What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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I'm not done with it yet, but I'm re-reading "Shop Class as Soul Craft." If you're a tinkerer, a weekend mechanic, someone who enjoys a tool in your hand, but work in an office or are a "professional" I highly recommend it. Not an easy read though. Extols the virtue of connecting with the stuff we use every day. (Hey, I'm one of the people that bemoans the fact I can no longer work on my cars other the simplest of tasks). Actually has some fairly deep philosophy in it.

It's inspiring me, after 35 years as an engineer manager, to maybe go work as an apprentice in sailboat or auto restoration shop. Heck, I'd do it for nothing if it was the right kind of work.
 
Moemg said:
Last week I read "Beautiful Boy " by David Sheff . It is the heartbreaking story of his son's addiction. A few parts were slow but the rest was a great read .
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I read this a while ago and recommend you also read his son's version "tweak" by_nic_sheff. It was very interesting to read the two versions of the same time span.
 
Sophie's Choice by Styron. Lots of sexuality, no doubt risque back when it was published. Good read. Styron sounds like Dostoevsky a lot.
 
H2ODude - "Shop Class as Soul Craft" looks like a great read - could be my next. Right now I'm looking at/reading "Illustrated Guide to Wood Strip Canoe Building". I'd like to build a wood strip canoe or boat someday.
 
Just finished Grisham's The Litigators. Excellent. Grisham may be the world's best story teller.
 
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Set in the future, possible life is detected on a distant planet and a mission of scientists and Jesuits set out to investigate. Great science fiction--a real page turner with an interwoven double plot--and deep themes about good, evil, God's providence, and intelligent life on other planets. Russell is a very versatile author: I'm now reading A Thread of Grace (about a northern Italian town that harbored Jews during the Holocaust) and Doc (about Doc Holiday and the OK Corral fight).
 
Marita40 said:
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Set in the future, possible life is detected on a distant planet and a mission of scientists and Jesuits set out to investigate. Great science fiction--a real page turner with an interwoven double plot--and deep themes about good, evil, God's providence, and intelligent life on other planets. Russell is a very versatile author: I'm now reading A Thread of Grace (about a northern Italian town that harbored Jews during the Holocaust) and Doc (about Doc Holiday and the OK Corral fight).
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The Sparrow is one of my all time favorites. I love books that manage to be uplifting and devastating at once. :)
 
Physics of the Future: how science will shape human destiny
by Dr. Michio Kaku

if you watch much Discovery channel, Dr. Kaku will be familiar. He's a theoretical physicist who makes even the most complicated subjects simple.

His book is about predictions in the near term (next 20 year), mid term (20 - 50 years) and long term (50 - 100). The subject areas are medicine, computing, transportation, energy, and several others.

The book is an easy read and is fascinating.

For example, one of the near term medical inventions is expected to be a mirror that you can breathe on that will detect early stage cancer. The breath contains traces of proteins that malignant cells produce. The mirror will have a detection device and give a reading if the concentration of proteins indicates cancer.

The book also explains why so many futurist's predictions have been wrong (remember the 'paperless office'?) Seems that many predictions have been based purely on science rather than taking human nature into account. Dr. Kaku's predictions are based on sound science, but includes the human response as well.
 
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Since retiring, I've tried to read more classics...one good reason, they're cheap. I really made a mistake with Ulyssus tho. I couldn't make it thru the first 3 scenes. I will try again after another Jane Austin, this time Lady Susan.
 
Just finished (interesting look at international politics in the 10-15 years ahead, one "expert" view)
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Currently reading
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On the wait list for
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and
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Just finished Steve Jobs biography - DH gave it to me for Mother's Day. Very well written and interesting. Quite balanced between Jobs the genius and Jobs the a**hole.
 
John Galt III said:
Sophie's Choice by Styron. Lots of sexuality, no doubt risque back when it was published. Good read. Styron sounds like Dostoevsky a lot.
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This is a very good book, and the movie with Meryl Streep is also excellent. Another wonderful book with some period and other resemblances to Sophie's Choice is Enemies, A Love
Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, probably my all time favorite author. The move of the same name with a perfectly cast Lena Olin is also wonderful.

Ha
 
Nemo2 said:
Like calling contractors to come onsite to measure his high school for building additions. :LOL:
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The worst one, one he regrets, is that he convinced his best friend and opening act that he had to dress up as a woman to get a spouse discount on the plane, or he wouldn't be able to go on the tour. Lots of people, including the stewardesses, were in on it. He flew from LA to Philadelphia that way. Here's a picture:

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I just finished Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". I saw him speak about this book last Fall. DW gave it to me for Xmas. It's not just a lot of data and psychology experiments. It's a sweeping account of human history. It's very readable though I did take 5 months to finish it. Also, just in time, my May 18th edition of Science magazine is devoted to the topic of "Human Conflict".

Simultaneously, last week, I finished Sherry Turkle's book, "Alone Together". She's an MIT psychologist who has studied human/computer/artificial intelligence issues for the last 30 years. The first half of the book is about human interactions with the current generation of human like robots. The second half of the book is about the impact of social media on our lives. Very interesting. Both halves compliment each other nicely. I hadn't been keeping up with robot development so I learned a lot from this book.
 
I read the 2nd of the Brunetti series (21 novels in the series to date) by Donna Leon: Death in a Strange Country. Why did I like this novel? Because it dealt with the some aspects of the mixture of underworld and government that apparently existed in the early 1990's Italy. Maybe it's still there? There was also some interesting comparisons between Americans and Italian. Leon's bio is here: Donna Leon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some of the subject matter reminded me of a PBS TV Mystery series about a detective in Italy. I'm quite curious about the various European countries and their inner societal tensions. It's all so much in the news now too. It should be interesting to continue this series up to the present -- only 19 more novels to go.
 
I've just picked up a few of Augusten Burrough's books lately. I'd read his brilliant Sellevision novel a few years ago, but his latest essay in the WSJ caught my eye and I reserved a few others. Witty & elegant writer, lots of angst, but worthwhile reading.
 
I'm re-reading Dracula today. All the talk about zombies in the U.S. lately has me going back to the source--one source at least.
 
I got the Stephen Hawking's latest book from the library for my Kindle Fire: The Grand Design: Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow: Amazon.com: Kindle Store

It's a pretty interesting book but a little puzzling. I haven't spend much time reading modern pop cosmology books as I've been trying to read some of the pop physics books dealing with recent decades physics advances in the small (subatomic, quantum) world. I'll have to go back and The Grand Design to try to absorb more and firm up questions.

Regarding questions, towards the end there was this for example:
On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather then nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
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Well it's back to Chapters 5 and 6 for a review.

Hawking is big on M-theory. He states, tongue-in-cheek I think, no one seems to know what the M stands for. But the last paragraph of the book says:
M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find.
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Also there was a discussion of inflation in the early universe (in Chapter 6 again) with this interesting tidbit:
It was as if a coin 1 centimeter in diameter suddenly blew up to ten million times the width of the Milky Way. That may seem to violate relativity, which dictates that nothing can move faster than light, but that speed limit does not apply to the expansion of space itself.
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If someone here as a reference to the last (blue) part of this quote, I'd like to know about it. I guess this refers to General Relativity concepts.

I think what I need is the next layer of this physics onion explained without diving into too the whole onion.
 
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