Books read for pleasure

Long ago I should have started this record! Oops, I keep forgetting to enter the books I recently read. For some I wrote short summaries at Amazon, planning more. Planning to put the short summaries here. Actually, I put a few of my reviews at Amazon.

Books for 2005

Books for 2004

  1. Best Science and Nature Writing of 2004
  2. Best Science Writing of 2004
  3. Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel (purchased but not read yet)
  4. The Proteus Effect, Ann Parson
  5. The Hungry Gene, Ellen Ruppel Shell
  6. The Fall of Baghdad, Jon Lee Andersen
  7. A Hole in Texas, Herman Wouk (purchased but not read yet)
  8. The Secret of Life, Levine and Suzuki (unfinished)
  9. The Extravagant Universe, Kirshner (interesting!)
  10. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
  11. SETI 2020, Ekers etal (eds)
  12. SYNC, The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Steven Strogatz (Sleep!)
  13. Adam's Curse, Bryan Sykes
  14. The Quest for Consciousness, Christof Koch

Books for 2003

  1. Best Science and Nature Writing of 2003
  2. Best Science Writing of 2003
  3. Molecular Biology of the Cell, Alberts, et al
  4. IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and VanHanen
  5. It Must be Beautiful, Great Equations of Modern Science, Graham Farmelo (ed). They skipped Maxwell's Equations!
  6. Entwined Lives, Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior, Nancy Segal
  7. Twins and What they tell us about who we are, Lawrence Wright
  8. The G Factor, Jensen
  9. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Knots and Ropework, Beoffrey Budworth
  10. When Elephants Weep, Masson and McCarthy
  11. Oxygen, The Molecule that made the World, Lane
  12. Insect Lives, Stories of Mystery and Romance
  13. The Future of Life, Edward O. WIlson
  14. Ageless Quest, Lenny Guarente

Books for 2001-2002

  1. Best Science and Nature Writing of 2002
  2. Best Science Writing of 2002
  3. The Boer War: Tabitha Jackson
  4. The coiled spring: How life begins, by Ethan Bier
  5. The end of Science, by John Horgan
  6. The best American Science and Nature writing, by EO Wilson and Burkhard Bilger
  7. The Math Gene, by Kieth Devlin
  8. Aquagenesis, by Richard Ellis
  9. Fly, the unsung hero of 20-th century science, by Martin Brookes
  10. Principles of Genetics, Snustad, Simmons, and Jenkins
  11. Natually Dangerous, by James Kollman
  12. How the Mind Works, by Stephen Pinker
  13. Complexity of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod
  14. The impact of the gene, by Colin Tudge
  15. Evolution (the textbook), by Mark Ridley
  16. Evolution (anthology), by Mark Ridley
  17. The cooperative gene, by Mark Ridley
  18. The Botany of desire, by Michael Pollan
  19. The secret life of dust, by Rachel Holmes
  20. For the love of enzymes, by Arthur Kornberg
  21. Tales from the underground, by David Wolfe
  22. The case against the global economy, by Jerry Mander
  23. Mosquito, by Andrew Spellman and Michael de'Antonio
  24. Mac OS X, the missing manual, by David Pogue
  25. iMovie 2, the missing manual, by David Pogue
  26. The seven daughters of Eve, by Bryan Sykes
I've discovered free copies of "Chapter 1" of some hundreds of nonfiction books at the New York Times web site.

Enjoyed at an earlier time, Recommended!

  1. The Evolution of Cooperation: Axelrod
  2. The Moral Animal: Robert Wright
  3. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Richard Dawkins
  4. Genome: Matt Ridley (read it three times!)
  5. Climbing Mount Improbable: Richard Dawkins
  6. Cracking the Genome: Kevin Davies
  7. Our Cosmic Origins: Delsemme
  8. West with the night: Beryl Markham
  9. History of the Panama Canal:
  10. The Nurture Assumption: Judith Rich Harris (too many words)
  11. Flu : The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It, Gina Kolata
  12. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman
  13. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins
  14. Conquest and Cultures: Thomas Sowell
  15. Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell, Boyce Rensberger

Fiction enjoyed enough to recommend (and sometimes give to friends)

  1. Cryptonomicon: Neal Stephenson
  2. A man in full: Tom Wolfe (great beginning, weak ending)
  3. Snow Falling on Cedars: David Guterson
  4. Memoir of a Geisha: Arthur S. Golden
  5. Pickles: Brian Crane
  6. Bend in the River: V.S. Naipaul
  7. Highliners: William McCloskey
  8. The Monkey's Wrench: Primo Levi
  9. Alaska: James Mitchner
  10. Texas: James Mitchner
  11. Shipping News: E. Annie Proulx
  12. Crime and Punishment: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  13. Animal Dreams: Barbara Kingsolver

Older books

  1. T.Rex and the Crater of Doom: Walter Alvarez
  2. A plague of frogs: William Souder
  3. Netscape Time: Jim Clark
  4. Getting past No: William Ury
  5. Bots: The Origin of New Species, Andrew Leonard,
  6. Nonzero: Robert Wright
  7. How many people can the earth support?: Joel E. Cohen

Fiction, also ran

  1. Bean Tree: Barbara Kingsolver

Shortcut to Amazon.