Ten Big Ones and Metro Girl, by Janet Evanovich I like Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, so when I saw the latest one in the library, I picked it up. And Metro Girl is the start of a possible new series. I liked Ten Big Ones better than Metro Girl – the Stephanie Plum antics are […]
Category: books
Politics of Nature part 3
Okay, I said yesterday that part 2 would end my book review, but I lied. There is one crucial aspect of Latour’s book that I didn’t cover yet. To review, part 1 essentially covered chapters 1 and 2, part 2 covered chapters 3 and 4, and today we’ll cover chapter 5, which covers how to […]
Politics of Nature part 2
Continuing yesterday’s summary of Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour. Today’s subject: Latour’s proposal for a “Constitution” on how we construct reality in a democratic fashion via due process, one that cuts across science and politics and multiculturalists and facts and values. I’m going to sketch out the process first, and then go back and […]
Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour
Amazon link I started this book more than a month ago, as I mentioned at the end of this post. It’s incredibly dense. I don’t think I could have even started on it without having been trapped on that crowded bus with no other options for a few hours. Even once I got started, it […]
Going Nucular, by Geoffrey Nunberg
Amazon link Most of my readers will have heard of Nunberg, a Stanford linguistics professor who’s a regular contributor to Fresh Air and the New York Times Week in Review. This book is a collection of pieces from those venues, where he muses amusingly about quirks in our language for a few minutes at a […]
Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, by William J. Mitchell
Amazon link I mentioned in this post how I picked up Me++ at the Whitney Museum, and started reading it. Some interesting ideas here. I found out later from Jofish that Mitchell is the current head of the Media Lab at MIT, which explains a lot about the book. There’s nothing particularly innovative about his […]
Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith
Amazon link While we were driving up to Cornell, Jofish recommended this book. I’d read another of Smith’s books, Spares, borrowed from the library, but it made absolutely no impact on me, and I didn’t remember a single detail. But, in the mornings, while waiting for others to wake up, I picked up Only Forward […]
Finite and Infinite Games, by James Carse
Amazon link After seeing James Carse speak, I was eager to read his book, which I finally got around to doing on this vacation. It’s a deceptively simple book, with lots of short, simple sentences. But there’s a lot of thought packed into those sentences. I covered his overall gist in that previous post, where […]
Emotional Design, by Donald Norman
Amazon link I go back and forth on my feelings about Donald Norman. I think that his observation of The Design of Everyday Things was a really important insight in understanding how omnipresent the role of design is. I liked his idea of information appliances in The Invisible Computer. But I’ve always been left a […]
Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
Amazon link Picked this up in my big library trip of a couple weeks ago. Again, recommended by a friend. Plus, I’ve been curious about Palahniuk since seeing Fight Club. I really like his stylized writing in a lot of ways, and it’s easy to see the resemblance to the style of Fight Club. I […]
