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{ Category Archives } Books

Books, sometimes from bookclub, sometimes not.

Toddler Books

Our tod­dler daugh­ter (18 months old) likes hav­ing books read to her. Some of them are def­in­ite favour­ites, to be read as often as pos­sible, while oth­ers are the ones she likes when she’s told to go and get another book. They’re not neces­sar­ily books I would choose myself, but it’s not my taste that […]

2007 12 17 Family Comments (6)

Physical Insights

Lest any­one think that phys­i­cists don’t care about the real world, Bob Park pub­lishes a short weekly news­let­ter that touches on sub­jects ran­ging from sci­entific hoaxes to incon­sist­en­cies in the way the U.S. Admin­is­tra­tion handles vari­ous issues. It mostly con­cen­trates on sci­ence and tech­no­logy, but not only. The Fri­day, Octo­ber 26, 2007 news­let­ter also discusses […]

2007 11 08 General Comments (0)

Market Choice

Here’s a fas­cin­at­ing piece dis­cuss­ing how fixed prices on books in Ger­many was actu­ally push­ing prices down (con­trary to eco­nomic the­ory), while sup­port­ing a wide range of book­sellers. When I was last in Ger­many, apart from my usual beef about Ger­man book­sellers not tak­ing credit cards, I found no reason to com­plain about the range […]

2007 10 25 Rants Comments (0)

Small Gods

Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods is a good place to start in the pan­theon of the Dis­cworld books. That’s the reason we chose it, rather than one of the many oth­ers, to read in book club. There are a couple of places where hav­ing read some of the other books would give some addi­tional depth (the […]

2007 10 10 Comments (2)

Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray

The book­club dis­cussed Oscar Wilde’s The Pic­ture of Dorian Gray. Read­ing this was a reminder that one reason I go to book­club is to be encour­aged to read books I oth­er­wise wouldn’t, and to get more out of them than I can on my own. The Pic­ture of Dorian Gray (Wiki­pe­dia review) is the story of […]

2007 08 16 Comments (5)

Henry VIII’s Wives

Here’s a review of Ant­o­nia Fraser’s The Wives of Henry VIII (there also seems to be an updated ver­sion, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Women in His­tory)), which the book­club picked, par­tially because I’d read it before and thought it was inter­est­ing, par­tially because most of the book­club mem­bers knew a little about that […]

2007 06 28 Comments (1)