This is about 20% complete, and may never be better than that, as I tend to be in lots of books at a given time. I will focus on writing up the books that are most likely going to be added to my favorites list.
These books are very present in my life right now. If you like these books or are inspired to read them soon, I'd love to share our experience of them. In the case of the books that are especially deep or are best read over a period of time, I'd love to have regular conversations with you while we read them.
I generally zoom through these pretty fast and rarely think of them as worth commenting on. Don't expect many to show up here.
This is a short semi-transhumanist science fiction story. Society has transcended gross material limitations. Human beings are immortal and cybernetically enhanced. Reputation has replaced money as the economic driving force. Yet human nature, including intelligence levels, has not changed. While pretending to have a post-scarcity world, the characters suffer from a great scarcity of intelligence, love and intimacy.
Being only slightly trans-humanist Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom is a quick and easy read. It presents lots of good questions about what human beings should care about if they are not driven by survival or gross economic pressure. While the situation in the book is not realistic, it frees us to think about these fundamental questions more deeply in our own lives.
I've just finished re-reading Nonzero. Robert Heinlein once defined a good book as one which you can read again and get more out of it, and a great book as one which you can read again and again and keep getting more out of it. Nonzero is definitely in the great category. A conversation I was having recently with John Smart of the Acceleration Studies Foundation reminded me of Nonzero and made it clear to me that a re-read was in order. In Nonzero, Robert Wright brilliantly applies game theory to the evolution of life and human culture and makes an excellent case for the continuous expansion of non-zero-sum games in both arenas, giving a strong direction of progressive change in both. The book is much deeper and broader than that simple sentence implies, and I consider the book a must read for anyone who is interested in the nature of being human.
Roger Penrose is my favorite physicist and my favorite writer on Physics. He explores physics at the ultimate level, using models that generate spacetime, rather than occur within it! He is also an inventor, and some of his earlier work inspired the artist Escher. He is also an unrepentent Platonist, i.e., he references a non-physical timeless domain in which abstraction, including mathematics, lives. Many of the best mathematicians and mathematical physicists are (or have been) Platonists, but it is not fashionable to admit it.
In his earlier book The Emperor's New Mind, Penrose wanted to talk about some unusual thoughts of his about how human consciousness might be a quantum phenomenon, but in order to explain it, he had to bring the reader up to his level in the relevant mathematics and physics — and he did! It is ironic that his theory of a quantum basis for consciousness is rather lame but the book is absolutely priceless for the lessons which constitute the bulk of it.
Given all of the above, when I heard Penrose discussing his new book The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe on NPR I bought it immediately and started reading. It is exactly what it says it is, but I'm not as happy with it as I was with The Emperor's New Mind. Most of both books consist of giving the reader the necessary background to understand the later material. In The Road to Reality this material seems hurried and incomplete. In particular, his coverage of complex analysis, which he makes clear is key, seems more like a tease. As a result, I've set the book aside for awhile and I'm reading other material on complex analysis. Why am I willing to work so hard? Because it really is A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, no fooling! If it takes me a year to read it, or more; if I have to read it more than once, it's worth it. What I'd really like to do is read it with others, so we can support one another in really understanding it.
Richard Dawkins has been on my read every non-professional thing he writes list since his seminal [heh!] The Selfish Gene. This book is very different from his earlier works, as it covers all forms of life that are or ever have existed on this planet! This book is perforce long and sometimes a bit dry. It's also completely fascinating. He takes the unusual approach of starting with our own species and then goes back in time following our earlier and earlier common ancestors with related species and then larger and larger related groups of living organisms. Right now I'm about halfway back to the beginning.
I love computer programming and all of the books and languages I've used up until recently have been severely limited in their approaches. This is the first book to cover most of the major computer programming models and it uses one of the best programming environments (Mozart/Oz) for its examples. I'm having a blast reading the book and doing the exercises. Soon I'll need to come up with some really challenging projects to exploit the power of Mozart/Oz. The only flaw in my mind is the bias against lexical typing. If you're seriously interested in computer programming, this one is a must read.
So why read this if the one above is so good? C++ is the most efficient general-purpose portable computer programming language available. Type-based (template) metaprogramming is one of the most powerful programming technologies available. Its also highly mind-expanding. If you're a true geek and you have a strong background in C++ this is for you. Otherwise, forget it!