What are you currently reading?

[North Star]

John, you ought to check out some lectures by Feynman on Youtube!

[mahler10th]

My niece is a teenager, fifteen I think,  but because of her disability she is very, very wee and could be taken for an eight year old.  I know she has had a good standard mainstream education, but by all the theorems I had no idea she was so far, far ahead of me and most in mathematics.   

John, you ought to check out some lectures by Feynman on Youtube!

Thanks 

[Opus106]

I am now off on a mathematics kick, and I suspect I will ask her advice and even seek her tutelage in my new quest to understand mathematics and stuff...

Maths is a difficult subject to get across using words alone, but if you are so inclined to read further on the topic I would recommend Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem. It was my own gateway to the subject, at a time when I had a grudge against it but enough curiosity to borrow it from the library. You may have heard about the theorem in the title, which started life as a marginal note, beat the best minds in the world for over 350 years, and was eventually beaten by a decade-long struggle by a mathematician who solved it nearly single-handedly (you know what they say about shoulders and giants...).

[Todd]

I'm a few chapters into All the Great Prizes, by John Taliaferro, a lengthy bio of John Hay, apparently the first in 80 or so years.  Well written and researched, the sizeable samples of Hay's writing show him to have a pen on par qualitatively with John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, though more florid in style and more readily accessible to modern readers.  His mind was also as sharp as those august gentlemen, it seems.  It'll be a little while before I get to the good stuff - ie, his work with McKinley and TR - but the early stuff with Lincoln is informative on fine points.  (The young Hay may have been the author of the famous letter to Mrs Bixby - the one cited in Saving Private Ryan.)  Mr Taliaferro is quite a good writer as well.  It's a page turner as far as bios go. 

Now, if only someone will do something similar for Elihu Root. 

[Bogey]

I'm a few chapters into All the Great Prizes, by John Taliaferro, a lengthy bio of John Hay, apparently the first in 80 or so years.  Well written and researched, the sizeable samples of Hay's writing show him to have a pen on par qualitatively with John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, though more florid in style and more readily accessible to modern readers.  His mind was also as sharp as those august gentlemen, it seems.  It'll be a little while before I get to the good stuff - ie, his work with McKinley and TR - but the early stuff with Lincoln is informative on fine points.  (The young Hay may have been the author of the famous letter to Mrs Bixby - the one cited in Saving Private Ryan.)  Mr Taliaferro is quite a good writer as well.  It's a page turner as far as bios go. 

Now, if only someone will do something similar for Elihu Root.

Looks excellent, Todd.

[kishnevi]

Not actually reading these now--I've read them more than a few times, and my copies need to be replaced on account of wear and tear, so I ordered these from Amazon MP--but this thread seemed to be the most logical place to report a book purchase.



Members of a musical forum might be interested in Bruce Montgomery aka Edmund Crispin.  Under his own name he composed, mostly film music;  under the Crispin alias he wrote a series of mysteries featuring Gervase Fen, Oxford professor of Literature.    Case of the Gilded Fly was the first, and Moving Toyshop possibly the best of the series from a technical standpoint (not merely the corpse, but the entire scene of the crime disappears!),  but the musically oriented might best appreciate Swan Song, which is set against the backdrop of a production of Die Meistersinger in the post war years.  Crispin/Montgomery had a taste for locked room mysteries (of which both Gilded Fly and Moving Toyshop are examples) and as time went on, he recycled some formulas too much), but all the stories are moved into excellence by the outbreaks of authorial humor that might remind the reader of Douglas Adams, and are never ever found in Agatha Christie (although, to a lesser extent,  Sayers could produce some tongue in cheek moments worthy of everlasting fame)--and sometimes a very grim humor.   Perhaps the best of the series overall is the last, which was written after a hiatus of many years,  Glimpses of the Moon.

At any rate, if you like classic British mysteries and have never read any of the cases of Gervase Fen (there's also a collection of short stories, Fen Country),  I highly suggest seeking them out.


BTW,  this order marks a first for me: I've never ordered a book from Amazon or Amazon MP until now!

[Sergeant Rock]

Donald Harington The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks. The story of the Ingledew family set in the town of Stay More Arkansas: six generations of Stay Morons.




Sarge

[mn dave]

Those who are friends with me on Facebook already know that I'm reading these:

Sequel to the Shining.
[asin]1476727651[/asin]

[asin]0306808552[/asin]

[Daverz]

My niece is a teenager, fifteen I think,  but because of her disability she is very, very wee and could be taken for an eight year old.  I know she has had a good standard mainstream education, but by all the theorems I had no idea she was so far, far ahead of me and most in mathematics.   

The Feynman Lectures on Physics would make a great gift.

[asin]0465023827[/asin]

[Opus106]

The Feynman Lectures on Physics would make a great gift.

As an aside: the LATEX-formatted HTML version of the first volume was put up online recently, with the consent of the publishers.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html

[Artem]

Finished this book recently. Very interesting approach to covering the band's history by following recording of each of their songs.

[Karl Henning]

I should read that, in hopes of finding it more responsible writing than his Shostakovich book . . . .

[Geo Dude]

Currently working on these three.

[Brian]

A double dosage of disastrously delectable detective delights from the most devious and deranged writer in American history! Harry Stephen Keeler is truly the Florence Foster Jenkins of world literature.

These are two of three books from a trilogy, and somewhere in the trilogy (I read an abridged one-book version) is my favorite line of narratorial prose in all the wide world of words:

"O'Rourke paused belligerently."

[Brian]

Oh man I'm at the bottom of page 1 and it's already deliriously racist!

[Brian]

Oh my gosh on page 25 some characters canoe down the Amazon to escape a bunch of horny jaguars.

[Daverz]

I think you need one of those twittertwat accounts, Brian.

[Brian]

I think you need one of those twittertwat accounts, Brian.

http://twitter.com/bgreinhart

[Drasko]

[Josefa89]

I'm reading "The Casual Vacancy" by J.K. Rowling, it's actually very nice.