Recommended reading

** Here are some books I've read that I think you'd enjoy.

FICTION
Neal Stephenson:
Snow Crash

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal
Stephenson
plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia
controls
pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise
city-states,
and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's
hype would
lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai
swordsman, and
pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer
drug called
Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a
guy with a
name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century
novel,
Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern
civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a
whole lot
more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be
plausible. --
This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The Diamond Age

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy
of "A
Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually
a super
computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord
Finkle-McGraw's
daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian
society. But
Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book"
has fallen
into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to
change.

Cryptonomicon

From Library Journal
Computer expert Randy Waterhouse spearheads a movement to create a safe haven
for
data in a world where information equals power and big business and government
seek to
control the flow of knowledge. His ambitions collide with a top-secret
conspiracy with
links to the encryption wars of World War II and his grandfather's work in
preventing the
Nazis from discovering that the Allies had cracked their supposedly unbreakable
Enigma
code. The author of Snow Crash (LJ 4/1/92) focuses his eclectic vision on a
story of epic
proportions, encompassing both the beginnings of information technology in the
1940s
and the blossoming of the present cybertech revolution. Stephenson's
freewheeling prose
and ironic voice lend a sense of familiarity to a story that transcends the
genre and
demands a wide readership among fans of technothrillers as well as a general
audience.

Quicksilver

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In Quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," Neal Stephenson
launches his most
ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with
the
ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for
MIT in
eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch's message conveys, is key to
resolving
an explosive scientific battle of preeminence between Isaac Newton and Gottfried
Wilhelm
Leibniz over the development of calculus. As Daniel returns to London aboard the
Minerva,
readers are catapulted back half a century to recall his years at Cambridge with
young
Isaac. Daniel is a perfect historical witness. Privy to Robert Hooke's early
drawings of
microscope images and with associates among the English nobility, religious
radicals, and
the Royal Society, he also befriends Samuel Pepys, risks a cup of coffee, and
enjoys a
lecture on Belgian waffles and cleavage-—all before the year 1700.
In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked"
Jack
(also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a
Turkish
harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by
Eliza's lust for
fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of
Daniel in the
third book of the novel.

Yan Martel

Life of Pi

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Yann Martel's imaginative and unforgettable Life of Pi is a magical reading
experience, an
endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately,
faith. The
precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry,
India, where
he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog
attracts fleas."
Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie
and they
hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds
himself adrift
in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a
spotted hyena,
a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker ("His
head was
the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth"). It sounds like a colorful
setup, but these
wild beasts don't burst into song as if co-starring in an anthropomorphized
Disney
feature. After much gore and infighting, Pi and Richard Parker remain the boat's
sole
passengers, drifting for 227 days through shark-infested waters while fighting
hunger, the
elements, and an overactive imagination. In rich, hallucinatory passages, Pi
recounts the
harrowing journey as the days blur together, elegantly cataloging the endless
passage of
time and his struggles to survive: "It is pointless to say that this or that
night was the
worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none
the
champion."
An award winner in Canada (and winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Life of Pi,
Yann
Martel's second novel, should prove to be a breakout book in the U.S. At one
point in his
journey, Pi recounts, "My greatest wish--other than salvation--was to have a
book. A long
book with a never-ending story. One that I could read again and again, with new
eyes and
fresh understanding each time." It's safe to say that the fabulous, fablelike
Life of Pi is
such a book.


NON-FICTION

Dan Pink
A Whole New Mind

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Just as information workers surpassed physical laborers in economic importance,
Pink
claims, the workplace terrain is changing yet again, and power will inevitably
shift to
people who possess strong right brain qualities. His advocacy of "R-directed
thinking"
begins with a bit of neuroscience tourism to a brain lab that will be extremely
familiar to
those who read Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open last year, but while Johnson was
fascinated by the brain's internal processes, Pink is more concerned with how
certain skill
sets can be harnessed effectively in the dawning "Conceptual Age." The second
half of the
book details the six "senses" Pink identifies as crucial to success in the new
economy-
design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning-while "portfolio" sections
offer
practical (and sometimes whimsical) advice on how to cultivate these skills
within oneself.
Thought-provoking moments abound-from the results of an intensive drawing
workshop
to the claim that "bad design" created the chaos of the 2000 presidential
election-but the
basic premise may still strike some as unproven. Furthermore, the warning that
people
who don't nurture their right brains "may miss out, or worse, suffer" in the
economy of
tomorrow comes off as alarmist. But since Pink's last big idea (Free Agent
Nation) has
become a cornerstone of employee-management relations, expect just as much buzz
around his latest theory.


Virginia Postrel

The Future and its Enemies
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Virginia Postrel smashes conventional political boundaries in this libertarian
manifesto.
World-views should be defined not by how they view the present, she says, but
the future.
Do they aim to control it, as many conservative reactionaries and liberal
planners want to
do? Or do they embrace it, even though they can't know what lies ahead? Postrel
(editor of
Reason magazine) firmly places herself in this latter category--the dynamists,
she calls
her happy tribe--and urges the rest of us to sign up. The future of economic
prosperity,
technological progress, and cultural innovation depends upon embracing
principles of
choice and competition. The downside of this philosophy, Postrel readily notes,
is that it
doesn't allow us to manage tomorrow by acting today. And that's exactly the
point: we
shouldn't want to. A future constructed by an infinite number of individual
decisions,
made privately, is one she believes we should encourage. The Future and Its
Enemies is at
once intellectually sweeping and reader-friendly; it has the potential to join a
pantheon of
books about freedom that includes works by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Malcom Gladwell
Blink
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows
in an
instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for
snap
judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid
storytelling.
Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed
dating, choking
on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers
to think
small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely
on our
"adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and
sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new
idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate
our first
impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong
cue
leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome
but hapless
president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he
illuminates
the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou
Diallo in the
Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to
urge
training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant,
cage-rattling book,
one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp
might look
like.