Books I have read with short reviews. Probably useful to no one, but I like to keep track of what I have read and found interesting.
Review:
Wells had a certain breathless observational mode. This book captured that well, but, frankly it is unendurable. 150 pages into 510 and I just could not keep it up. The book wore me out.
Review:
I thought this book would be about how the brain talks to itself. It is not that. I was instantly bogged down in technical material that I could not decipher. It seems like this is a pheneticist thinking about the brain purely from the perspective of language. And, treating the brain as a machine. I just couldn't get through it.
Review:
There is very little reference to Zeno in existing works and no original works of Zeno have been found as of now. I feel that Lee goes as far as possible with the small scraps he addresses. I never thought of Zeno as the founder of the dialectic (I thought it was Socrates, but I was clearly wrong) and am glad to know more of him.
Review:
It took me a long time to read this book. That was true for two reasons: 1) I often read to escape and this book is no escape and 2) the material required thought. The basic argument is that living and consciousness are linked (the need to protect one's life is a significant part of consciousness). "Living" does not rule out computer based life, but it would have to have a threat to its existence which required maintenance and occasional careful consideration. I found the argument broadly compelling.
Review:
I wondered how far von Neumann machines as a center point for a story could go. I didn't think very far, but this book is excellent. It is amazing to me that Taylor keeps coming up with complex and believable ideas on how the future might unroll. Really enjoyed this book.
Review:
This book was fun! There was a bit of a mystery, a bit of romance, and a bit of conniving. All of that blended together in Greer's odd style to create an enjoyable read.
Review:
I kind of thought that a series about the Tower of Babel would have religious overtones, but this does not have any overt religion (there are some moral lessons, but it doesn't seem to be an allegory or anything like that). Instead, the tower serves as a backdrop for a search and rescue or mission oriented story. The character development is interesting, although some characters seem to follow a basic structure, none are particularly strongly correlated with the basic structure. This was a fun read with plenty of unexpected adventure and largely the story of naïveté graduating into a better understanding of how to work with the world in which one finds ones self. Bancroft has done a good job with world creation and sets a nice backdrop for the main character to do the things that seem well beyond a school head master.
