Amazon link and Official book website I read this NYT magazine article about Steven Levitt a couple years ago and thought it was great. Levitt is an economist at the University of Chicago who spends his time trying to think up interesting ways to sift data to answer hard questions: For instance: If drug dealers […]
Category: reviews
Business books
[n.b. This post has absolutely nothing to do with yesterday’s post. Lots of interesting discussion happening out there, though – Mary Hodder was kind enough to clarify her intent with a comment on my post, and put up a post collecting other feedback on the subject] Today, we’re returning to an observation I made at […]
Writing in books
While I was up in Portland, we were looking at one of the papers on the fridge of the house that Jofish is renting. It was for a high school English class, where the students were supposed to read some Dickens novel, and then scribble in the novel to demonstrate their connection to the text. […]
Unfinished books
Two books last week I started and quickly gave up on that I figured I’d document for the sake of completeness. I gave it a few days because I thought I might go back and give them another chance, but then my new Amazon order came in, so it’s pretty much a lost cause. One […]
Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Amazon link This and Collins’s previous book, Built to Last, are two standard business books that everybody refers to. I’ve been meaning to read them for a while, but never got around to it. But, at the mega-library trip last Saturday, I saw it, I picked it up, and I read it yesterday on my […]
What should I do with my life?, by Po Bronson
Amazon link I’ve liked Po Bronson’s other works, but when this book came out a couple years ago, I didn’t really feel it was worth checking out. What was the point of reading about how other people had answered the question of what to do with their lives? But it stayed on my to-read list. […]
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman
Amazon link This was referenced in the footnotes of some other book that I read, but I can’t remember which one any more (maybe Six Degrees?). Kauffman is a MacArthur Fellow who works at the Santa Fe Institute, which is a center for studying complexity theory (and a place I’ve occasionally dreamed of working at), […]
More graphic novels
As mentioned previously, my local library branch now stocks graphic novels. I picked up a few more yesterday, of which the only notable one was Fray, by Joss Whedon. As everybody knows, I was a huge fan of Buffy (and a somewhat lesser fan of Angel and Firefly (although I went to see Batman Begins […]
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
Amazon link I’ve meant to read this since the day it came out both because I follow baseball and because I’ve liked other books by Michael Lewis, but never got around to it, because I didn’t think it was worth buying. But I finally saw it in my local branch library yesterday, so I picked […]
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
Amazon link I borrowed this from my girlfriend Lilia, who had it recommended it to her by one of her planner friends. It’s a little bit hard to describe. Nominally, it contains Marco Polo’s descriptions of cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. But it’s more about the exploration of different aspects of what makes cities […]
