Books read since September

Non-Fiction:

• The Man Who Lied to His Laptop by Clifford Nass
• The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
• With the Old Breed by E. B. Sledge
• What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
• Half Empty by David Rakoff
• Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose
• Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz
• Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
• Laws of Fear: Beyond The Precautionary Principle by Cass Sunstein

Fiction:

• Kinki Lullaby by Isaac Adamson
• Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
• Kraken: An Anatomy by China Mieville
• Year's Best SF 15
• The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
• The New Space Opera
• Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Kraken was the best fiction. Being Wrong is the best book I've read in ages; not only is it beautifully, quotably written, but once the phenomenon is pointed out, I started seeing it everywhere.

Books Read Since June

Fiction:
Transition by Iain Banks
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Freedom(tm): A Novel by Daniel Suarez
The Trade Of Queens by Charles Stross
Chronic City: A Novel by Jonathan Lethem

Non-fiction:
The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communites That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand
Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki by David Chadwick
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Best fiction was Transition and, mmmm, maybe Chronic City. Best non-fiction was Whole Earth Discipline, but all of them are worth reading.

Music Bought in Last Four Months

"Venus on Earth" by Dengue Fever
"Ultimate RUN/DMC" by RUN/DMC
"Aswad" by squaremeter
"Collide" by Beats Antique
"Treats" by Sleigh Bells
"Into the Trees" by Zoë Keating
"How To Destroy Angels" (EP) by How To Destroy Angels

I also bought year of Pandora One, which is exposing me to a lot of other music to buy (e.g., Beats Antique). Here's my Pandora profile.

Books Read since March

Another list-of-media-that-I've-consumed-in-time-period-X post.

Fiction:
Year's Best SF 14 edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Seppuku by Peter Watts
Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Sea-Wolf by Jack London
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
The Candy Shop War by Brandon Mull
The God Engines by John Scalzi
Reheated Cabbage: Tales of Chemical Degeneration by Irvine Welsh

Non-fiction
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou
Greetings from Afghanistan, Send More Ammo: Dispatches from Taliban Country by Benjamin Tupper
Columbine by Dave Cullen
Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Sane Asylum by Charles Hampden-Turner
Music: I-LXXIV by August Kleinzahler

Best fiction was The Windup Girl and Blood's a Rover, and Year's Best SF 14 was a surprisingly good short story collection. Best non-fiction was Columbine and Sane Asylum (a mid-1970's examination of the Delancey Street Foundation), and despite what is said about writing about music, Music: I-LXXIV was really good.

Books I've read in 2010 (So Far)

From the library:

• John Adams by David McCullough
• Inside Delta Force: The Story of America's Elite Counterterrorist Unit by Eric Haney
• The City: A Global History by Joel Kotkin
• Don't Hassel the Hoff by David Hasselhoff (a gag gift from my brother)
• Mariposa by Greg Bear
• Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi
• The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
• The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception by H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace

And I've also been reading books on my Nexus One with the Aldiko reader:

• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• Makers by Cory Doctorow
• Starfish by Peter Watts
• Maelstrom by Peter Watts

For fiction, the Peter Watts books are great. John Adams and Age of Wonder are the standout non-fiction.

More Books from the Library

Books I've gotten from the San Francisco Public Library (Mission Bay Branch) since my last books post in August:

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs
Beijing Coma: A Novel by Ma Jian
Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal
The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan
Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace by William Lobdell
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Wireless by Charles Stross
Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age by Andrew F. Jones
The City & The City by China Miéville
A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind by Charles Fernyhough
The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher
The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard
Quantico by Greg Bear
Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress by Candacy A. Taylor

And I'm currently reading John Adams by David McCullough

The best fiction was a tie between "Beijing Coma" and "We Need to Talk About Kevin", both of which are extraordinary. "A Thousand Days of Wonder" was the best non-fiction, but I'll call out "The Works: Anatomy of a City" if you're an infrastructure nerd. And if the title of "The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down" sounds really interesting to you, it's worth reading.

My Google Listen Soundtrack

I use Google Listen on my Android-powered phone to listen to podcasts. It's quite nice, and I've basically time-shifted all my NPR and other radio listening to it.

Here's what I'm currently listening to, in no particular order:
* Planet Money - Straightforward, non-polemical discussion of financial stories.
* Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! - A weekly news quiz/humor show.
* The Moth - Stories told in front of a live audience with no notes.
* Onion Radio News - One minute humor pieces from the genius that is the mighty Onion empire.
* This American Life - Observational stories or long-view reporting on a theme.
* Radio Lab - A science show? A psychology show? With some some pretty daring editing (for NPR).

Reading the above, I see why I don't write promotional blurbs for a living, but all of them are worth listening to.