grand space-opera science fiction by my favourite SF author, Iain M. Banks. Nobody does it better.

The Intelligencer - In the spirit of Possession, with a bit of Da Vinci Code tossed in. A collection of encoded manuscripts from Elizabethan England is found. Simultaneously with the story of their decoding, the story of their encoding is told.

Turing (A Novel About Computation) - the title pretty much says it all. One of the main characters is an AI named ... you guessed it ... Turing. The author is Christos Papadimitriou, a theoretical computer scientist of great renown, and as it turns out, considerable narrative skill.

Worlds That Weren't - a collection of four novellas of alternate history.

Krakatoa - the history of the island volcano (it's west of Java, despite the title of that movie) that blew up in 1883. Fascinating to read this so soon after the tsunami disaster in the same part of the world. The Krakatoa explosion was the first major event to be known almost immediately around the world, thanks to the newly installed telegraph wires that linked continents.

The Girl Who Played Go - set in Manchuria in the 1930's, dealing with the relationship between a Japanese soldier and a Chinese girl. The chapters alternate back and forth between the two characters' points of view.

Isaac Newton - James Gleick does a great job of introducing the man behind so much of modern mathematics and physics.

Memoirs of a Geisha - the woman on whose life this novel is based has claimed that it contains many falsehoods about geisha life. The author stands by his version.