Reading List

I received a few new books over the Christmas holidays. They total somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3,500 pages, so I should be finished reading them all roughly around the end of time. Here they are briefly, and hopefully I'll post some comments as I finish each of them. Don't hold your breath, though.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
This is a wonderful thousand-page book that would seem to have an incredibly narrow appeal. It's essentially a survey of current thinking across all mathematical disciplines, written to be as accessible as possible. The original goal for the book was that it could be handled by anyone with high school-level math, but the authors weren't able to meet this for all sections. I find this incredibly interesting, and pretty much everyone else I know would not find it interesting at all :).

Under the Dome, Stephen King
I'm a reasonably big fan of King, although I haven't read some of his more recent stuff. This one has been getting reviews in the range of good to great, and drawing comparisons to The Stand, which is a favourite of mine.

The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons
Bill Simmons writes for ESPN; he's also known as The Sports Guy. This book is essentially just all of his opinions about basketball, including a few hundred pages ranking the best players of all time.

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born
Stephen King wrote a seven-novel series called The Dark Tower over a period of about 30 years. Recently, Marvel has been publishing comics in the Dark Tower universe. This book is a collection of the first few issues.

A Mathematical Nature Walk, John Adam
I hadn't heard of this one prior to receiving it for Christmas, but it looks to be the kind of thing I like.