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Book recommendations?
I'm looking for book recommendations! In particular, I'd like to read some nonfiction, preferably popular science. 20-30 years ago, I used to read Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks, and I quite enjoyed the non-academic but still informative style. The weather should be sufficiently not-bad this weekend that I can make it to the library by bike, but I need to request books now if I want them to be waiting for me when I get there.
Specific genres of interest, in order of preference:
* Popular science
* Other nonfiction of the "more readable than dense" sort
* Fantasy & sf (preferably small stories in pleasant settings; ie, not dystopian or grim)
* Romance (gay, straight, poly, I don't much care. I have read tons of this lately and probably won't read any new recs right away, but I'm always looking.)
Thanks!
Specific genres of interest, in order of preference:
* Popular science
* Other nonfiction of the "more readable than dense" sort
* Fantasy & sf (preferably small stories in pleasant settings; ie, not dystopian or grim)
* Romance (gay, straight, poly, I don't much care. I have read tons of this lately and probably won't read any new recs right away, but I'm always looking.)
Thanks!
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Also Hawking's A Brief History of Time: short and readable and informative. Fun things to think about! (at least if you are a philosopher type :-)
I also recommend John Reader's Africa. Gives a much better appreciation and understanding of the people of the continent than we usually get in the western developed world.
Fiction:
Good Omens by Gaiman and Pratchett.
Discworld series by Pratchett.
Anything by Anne Tyler (Breathing Lessons)
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Anything by Amy Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses)
Will have to think on other recs
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*reads your fics while she waits for weather to be good enough for trip to library* n_n
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*hoping weather stays lousy in ur town*
:D
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One of the big reasons I enjoyed it, was actually because of the string theory part -- every time I had heard string theory described, it was always really really complex, with equations so complicated they couldn't be solved, and edge cases all over the place.
One of the things that always struck me about science is that usually when we stumble on the right answer to something, that answer is simple and elegant -- look at the equation for gravitation attraction (which is basically "multiply the masses, divide by the square of the distance between"), or Einstein's mass/energy equation (E=mc²). Both very simple, but from them derive a huge number of complex behaviors (like the behavior of our solar system!). This is one of those tests I have for new science... can you express it with a very simple list of rules or behaviors, or do you need some long, convoluted explanations to explain it?
Anyhow, Elegant Universe actually gets into string theory and ties it together with all the other things it's discussed in such a way that string theory ends up being quite simple and elegant. The equations are actually really simple, but the application of them is quite complex (much the same way that gravity is simple, but orbital mechanics aren't). I actually left the book feeling that string theory wasn't completely there, but that it did actually add a lot to the discussion and had a lot of really nice ideas to it that made a lot of sense.
...and it does that in a way that, to me, felt fairly accessible to someone who isn't already an expert in any of these things, since it really does start with "this is what matter is" and work its way slowly down through the layers.
(I'm doubting you'll actually want to read it, but if you do, let me know, so I can flip through it again and we can have proper discussions about it!)
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==============/ Keith DeHavelle
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But The Creators should be right up your alley.
In a different vein, Hillsdale College put out a free series of 40-minute lectures on the history of Western philosophy and thought, running from the ancient Greeks through Lincoln and Churchill. This is about 100 lectures (one a week for the past two years), and they spend more than one on some topics (like Aristotle, who I think got four lectures).
I'm calling them "lectures," but they are much less formal. It's a host interviewing one or two experts on the topic, and it's a nice way to taste things that you may decide to explore later. It was through these talks that I came to know of the works of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, which now decorates my workspace and is in front of me at the moment.
The podcasts are free, and are called "Hillsdale Dialogues"; they should be easy to find from any podcast source and I often listen to these and similar works while running errands.
==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Simon Winchester "Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded"
RE: Simon Winchester "Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded"
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