13:41, Thursday 1 May., 2008 Link
Books read April 2008, with date finished:
- Arcadia, Tom Stoppard (1st)
- Adventures in Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry (3rd)
- Harmonograph: A Visual Guide to the Mathematics of Music, Anthony Ashton (6th)
- Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, Daniel Goleman (11th)
- Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, Alfred Jarry (13th)
- The Child Garden, Geoff Ryman (15th)
- Michael Rosen's Sad Book, Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake (15th)
- The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin (18th)
- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks (20th)
- Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Norbert Wiener (22nd)
Arcadia's deeper than I remember. Wow. Harmonograph has taken me on a journey. Jarry's books, I have no idea what's going on - I don't even know if I enjoyed reading them - but they've wriggled deep inside my brain and changed me more than most other books I've read in the last couple years. Valuable ammunition in the assault on cause and effect. World War Z is very close to the stand-out book this month. A great zombie novel didn't need to be told as a retrospective oral history from multiple perspectives, but Brooks did it, and my goodness I haven't encountered a book so impossible to put down for a long time. I'm not kidding: I couldn't sleep with that book unfinished on the floor, and picked it up and held my eyelids open until it was done.
But I try to recommend only one book a month. Read Rosen's Sad Book. Sigh.