Unofficial What are you Reading Thread?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Still reading Inkheart, except basically not really because I don't have time to read.

[Richter]

"Blood Germs and Steel", with occasional chapters from Salvatore's "Cleric Quintet" for pulp fun.

[LMNO]

Finished Black Swan.

Clearing my head with "Feet of Clay" (Discworld series)

Also reading "The 36 Strategies" at work, as part of Cain's reading assignments.

[Cain]

Incidentally, I named that file wrong.  It should be named The 36 Strategems.  Small difference, but a strategem is a trick applied to try and keep a strategy working, and not a wider modus operandi.  Usually.

[Jasper]

My travel bag contains Algebra Demystified, Calculus Demystified, Dark Tower III, the Eisenhorn omnibus, Man And His Symbols, The World Is Flat, Chaos, and What Is Intelligence?

It is a big travel bag.

It also holds Transmetropolitan 0-5

PPS several notebooks and journals and sketchpads

[Triple Zero]

i finished the black swan during my christmas holidays, my opinion is still that i like the book and agree with the ideas it brings, but that i think it's a real shame the author has been so careless with his examples and facts (i discovered many more errors, it's mostly annoying if you just happen to know something about it, maybe he did it on purpose to keep those damned statisticians away?)

i am currently reading snow crash for the second time.

i'm halfway through "the language instinct"

i have dawkins's "god delusion" borrowed from a friend, on my to-read stack. do you guys know if it's any good? cause i dont really care about either atheism or christianity :-P

and a french novel (translated to dutch) by Michel Houellebecq, "The Possibility of an Island", "a novel that alternates between three characters' narratives, Daniel 1 (a current day comedian) and Daniel 24 and 25, neo-human clones of the Daniel 1." [wikipedia] -- weird, so probably good

[Cain]

The God Delusion is....alright.  Its not a very philosophically deep book however.  Its hardly a modern version of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, a much superior book by David Hume.

[Triple Zero]

in some discussion about religion (a guy that wasn't really sure if he quit being christian or not) this guy started quoting Hume and managed to bore the fuck out of me fairly quickly.

so, you say dawkins is worse?

[Cain]

Hume was hilarious, in context.  You have to get to the parts where his dialogues start parodying Christian rationalist views about the Universe.  Dawkins may be smart, but he never accurately used Christian theology to make an analogy of a blind carrot maker.

[That One Guy]

I just started reading "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. Pretty interesting so far. It postulates what the earth would be like if humanity suddenly (whether via disease/rapture/whatever) disappeared but all of our infrastructure was still intact. How long would everything last? What would last the longest? What would go first?

I'm on the second chapter, where he's focusing on Manhattan (bridges would last a couple centuries, structures like Grand Central Station 5 or 600 years, most other housing maybe a few decades). Good stuff, and so far there hasn't been any real moralizing about things.

[Deepthroat Chopra]

Just finishing off "Jonestown" by Chris Masters. It mightn't seem of much value to readers outside of Australia, being a bio on Australia's most powerful "shock jock". However, it does show how highly dysfunctional and unhappy bastards, such as Jones, can shape public policy through narcissism and exaggerating their own power.

[Diseris]

The Dance of Time by Michael Judge

A nice time-line of the origin of the standard calendar. A bit light on references, but I remember a lot of the stories from college and its nice to see them in print.

[Triple Zero]

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

i forgot if this one came before or after the Black Swan, but he mentions black swans a lot, so i guess after.

i have a bit less trouble reading it than the Black Swan, this time he's mostly telling stories and actually partially acknowledging he's not gonna be scientific about it (but just skeptical empirical or something).
also i have the idea that he will come with a bit more practical info than just broadly outlining the problem, but i have only just begun reading the book.

[Cain]

I believe it came before.  He's used the term Black Swan alot, but the actual book came only very recently.  I've barely thumbed through my copy, but apparently the original version was printed in 2004.  Original Black Swan was 2006.

[Triple Zero]

*looks inside*

yep you're right.

i temporarily swapped it with a friend after i told him about the Black Swan. something tells me i should probably plunder more of his bookshelves ...

i'll withhold judgement until i finish the book but it kinda puzzles me why Taleb would write two books about pretty much the same subject matter. cause so far (pg 38/262) i've read nothing that i didnt also get out of the Black Swan.