Book Binge
Mike and I went to Barnes and Noble the other day looking for a book for him. We didn’t find one, but I bought three books for myself. I haven’t got a chance to read them yet, but I’m excited about all of them:
Digital Fortress by Dan Brown: I enjoyed reading The DaVinci Code, so I thought I would give another book a chance. The premise of the book is that someone has created a code that is unbreakable and it puts the government in a bad situation. The hero is a mathematician, which I like. The only problem with the plot is that anyone with a random number generator can create an unbreakable code nowadays. Cryptography has gotten to be a big computer issue, so I’m wondering if Dan Brown has the “skillz” to actually write this book. I guess I’ll see.
You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay – The book I picked up is the fancy schmancy version with lots of pretty pictures and full color glossy pages. I don’t know why I was willing to pay ten bucks more for this book, but I had wanted to pick it up for awhile and I thought the paper felt good. I have long believed that there are psychological reasons for some of our sicknesses. I thought I invented the idea until someone told me about this book that has been around since 1984. I thought I’d read her take on the whole idea and see what she recommends about my stomach pains.
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld: Ever since I read Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, I have been waiting for this book to come out. This is a sci-fi book set in a future where everyone undergoes surgeries to make them “pretty” at the age of sixteen. Our hero narrowly escaped her surgery throughout most of Uglies, but at the very end, she was taken into the large facility and changed. Will her friends be able to rescue her? Will she even want to be rescued after she becomes “pretty”? I put this book on hold at the library, but when I was at Barnes and Noble, I already had an armful of books, so I decided that I would actually buy this one. This is the book I’m most excited to read.
I just finished reading this book, so I’m free to start in on my new ones.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell: I just finished reading this book. I picked it up and read over half of it in an evening. It is a non-fiction book about the ability of our minds to make split-second decisions. Some people call it intuition; others call it a gut reaction. Whatever it is, it’s usually right, even when we can’t articulate why it’s right. I was kind of hoping this book would tell me how to use this ability to my advantage, but it is focusing on stories about the phenomenon instead of how-to instructions.
Click here to read the best quotations from the book:
When I said I was hibernating this winter, I wasn’t lying. I’ve stocked up on enough reading to keep me busy for a couple of weeks. Maybe by then, I’ll be acclimated to the weather enough to be willing to venture outside.