My Reading List

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Doctorow's writing is in the spirit of William Gibson, and this book reads a lot like Gibson's early writing. I think Gibson has gotten a lot better in his later books, and I think Doctorow is following that path. What I really like about Cory's writing though is the ideas are cyber punk in spirit, yet very specific to the real world. Rather than a dark and dirty future, Doctorow presents a world that is kind of right now, with just a couple new inventions. The Disney setting is full of social commentary, lots of fun. Makers is a later book, and has a somewhat more developed writing style, but Down and Out is not as ambitious and is an easier fast read, yet retains a punch.

Dick's books are all similar--they run hot and cold. At times the writing if fantastic, and at times it drags. VALIS is about observations from a psychotic mind, but the insights often make a lot of sense. In VALIS I see a lot of Pynchon, especially The Crying of Lot 49.

A detailed account of the demise of North Korea. Demick tells a great story by following two central characters. The story jumps off to numerous other side stories, all from defectors, and lining those all up with macro data on the country. This is a very moving and well done book.

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Strong science fiction space opera here. Niven is of course always strong, and Pournelle is fun. The jump drives, super nova remains, all seem very similar to Antares Dawn, so I would suspect this book influenced McCollum. Lots of solid military action, good plot, and well covered science devices.

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This is a great detailed coverage of the personalities behind Long-Term Capital Management. Lowenstein does not stop there though. The blow by blow financial details as the firm loses everything is engrossing. Maybe this got me excited just because I am interested in finance, but Lowenstein really did a lot of digging on all the details.

Space opera, with way cool technology. Vinge actually has an original idea for science fiction, which at least I have never seen before. Different parts of the gallaxy cause different levels of mental ability. Sounds stupid, but it is actually way cool. The two books are only losely related but do exist in the same universe.

McCollum is an engineer who is also a writer. These stories have a very strong scientific basis. Space battles are very real, while the stories are kind of weak, especially the human side. These are like a Star Trek story, with much better science, and I really like that.

Very dated to the 1990s, but accurate to the science at the time. The story lacks the simplistic, and fun, evil and good characters Bova normally has. This story is more an detailed exploration of how a Mars mission would work.

A good look at the different uses of free in marketing. The center of attention is on the Internet, but there is a bit of history also.

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This is not a tight sequel to the other Chalion books, although it seems to be marketed as such. The universe is the same as Chalion, but the characters are different, with some references to the previous events covered in the other two books. The story centers on a swordsman and a damsel and the animals spirits that possess them. This book actually could be read before the other two, acting as an introduction to the spirit world Bujold has implemented. It is a kind of primer on the Chalion universe spirit world. As such, it feels a bit like a follow on book, but the story is still enjoyable, as Bujold is great at character studies.

A critical analysis of marketing efforts, which asserts firms need to do something very different to get the attention of customers. A bit inconsistent in style, and not data driven.

Pretty good details on KFC's growth in China.

Audio review here: http://ccc.qbook.tv/content/view/146/86/

All my friends dismiss this book as conservative clap trap. Well, it does have that side, but the core point seems sound to me. The idea that the government can regulate improvement is just not valid. People who can actually create, will create, and those in government will always be tempted to satisfy their constituencies by grabbing the wealth created.

A new Ender book. That is enough to push me into buying this one. Card has made quite a number of small sequels, side stories, which I avoided after reading one of them. This book ties those side stories together and fills in the space after Ender's victory and before his new life in exile. Thus, this is a continuation of the main Ender story, and fits in well, with lots of plot twists, usually coming from Ender thinking up something the reader just does not expect. As such, I was getting a bit tired of Ender just being so smart. It seems he is always a step ahead--to the point that I suspect the author is just helping Ender out. It doesn't help that the I already know where Ender will end up after this adventure, so there is never any real risk that Ender will fail. Card does counter this problem though by making the story much more about Ender's sister.

Details, details, details, that is what this book has lots of. What it does not have is an artificial narrative tacked on top of a history of the CIA. I actually like this, as I am a bit tired of reading histories that are told through stilted narrative stories. Weiner simply gets right down to work, with tons of documents he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The results are very depressing. Plenty of the issues have come out before, but here, we are told the details that the failures we may have heard of, were actually parts of long efforts screwed up from the very start. Everyone and every plan were totally off the wall, incompetent, unqualified, and worst of all, down right stupid. The main issue Weiner exposes is that the CIA efforts continuously fail because they lack any review and feedback mechanism, key for improvement. Because the CIA is "secret," however, such reviews are blocked, thus the organization gets stuck in a dysfunctional cycle, where employees become more concerned with keeping their jobs, expanding budgets, and going home to a niche DC suburb home, where there is a hot dinner, than actually gathering any legitimate intelligence from overseas locations, where the real threats to the USA lie. Overall, a very depressing book. I cannot remember a single CIA success. Weiner kept me interested, not least of all because each chapter includes little pieces of other history we know well. Now we find how CIA was tied into those periods, those people (mostly people in the executive branch), but I can see how readers might be bored with the constant drone of abysmal failure after failure. Rudnicki's narration is outstanding.

After reading Atkinson's book, When Will There Be Good News, I wanted to read everything she has written. This stuff is just really good. For some reason, reading these mysteries takes me back to my love with Dick Francis when I was in junior high. These books are of course much better, centring totally on the human stories, while the mystery is on the side. Maybe it is like Dick Francis for adults??? Whatever it is, I just find Atkinson's voice to be very appealing.

I have been reading Amy Tan since college days, but didn't get to this book until eight years after its release. Well, this is the best she has ever written. It may be a bit too sentimental at times, but I do not think it is over the top. With my Chinese experience, I can say so many of these people and their stories ring very true.

A departure for Bear here, not a strong science fiction novel. The book is still hard science, but it is bordering on a CSI episode. Terrorists, injuries, forensic evidence, and so on, I could have skipped this one. I hope Bear gets back to the space stuff

A different approach to the classic aliens visiting Earth. The whole earth is encased in a time bubble, which is kind of silly. That is okay though, because the story centers on just a couple characters and their lives. This is less a science fiction book than a character study. I liked it.

Well done history. Cummings writing stays interesting, and kept me listening through this long book. Lots of details, but never dry. Oppenheimer has always drawn a lot of attention, so there is some stuff here we have read in different places, but there was lots more detail and follow up.

A well documented and detailed history of the cure for Polio. I found this book to be especially interesting because of the academic in fighting aspect. Research grants, lab work, claiming credit, etc. It is a good history and also a good insight to the reality of how these big discoveries are not just a sudden event but a result of decades of many people working and competing.

A hard hitting summary of the state of eco diversity on Earth. The writing is strong, and although the topic is not an interest of mine, I found the book hard to put down. A bit depressing, but worth while.

Frank did a series of articles for the WSJ, and this book is a a follow up to those. Great details and stats on the luxury market but also a lot about the rich that do not spend on luxury. A solid business book and helpful to those who want to get a realistic perspective of what it takes to serve the rich and become rich.

Only crediting Shatner as the author, that may explain why the story is weak. Well, mixing up the captains is kind of cool, and as always, this is just for fun.

Another Gainman ghost/demi god story, this is a strange read. The characters are what keep the story going, but I always am on the edge of not liking Gainman's work. This book does not push me either way.

I read this a couple years back, when Michael Turton introduced Lois McMaster to me by loaning me this book. I got this audio copy for Antony, since we had been playing a Traveller RPG with a character I had created based on Miles Vorkosigan. Space opera is the best way to explain this series, but there is little emphasis on technology and lots of emphasis on character development.

This book always appears on science reading lists, and after reading it, I can see why. Rather than totally dry and difficult, Darwin's style is interesting and full of easy to understand examples. Most striking was the main issue Creationist use today to attack evolution were addressed in this book. I was totally blown away with the fact that Creationist have brought NOTHING new to the debate after more than 150 years. The first half of the book centers on the question of how species emerge, along with a lot of debating exactly what a species is, any way. This gives a good perspective on what science is about, how it operates, and just how crazy man-made labels can be. The second half of the book was more of a struggle, as Darwin tries to use logic and examples to explain inheritance without the benefit of gene theory. He seems to miss the mark on many points, and it was hard for me to concentrate on the book near the end.

A very detailed history of the US Government's case against Microsoft. Everything here is from the court case, so there is not a lot of back story of what was actually happening at Microsoft. It is most just the facts, and as such, Auletta does a good job. I got a very clear picture of the whole case, and how both sides were maneuvering to get what they wanted. Obviously, the book is critical of Microsoft, and straight out calls Bill Gates childish. So there is not a lot of pro business attitude, and a bit too much of "the judge is my buddy because he let me interview him . . . he is sooo smart, and he says Bill Gates is . . ." Keep in mind the judge doesn't even use email.

While I am not nuts over self improvement books, time management is something that does interest me. Allen has gotten a lot of hype going on around this book. That kind of turned me off, and all the people on Amazon.com writing how this book changed their lives also made me hesitate. I gave in after all, and cannot say I was disappointed was just as bad as I thought it would be. For me, the best book on time management is Covey's book The Seven Habits of HIghly Effective People. What that book had and Allen's does not is just how to use larger strategic orientation in order to make decisions about what exactly is actionable and not, what needs to go into a To Do list, etc. Allen spends almost all the book telling the reader to go buy folders and filing cabinets. As is normal for current business books, the author must mention how great he is and all the consulting he has done. This bothered me in a big way because of all the stories Allen told of "High Level" managers he had helped. It seemed they did not quite understand such concepts as putting projects into folders, rather then the floor, and of making schedules! WOW, that is the state of American management--they need to hire someone like Allen to tell them how to buy folders! On the other hand, if this book could be cut down to about 20 pages, the system of thoughts, lists, actions, and projects is useful. The program ThinkingRock seems to do all this very well.

Is it because I was fresh off Pynchon's Against the Day that Stephenson's work seems to be little more than a Wikipedia version of that book? Well, maybe. Gibson's Spook Country is a good contrast also, where each and every sentence is meaningful and well written. In Quicksilver, I often found myself wondering why soooo many meaningless and just not so well written sentences were on the page for me to slog through. That does sound strange though when Pynchon's ATD is anything but short, but ATD also is made up of sentence that I know I can read many times over, and each time get something out of it. Quicksilver simply seed to full of filler and it has two more books to go! I will move on as the Enlightenment period is well covered, there are good scenes, and I'm just hoping Stephenson has a good reason for all this.

Takeshi Kovac novels that follow on to Altered Carbon. This is cyber punk with lots of noir. These two follow very similar formulas with similar results. The science is really weak and lots of the key devices in the books seem to raise more questions than are ever answered. The biggest device is the sleaving idea where human consciousness can be put into a new body at any time. If this were the case, however, I find it strange everyone is always avoiding being killed, sine one just resleaves (ala the new Cylons). Many questions are left open, and while the excitement level is high, the sex scenes are over done and a bit juvenile. In both these books, Takeshi is placed in impossible situations and uses his over the top Envoy trained skills to overcome. This device got a bit tiresome too. It seemed like no matter how deep the shit got, the author needed only write, "Drawing on Envoy training, Takeshi . . . " and like magic, the situation was overcome. Lots of the prose seem wasted and a bit bloated, but that may just be because I was just fresh from reading Gibson.

Read by Takei, this book is much more about his own growing up and his family's experience during their internment during WWII. As such, the book is really well done. The writing is clear and to the point, and of course the Star Trek thing is in there too.

This book centers on a single story of a family impacted by the Asteroid Wars. The tie in is really nice, and the very human story is a bit different from Bova's other Asteroid books. Here, there are no big bad businessmen taking over something. In fact, Dorik Harbin, a very big bad guy in previous books, is somewhat of a hero here. Because of this focus, I thought this is actually one of the better in the series.

This is the story of Dr. John Snow and the development of modern epidemiology and germ theory. As a history of science read, this book is very good. It has lots of drama and reads like a mystery. I did learn about Snows research into anesthesia, something I didn't know about. Most of the book centers around the cholera outbreak in London and Snow's work to counter the generally accepted miasma theory. This is a great book for young researchers to see how prevailing paradigms can be completely wrong, yet generally accepted and even unquestioned.

This is a big book, but at least it is just one volume. In audio format, it is simply the longest book I've every listened to (53 hours). What is most surprising at the start is that this book is very accessible! I really didn't expect Pynchon to read this way, but his use of multiple styles, especially the turn of the century (19th to 20th) adventure genres made for a very enjoyable read. Of course there is a lot of strange stuff going on, and the sexual description gets very detailed, but these all fit into the story well. In the end, I didn't really have any feeling about story. Rather than a single point, it was the process, at times slow, and always very well read by Hill, that was most interesting. A large amount of early American capitalism is here, but always seeming to be a metaphor for our current time.

A very detailed history of the Mellon family (lots of time spent on the father), but more importantly, this is a description of the rise of American-style capitalism. David Cannadine is a historian with obviously great research skills. This audio book tops 36 hours and I found every minute of it to be interesting. I'm so sick of journalist writing shallow books on topics they only have a passing interest in (and zero research ability beyond talking to someone who just so happens to want to sell something). Prof. Cannadine says the book was more than ten years in the making--I just wish we had more quality business history like this.

A very well done history of the fight against bacteria, which led up to the magic bullet of sulfa. I especially liked the fact that Hager is a scientist turned writer rather than a journalist turned nothing. His grasp of science shows throughout the book, and this book has one of the best beginnings I've seen for a history of science book. The detail is amazing and always interesting, mixing large doses of big business, academics, science, and politics.

This book was surrounded with a lot of hype, but I didn't find it very interesting. Dubner goes on and on about Levitt as if he is a god. Well, this stuff is totally mainstream social science statistical work. Nothing is so surprising or shocking as Dubner makes it out to be. Basically, if you don't know anything about economics and statistics, this book will give you a good idea of how these tools are used in social science.

I'm nearing the conclusion of my mission to read all of Austen's works. Started on the quest by one of my daughters, I've worked by way through to the more known works, or at least the ones that have gotten multiple BBC treatments. Of course, for Anastasia, all the stories were new because she had never seen those productions (Taiwan schools keeping kids to busy for anything like that). Persuassion didn't surprise in anyway then, because I knew the story, but listening to this book now, I was surprised by the writing. So many sentences I just wanted to write down and read again.

Cyber punk with a cop in a dark city with a bunch of really pad people. Sounds pretty standard, but Morgan adds a few interesting twists. The universe he creates is along the lines of Blade Runner, but there is none of the really psychotic stuff of P. K. Dick. Instead, people can change bodies (sleeves) and this alone can cause quite a bit of confusion. Pretty good stuff from a guy who says he was and ESL teacher turned writer.

Readers of Fast Food Nation may be attracted to the topic of this book, but there are differences--all for the better. Pollan goes much more into the underlying macro sturctures of the food industry that have led consumers in the U.S. to the current supermarket situation. There is of course a lot of the assumptions that the situation as it stands is bad, but overall, Pollan really spends much more time on how the current food industry functions and how alternatives function.

Listened to this while on a long American road trip, and it worked well because the story is also a long journey. The story starts out fairly normal, slowly gets a bit strange, and then nothing much seems to happen. I was always waiting for some really weird event, but Clarke moves very slowly, creating a world where the magic being performed by Strange and Norrel seems quite normal. What we end up with is a story about relationships set in Victorian London that happen to have a bit of magic and darkness involved.

Frans de Waal is a well published primatologist and this book shows that back ground with lots of very academic ideas about humans and their behaviors within the context of ape behavior. The main thesis of the book is that the assumption human violence comes from chimps is wrong because chimps are just as modern as we are, with both of us evolving from a common ancestor. Another ape to evolve from that common ancestor is the benobo, which not only have very different behaviors from chimps, but have created a culture based more on female power with a big emphasis on sex. De Wall's point is that we also have this potential in us, and it is silly to only see our violent chimp side. A really well argued point with lots of examples from his own research.

Vance does a great job of conceptualizing Shakespeare's life, and in turn, the writing. Always interested in history, I was very satisfied how Vance blew away silly questions about who Shakespeare was, or if he really existed by simply making the point that we have a lot more information about Shakespeare than many other people who lived at the same time, and who's existence we don't question. It wasn't exactly the information age. Lots of stuff here about contemporary issues and how they worked there way into Shakespeare's plays.

A very long book (over 18 hours), Mayer does a great job of adding context to Jackson's life by going over the surrounding events. I really liked how this book filled in my own history gap between the revolution and the civil war. The U.S. in transition, and Jackson is detailed in this book as very representative of the changes in U.S. democracy, foreign policy as well as domestic issues, such as monetary questions (as in the Central Bank).

Given my association with Chinese culture and business, I found this book to be quite good and accurate. McGregor was the first reporter stationed in Beijing from the WSJ and has many stories to draw on from the early and mid 1990s. The writing is quite good and the stories all interesting, but they all center on very large companies and read much like the WSJ itself. Occasionally, there is some insight on behavior and culture but these are usually stated in negative contexts, which McGregor always gets right, but risks activating readers' misunderstandings of Chinese culture in the business context. Overall, much like the WSJ, I felt good while reading, but a bit empty after finishing since I live in the small world of reality, not the CEO level of fantasy.

This fiction reads almost like a Douglas Adams book at times. The humor is not centered on science fiction, but rather on spiritual mysticism. A follow up to American Gods, I was expecting a book that copied that one and carried on with the characters from that book, however, this is not really a related book at. The only similarity is that really strange stuff seems to be kind of normal. A fun read.

A Klingon agent on the Enterprise lets us see events from the perspective of an ensign, rather than from the Captain's seat. Cool stuff.

As always, McCullough is great in combining the facts with the context while writing in a style that reflects the time he is describing. I didn't know much about the flood, so I learned a lot, but more important was seeing the life styles of of people in the late 19th century.

Lots of politics and solid science. Bova is not heavy on any social meaning, but he is really good at describing the way things in the future could really happen and all the troubles that go along with it all.

I'm not a big fan of Crichton, who reminds me a lot of Tom Clancy, with stories including lots of testosterone. The men are always real men, and so are the women! This story asserts that the science behind global warming is not well done and is in fact manipulated by special interest groups more concerned with their own incomes than with real science (the action of the book are eco-terrorists). Okay, I guess so, but what the issue really concerns is risk management, and if we all wait for proof of a disaster, then the price will be too high. Crichton centers too much on an assumption that science can 'prove' something--it can't. It is the building of support from many sources that makes a hypothesis more strong than a competing one. Certainly constantly pumping carbon dioxide into a closed system will do something not good for life on Earth!

I missed the whole cyberpunk thing as I just moved to Taiwan at the time it broke. Time to catch up. Gibson's founding book of the genre is at times hard to follow, due to the jump-cut nature of the writing and no time taken to explain anything. I kind of like this, where the story assumes anyone living in the future would know all the basics already! The story and charcters are a bit bland though--very different from Pattern Recognition, which does have very good characterizaion.

Vannegut is very good in this second novel. I really loved the new religion CGUI (Church of God the Utterly Indifferent) as well as the Martian invasion of Earth that was planned with totally moronic assumptions. Throughout the book Vannegut uses very short, simple, and clear sentences that lack any form of excitement. At no time does the plot speed up, but rather it moves along a a slow speed as Niles Rumfoord romps all around the Solar system as a result of being stuck in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum (meaning he is all places at all times). This book is a bit more a comment on the overall social situation of humans, with their inability to take hold of their own future, but rather letting others decide everything in the name of religion or some other excuses.

What I expected to be a dry list of facts is rather an exciting story that includes both office politics while not skipping any of the financial, marketing, and strategy details. What I love most is how Eichenwald just lays out the reality that no one at Enron (and I think most companies) ever thought it was important to actually know the details of what they were doing, or ask someone who actually had 'real' experience. From the start, this is true. The best example is the company's name, with millions paid to a consulting company, and three months, the name Enteron was invented and trademarked. So many 'smart' people thought this was just great, but no one bothered to check the dictionary. From Wikipedia: "Initially, the company was to be named Enteron, chosen for the positive connotations of "enter" and "on," but when it was pointed out that the term meant "intestine" (which had other connotations for a natural gas company) it was quickly shortened." That sums it up so well. This book should be required reading in all MBA programs--ESPECIALLY at the 'top' schools.

Listening to this now. So far, I of course love to hear McCullough read his own work and the writing, as always is first rate. McCullough uses lots of vocabulary from the era and a style that is right out of the 18th century at times. On the history side, I don't see anything hear that is not well covered in other books except a larger emphasis on letters and notes from all kinds of 'normal' people involved in the fighting. This makes the book interesting if not ground breaking.

Greg Bear's cyber punk novel that came out in the late 90s. One of the disadvantages to studying a Ph.D. is that you miss all the stuff going on in the world, thus it was I didn't even know Bear wrote this since it was the same year I started my Ph.D. studies. This is very solid Bear stuff, lots of nano technology, and the cyber punk is in there with a lot of online activity. The basic story is that everyone in the US is medicated to make them 'mentally healthy' and some Greens want to rip down that artificial world.

A perfect compliment to Birth of a Salesman, which ended on the the new supply of products from mass /standardized production and the problem of creating a consumption oriented culture out of the American culture that was not very consumption oriented. Friendman asserted that salesman made this happen, and Leach picks up on that with the role of department stores, 1880-1920. This book not only has a great social conceptualizing of the consumption culture that has become globalized, it also does a good job on the history.

By the inventor of the Palm, Hawkins shows a lot of honesty--he comes out says he was rejected in his attempts to enter the academic circles of brain/AI research, but he struck out on his own to make money that could support his own research direction. Not a bad start. I also like that the book did NOT try to sell anything. I'm so fed up with the BS in almost all business related research books that are thinly veiled self-help scams with a heavy emphasis on the 'secret' or 'trade marked' method of the great and all mighty author! Hawkins' book has NONE of that. The science is good and the writing clear. Very good stuff for my marketing metaphor related research.

Ambrose centers on the WWII piloting career of George McGovern as he weaves the story of the strategic bombing campaign from Italy. This is a part of the war I had not known much about, since the 8th Air Force got all the publicity. While telling one man's story, the book touches on many other people, including the 99th Fighter Group made up of all black fighter pilots in P-51s escorting the bombers over Germany. Ambrose's telling of the story is not hyped or overly dramatic--in fact it seems at times that he purposely stays away from playing up the violence, but as the story goes on, this works to add to the book's drama. And to top it off, Ambrose adds into the fabric of the story a little tale that ends the book and could not have been written even in a work of fiction. This is real history that is better than fiction!

This books seems to have gotten very popular in the US during the 90s because it is often used by teachers in schools for writing assignments. The story centers on a utopia that has its bad side, but compared to the dystopian stories I've read previously, the community in the Giver actually seems not so bad (especially when compared with the world we have now. My kids all listened to this one with me and I found the story to be perfect for younger ones, pre-teens.

These two books are really one story. I read this along with my daughter and they are great for young people. Along the lines of utopia/dystopia story line.

A different Star Trek that does not involve the Enterprise crew (at least not much). Filling out the Khan story and the whole eugenics thing, mentioned in STOS, these two books do a good job. I really liked how Cox threw in lots of references to socially current events and trends from the 70s and 80s. I don't know how old Cox is, but he has some good memories of the 70s or he has done his homework (at one point he even references a character going out to see a Sajit Ray film, which also ties into the whole India link). Overall a couple smart novels with the normal Star Trek fun adventure feeling.

A nice history of the creator of the modern electronic computer, and perfect for anyone who doesn't know where computers come from (my university students once guessed that the first electronic computer was made in 1886). McCartney does the basic job of covering the start of the computer age in this book, but he never really gets very deep. What surprised me was how much the author felt the need to include explanations of contextual situations, as when he mentioned the supply of gas ration coupons--the whole reason for such rationing had to be explained. This always gave the book a feeling that its target audience is ten year old school kids. I also got the feeling that this ground has already been covered and it is so far from the event now that there is not much new to uncover.

I knew this book was not going to be a hard sci-fi, but I wanted to check out how a popular book uses the idea of time travel. The story is about a man with a genetic problem that causes him to slip through time (forward and back, but mostly back to times he has already experienced). I couldn't help comparing this literary device to Vonnegut, but Niffenegger is not Vonnegut! There is little social commentary, and the whole time travel issue is really just a way to jump in and out of different micro-points in the relationship between the two main characters--Henry and Clare. Thus, what we have here is a love story that gets very sentimental from early on. In this way, the story is much more like Heinlein's later work. Niffenegger is good at describing details, but she often gets a bit snobbish. I'm not at all sure Henry and Clare are easy to relate to outside of their love (which is continually emphasized) since Clare is from a rich family and Henry from famous musical parents. After The Jane Austin Book Club , this book was a bit of a let down. I wish Niffenegger spent more time on the hardships of Henry's and Clare's life caused by the continual disappearing (the only hardship in this storybook love affair is Clare's pregnancy, which is made hard due to the baby's time traveling genes).

David Brin winds up the Second Foundation Series very well. Everyone from the previous books, and a few new characters, all come together here. There is even a bit of action along the lines of the original Foundation's space opera format. I really liked the details brought to the robots and the ever growing number of factions and political intrigue. Seldon is at the center of it all as he is thrown all around the universe by robots all seeking is approval for their own factions. Brin keeps up a good quality of writing and follows on Greg Bear's novel well. While I'm glad to be back in Asimov's universe, I miss the master.

Some more Star Trek. These are short books in the SCE series. Ward and Dilmore are interesting authors who stay very close to TOS. Fun Books that pick up where a couple of the old episodes left off.

Chilling!

The second book in the post-Asimov foundation series is by one of my favorite SF authors--Greg Bear. This book picks up after Gregory Benford's Foundation's Fear, but does not come chronologically right after the end of that book. Rather, what has been done in this new series is that spots not filled out by Asimov are now filled in, so Benford's work takes place just as the main character, Hari Seldon, takes the post of First Ministership, while Bear's book takes place after that time and what we were left to think was the decline and death of Seldon (that impression made in Asimov's Forward Foundation. Bear is really great at picking up a genre that is not his own (as I liked in his Star Trek and Star Wars novels). Foundation and Chaos is more like Asimov's style than Benford's, but Bear still manages to fill out some details not covered before, especially about political strive among the robots. The idea that the robots have differing opinions and political groups working against each other is really amazing. Loved it all.

This book is great. Even though the basic story has been copied and done a million times by Hollywood, there is no better than Heinlein. I really loved the detective story approach, which gave a bit of a dark story to the alien invasion idea. The characters are still true Heinlein, all totally cynical, but determined to do the right thing.

A fun kid's oriented book by Heinlein. Classic 50's science fiction about a boy who wins a used space suit, fixes it up, and gets picked up by aliens. The cynical view of commercialism and social norms are here, but only on the peripheral (all of which Heinlein's later works put full center). This is just a fun book that all kids would like, my son and I had fun.

In Vonnegut's Timequake the author mentions that he would have liked to write a novel about his German immigrant family, but concludes there are not enough interested people to read about Germans in middle America. Middlesex proves this point wrong, or maybe right. Middlesex is about Greek immigrants living in Detroit. The story is sweeping, going back a couple generations and then up into the 1980s. While this book has received much praise, including The Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I had a hard time sticking with this long book. Much of the imagery used is overly cute, such as TV images ("Now let's see all this in fast forward . . ."). This problem for me is that the reflexive narrative tools are too shallow and have little meaning of their own, but rather are just like candy thrown out to prove the book is post-modern. All that said, the book starts and ends with the interesting story of Cal, who is both male and female due to a genetic defect. What the reader ends up with is not this tempting story, but all the family history that has come together to create the genetic defect. This is a bit interesting. Eugenides uses the genetic defect to lead his story through all the details of the family members who own the DNA. Overall, this book is better after it is done, with the wide view of Cal's family story, which is the story of many Americans.

I got this book while in the U.S. for the 2001 summer after hearing McCullough speak about the book on NPR. I started the book, got busy, and put it down until this week. Once I got back to it, I couldn't stop! McCullough brings out much detail about Adams without ever bring boring. What contributes to this, in a large part, is the never ending emphasis McCullough puts on the importance of the FIRST democracy in the world--the newness of it, the rise of rationalism, the huge risk taken by the leaders, and the sacrifice of those, like Adams, who gave their lives for the development of this new country that they truly believed would lead the world with its new political concepts. Because of that overarching energy and admiration McCullough's book left me seeing Adams, and other Founding Fathers, as human, but devoted to an ideal--freedom and self-government.

I want to read a new book by Karen Joy Fowler called The Jane Austen Book Club, so I thought I should actually finish a real Austen book first. Since Emma is the book first read in the fictional book club of the book, I though I would go with that. This is a long, slow book that is very much unlike the most writing we see today, but that really didn't put me off. At times the pace was so slow, but then Austen would come up with some dialogue that was just such a funny comment on the very rigid and formal social structure the story takes place in. I don't really know much about Austen's writing, and maybe I am reading too much into it, but it seems that she really skirts the edges of confronting many of the social issues of her day. I also very much liked the insight into English life and the historical sources of current English culture. Overall good, but now time to move onto Fowler's book.

Okay, another Vonnegut book, and as always, right from the prologue I was caught by the throat and then thrown into Vonnegut's world--but the scary part is that it is not his world, it is our world. I love the reflexive nature of this book, and I guess it could get boring after a bit, but Vonnegut handles it very well and always keeps us caring about the characters, of which Vonnegut himself is one.

Woodward does a very good job of putting many stories together from the start of the Bush administration to the start of the Iraqi war. In many ways, this book is very much like Suskind's The Price of Loyalty, which centers on O'Neill's perspective. Plan of Attack includes many perspectives, and they really reinforce what O'Neill observed about Bush and the other participants. What Woodward has captured in this book is a much more complete picture of who Bush is, and I have to say it is a very scary profile. While many have commented that the book does not do enough analysis of what is reported, I couldn't disagree more. The analysis is right there, in the facts that are reported.

Although mostly a research book, Roger's text is generally interesting and his theories of diffusion can be used in so many areas. This edition is very up-to-date, with great examples. Not your everyday read, but not quite a dry academic work either.

This is a well written book about the near future, when everything has gone wrong. Global Climate change is a given, but the big screw up comes from genetic engineering let lose. The story is told from the perspective of young people, so I think I would have liked this book better as a teen, but of course as things go wrong, the characters grow up and in any case they are easy to relate to. Atwood has captured the male characters very well, in a way like Le Guin in many of her stories. This Oryx and Crake is very dark and ends very well, but things are not tied up and finished in a happy way--very close to the truth, making this a depressing read. I loved it.

This is my first book by Gaiman and I picked it up because it was a Hugo winner. At first it was hard to get into, but the reading is very well done, with Guidall giving great voice performances. The story picks up as the idea becomes clear that historic gods are taking a stand in America against the new gods, such as the TV and shopping mall gods. The main character, Shadow, gets involved with a god named Wednesday who is very similar to Heinlein's Lazarus Long. I like the Shadow character, who is very, very, laid back. As the story wraps up, it becomes clear that another movie/action ending is in store. Not very satisfactory at that stage, but still an interesting novel.

Bought a bunch of STOS books on sale at Palm eReader, they were going for like two dollars a book. McIntyre's book is not bad and attempts to bring a bit more science into the story than is often normal, although the science component of ST is standard. What is most interesting is that this book is from 1986, but it reads almost exactly like one of the many Voyager episodes that include time travel. The effect is well done here, but of course some questions never get answered well. While not a Greg Bear book as far as the tightness of the story and the science goes, it is good fun.

This is the fifth in the Hitchhiker 's Guide Series and the last. Read by Adams himself, the audio book is enjoyable, but very confusing--which I think is the point. I see from cruising the Web that everyone was most surprised by the sudden ending, not to mention it was not exactly ended on a high note. A sequel seems to be set up at the end, but with Adams early death, well the end really is the end. Too bad.

This book reads like an ethnographic study of an alien culture. Like her book The Dispossessed, Le Guin has detailed characterization along with detailed descriptions of the society where humans are neither male nor female in the middle of complex political battles. Another really great Le Guin story with 100% meaning and implications for the world we live in now!

Being a big fan of Greg Bear I like to read is attempts at different sci-fi genres. I liked his Star Trek novel, so I thought Star Wars might be worth while, even though I don't really like Star Wars (or anything Lucas did after THX 1138). I read this on the plane flying to the USA, so it was a nice distraction. Bear brings a bit of nice characterization to the story, but Bears science is left behind, in favor of Star War's fantasy universe.

As part of my SARS research, I wanted to find some literature that could tie into the Taiwan SARS event. After looking around, I found Camus book and it is so perfect. The great match to the SARS event is that emotional state of the people in Camus book, all residents of a small town where the plague breaks out. No one can enter or leave the town and slowly the plague spreads. The parallel to Taiwan's experience is really striking.

I liked Wright's The Golden Age so much, why not try out the author who started Cyberpunk sci-fi, I thought. So here it is. Stephenson has a very cool style that just makes you smile at nearly every sentence. He doesn't really have the depth of Wright's work, but it is a lot of fun. Lots of cyberspace stuff put on a conventional plot to save to world before high noon. The characters are all easy to dislike, they often see themselves as total losers, which is right in line with the post-modern world I guess we all live in. The politics of the book are very nicely done, with nearly all parts of nationhood taken over by commercial interest.

I liked Crispens other two books about Spock so I just had to get more. This is just the kind of book I wanted to get my hands on so bad in the mid 1990s when I couldn't find anything good in Taiwan bookstores. A nice sci-fi to relax with and escape all the local pressures. But Noooo, the random selection and my own being too busy all worked against it. Well, at last, with ebooks I have no trouble getting what I want, and this is one I am glad I got. Crispen really does the best job yet of linking the original series with her story. There are a lot of characters in this story, and it gets a bit mixed up at times, but she pulls it off in the end through the central thread of Spock's mother, mostly seen through her own diary after her death early on in the book.

Anastasia is reading this on her Palm, so I wanted to read it too just to keep up with what she is reading. This kids sci-fi is actually a good little read. This kind of book can really show young people that reading is fun, not just all heavy meaning with lots of vocabulary to slug through. Fun with some political correctness, but living in Taiwan, I take what I can get.

Love Clarke, so I was very interested to see these books offered as ebooks. Got a great deal for all six books and didn't know what to expect. Ends up the books contain short storiesfrom Clarke, some of them going back to the 1950s, but now a whole universe has been woven around them with the central character Venus Prime (a kind of super government X-woman) who has gone independent.

I'm still reading these.

Sounds boring, but this book uncovers the history of the philosophy behind the number zero, which turns out to be very interesting. The down side of the book is that it goes off into the standardized scientific/social discoveries and then explains how zero is at the core of all the new action. I get a bit tired of hearing the exact same few scientific discoveries being covered in history books. I guess science historians all tend to cover these, like Newton, Einstein the expanding universe, etc., so that writers keep falling back on what is already out there. I actually found the first half of the book more interesting since it covered Greek thought on numbers and then Eastern ideas of zero. Of course you have to have some interest in science and/or mathematics to get into this book.

This is Crispin's follow up to Yesterday's Son and a pretty good one. In this book Spock's son comes back into the story as Kirk, Spock and McCoy must travel back in time to when Zar has become leader of a group of people all living in a kind of Middle Ages time. Lots of swords and sorcery stuff makes this book very interesting and different for a Star Trek novel.

Dick Francis' mystery novels are great because they often involve people with no special skills to solve a mystery except the fact that they have been wrongly accused. Since high school I've really liked Francis' books, which is kind of strange since his books are always set around horse racing--which I have no interest in at all. I think it is the professional level of those in the story, where they simply are very good at what they do, taking it very serious, and that just happens to be horse racing.

Saw the movie many years ago and thought I would try out the book. Crichton's writing is like Tom Clancy with a technology emphasis. It is all just a bit stiff and meaningless for me while also lacking any of the fun I have with Star Trek books. This topic is interesting though (a virus is set lose by accident from a government experiment and the technology well presented.

As part of my research on SARS's impact on shopping behavior, I got this book to understand the Plague's impact on the European Middle Ages economy, which is exactly what this book does. Cantor is not the best writer, but the book does seem well researched. There are numerous examples and the emphasis is always on how the Plague impacted economic issues. I especially liked how Cantor explained the workings of the economy during the 13th century, with many positive points and a special emphasis on how the economy fit the context of the time. Links from that time to today's economic and legal environment are all clearly pointed out. This linking even has Cantor often citing money in current value equivalents, and drawing parallels to current CEOs and billion dollar cash flow businesses. A bit risky for a historian I think, but perfect for my research which will attempt to use these history examples to draw parallels to SARS' possible economic impact.

I've never read Crispin's work before, but she has had many good reviews, so I recently picked up three of her original series books. This one was published in 1984 while she was just starting her writing career; originally Crispin was a Star Trek fan. The story is a follow up of the television episode "All of Yesterday's," which is a great story itself! Crispin handles dialogue fairly well, and I really liked how the story was personal, rather than saving the universe. Here, Spock finds he has a lost son, from the early episode's trip to the past, who he feels responsible for. Spock, Kirk, and McCoy rescue the boy, Zar, and soon get caught up in Romulan trouble, which actually is all part of a small scale misunderstanding on the Romulan's part. Many of the earlier Star Trek books seem to have this smaller scale emphasis--much more like the original television series.

Christie Golden has mostly written Voyager stories, with this being her first Original Series book. Writing for the Kirk and the original crew is not easy, since so many books have been written and the whole Star Trek franchise has changed direction so much since first show aired in the late 1960s. Golden has done a great job here with some very good dialogue that really feels like the original show. The story takes place after the last film time frame (The Undiscovered Country), and has the core crew flying around space again in a Klingon starship, which lead to some funny lines (since they've been stuck on Klingon spacecraft since the third film). On the down side, I didn't like the core objective of the story was to save all of Starfleet (AGAIN!). While the dialogue was personal and warm, the story is some big mission, which seems to be the norm for many Star Trek books. I would much prefer some small-scale stories with small goals that may not mean much on the scale of the Alpha Quadrant, but mean a lot to the people involved.

A little quick read for two bucks! Kind of like watching a television episode with some familiar characters and a bunch of new ones. The S.C.E. are Starfleet Corps of Engineers and in this first book we get introduced to what they do, which is explore alien technology. In this case, that means going inside a huge alien starship. The writing is okay and Smith has written a lot of the newer Star Trek books that introduce new groups of characters and new missions.

Well, Asimov isn't writing much these days, but I miss his robot universe. So why not try the next best thing. I was very pleased with Allen's writing, which was very much in line with the Master's mystery writing, while also including all the needed points of Asimov's robots. That said, the story was a bit simplistic, not to say Asimov's books were not. The problem is I got to like Asimov's work more and more as he got older and, I think, wrote better stories that involved much more human implications. This is the first book of three, and I will try the other two.

This is a well researched book detailing the relationship between IBM and the Nazi use of early computers in their military efforts. The specific center of attention looks at the vital role these machines played in organizing Hitler's final solution for the Jews and other undesirables. A great investigative reporting style combined with nice historical background. Read this book if you want to see just what companies (and that mainly means their top executives) will do when let lose on the world.

I was never into Heinlein's books when I was young, just busy with other books I guess. After reading Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress a few years back, I realized what I had missed. This book is the story of an Earthling who returns to Earth from Mars as a Martian. There really is not very much science in the book, and what there is really dates the book and gives it more the feeling of 1950's science fiction. That is the down side. On the up side, the story is much more a social commentary, so those small details, in the end, don't really matter much. Heinlein's commentary on politics, religion, and social intolerance is right on target, and just as relevant today as ever.

A soft marketing book covering the idea of how buzz (word of mouth) has been used in previous business success. This book is not very technical and does not offer much in the way of theory, but it does have a number practical examples and it is good for a reality check. Although not very academic, I enjoyed the consumer emphasis of the book. Rather than a formula for success, this book gave me some encouragement in the application of buzz in selling a product or service.

This is a nice little collection of articles from the magazine Scientific American. A good overview of the state of the art and progress of artificial intelligence (computer intelligence). Each chapter is one article written by leaders in the field, with an emphasis on making the concepts easy to understand.
The conclusion I brought away from this book is that computers have already reached intelligence, and that trend will continue, but it is not the kind of intelligence humans exhibit. In the future, as computers gain intelligence, they may present us with many problems in understanding just what we have created.

I read this just before SARS broke out. With his very detailed science, Bear scared me real good. The mixing of science, mystery and academics is just what I picture my boring life being.