| My recent favorite books: Epic Fantasy: The Malazan series. (Gardens of the Moon, the first book is a challenging read and has a bit of an anticlimatic end. Don't judge the series till finishing the first three books. They get easier to read starting book 2). History: The making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes. (The title is misleading - it's not about the manhattan project really. The book traces the history of nuclear physics, starting from Rutherford realizing that most of an atom's mass must be concentrated in a nucleus - and step by step, follows all the turns and surprises as a group of people pieced together what an atom must be made of. The book makes an unavoidable turn into the manhattan project and ends with Hiroshima/Nagasaki, so yes the Manhattan project does make a significant part of the book, but it's really not the focus of the book). Design: The Elements of typographic style by Robert Bringhurst. (A beautiful book about typesetting beautiful books). Nature: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. (A fascinating book about fungii. I'll never see trees the same way again). Autobiography: A man for all markets by Edward O Thorp (Claude Shannon shows up and helps the author try to cheat at Roulette using wearable computers! A lot of fascinating stuff). More history: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. (A book on the British East India company went from being a merchant company to eventually becoming the British Raj). |