The 20 books most often tagged popular science on LibraryThing:

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
2. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
3. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
4. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
5. Chaos by James Gleick
6. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe… by Richard Dawkins
7. The Code Book by Simon Singh
8. Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh
9. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
10. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt
11. The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose
12. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
13. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
14. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
15. Blink: the power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
16. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
17. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”; Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
18. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
19. The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
20. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley

No surpises. Every book on this list is wildly popular, but I can’t help wondering if popular also means ‘read’ or rather ‘owned’…

Fundamentals of Physics is a calculus based physics textbook by David Halliday, Robert Resnick, and Jearl Walker. It is a perfect introduction into physics, and has been well-known to science and engineering students for decades as “the gold standard” of freshman-level physics texts. It explains physics in a clear way without resulting in a ‘… for dummies’ book.

The textbook covers most of the basic topics in physics: Mechanics, Waves, Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism, Optics and Special Relativity. The extended edition also contains introductions to topics such as Quantum Mechanics, Atomic Theory, Solid State Physics, Nuclear Physics and Cosmology.

Two must read books about computer programming:

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a textbook about general computer programming concepts from MIT Press written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, with Julie Sussman. Widely considered a classic text in computer science, it is also known as the Wizard Book (there is a wizard on the cover). Using a dialect of the Lisp programming language known as Scheme, the book explains core computer science concepts. The full text is freely available here (html). There is also an official SICP site, and also the MIT Open Courseware version of the SICP course to assist.

How to Design Programs (HtDP) is another very good textbook on the systematic design of computer programs published in 2001 by MIT Press. Like SICP, HtDP relies on a variant of the Scheme programming language. Indeed, it comes with its own programming environment, dubbed DrScheme. This book also comes with an own web site including the full text.

I think you should read these books BEFORE starting to learn programming languages.

Listing and reviews for a large number of books in cryptography

Jennifer Ouellette put together a great list of pop-science books. Of course wikipedia has an extensive list of notable science books as well. My three favourite books are:

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics – Richard Phillips Feynman
• Philosophical Investigations (German: Philosophische Untersuchungen) – Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) – Douglas Hofstadter

The Free Physics Textbook, probably one of the best on the internet ! Just great !

The Twenty Science Fiction Novels that Will Change Your Life.

And … 20 Science Books Every Scifi Fan (and Writer) Should Read

Lists… I know…

The Observer’s literary editor Robert McCrum stood down this month after more than 10 years in the job. And what a tumultuous 10 years. When he started it was a world of ‘cigarettes, coffee and strong drink’. But that has all changed – new writers, big money, the internet, lucrative prizes and literary festivals have all helped revolutionise the books world. Here he charts the changes in 10 short chapters – and wonders if an ‘iPod moment’ is imminent.

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google? More by Robert Darnton at the NYRB.

But is “historical truth” truer than fictional truth? The difference between history and poetry, Aristotle argued, is that “the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history.” Historians have turned this thinking on its head. History, not literature, is the serious stuff.

More by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker

It has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it. The end of print encyclopedias ? I would hope not. Call me old-fashioned, but I love these printed editions.

Secretum secretorum is a medieval treatise also known as Secret of Secrets, or The Book of the Secret of Secrets, or in Arabic Kitāb Sirr al-asrār, or the Book of the science of government: on the good ordering of statecraft. It is a mid-12th century Latin translation of a 10th century Arabic encyclopedic treatise on a wide range of topics including statecraft, ethics, physiognomy, astrology, alchemy, magic, and medicine. It was influential in Europe during the High Middle Ages.

Sample page (source)

Two charts for determining whether a person will live or die based on the numerical value of the patient’s name. From copy of a portion of Kitāb Sirr al-asrār falsely attributed to Aristotle (see pseudepigrapha). The copy is dated on fol. 9b, line 12: Rajab 1264 [= 3 June-2 July 1848]. The copyist is not named.

(Unfortunately I cannot read Arabic, and couldn’t locate a translation either of this page)

A revelation in its time, Micrographia (1664) exposed the previously hidden microscopic world. Robert Hooke, an early developer of the compound microscope, used his device to peer at the eyes of flies, the stinger on a bee, hairs, bristles, sand particles, seeds, and more, noting every detail with both words and masterful illustrations. The original book is a hefty three pounds, so the digital versions now available are more convenient, but there is something to be said for flipping through a printed copy and discovering, like a hidden treasure, each drawing in its beautiful intricacy.

Marginalia is the general term for notes, scribbles, and editorial comments made in the margin of a book. The term is also used to describe drawings and flourishes in medieval illuminated manuscripts. True marginalia is not to be confused with reader’s signs, marks (e.g. stars, crosses, fists) or doodles in books. The formal way of adding descriptive notes to a document is called annotation.

More info at the marginalia pages of the Cambridge University Library

Yesterday I intended to start reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. But I decided (after a visit to the book shop…) to read first some stories by Jorge Luis Borges : Historia Universal de la Infamia (1935), Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949).

Note to myself: write an essay about Borges.

Yesterday I finished reading Life & Times of Michael K, a book written by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 2003. A very fine story indeed. My next book will be Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It’s the debut novel by British writer Susanna Clarke.

The book is set in an alternate 19th-century Britain, during the Napoleonic Wars. The story is based on the premise of magic returning to England after hundreds of years of desuetude, and the tumultuous relationship between two fictional magicians of the time. The story incorporates historical events and people into its fictional alternate reality. Historical figures encountered in the novel include the Duke of Wellington, Lord Byron and King George III. The novel, written in a pastiche of Jane Austen’s literary style, uses quasi-archaic spelling for several words (such as shew, chuse, connexion, sopha, scissars, headach, and surprize).

The book is interspersed with hundreds of fictional footnotes which reference a number of fictional books including magical scholarship and biographies, and which provide a detailed backstory. Many pages of the book contain more footnote text than main body text. The book features several illustrations by Portia Rosenberg.

Further references:

• Seminar with Susanna Clarke at Crooked Timber
• Susanna Clarke’s Magic Book, John Hodgman, The New York Times Magazine.

The world had changed. The life of the mind in the Age of the Feuilleton might be compared to a degenerate plant which was squandering its strength in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to the pruning back of the plant to its roots…[It had] become common knowledge, or at least a universal sense, that the continuance of civilization depends on this strict schooling. People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue. It took long enough in all conscience for realization to come that the externals of civilization — technology, industry, commerce, and so on — also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.

- H. Hesse in The Glass Bead Game

James Wood about Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Writer discusses the vivid way Tolstoy renders the vitality of his characters. Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and he seems merely to run and… Review at The New Yorker.

Amazon has launched its first electronic book reader, a wireless reading device named Kindle, hoping to drag one of the last bastions of the analogue world into the digital age. Review at The Guardian.

Update: the Kindle ingnites the flames…(37 Signals).

The tumultuous decades between the wars saw the birth and development of a new genre—pulp fiction—that sought in the gritty seams of American life a fresh moral code, one that made sense for hard times and harder people. A review at Bookforum by John Banville. Big Book of Pulps is 1168 pages filled with crimefighters, villains, and dames, and in which the editor compares pulp fiction with jazz…another “entirely . . . American invention.”

‘Many enemies, much honour’, Sigmund Freud thought. It is an opinion that Craig Venter undoubtedly shares, for he quotes with relish a remark once addressed to him by a government functionary: ‘This is Washington, and we judge people by the quality of their enemies, and son, you have some of the best.’ Walter Gratzer reviews A Life Decoded: My Genome – My Life by J Craig Venter

Today I bought:

Wikipedia entry on the writer Murakami and on the book Kafka on the Shore.

Just finished The Inheritance of Loss, a novel by Kiran Desai. A book I really enjoyed.