So I went to Book Thing of Baltimore on Saturday to pick up some free books.  Here’s what I grabbed, starting from the top and moving on down:

• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (Because I was never going to pay for a copy, and making sure some poor college student doesn’t end up losing a few years to Objectivism is almost a public service)
• The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
• The Godfather by Mario Puzo (I had to fight my friend Ben to keep this book).
• The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (Sequel to the amazing book The Mote in God’s Eye).
• Confessions of a Tax Collector by Richard Yancey
• The American Way in Taxation by Lillian Doris (I actually could have used this book last semester to write my cap gains paper but whatever)
• Maestro by Bob Woodward (It’s the story of Alan Greenspan.  What’s not to love)

prettybooks:

Breakthrough (by Brett Jordan)

This wouldn’t happen if you used an eReader…Just saying.

(via thelos)

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright, speaker of two of my favorite TEDTalks, is a book arguing that nonzero action is the driving force of History.  The tract, a limited game theory analysis of cultural evolution, is incredibly well researched and thought out.  There isn’t really a strong mathematical component; quite a lot of the logic is intuitive rather than formal — which is not to say you couldn’t formalize the logic it just is outside the purview of what is a journalistic polemic rather than a mathematical one.  In many ways this is like Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation.

One of the reasons I like this book is because Wright thinks quite a lot like I do.  For instance, while discussing possible distinctions between different social groups’ relative change in technological progress he discusses two functions of population density.  The first is a result of ease of trade and communication (it’s quicker to spread knowledge and to trade surplus goods if your market is closer rather than further from you).  While reading the first I had the thought, “Wouldn’t another function of pop. density be that the percent chance of inventions would increase?” and within the next two pages Wright is discussing that thought as part of his “Invisible Brain” hypothesis (to be compared to the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith).

My major problem with the book is a pedantic one; instead of using footnotes — which I prefer for non-fiction books — he uses an overly arcane endnote system that uses daggers (†) instead of actual superscript arabic numerals.

And when was the last time you invented something as clever as the boomerang?

Now that law school is done I’m going to do some light reading this week.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld is a ridiculously fun book.  It takes place during an alternate history World War One between the Darwinists and the Clankers.  The Darwinists use biological creatures, engineered thanks to Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution and genetics, to wage war.  The Clankers use mechanical machines of war; diesel and gears, lumbering mechs, airplanes and zepplins.  There are two narratives in this book, Prince Alek, son of assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who must escape from the conspiracies of the German Government, and Deryn Sharp, a young girl masquerading as a boy in order to join the British Air Service.

This book is essentially world-building at its finest. You get a lot of technical details about both Clanker technology and Darwinist science, but it’s a little thin on coherent narrative.  What is probably the main thrust of the series is still shrouded in mystery, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It definitely makes you want to read more, and that’s a good thing.  It’s a fun book with lots of imagination and characters you can empathize with.  It’s also a very quick read, which is always a good thing, in my opinion, since I read few books for fun.

A sequel, Behemoth, will be out this October.