Rating: 3/5 Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). This book was a bit of an emotional see-saw for me. I found myself agreeing then disagreeing with her almost page by page. But before I analyze, let me describe the book. It’s...
Rating: 4/5 Keith Devlin, The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern; A Tale of How Mathematics is Really Done (New York: Basic Books, 2008). One of the intriguing things about studying history is hindsight. As a music historian, I was fascinated by the...
Rating: 5/5 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (New York: Routledge, 2002). Dr. Faustus was an actual historical figure. He was apparently an itinerant scholar and fortune teller, and there is some documentation on his life during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. (See the Wikipedia article...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin, 2nd edition (NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001). Goethe’s Faust has been on my reading list for a long time. I finally got through it, and it was nothing like I expected. My exposure to Faust has been through music and music...
Rating: 1/5 Anton Zeilinger, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010). I just can’t do it. I’m 100 pages in and I just can’t bring myself to slog through the other 200. I love science books, I am fascinated by physics, and I still want a math degree one...
Rating: 4/5 Oliver Sacks, Musicophila: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2008). I received this book as a gift on my birthday back in 2008, but at the time I was studying for my comprehensive exams so I was somewhat over saturated (understatement!) with music readings. I’m sorry, Blais, but I’m...
Rating: 5/5 Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2010). I have read a fair bit of Wendell Berry lately, and I will soon be looking more closely at his fiction. This collection of essays is more autobiographical and is certainly more literary. The overall focus is on influence—how we...
Rating: 3/5 Juan Enriquez, The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future (New York: Random House, 2005). As I read the book (and specifically, as I slogged through the insane typography) I wasn’t sure whether I should accuse him of genius or hubris. After finishing the book, I decided it’s...
Rating: 5/5 Wendell Berry, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010). I can’t say enough how much I enjoy Wendell Berry’s writing. At a technical level, his writing is beautiful. He uses plain language , and his arguments are clearly and logically laid out. At a content...
Rating: 3/5 John Brockman (ed.), Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011). Edge.org is a sort of think tank, and every year, John Brockman comes up with a question to ask “over 150 of the smartest people in the world.” This year’s question...