Book recommendations

Voller Sympathie für Land und Leute nimmt Eric T. Hansen, ein gebürtiger Amerikaner, liebgewonnene Vorurteile der Deutschen über sich selbst auseinander und konfrontiert uns skurril und humorvoll mit teilweiswe peinlichen Wahrheiten: Warum wir Deutschen zwar den VW-Käfer erfinden können, aber keinen lustigen Film über ihn drehen. Warum wir Deutschen aus ein paar toten Dichtern dermaßen Kult machen, dass man fast meint, jeder würde sie lesen. Warum wir Deutschen von unseren Problemen so fasziniert sind, dass es fast schade wäre, sie zu lösen. Und warum wir Deutschen glauben, Hitler gehöre uns ganz allein.

I'm about to start reading McCarthy's "The Road" but light reading it is not - it is about a father and son heading for the coast following a nuclear attack and how love and hope can go on even under the bleakest of circumstances. The reviews have been resoundingly good, some even saying that this is the masterpiece McCarthy readers have been waiting for, but bleak/beautiful was always his terrain.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.

Dear Reluctant Shopper,
Welcome to my flap. If you are reading this, I can only assume that you're hesitating to buy this book. Maybe you're thinking I don't know anything about this book; I would like more information. Should I buy it based solely on the exceptionally striking cover shot? Well, that's a good enough reason for me.
Do I really need to add that there's a secret poster you can see only after the book is purchased? A poster that involves plenty of skin and would make a perfect addition to any basement rec room? Why are you still reading?

It's not a competition. You don't have to be the perfect host, just the prettiest.

World War Z - Max Brooks

The Society of Mind summarizes a lifetime of work by a founder of and perhaps the most influential single individual in the field of Artificial Intelligence. It provides the first articulation of a computational theory of mind that takes seriously the full range of things that human minds do.
In this article we could only examine a small fraction of the full Society of Mind theory, and we encourage the reader to go back to the book and read it cover to cover. The Society of Mind is more than just a collection of theories—it is a powerful catalyst for thinking about thinking. Minsky encourages the reader to ponder questions about the mind that they may never have thought to ask, and provides hundreds of examples of how one might start down the road towards answering such questions.
In our experience it has been useful to return to the book once each year, as it is written at level of abstraction where each reading brings out new ideas and reflections in the mind of the reader.

we should all study books like this to be properly prepared.

fill out the questionnaire, you get a 5€ voucher!

I also got my voucher today. I will probably buy a cheap book with that, because I work at a bookstore so on an expensive one I could probably get a better discount at work. I'll have to browse Amazon (and my list of books I want to buy sometime) and see what I'm going to get with it.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. A simply amazing book.

It may be the most beautiful, haunting, desperate, touching, bleak, hopeful, difficult, easy, bracing, heartbreaking, tough, tender, fragile, strong book that people may ever read.
High praise indeed.
But it is not a book for all.
Not everyone is at home with their darker side and an acceptance of that would be necessary for a book of this type. This book is pain and glory and rammed full of quotable passages. The Beckett comparisons hold true with the questioning about faith and belief and future.
The central relationship between a man and his son sears the reader like the scorched landscape. To create great beauty where there is none is a towering achievement.
Nominated for the US National Book Award, it feels like a good-bye from McCarthy, that The Road may be his final work. It is a noble farewell.
Random House, McCarthy webpage
Amazon.co.uk
Cormac McCarthy.com

That entire first year, gosh, I was happy. I was a foreigner! I'd never been to Europe and now here I was, in a country where everyone sounded like Winston Churchill or Mary Poppins; where all the women had flawless skin and all the men looked as if they'd been wandering around in the Underground since World War II, never having seen the light of day or another change of clothes. Every aspect of life in England seemed a notch from normal. Which made even the mundane exotic and exhilarating. I swear if I had been mugged on a greensward, this, too, would have been utterly delightful because he wouldn't have been just any mugger; he would have been a mugger with an accent.

The Brief History of the Dead - Kevin Brockmeier

This story weaves two plot lines together. In one, the recently deceased are in The City, an after-life place where existence continues superficially much as it was when the residents were alive, but fundamentally changed by their own deaths. The dead stay in this city while there remains at least one living (literally) person who still remembers them. After such a time as no one alive has memories of them, they vanish. In the second plot, a near-future world of growing climate change, species extinction, continuing wars & terrorism has finally produced a synthetic virus causing a plague which is destroying the global human population. A stranded animal research scientist in Antarctica, Laura, struggles across the Ross ice shelf in a desperate search for missing companions.

This book sounds like a morbid bit of depressing science-fiction, but is really an exploration of memories, relationships, and the connections between people. It's nicely written, and although I thought it could've delved into the interesting characters in The City some more, it's a good read. This book is on several critic lists for 2006, because of the interesting plot and well-done narrative style. Recommended.

The first chapter can be read online here.

The Blind Assassin is (at least) two novels. At the end of her life, Iris Griffen takes up her pen to record the secret history of her family, the romantic melodrama of its decline and fall between the two World Wars. Conjuring a world of prosperity and misery, marriage and loneliness, the central enigma of Iris's tale is the death of her sister, Laura Chase, who "drove a car off a bridge" at the end of the Second World War. Suicide or accident? The story gradually unfolds, interspersed with sketches of Iris's present-day life--confined by age and ill-health--and a second novel, The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase. Allowing a glimpse into a clandestine love affair between a privileged young woman and a radical "agitator" on the run...

On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother's past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga - Greece's former leper colony. Then she finds Fortini, and at last hears the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters and a family rent by tragedy, war and passion. She discovers how intimately she is connected with the island, and how secrecy holds them all in its powerful grip...

Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to (...) and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. (...)

Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation).

"The bastard love child of The Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code. Very entertaining."