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2003 Books So Far

Considering that I don't have any new programs to talk about, or any new pictures to display: I present the list of books that I have read this year, to date. I may have read the book before, but I must have spent time THIS YEAR on it. There are a number of nonfiction books in the list. The standards are a little easier on those: I need to have acquired the book this year, and have skimmed through a majority of it.

  • Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. An excellent futuristic story by my current favorite author.
  • OpenGL: A Primer, by Edward Angel. A bare-bones introduction to the 3D graphics API, but any serious work requires more information.
  • MySQL and JSP Web Applications, by James Turner. Interesting introduction to MySQL-backed JSP pages.
  • JSP Weekend Crash Course, by Geremy Kawaller, et. al. Some good JSP info, but a little too thin in content.
  • Year's Best SF, edited by David Hartwell. A series of excellent short stories. I think that my favorite was Robert Silverberg's "Hot Times in Magma City", a story about volcano-fighters in a future Los Angeles.
  • Year's Best SF 4, edited by David Hartwell. More short stories, but a bit weaker than previous years'. My favorites were "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang and "Unraveling the Thread" by Jean-Claude Dunyach.
  • Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier. A striking story set in the South of the Civil War.
  • Darwin's Radio, by Greg Bear. In progress.
  • Best Places: Central California Coast, by Judith Wylie. Good guide to livin' the California dream, and came in handy last weekend.
  • Crytonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. Excellent story about World War 2 codebreakers and present-day entrepreneurs. This may be my current favorite book, by my current favorite author. Very well written.
  • Tactics of Mistake, by Gordon R. Dickson. Military science fiction. Not the best written book, but still interesting.
  • The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne. Story about castaways on a (nearly) deserted island. This is the first book that I have read by Jules Verne, oddly enough.
  • The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. One of my all-time favorite stories. Revenge.
  • The Ascent of Man, by J. Bronowski. Nonfiction with lots of beautiful pictures. It tells the best story of them all.
  • Modern C++ Design, by Andrei Alexandrescu. Demonstrates the use of templates to solve common architectural problems in C++. Perhaps the most recent important book in the C++ community. Not for amateurs.

I recognize that this list is pretty weak, but I haven't had a lot of time to read everything that I would like. And I fear that my tastes have become less adventurous because of it.

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Comments

I recently read, "Ghostwritten" by David Mitchell. I think you'd like it.

Hi,

Since you're starting a book club, might I recommend:

- "Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov
- "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak

If you want to know more about them, I'm sure you know where to find them out. But, they were among the best Russian books I read at ND -- the first very fantastical, satirical view of life in the early Soviet days, the second a poetic sweeping dramatic epic set during the Russian Revolution that is like The Fountainhead with a heart.

Cheers.

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