This past year, I read about 14 or 15 books. Most of the reading was done in the restroom, oddly enough, although a couple books were read while sitting on the couch.
For 2010, my quantifiable New Year’s Resolution is to read ~20 books. I received a bunch of books for Xmas last week, and I have several books I picked up last year that I’ve yet to read.
So, for 2010, here is the docket (no particular order):
- The Essential John Nash
- The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
- Game Design Workshop
- Connection Games: Variations on a Theme
- Number Freak: From 1 to 200, the hidden language of numbers revealed [reading now]
- Satan, Cantor, and Infinity: Mind-boggling Puzzles
- Cracking the GRE (2010) [B&N didn't have Kaplan]
- Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America
- Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
- Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy has Distorted our Politics and Haunts Our Future
- Alternadad
- Poorly Made In China: An Insider’s Account of the Tactics behind China’s Production Game
- The Order of the Stick, book 3: War and XPs
- The Fountainhead [Melissa's suggestion]
- Logic Made Easy: How to Know When Language Deceives You
- The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements
- The Disorganized Mind: Coaching Your ADHD Brain to take control of your time, tasks, ad talents
- Organizing For Your Braintype: Finding Your own solution to managing time, paper and stuff [different author]
- Outliers: The Story of Success
- Master Your Metabolism
- The Selfish Gene
- Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health & Survival in a bacterial world [reading now]
- A Short Guide to Writing about Biology
- Microcosm: e. coli and the new science of life
- Bioinformatics, a computing perspective
- Python for Bioinformatics
- Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0
Applications
I’m going to make this a page up above to track my progress!
nice post! 20 for the new year is a solid goal and i like this list. i heard the selfish gene is doubtable (from greg epstein, the humanist chaplain at harvard and one of my heroes
). let me know when you’re done with that GRE book–i gotta take it this year, too!
much peace,
adrienne
I’ve actually read about 1/3 of the way through the Selfish Gene already — it’s really not that huge of a leap. Dawkins isn’t saying that genes are LITERALLY capable of being “selfish” (in the sense that they have some kind of autonomy) but rather that an individual’s genes (be they human, canine, bacterial, etc.) are selected for depending on their ability to propagate and spread further.
It’s similar to how a virus works: A virus itself, the protein coat attached to the injection mechanism, dies immediately after it infects a target cell; but the viral genetic material is reproduced within the cell, and the new virii are released to repeat the process. The “gene” is clearly being “selfish” in the sense that the virus is essentially sacrificed for the benefit of genetic propagation. Technically speaking, a virus isn’t living, but it works as an analogy.
Another book, “Survival of the Sickest“, that I reviewed a while back for another website, supports the notion of the Selfish Gene — many of the diseases we have in modern society, in humans, such as Hemachromatosis, Diabetes, Favism, etc. are genetic anomalies that allow humans to survive certain adverse circumstances (the bubonic plague, extreme cold climates, malaria, respectively) at the expense of long-term health. Put another way: As long as the person can live long enough to reproduce (and thus pass on their genetic material), the survival beyond that point is inconsequential.
There are other factors involved in selection, of course — but I wouldn’t discount the Selfish Gene idea entirely.