Thursday, October 16, 2008

Sabbatical Reading

I'm taking sabbatical from work for the last two months of this year---hurrah! Something I'm hoping to do a lot is read; I've accumulated a large stack of unread books on my nightstand (for the English: that's a bedside table) and I need to catch up. Here's what lies before me.

Reading at the moment:

  • The Goal - despite the moronic and desperately tacky marketing and cover, actually so far a good book full of allegorically packaged business insights.

Top surface of nightstand:

Next nightstand shelf down

  • The Road to Reality - any book subtitled "A complete guide to the laws of the universe" is going to take a while to get through, I feel.
  • Against Depression - as a depressive, I appreciate Kramer's work. I liked his concept of "cosmetic psychopharmacology" and even own the domain thymoleptic.com.
  • Watching the English - deep but trashy but amusing but deep but trashy. I've been trying to finish this for years.
  • The Making of the Atomic Bomb - my ex-boss recommended this to me before just before I left my last job. He raved about it but it's 886 incredibly dense pages. I get daunted.
  • Dive into Python - bought before I had my kick-ass one-day Google training on Python. It's there when I feel the need.
  • The Stories of English - file this under "fascinated by linguistics". Plus I'm a fan of David Crystal generally.
  • Secrets and Lies - of course like me you read his blog. The books have a similar appeal. Did you know he works at British Telecom? Weirdness!
  • Python in a Nutshell - a freebie from Google long long ago. I've never written anything serious in Python but I'm certainly Python-curious.
  • Designing Interactions - Amazon tells me I bought this 16 months ago. Rats.
  • Effective C++ - Google freebie. I've never programmed C++, which probably makes me uniquely odd for someone who started coding 20 years ago. I don't think I'll ever feel the urge to use the language, but studying it would surely be interesting.

Bottom shelf of nightstand

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