Books
Jason Kuznicki on Aug 18th 2007
Rather than writing in-depth (or to the point of tedium) on one book for the next several months, I thought I’d post a list of books I plan to read in the near future. About once a week, I will give a brief writeup of one of the books on the list (something like this, but, err, less sour).
Here is my preliminary selection, which I will start reading once I’ve finished writing on The Open Society and Its Enemies, for which I have two more posts planned:
Accelerando by Charles Stross
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
Life With Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia by Lesley Chamberlain
Overclocked by Cory Doctorow
Philip Dru: Administrator by Edward Mandell House
Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle
It’s heavy on the science fiction, I know. But after Popper/Plato/Hegel/Marx, I think I’m entitled to a little fun. Other suggestions?
Filed in The Bookshelf
I’d like to recommend “Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson. It’s an excellent biography.
Jason, I hope you’ll enjoy *A Confederacy of Dunces* as much as I did. I’ve taught the book. I think there’s no spoiler in saying that I read it as a kind of inversion of Mark Twain’s *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court*. It certainly ranks as one of *the great* American comic novels.
The Man who was Thursday is a lot of fun, although you might get more out of it if you read Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Thursday.