Anton's Book Page

It's time for a new look! I'm still not sure what the purpose of this page is (beyond the obvious vanity factor of most personal web pages), but I think it needs more organization. So I'm going to give that a try, breaking the page up roughly by genre, while (occasionally) maintaining a list of recently read books.

This page overlaps with my reading page; I'll try to find an effective way to merge the two in the future.

As before, if you have suggestions for books I might enjoy reading, please let me know.

You might also want to check out my fantasy and science fiction page until I get it merged as well.

Topic Index:

Fiction

Favorites.
General Fiction.
Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Mysteries.

Non-Fiction

Favorites.
Science & Mathematics.
Computers.
History.

Below this line is my old page; at some point these contents will either go away or be placed appropriately.

(OK, if I don't start now, this will never get started. Here's a few of the books I've been reading. No full-length reviews, but those might come later if I get ambitious. Most likely nobody reaches this page anyway.)

July 17, 1999:

Obviously this hasn't been updated for a while. Don't expect a full list of the books I've read in the past year! But here are a few worth seeking out.

England, England and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes. My wife and I were lucky to have an opportunity on our vacation to hear Mr. Barnes reading from the former, and were inspired to pick up several of his new books. I highly recommend these; they're humorous, playful, and reflect a slanted look at Western society and the world.

The Sparrow and Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell. These two books explore the meaning of faith, in a well-written science-fiction setting. A friend pointed me to them, and I'm glad she did; they were well worth reading, thought-provoking, captivating and intense.

March 29, 1998:

Advanced Computer Architectures: A Design Space Approach, by Dezsö Sima, Terence Fountain, and Péter Kacsuk. The many typographical errors in this book (at least, in its 1997 first printing) lead me to advise caution in using it as a textbook. However, if you're already familiar with computer architecture and are interested in learning about some of the newer techniques, I highly recommend it. It covers the major techniques used in superscalar processors as well as providing information on distributed and parallel computing, including cache coherency. As with most texts, it provides an extensive bibliography, which seems to be well-chosen and up-to-date.

How to Lie with Maps, by Mark Monmonier. Inspired by How to Lie with Statistics, this book struck me as being written in a more readable style and going into more depth (though perhaps I'm simply showing my relative ignorance of cartography). It explains the choices which must be made to produce a useful map, then discusses how these choices may be made poorly through ignorance, error, or malice to produce a result which is useless or misleading. I highly recommend this book to everyone; it should be a required followup to those elementary school classes where you probably learned to read a map for the first time.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. This is one of those books I've thought about reading for a long time, but had never gotten around to. I enjoyed it, learning a fair amount about early 20th century physics and politics and watching them converge on what seems like an inevitable consequence. If you have an interest in either history or science, or simply want to understand more about how our ability to destroy the world was developed, you should check it out.

Smoke and Mirrors, by Jane Lindskold. I didn't enjoy this as much as her Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls, but it was fairly well-written and was based on an interesting idea. I wish some of the science had been explored in more depth, and that there had been more development of the minor characters. Perhaps making the book slightly longer would have helped.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte. A co-worker of mine brought these to my attention, and I'm very glad, for they pointed out many ways in which I could improve my communication skills. As their titles imply, these books are about communicating graphically, focusing on statistics in the first book and more general types of data in the second. Tufte presents clear examples of graphics which work well and others which don't; you may not always agree on the details, but you'll never look at graphs (whether designed by yourself or someone else) as uncritically again.

March 1, 1998:

Proteus Manifest, by Charles Sheffield. I discovered this in a used bookstore up in Cable, Wisconsin, and am very glad that I did. The second novel included in this book club edition (Proteus Unbound) is one of the most creative hard-SF novels I've read in a long time. I highly recommend it.

February 22, 1998:

Doctor Who (New): The Pit, by Neil Penswick. Overall, I've been very impressed by the New Doctor Who series. This isn't one of my favorites, though; the plot is almost non-existent, which creates rather an uncomfortable feeling of reading about random, unconnected events.

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould is one of my favorite authors; I've read and enjoyed many of his books of short essays (mostly collected from his column in Nature magazine). In this book, he examines the development of two contrasting views of geological time (directed versus cyclical) through the writings of three early geologists. It was an interesting read, and I enjoyed working through the philosophical implications with Gould as a guide. I'd highly recommend any of his books, including this one.

The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse, translated by Jack Zipes. I've never read any of Hesse's novels, but these short stories encourage me. They are approachable and fun to read. Not fairy tales in the traditional sense, they still have the feel of those stories which speak to a universal experience and to the basic emotions which we all share. Zipes's translation is clear and his words fit the stories well; however, without reading the original stories, I can't say much beyond that.

The Ebony Tower, by John Fowles. The stories making up this book are complex studies of character. From an old painter retired to escape the modern art he detests, to a man victimized by an apparently random crime, Fowles shows an interplay of emotion and intellect which is delightful to read. These stories are enjoyable and reward some extra time spent to appreciate their language and detail.