Stuff I've recently read:
Noam Chomsky - Hopes and Prospects. It goes without saying that this is chock full of important information that conveniently gets left out of mainstream media outlets; anyone who's read one of Chomsky's book-length volumes before should know what to expect. Needless to say he's not a fan of the current administration and he makes it clear just how far they've descended into the same lawlessness practised by the Bush administration. I'd say this is pretty much essential reading for anyone who wants insight into why the country hasn't improved as much as so many of our media types believed it would. And, as is par for the course with Chomsky, the documentation for his claims is quite thorough, so you can figure out where he's getting his information pretty easily with a trivial amount of googling of the sources listed in the endnotes.
Daniel Suarez - Daemon and Freedom™. After a famed computer game developer's obituary is posted in the news, a computer program activates that begins killing former employees of his company, and later law enforcement officials who attempt to investigate his property. And that's only the beginning. I'm not going to disclose any of the plot beyond this because Suarez takes delight in constantly confounding the reader's expectations, especially in the first book. I will say that this is a technothriller with no letup on either the techno or the thriller that was written by a person who clearly understands the technology he's writing about, which is a nice change of pace for the usual entries in the genre (Dan Brown I'm looking at you). All of the technologies described within either exist in real life or are expected to exist within short notice, and the fact that Sobol was a multibillionaire who spent a lot of his fortune on R&D makes the existence of anticipated technologies more believable. I will also say that Suarez has a superb grasp of the issues facing mankind and many of the solutions he has for them are things I'd never even thought of before. Whether they're realistic will be up for the reader to decide.
Current reading includes:
Nouriel Roubini & Stephen Mihm - Crisis Economics. Roubini has a reputation as the economist who predicted the current economic crisis in perhaps the greatest detail, and the analysis here goes a long way towards explaining how he was able to do it. The authors contend that financial crises are entirely predictable based on certain behaviours in the market, and go into exhaustive detail describing some of these behaviours. The authors then review how various schools recommend dealing with crises (Austrian, Keynesian, Marxist, etc.), going into the strengths and weaknesses of each, and then make specific policy recommendations for how to deal with crises in the future, most of which seem to be eminently reasonable (I've only skimmed through this part of the book at this point). Recommended reading.
John Twelve Hawks - The Traveler. Since the final volume of the trilogy finally came out in paperback last week, I picked this up in the book store a few days ago based on a recommendation from customers who seemed to know what they were talking about last year. The series is set in an alternate reality earth where people called Travelers can visit other realms, but apart from the existence of Travelers and a few other factions invented for the series it's set in our present day. Thus far the depiction of technology used for surveillance and the extent to which it is employed makes Orwell look downright complacent. This is paranoia fuel to the highest degree: they really are out to get you. Libertarians and left-wingers will probably appreciate Twelve Hawks' view of the world. Thus far I've been immensely drawn into the series and have already picked up the second book.
I have a lot more stuff I'm reading at the moment (working at a book store basically ensures that I never have fewer than ten books in progress at once) but I'm too lazy to talk about it now. Maybe later.
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Originally Posted by Miriel
