Some summer light reading set in the Star Wars universe combining it with the horror genre and featuring some very popular characters is a wonderful way to chill out. 😀
Tag Archives: books
Recommended Books: Conn Iggulden’s Conqueror series
There’s loads of historic novels about Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Hernán Cortés, Francis Drake or Alexander the Great, but this is the first time I read a series of books about Genghis Khan, his progeny and the creation of the Mongol Empire. The style is riveting, the story very dramatic and the writer even clarifies in the appendices where he takes creative liberty with historical facts (after all, it’s a novel, not a chronicle).
Go read this now before it becomes a Hollywood movie.
Dos libros de futbol (Dios es Redondo & La Tenés Adentro)
Acabo de terminar dos libros de futbol que me encantaron por razones totalmente diferentes.
Dios es Redondo de Juan Villoro es una colección exquisita de ensayos de futbol escritos por un autor bastante reconocido con una pasión por el deporte y un humor exquisitos. Un libro recomendadísimo para todos los que adoran el balompié con el corazón pero lo examinan con el cerebro. Algunas citas como muestra:
El juego sucede dos veces, en la cancha y en la mente del público.
Elegir un equipo es una forma de elegir cómo transcurren los domingos.
Es posible que el futbol represente la última frontera legítima de la intransigencia emocional; rebasarla significa traicionar la infancia, negar al niño que entendió que los héroes se visten de blanco o de azulgrana.
En sus peores momentos, el fan del futbol es un idiota con la boca abierta ante un sándwich y la cabeza llena de datos inservibles.
El sentido de la tragedia inventa insólitos recursos; sin embargo, a veces el futbol se parece a la canción ranchera y lo bueno consiste, precisamente, en salir ultrajado: “¡Qué manera de perder!”.
Un mexicano adicto al futbol es, entre otras cosas, un masoquista que colecciona agravios, jueves de dolor para los que no hay domingos de resurrección”.
La pelota reclama afecto. Si es pateada con pasión, el tiro acabará en las redes. Si es pateada con angustia o despecho, acabará junto a un vendedor de cervezas.
La tenés adentro de Juan Carlos Pasman contiene la crónica de la “era Maradona” al frente de la selección argentina desde el punto de vista de uno de sus mayores críticos en el periodismo deportivo rioplatense. El libro está muy mal editado y se nota que fue escrito a las carreras, pero pasando esos detalles por alto es interesantísimo. Para los que quieran saber más de cómo se manejan los intereses alrededor de la selección albiceleste es un libro imperdible. Quisiera saber cuándo habría un libro así sobre la selección mexicana en sus etapas La Volpe o Aguirre, pero para como se maneja el oligopolio televisivo probablemente nunca sucederá.
Recommended book: The Ascent of Money
This is a very interesting book by Niall Ferguson that has already been reviewed here and here. It also has a companion TV documentary.
Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these. For example, the Renaissance created such a boom in the market for art and architecture because Italian bankers like the Medici made fortunes by applying Oriental mathematics to money. The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Hapsburg Empire because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust.
This should be required reading or viewing for everybody who handles money every day i.e. for all of us. For good or ill our livelihood depends on understanding the financial events around us but in order to graduate from high school you need to understand science, biology and language but not how to calculate compound interest. Money, as they say, is portable power. Get something to eat and watch the full TV documentary below (also divided by episodes in the PBS website).
Recommended book: The Black Swan
It took me a really long time to finally read this 2007 book (not related at all to the current Natalie Portman movie of the same name).
The whole point of this book is to make a long, winded argument about why the impact and occurrence of the highly improbably is consistently underestimated, with huge consequences for everybody. While it is a rambling, philosophical book whose point could have been put much more succinctly in half the amount of paper, it is also a very interesting (and some would say prophetical) way of looking at the world as one can see from the interview below.
Recommended book: The Muslim discovery of Europe
I’ve always been interested in finding out “the other side of the story”. That was one of my main incentives in learning foreign languages, and the reason why I usually scan international newspapers. As a recent project put me in constant contact with Turkey, I was able to pick up this book at Istanbul airport and was able to read it through. While this blog gives a longer review of the book than I’d be willing to write here, the most interesting bit of the whole book was that for the peoples comprising Medieval Islam, Europe was an uninteresting barbaric fringe following an antiquated superseded religion, and so approached their contact with Europeans from a stand of perceived moral superiority. Not unlike the way Europeans viewed the peoples of the New World in the 1500’s.
The book then gives a summary of how those attitudes changed with the faster European development of the Renaissance to a situation where while European technical, scientific & military expertise was sought after, cultural contact was still avoided. 300 years later, the situation is starting to change as can be seen in the TED talk below:
Disclaimer: I know Turkey is in general much less traditionalist than other Muslim countries. It is generally agreed that the push West was started by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which was not covered in this book.
Recommended book: The pleasures and sorrows of work
I was going to write a review of this Alain de Botton book whose theme is why and when work is meaningful (answer: when it creates delight or reduces suffering in others), but obviously somebody else had made a better job of it.
Somehow I found this ode to how important and significant jobs which we wouldn’t otherwise notice such as power transmission engineering or fishing and food logistics strangely uplifting for a simple reason: I can fully identify with the drive to create delight in others through the results of my efforts.
We end up coming back to the same thing: maybe empathy is what makes us human?
Recommended Book: The Facebook Effect
A very readable, if slightly biased, book on the origins and philosophy behind Facebook. If you want to know more about how startups grow and how Facebook works (or says it works), read this book.
More info: Facebook Effect fan page, Techcrunch
Recommended Book: Wake
Robert J. Sawyer, one of my favourite sci-fi authors (moderately famous now that his novel Flashforward has been adapted as a TV series of the same name) scored another coup with his latest novel. I won’t spoil it for you, but it touches upon how it is to live with blindness, Chinese censorship of the WWW and emerging consciousness. The good news is that it’s the first of a trilogy to be completed in the next couple of years, so I’ll be gladly waiting for more.
Recommended Book: Grown Up Digital
Chances are if you were born after1980 like countless others (including yours truly) you are marveled, intrigued and annoyed by the way older people see you, your habits and your value systems. You understand (but don’t always sympathize with) the way your elders understand technology and the web… or don’t. You are used to have the TV on at the same time as your music player while you read a book, browse the web and have friends coming over. For you video games are as much a social experience as a way to relax and pass away time, and there is no way you would look at them as “The Big Satan”. If you’re already working, you might have a hard time adjusting to hierarchies, but are a diligent team worker and require honesty from the company that employs you.
If you want to get a broader perspective of why these characteristics set you apart from your elder peers, or if on the other hand you are looking inside these brats’ fenced garden see how it all came to this 😉 this is the book you want to read.