What have you read this year?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I just looked over my Kindle's order history and, well, this year was surprisingly productive...

 

• 16 Terry Pratchett novels. I recommend all of them.
• Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium, which is Bart Ehrman's take on the New Testament. Ehrman is a well-known Biblical scholar, and he thinks Jesus was the first in a line of apocalypticists in Christianity -- that is, Jesus' primary message was that the world was going to end soon and the Kingdom of God would come to Earth. Interesting book because it challenges your preexisting notions while justifying its positions very well.
• Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker. Central thesis: psychiatric drugs make mental illness worse, not better. My verdict: not as insane as you'd think, once you've finished reading. I posted a review of this earlier this year.
• When Prophecy Fails, a classic work of psychology. Psychologists infiltrate a group whose leader believes she receives messages from aliens; they must prepare for the destruction of Earth, where the close followers will be transported off Earth in the nick of time by the aliens. This is the book largely responsible for popularizing the idea of cognitive dissonance, and it's fascinating. The story could be better told -- it's written by social scientists proving their hypothesis, not journalists writing a good story -- but it's fascinating and hilarious.
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman. You might not agree with all of its conclusions, but it's still interesting (and relevant, despite being a decade or two old).
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach. A fun overview of spaceflight, but skimps on the spaceflight and emphasizes the "fun," dealing more with Roach's adventures in writing the book than in hard facts about space.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick, which is the book that spawned Blade Runner. Dark but gripping, and thought-provoking.
• I crammed a collection of George Orwell's essays in here. Read this essay at the least: it's Orwell on "Politics and the English Language". It is doubleplusgood.
• Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys, by Michael Collins, the First Man to Watch Two Other Guys Land on the Moon. Interesting stories of the space program (bonus points for this radio transcript: "YOUNG: I got the farts again. I got 'em again, Charlie. HOUSTON: Okay, you have a hot mike." [i.e. "your microphone is on"]).
• The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, by Rachel Maines, because, well, you can't pass up a book with that title. Short version: For thousands of years, men thought women were incapable of orgasm, and cured female "hysteria" (restlessness, irritability, etc.) with genital "massage". Eventually someone discovered that this could be done by machine, and suddenly their female patients kept coming back.
• Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, by Gary Noesner, who was chief hostage negotiator for quite a few years. The incidents are interesting, but this book is rather light otherwise. Some good stories, but not much else.
• American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, to whom I say: er, what just happened?
• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. Perhaps one of the best novels I've ever read, and it's even better if you know a bit about Jesus and you don't mind blasphemy. It's the narrative of Jesus' life, as told by his childhood friend, who is a smartass. Moore sticks well to New Testament narratives, but there's that inconvenient gap between Jesus' birth in Luke and his preaching career twenty years later. Moore fills it in with his own hilarious story. Go, buy the book.
• Bloodsucking Fiends, by Christopher Moore. A woman is turned into a vampire against her will, for the amusement of another vampire. An aspiring writer who works the night shift at Safeway comes to her aid. Roughly as hilarious as Lamb, but shorter and with no Biblical references.
• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon. This is what happens when a Baltimore Sun journalist spends a full year hanging out in the homicide department with unrestricted access to everything. It was published in 1991, but it is still fascinating, while gritty and somewhat disturbing as well. Very good overall.
• The Mind's Eye, by Oliver Sacks, which I am in the midst of. Not as good as Sacks' older books, I think; you just start getting interested in the case when he moves on to the next chapter and the next patient.
• Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, an interesting journey into the world of science and morality. It's an unusual format: the first portion of the book is an essay by Frans de Waal, who works with primates and explains how they show evolved moral behavior. The rest of the book is five essays by other philosophers and scientists, who build on some of de Waal's points and criticize others. Fascinating, but requires your constant attention or you'll get lost.

That gives me more than 30 books read, and I currently have around $80 of Amazon gift card credit to spend on more Kindle books. Funny, I don't feel like I read that many books...

[Ringer]

Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention - The transparent and automatic feat of reading comprehension disguises an intricate biological effort, ably analyzed in this fascinating study. Drawing on scads of brain-imaging studies, case histories of stroke victims and ingenious cognitive psychology experiments, cognitive neuroscientist Dehaene (The Number Sense) diagrams the neural machinery that translates marks on paper into language, sound and meaning. It's a complex and surprising circuitry, both specific, in that it is housed in parts of the cortex that perform specific processing tasks, and puzzlingly abstract. (The brain, Dehaene hypothesizes, registers words mainly as collections of pairs of letters.) The author proposes reading as an example of neuronal recycling—the recruitment of previously evolved neural circuits to accomplish cultural innovations—and uses this idea to explore how ancient scribes shaped writing systems around the brain's potential and limitations. (He likewise attacks modern whole language reading pedagogy as an unnatural imposition on a brain attuned to learning by phonics.) This lively, lucid treatise proves once again that Dehaene is one of our most gifted expositors of science; he makes the workings of the mind less mysterious, but no less miraculous. Illus. (Nov. 16)

The Man Who Loved only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth - Paul Erdös was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history. Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdös would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce, "My brain is open." After working through a problem, he'd move on to the next place, the next solution.Hoffman's book, like Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals a genius's life that transcended the merely quirky. But Erdös's brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash's despairing schizophrenia. Erdös never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. Oliver Sackswrites of Erdös: "A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdös was totally obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He traveled constantly, living out of a plastic bag, and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art--all that is usually indispensable to a human life."

 

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is easy to love, despite his strangeness. It's hard not to have affection for someone who referred to children as "epsilons," from the Greek letter used to represent small quantities in mathematics; a man whose epitaph for himself read, "Finally I am becoming stupider no more"; and whose only really necessary tool to do his work was a quiet and open mind. Hoffman, who followed and spoke with Erdös over the last 10 years of his life, introduces us to an undeniably odd, yet pure and joyful, man who loved numbers more than he loved God--whom he referred to as SF, for Supreme Fascist. He was often misunderstood, and he certainly annoyed people sometimes, but Paul Erdös is no doubt missed

 

The Moral Animal: Why We are The Way We are - An accessible introduction to the science of evolutionary psychology and how it explains many aspects of human nature. Unlike many books on the topic,which focus on abstractions like kin selection, this book focuses on Darwinian explanations of why we are the way we are--emotionally and morally. Wright deals particularly well with explaining the reasons for the stereotypical dynamics of the three big "S's:" sex, siblings, and society.

 

Proust and The Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University, integrates psychology and archaeology, linguistics and education, history and neuroscience in a truly path-breaking look at the development of the reading brain-a complicated phenomenon that Wolf seeks to chronicle from both the early history of humanity and the early stages of an individual's development ("unlike its component parts such as vision and speech... reading has no direct genetic program passing it on to future generations"). Along the way, Wolf introduces concepts like "word poverty," the situation in which children, by age five, have heard 32 million less words than their counterparts (with chilling long-term effects), and makes time for amusing and affecting anecdotes, like the only child she knew to fake a reading disorder (attempting to get back into his beloved literacy training program). Though it could probably command a book of its own, the sizable third section of the book covers the complex topic of dyslexia, explaining clearly and expertly "what happens when the brain can't learn to read." One of those rare books that synthesizes cutting edge, interdisciplinary research with the inviting tone of a curious, erudite friend (think Malcolm Gladwell), Wolf's first book for a general audience is an eye-opening winner, and deserves a wide readership.

 

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend - Borne out of a quest to understand her sister Carolyn's lifelong sinister behavior (which, systems engineer Oakley suggests, may have been compounded by childhood polio), the author sets out on an exploration of evil, or Machiavellian, individuals. Drawing on the advances in brain imaging that have illuminated the relationship of emotions, genetics and the brain (with accompanying imaging scans), Oakley collects detailed case histories of famed evil geniuses such as Slobodan Milosevic and Mao Zedong, interspersed with a memoir of Carolyn's life. Oakley posits that they all had borderline personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder, a claim she supports with evidence from scientists' genetic and neurological research. All the people she considers, Oakley notes, are charming on the surface but capable of deeply malign behavior (traits similar to those found in some personality disorders), and her analysis attributes these traits to narcissism combined with cognitive and emotional disturbances that lead them to believe they are behaving in a genuinely altruistic way. Disturbing, for sure, but with her own personal story informing her study, Oakley offers an accessible account of a group of psychiatric disorders and those affected by them. Illus.

 

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior - Recently we have seen plenty of irrational behavior, whether in politics or the world of finance. What makes people act irrationally? In a timely but thin collection of anecdotes and empirical research, the Brafman brothers—Ari (The Starfish and the Spire), a business expert, and Rom, a psychologist—look at sway, the submerged mental drives that undermine rational action, from the desire to avoid loss to a failure to consider all the evidence or to perceive a person or situation beyond the initial impression and the reluctance to alter a plan that isn't working. To drive home their points, the authors use contemporary examples, such as the pivotal decisions of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush, coach Steve Spurrier and his Gators football team, and a sudden apparent epidemic of bipolar disorder in children (which may be due more to flawed thinking by doctors making the diagnoses). The stories are revealing, but focused on a few common causes of irrational behavior, the book doesn't delve deeply into the psychological demons that can devastate a person's life and those around him

Also an enormous amount of comic books that would make me feel way to geeky to list.

 

And some others that I can't think of off the top of my head. All information is from Amazon. School cuts into my reading time so freaking bad I can't hardly get most of my books done. Have about 15 next to my bed that I still need to read.

Edited December 30, 2010 by Ringer

[caharris]

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

Excellently written. Sure his ideas may not be completely original or you may not agree, but he presents his ideas in a very accessible way.

 

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Need I say anything? Perfection.

 

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins

Good, but I got bored with it.

 

Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne

After reading The Greatest Show on Earth, this was a tad redundant. Well written, but don't read these two back-to-back.

 

A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Still in the process of reading, but it's a great text about the progression of ideas in western philosophy.

 

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

Meh. It isn't that I disagree with any of it, it's just that it's so watered down for the mass public.

 

God The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist by Victor Stenger

Probably one of the best books I've ever read.

 

The Non-Existence of God by Nicholas Everitt

Useful, but not something you read for thrills.

 

The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind

Excellent book. I enjoy his thought experiments and presentations, and I think he did a fine job of putting emotion into the story.

 

Godless by Dan Barker

Excellent book, but his personally story is sad.

 

 

Wow, my reviews are terrible compared to the above posts