People who’ve known me for a little while sometimes comment that I seem to be interested in everything. I can understand how people get this impression, but it’s not true. In fact, I’m only interested in a relatively small number of topics but ones that don’t neatly fall within the boundaries of traditional subject decompositions. Nevertheless, I think that my interests form an unusually coherent and focused whole. I mention this only because the books that I’ve read recently manifestly reflect almost the full range of my interests. But, paradoxically, those interests are perhaps not the ones that one might deduce from the list!
(The obvious omissions from the picture painted by these books are mathematical physics and science fiction. The former is missing because my policy is to only include books that I have read in their entirety and although I have been reading many excellent physics books recently I have not been reading them from cover to cover. The lack of science fiction is more mysterious; I will rectify that in the near future.)
Anyway here are the books I’ve read over the last couple of months together with brief comments:
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The Roman Republic
Michael Crawford - Lucid and coherent thematic history of the rise of Rome from Italian to Mediterranean power, and the breaking of the Republic under the weight of empire.
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The Civil War
Gaius Julius Caesar - Commentaries on the civil war against Pompey by the man who started it, and thus set in motion the terminal convulsions of the Republic.
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The Conquest of Gaul
Gaius Julius Caesar - Thrilling dispatches from the Gallic front by Rome’s most brilliant and charismatic general, as exciting now as they were two millennia ago.
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Sputnik Sweetheart
Haruki Murakami - A strange and beautiful novel about the mysteries of loneliness and longing. Not as baffling as some of his works.
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Entering Space
Robert Zubrin - A plausible discussion of the ways we could build a spacefaring society; debunks bad ideas as well as promoting good ones.
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The Future of Ideas
Laurence Lessig - An important argument about freedom in a creative commons on the Internet, but too long and more than a little repetitive.
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The Pragmatic Programmer
Andrew Hunt, David Thomas - Articles on aspects of software development not usually taught by books or courses: wisdom, not knowledge.
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Rubicon
Tom Holland - A narrative history of the turbulent decades of the Roman Republic’s cataclysmic dissolution, ending with the emergence of Octavian’s monarchy.
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Rapid Development
Steve McConnell - If you need to develop high quality software with tight constraints on time and money, you should read this first.
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Mapping the Deep
Robert Kunzig - Wide-ranging popular introduction to ocean sciences, both physical and biological; almost every page taught me something wonderful.
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I'm reading Tacitus' Annals at the moment, but when I've finished that I'm going to read Suetonius. After that, I'm not sure: either Ammianus Marcellinus or maybe back to Appian, Polybius and Livy. Or Tacitus' Histories, I suppose. |
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marcus aurelius is one i turn to often, not history per se, but still... |
recently finished gaul and mid way through civil war; both tremendous examples of personal and political propaganda, though suetonius is funnier...