Recently, I did some work on replacing some of the books on my bookshelves with digital/electronic versions on my iPad mini as part of the Great Digitization Project (GDP), and in the process, discovered some books I'd started reading, but haven't really delved into in quite a while. Some of those books will be listed below, and I'll also include the electronic books I've been reading electronically (the iPad mini is a great reading device!) and the print books I'm currently reading. This will serve as both a great catalog for me to access to see where I am in the readings, and a way for you to see what I'm reading about. I welcome your comments, suggestions, ideas, criticisms and any feedback you have on my reading choices.
Fiction
Centennial by James A. Michener, Fawcett Crest Books, 1974, ISBN: 0-449-23494-0
I'll have to watch the TV mini-series when I finish the book! It ran in 1978-1979, and starred people like Raymond Burr, Barbara Carrera, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Conrad, Alex Karras, Brian Keith, Sally Kellerman, Donald Pleasance, Lynn Redgrave, Dennis Weaver, Timothy Dalton and Andy Griffith, among others!
The Counterlife by Philip Roth, Vintage Books, 1986, ISBN: 0-679-74904-7
One of Roth's Zuckerman books. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is considered one of Roth's better novels. I've only read one of his so far, so we'll see how it measures up. Good so far!
Non-Fiction
The Road To Reality, A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose, Alfred A. Knoff, 2004, ISBN-13: 978-0-679-45443-4
With a title like that, I just had to get it! It's been on my shelf for many years after I got stuck trying to understand Riemann surfaces. The book focuses on the math required to understand the standard particle theory of physics and other physical theories and laws, then gets to trying to explain these. It's a goal of mine to try to get through it and at least peripherally understand the universe.
The Sense of Order, A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art by E.H. Gombrich, The Wrightsman Lectures, Cornell University Press, 1979, ISBN: 0-8014-1143-2
So, I found myself in St. Philip's Books, an amazing tiny but stocked to the hilt bookstore in Oxford when Nancy and I were visiting Tevan in Oxford, where he was doing his semester abroad. They have an amazing collection of rare and old books and specialize in religious texts. We spent awhile in there, and I just had to get a book, but didn't want to lug it around England and on the trip home, so I asked if they could send it to me in Astoria. No problem! The librarian there was amazingly knowledgeable about the books and extremely nice. They gave me a huge discount and shipped the book free. I have a fascination for patterns and symmetry, and this book talks about that and analyzes art and designs and even has a section on complexity! It's a great coffee table book, and I hope to get into it for real some day.
Order Out of Chaos, Man's New Dialogue with Nature by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (forward by Alvin Toffler), Bantam Books, 1984, ISBN: 0-553-34082-4
This was actually the book that started me on my complexity journey back in around 1985, when a professor friend of mine, Dennis Mulcahy, suggested this book to me when I was doing a Master's degree in Adelaide, Oz. I remember back then that it was hard to get through, but opened my eyes as to why life can exist. I didn't bring the book home with me when I returned to the US (I didn't bring much back with me at all!), so I've had to remember things all these years. I finally decided to buy the book used for virtually nothing from Amazon, and have been going through it slowly for months. I realize now that the reason it was such a slog then (and somewhat now) is that more than half the book talks about the philosophy of science, which is fascinating, but a big topic that is not all about science. But eventually the book gets into its main topic, which is the chemistry of life and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, which is what Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for. I later read Being to Becoming, another Prigogine book that further explores the one-directional hand of time.
Mapping Time, The Calendar and Its History by E. G. Richards, Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN: 0-19-286205-7
I believe I bought this one in England. There's some cool math around calendars that I'll be using in my Upward Bound math class this summer.
How To Read Churches, A crash course in Christian architecture by Denis R. McNamara, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2011, ISBN: 978-1-4081-2836-7
Bought this one in Blackwell's in Oxford. I was so impressed with all the church buildings in Oxford and Cambridge and London on our trip that I couldn't turn down the chance to learn more about the architecture. Great book! I read most of it last summer, and am up to the Baptisteries & Fonts chapter. Gotta go on a world church tour some day... (at least I saw Notre Dame before it burned!)
Mathematics, Queen & Servant of Science by Eric Temple Bell (forward by Martin Gardner), Tempus Books, 1951, ISBN: 1-55615-173-X
And this one comes, I believe, from a small bookstore on Salt Spring Island, where I used to go each summer to attend fiddle camp with the great organization Fiddleworks. I linked the author because he's really interesting, worth looking into, and not known too well. He wrote science fiction under the name John Taine (his son's name was Taine). Gardner compares him to Lewis Carroll! Bell was a prolific mathematician who taught at the University of Washington. I put down the book a few years ago about halfway through. Hopefully, I'll finish it one day. Cool stuff!
The Tree, A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge, Three Rivers Press, 2005, ISBN: 978-0-307-39539-9
I love trees, so couldn't resist this one. I stopped reading it a while ago, as the part of the book I was in was just a survey of trees, and it was a bit boring. One day I'll pick it up again, I hope. The why they matter part is of some interest...
Invasion Biology, Critique of a Pseudoscience by David I. Theodoropoulos, Avvar Books, 2003, ISBN: 0-9708504-1-7
This is an important book in my library. The story goes that many years ago, I attended a talk given by the author at a local hotel that's owned by Fritzi Cohen, who is a vocal critic of pesticides, and was at the time fighting the state and local governments and a bunch of local shellfish growers over spraying her oyster beds with a pesticide to kill spartina grass, which everyone said was destroying the ecosystem there in Willapa Bay. Well, the talk was a real eye-opener for me, and I bought his book and started looking into the whole invasive species issue, eventually going to a conference and giving a talk on it and writing a lot about it in the local alternative newspaper (HIPFiSHmonthly). Though a big difficult to read, the book is a spot on and pretty hard-hitting critique of invasive species ideology. I thought I had finished it, but the bookmark is there, towards the end, just before a chapter called Pseudoscience. Important book!
The Beauty of Numbers in Nature, Mathematical Patterns and Principles from the Natural World by Ian Stewart, The MIT Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-0-262-53428-4
As I said above, I really like symmetry and patterns, and this book is a beautiful example of an exploration of these things. It's a survey of concepts and phenomena that begins with a musing on a snowflake. It's a good book for the coffee table, and to pick up occasionally and read something some interesting math and science.
Ki: Energy for Everybody by Louise Taylor and Betty Bryant, Japan Publications, Inc., 1990, ISBN: 0-87040-786-4
I bought this book a long time ago, while I was still in Seattle. I was into Tai Chi and interested in lots of health-related stuff as I entered my 30s. I never finished reading the book, and never really used it as a resource to do exercises for my back and health. Now that I'm really getting into this stuff again, I think I'll dust it off and see whether I can use some of the exercises and advice in it in my regimen for trying to stem the scoliosis and other health-related things from getting me.