Conscious Capitalism! Liberating The Heroic Spirit Of Business!
This is a book that’s sold at Whole Foods, a local grocery store with a thin veneer of green, organic lifestyle and ridiculous prices. To understand why people fall for this stuff is to understand the American marketing machine.
My library in the US. Most of my books are in Europe, and only a few treasured ones made the trip over here.
Flashback to my time at university. The Sedgewick was the most popular algorithms book among students, being both cheaper and translated to German. Myself, I was using the CLRS Introduction to Algoritms.
This book was found when we were rummaging through stuff that was going to be thrown away at work, and I couldn’t let that happen. I could have used it last week when I was implementing patricia tries. Why is there no good C implementation of them on the ‘net? Anyhow, the question of how to delete an element from a patricia trie isn’t addressed in Sedgewick, so it wouldn’t have helped. I found out, so it wasn’t important, but still, you look up one thing in a classic like this and it’s not in there? How sad.
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman.
I just finished the book, and like all good books it went by far too quickly. I highly recommend it. In fact, I recommend all of Gaiman’s books. The story is set in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign, and the young Tristram Thorn sets out into the mystical Land of Faerie to find a fallen star for his loved one. The language is beautiful, it’s a book you want to read aloud to somebody.
Last week I finished dogs of riga, the second book in the Kurt Wallander series. Like the previous two books I read from Henning Mankell, it is an excellent crime novel. This time it plays in the early 90s, times of change in Latvia where Wallander is sent to investigate a murder. I’m reading this in norwegian, to improve my working vocabulary, and it’s working out quite nicely. It’s apparently better to read it in swedish, though. Oh, well…
Yesterday I finished another classic, the lonelyness of the long-distance runner. It’s a short story, and was apparently hailed because it’s an early example of literature from a working-class perspective. I’m not sure it’s such an important book today. The narrative is interesting, though, it’s one long monologue that the main character has while he’s running.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman is definitely among the top 3 books I’ve read this year.
Just as in American Gods, Gaiman invents a whole society that’s right before our eyes but that we cannot see any more. This time they are not forgotten gods, but an underground “London Below”, a society living under London, in abandoned subway stations, WW2 tunnels and abandoned places. I’m two thirds through the book, and I want to savour every page of it. Next on the reading list: Stardust.