“we are often served better by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.”
i recently heard about a new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson, and when i posted the quote from it (above) on facebook, a friend of mine replied with the link to the “trailer” for the book.
impressive, insightful, and wicked fun to watch (not to mention ponder!). this looks like a real winner, and i can’t wait to get my hands on the book itself!
i get asked fairly often if i’ve read anything good lately or for general book ideas/suggestions, and it seems that whenever the question comes up, my mind draws a blank… but i know i must have read a few good books in my day :p so i thought i’d compile a little list for future reference. take it as you will.
(NOTE this is still very much in progress. I started it and didn’t have time to add everything. But I plan on doing a more comprehensive compilation…someday :).
My Top 5 (in no particular order)
This list gets changed every… well it’s only been changed once since I first made it 3-5 years ago. It’s rare for me to find a book that competes with these.
The Worthy Rest (in no particular order)
i found this picture last night as i was milling around flickr, and i can’t stop thinking about it. i want to transform my entire bookshelf — i want to cover all my books in white paper like this, write the titles on their bindings in sharpie, and live simply in monochrome. right now, all my books are in boxes, but when i get somewhere and unpack, you’ll be the first (or thereabouts) to know.
for my birthday, i got two new books, the first of which i finished the other day. the sweetness at the bottom of the pie, by alan bradley, is a real winner. it’s a murder mystery, placed in 1950s england, and the sleuth is eleven-year-old chemistry prodigy flavia de luce.
first flavia and her father find a dead bird with a stamp stuck in its a beak on the doorstep. the next day, flavia finds a dead body in the garden. and the story unfolds as flavia races to solve the murder before the wrong person is arrested.
bradley does an excellent job writing as an eleven-year-old prodigy. you never forget that flavia’s a child, but you never doubt her astuteness, either; and you cannot help but love her charm. she’s a true delight: determined, indomitable and precocious — but never annoying.
the book is great fun — it’s written for adults, despite having a child as the heroine, but it’s clean (notwithstanding the fact that there’s been a murder), lively, engaging and smooth. i give it 4 stars without hesitation, though i can’t quite move it up the ladder to a coveted 5-star slot. don’t let that discourage you, though — the sweetness at the bottom of the pie should definitely be on your must-read list.
i’ve been trying to come up with an incredibly awesome post, in honor of the fact that i’ve almost gotten 10,000 hits on this blog (i cannot believe it. seriously. thank you!)… but i couldn’t come up with anything amazing, so all i have to talk about today is — sea monsters. woot!
i’m sure you’ve seen the book pride and prejudice and zombies at bookstores, right? freaky picture of a zombie jane austen on the cover? well, i’ve seen it, but i’ve never read it — i just don’t really do the whole zombie thing. there’s something about undead that’s just unright.
but i have to admit, the next book in the series has got me pretty excited: sense and sensibility and sea monsters. that’s right. seriously, what could be better than jane austen + sea monsters and all the shinangians that go with them (pirates!)? click here for the publicity article about the upcoming book, and if you scroll down in that link, you can watch a teaser/trailer they made for it. love.
it’s not really a new way to discover the classics — im thinking if your first introduction to elizabeth and mr. darcy is when they’re out fighting zombies together, you’re going to be sorely disappointed to only see them dancing in the original — but it all sounds uber-fun anyway.
anyone know of a good (simple-ish) book on the brain and the chemicals in it — what they do, how they affect each other, etc. just a good overview, The Brain for Dummies, as it were?
i ♥ a good caper. i really do. ”caper” as in heists, the big-con and the like (not those pickled peppery things they put on pasta dishes). in another life (the one where i had no moral conscience, no sense of social obligation and order, and wasn’t afraid of my own shadow), i would totally be a caper-er. i mean, caper-ess.
however, seeing as i’m in this life and not another, i content myself (as i think most of us do) with watching and reading about other people’s heists (both real and fictional).
today’s post was inspired by this fabulous true-story article about the largest diamond heist in history. the loot was never found, although one of the culprits was convicted; this story is drawn from an interview with him. incredibly well-written too, and a good read. (thanks to Irene for sending it my way!)
my other favorite heist/cons (should you find yourself bored on a saturday afternoon) are as follows. I’ve tried to put them in a “my favorite” order, first to last.
Some other good ones… these aren’t necessarily favorite-favorites, but they’re still good; some of them are less heisty and more con/scam/crime/etc, but they’re in the same spirit as the classics above (listed in no particular order):
Some friends recently recommended The Inside Man (2006 film, Denzel Washingon and Clive Owens) and The Bank Job (2008 film), and I’m excited to see those.
