a pile of books

I like to read. Unfortunately I have not had much time to read in the past six months or so. Actually I haven't had much time to read since joining a startup 2 years ago because I must be averaging 60+ working hours a week since then, but that's a bitch session for another time.

What I'd like to discuss now is how tall my stack of books in the to-read queue has grown. That measure is twenty four and one half inches, surely the highest it has ever been. Many of these I picked up at a county book sale on my last trip to North Carolina, where they were going for $0.50 for a paperback and $2 for a hardback. Some I picked up on impulse at various independent booksellers around San Francisco, knowing full well that I had no time to read them, because I am an addict and can't control myself.

Here they are.

• The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Atkins, P. W.. I'm actually a third of the way through this one. It's pretty good.
• A New Kind of Science byStephen Wolfram. This book has 848 pages plus an additional 349 pages of appendix. It weighs more than a duck. I got a couple hundred pages into this and realized I needed to put it off until I had more time to give it the proper concentration required.
• Israel/Palestine: How to End the 1948 War by Tanya Reinhart. I'm about a third through this one. It's small and fits in my motorcycle jacket so I can carry it around easily. It mostly covers the past couple of decades in the region. I find the tone a little too biased against Israel, which is a shame because I think very convincing arguments can be made against Israel without any bias whatsoever.
• Jiu Jitsu Complete by Kiyose Nakae.
• An Introduction to Logic by Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel.
• The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. This is considered to be the first cyberpunk novel. It was published in 1975.
• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I've been meaning to read this for decades.
• Fraud by David Rakoff. This is a loaner from Mie.
• Karma Cola : Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta.
• Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold. I bought this from the author when he did a reading at The Mechanics Institute.
• The teachings of Don Juan :a Yaqui way of knowledge by Carlos Castaneda.
• The Cave Girl by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This was published in 1925, but the cover seems to have a more modern flavor (one in a long line of similar covers, apparently).
• Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku by William S. Higginson.
• Let's Get Lost: Adventures in the Great Wide Open by Craig Nelson. This was a gift from my housemate Cheu.
• Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. This predates (1968) The Shockwave Rider and it is recommended to read it first.
• Adolf Hitler by John Toland.
• Aku Aku: The Secret of Easter Island by Thor Heyerdahl. That's right, I haven't actually read this yet.
• Mathematical Snapshots by Hugo Steinhaus.
• You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. I bought this from the author at a book reading at The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina. Which is odd only because Eggers and I both live in San Francisco.
• Water Wars : Privatization, Pollution, and Profit by Vandana Shiva. I hear future wars are going to be fought over water, not oil. And the future is fast approaching.
• The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913
• Economics by Walter Wessels.
• The Coming Biotech Age: The Business of Bio-Materials by Richard W. Oliver. I bought this one two years ago! The damn Biotech Age is going to be over by the time I actually get to reading about it.

Comments

[Boros1124]

These books are very good. Although I would mention about the Eva Braun on the book. Good complement to the book Hitler.
http://www.konyv-konyvek.hu/book_images/44a/999640844a.jpg