In this series I note what I am reading and people comment with what they're reading. Sometimes, on Sundays, I post a special edition on a particular genre or topic.
If you like to trade books, try bookmooch
I've written some book reviews on Yahoo Voices:
Book reviews on Yahoo
Just finished
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. Really excellent novel in an SF vein, set in both present day and world war II. Girl super-spies, a female super-genius, a clockmaker who might (by accident) end free will, an evil Asian potentate and more, all mixed together with some really fine English usage. A novel about love, hate, revenge ...oh and saving the universe. Warning: There are some fairly graphic scenes of torture. Full review:
Now reading
Leibniz: An intellectual biography by Maria Rosa Antognazza. Leibniz was co-inventor of calculus (with Isaac Newton) but he also made contributions to law, philosophy, physics, economics, chemistry, geology, medicine, linguistics, history and more. This book is good, but fairly dense.
21st Century Science Fiction ed. by David Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. A collection of shorter length SF from the first decade of the 21st century.
The Yamato Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave. The "secret" history of Japan's emperors, especially during World War II and after. A bleak story of how the Japanese people have been manipulated and how MacArthur made people lie about war crimes.
Citizens by Simon Schama. The French Revolution. I found the prologue confusing, but it's getting better as I get into it.
I play bridge and I decided to start listing bridge books I am reading
Card Play Technique by Victor Mollo and Nico Gardner. One of the classics of bridge literature. Subtitled "The art of being lucky". Very well written, intended for that huge class of bridge players called "intermediate".
Why you Still Lose at Bridge by Jullian Pottage. A sort of sequel to the old classic Why you Lose at Bridge by S.J. Simon. This is a book about the mistakes ordinary players make and also about playing the opposition, not just the cards. Well done and readable.
Just started
Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. The railway comes to Discworld.
Is that a fish in your ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos. Interesting but somewhat frustrating. Bellos raises very interesting points but then often dismisses them. For instance, he discusses how to translate dialect and ungrammatical speech. Suppose you are translating Huckleberry Finn into French. Well, Twain makes Huck and Jim and the others speak in very distinctive ways, and France has no exact equivalents. But ... surely France has rural, uneducated accents (for Huck)? And France had slave plantations in Haiti. Why not make Jim talk like those slaves would? This is dismissed with something like "translators don't do that because they might get blamed for bad grammar". Bellos dismisses the idea that translation is impossible, but then gives examples of notions that would be very very hard to translate.
Read More