Recent Reading

[bjarvis]

My tastes in reading material run a wide range. These days, I'm mostly delving into history, self-improvement, business management and, rarely, indulging myself in some pleasing fiction.

This week's load o' words included:

• finishing "59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot" (Robert Wiseman)
  
• "Solaris" (Stanislaw Lem)
  
• "How Did That Happen?" (Roger Connors, Tom Smith)
  
• "The Richest Woman in America" (Janet Wallach)
  
• "The Zig Zag Principle" (Rich Christiansen)
  
• "World War Z" (Max Brooks)

In the queue for next week, in no particular order:

• "Bigger Stronger Faster" (Greg Shepard)
  
• "Rome: An Empire's Story" (Greg Woolf)
  
• "The Magic of Thinking Big" (David Schwartz)
  
• "The Little Book of Talent" (Daniel Coyle)
  
• "A History of Mathematics" (Uta Merzbach, Carl Boyer)

Comments

[theoctothorpe.livejournal.com]

I love that you're able to be hyper productive at work, AND have time to polish off several thousand pages of pleasure book reading in a week. Super envious.

Was this your first reading of Solaris? I saw the original film ages ago, then read the book, but didn't see the American adaptation that came out recently. It really is the Russian 2001 in scope. Amazing.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

It's rare that I get enough time to read a lot, but this week had fewer square dance calling gigs than I've had in the four weeks, as well as some passenger time while commuting to/from last weekend's C2 square dance event in York, PA. More evenings free means more reading, and it's a happy indulgence.

I haven't seen either the original film of "Solaris" or the US version so I was strictly going by the (translated) print version. The psychological and philosophical issues were fascinating, but some of the more science-like stuff --page after page of describing 'ocean' formations in great technical detail-- dragged heavily without adding much if anything to the book. I'd have taken an editor's pencil to much of those portions.

I'm still left with a big mystery, however: why were the other two scientists so secretive of their 'guests,' never allowing Kelvin to see or meet any? The psychology of their paranoia was only lightly touched while I thought it material worthy of fairly deep mining.

Overall, "Solaris" holds it own brilliantly against the test of 51 years since its original publication. Sure, the references to print books and paper-printed computer responses are a touch dated, but that's the only minor nit I could come up with which would indicate this book wasn't a recent, more modern release.

[trulygrateful.livejournal.com]

"A History of Mathematics" was my textbook for that very course during Summer 2009. I loved the course and the book even more. it was very interesting to read about the beginnings of all the mathematical concepts/formulas that we take for granted now.