Books

Now apparently I can read about 42% of chinese texts… Too bad that still doesn’t get me much comprehension.

This is mostly for me to review what I am supposed to know while I am on the road.

Pulitzer Prize winner Art Buchwald, best known for his regular column in the Washington Post, has been writing about his experiences since deciding against dialysis and checking himself into a hospice to wait for the end. They are insightful, funny, and sad. Take a minute to check them out.

• Having a High Time Where You’d Least Expect It
• The End. Or Maybe Not.
• Low-Interest Loan
• Who Art (Not Quite) in Heaven

I finally got around to ordering some new books. First up isThe Friar and the Cipher : Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World I am loving this book so far. Both the cipher and the unusual manuscript in the title reference The Voynich Manuscript, an encrypted tome discovered in 1912 by the English book dealer Wilfrid Michael Voynich. I am 80 pages in, and so far the book has concentrated on how knowledge was passed down from Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle through the Muslim world and back to Medieval Europe. It is truly fascinating, if I could retain half of the facts and bits of trivia that this book is throwing at me I would have material to bore and annoy my friends with for the rest of the year.

If you liked Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, you will love this book. The subject is similar, the pacing is better, and you don’t have to worry about which characters are fictional! Even better if you haven’t read the Baroque cycle, but plan to this book is the perfect primer to understand the environment of the characters in that trilogy.

The diary of Samuel Pepys is up in electronic form here. Samuel Pepys a 17th century civil servant known chiefly for the aforementioned diary. Which documents such cheery incidents as the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. Interesting reading if you need to kill hours upon hours at work (not that I have that luxury).

I of course found this through the metaweb project associated with Neal Stephenson’s book Quicksilver.

If you are attempting to get through Quicksilver, it gets better after page one hundred and twenty or so.