Havana Nocturne How the Mob Owned Cuba...and Then Lost It to the Revolution By T.J. English.  Meyer Lansky attempts to legitimize the mob by taking over a country.  He actually had a good party going for about seven years before a pesky lawyer turned Marxist shat in the proverbial punch bowl.  This was a real fun read - especially the descriptions of the nightlife and the {alleged} orgy set up by one of the mobsters for the benefit of JFK...

Anathem by Neal Stephenson - Long book, similar in style to the Quicksilver triology. Where it lacks in story development it makes up for in innovative concepts and interesting diversions on science and philosophy. Worth the read if you get off on reading pop-science books. Asimovian. I was disappointed with the Quicksilver triology, and was prepared to hate this one. I didn't, some of the concepts, which the litter the book like nuts on a forest floor, swam in my brain since with interesting results.

Twisted Little Vein by Warren Ellis - Short book, very similar to his comic books. Twisted and fucked up but with a distressing need for moral rectitude of the freak sort. Requires no mental heavy lifting. Fun enough.

Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams - Don't bother. Give it to a 14 year old boy who you look forward to making fun of.

Last edited by orangeplus (2008-10-05 23:05:47)

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BraidI've been realizing it's time to read this book again.  It's hard to describe what it is about, and harder to explain why it would be not only illuminating but entertaining.  It is a book about strange loops and abstractions, math and art.   It's a book about how our mind can conceive of things that can never actually be fully defined, and how a series of proteins can describe the construction of our entire body.  It's a story about Achilles and the Tortoise.

Here's the official description: 

Everything is a symbol, and symbols can combine to form patterns. Patterns are beautiful and revelatory of larger truths. These are the central ideas in the thinking of Kurt Gödel, M.C. Escher, and Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps the three greatest minds of the past quarter-millennium. In a stunning work of humanism, Hofstadter ties together the work of mathematician Gödel, graphic artist Escher, and composer Bach.
Gödel, Escher, Bach, a Pulitzer prize-winning treatise on genius, explores the workings of brilliant people's brains with the help of historical examples and brainteaser puzzles. Not for the dim or the lazy, this book shows you, more clearly than most any other, what it means to see symbols and patterns where others see only the universe. Touching on math, computers, literature, music, and artificial intelligence, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a challenging and potentially life-changing piece of writing.

Last edited by tojo2000 (2008-10-06 01:30:26)

The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition

I found this book at a dollar store when I was in high school.  It's a quick, easy read, and a great introduction to some of the early pioneers of transhumanism, scientific hubris, and how fucking insane the people who push the envelope actually are sometimes.  From Evel Kneivel on a steam rocket to missing frozen heads and shaved rat brains, it's full of interesting stories about fringe science, sometimes more fringe than science.

orangeplus wrote:

Anathem by Neal Stephenson - Long book, similar in style to the Quicksilver triology. Where it lacks in story development it makes up for in innovative concepts and interesting diversions on science and philosophy. Worth the read if you get off on reading pop-science books. Asimovian. I was disappointed with the Quicksilver triology, and was prepared to hate this one. I didn't, some of the concepts, which the litter the book like nuts on a forest floor, swam in my brain since with interesting results.

I loved Cryptonomicon, so I'll have to give it a read.