Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid’s Book… This is a very odd book. It’s printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It’s too short and simple, though, […]
Category: Booklog
Recent Reading
I was up late watching my Giants play the Carolina Panthers (they won in OT– now you see the importance of Brandon Jacobs), and today is a Baby Day, so I have no deep thoughts to blog. So here are some quick comments on recent reading: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. This is […]
The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder
I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil’s Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of […]
Counterknowledge, by Damian Thompson [Library of Babel]
This caught my eye at the library yesterday, because it looked like a compact survey of kookery, and I wasn’t disappointed. Indeed, it’s probably the most blog-like book I’ve read in quite some time– bits of the chapters could easily be posted at Orac’s place, and nobody would think it odd. The endnotes are even […]
Spaceman Blues, by Brian Francis Slattery [Library of Babel]
I’ve gotten out of the book-logging habit, but Spaceman Blues is good enough that I feel compelled to write about it. I had heard of the book some time back– I believe I recall Patrick Nielsen Hayden saying nice things about it at some con or another– but the packaging didn’t really give me a […]
Everything and More by David Foster Wallace
The best way– really, the only way– to sum up David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞ is by quoting a bit from it. This comes from the middle part of the book, after a discussion of Fourier series, in one of the “If You’re Interested” digressions from the main discussion: […]
Longitude by Dava Sobel
Jennifer Ouellette’s pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I’m really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I’m going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I’ve been trying to correct that. Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the […]
A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford by Richard Reeves
Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it’s a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton’s “Great Discoveries” series (which inexplicably lacks a web page– get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing […]
Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus [Library of Babel]
Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician’s assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly […]
Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos
John Allen Paulos’s Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I’ve been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read. Unfortunately, I […]