Read any good books lately?
Do share your opinions and suggestions.
Personally, I don’t read enough, and I stay within a too-narrow comfort zone of UNIX geek material. Help me, and other EC readers similarly situated. It’d be nice if the techie side of infosec was not the subject (Rich Bejtlich has that covered anyway)
I wrote up a review of Bryan Skyrms’ The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure a while back, and I recommend it highly (the book, not the review).
I also liked Amartya Sen’s Rationality and Freedom.
Thanks!
I really enjoyed “The Ghost Map” by Steven Johnson and “Changing Minds” by Howard Gardner.
The first is about the London Cholera epidemic; the latter, about how we influence the way others think.
Mediated – Thomas De Zengotita
A look at how our media shapes our comprehension of the world by skewing our perception. Well written, easier and more topically relevant than the father of this topic, Marshall McLuhan.
End of Poverty – Jeffrey Sachs
An incredibly well researched and well reasoned plea to take action against extreme poverty. Detailed practical material that not only points out the issues but shows us the way.
The primary reason I will miss my local computer book store is finding non-security/networking gems that I would not otherwise run across on Amazon and the like…
One of those books that I did pick up was Martin Gardner’s The Universe in a Handkerchief. It’s a book about the recreational mathematics creations/writing of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll). A rather fantastic read.
My frivolous read of the season is The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, a delightful set of amazingly erudite essays extolling the virtues of one or the other of the Jewish delicacies. It’s an annual tradition of Chris’ alma mater, Chicago, where faculty members have passionate but uproarious debates bringing to bear the best of academic tools for a ridiculous purpose. The tradition has spread, but Cernea compiles some of the original Chicago lectures, including Milton Friedman and Leon Lederman.
I absolutely loved Philip Pullman’s trilogy “His Dark Materials.” It’s Harry Potter meets Katherine Neville’s “The Eight.” It’s delightfully well written and has plenty of depth, even though on the surface it’s a fantasy story with a young girl-hero.
And for the traveler types, check out “Getting stoned with savages” and “The sex lives of cannibals” by maarten troost.
I don’t know how to read.
I liked “The Seven Sins of Memory” by Schacter (if I remember correctly ;-)) and am enjoying “Statistics Hacks” by Frey and “Chance” by Aczel.
On the fiction side, it’s all a blur of airplane reading.