Think Joyce writing about a revolutionary plot in the Petersburg of 1910-something, involving patricide and a time-bomb set for 24 hours from now. Yeah.
That and slowly working through Proust (book 5). I'm not sure if I really recommend it, but I'd be interested to hear thoughts from other smarty-pants HN people.
Petersburg is exactly what I wanted to read once school ends. All this CS and math work makes me want to just discorporate myself into a ridiculous, subjective work.
And I found it pretty tolerable. The footnotes are in the back (I think?) which kind of stinks for your first read. Unless you're a serious student of Petersburg history, the footnotes are requisite for understanding half of the nuance. Bely is doing all these tricks shifting the geography of the city and playing off places and events, and that's lost to the modern reader without help. I'm eager to read it again without paying attention to the notes though.
I'll take a look at Moravagine, it looks great. It's in line after Volume 3 of Gulag A. and Orlando Figes's history of the Russian revolutions. I need more context for all this pre-WWI stuff!
It changed the way I think about pricing, among other things, forever. He makes some wild conclusions then backs them up with scientific experiments. Its a fun read to boot.
"The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson - he's really good journalist and writes well. This is an interesting read about the newish "psychopaths everywhere" meme.
I recently reread Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.
I was prompted to do so by another book discussion. Not his best book - I think Blood Meridian and The Road are better - but McCarthy is a great writer.
For nerd non-fiction, I just read Jim Lovell's Lost Moon which though not a great book, is a good solid book about greatness.
I'd highly recommend any Scalzi book. The Old Man's War trilogy is great, but if you're after something more light-hearted then The Android's Dream or Agent to the Stars are also great.
What picture can we paint of the universe if we take together the best theories we have about fundamental things like time, life, virtual reality, cosmology etc. Easily the best book i've read in recent years.
Consider that Deutsch is a very distinguished scientist in the field of quantum cryptography/computing. He is really good at explaining things in terms that non-physicists and experts alike can learn a lot!
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Roadside Picnic - Strugatzky
Soviet Science Fiction book about the first and only visit
of earth by aliens. The approach is very unusual since there is never any direct contact between humans and the extra
terrestrial intelligence. The book is more like a study of human society and how it could develop if suddenly there was some extremely advanced technology available to us which we are too primitive to understand/control.
The Master & Margarita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita
Goethe's Faust & the story of Pontius Pilate retold in 1930s Russia. Really, I mean really damn good. Very readable.
Books 1 & 2 of The Gulag Archipelago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
An expansive history of the Soviet prison camp system, almost a folk history.
Petersburg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersburg_(novel)
Think Joyce writing about a revolutionary plot in the Petersburg of 1910-something, involving patricide and a time-bomb set for 24 hours from now. Yeah.
That and slowly working through Proust (book 5). I'm not sure if I really recommend it, but I'd be interested to hear thoughts from other smarty-pants HN people.