Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Reading

I finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (review), and it was pretty much what I remembered from reading it as a kid. It did read like a kid's book and was pretty short, and that may have bothered me if I didn't have such great memories of reading it as a kid. But since I did, it didn't matter much to me. I'll now move on to the next book in the series, Prince Caspian. Again, if you're reading these books for the first time, make sure to read them in the order they were published, not the ridiculous chronological order they're being marketed in currently.

So what's everyone else reading? Not that I expect much response, since I just did one of these a couple of days ago.

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1 comment:

PaulNoonan said...

The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford.

Just finished it. It's excellent. Here's an excerpt:

The most surprising examples of all comes from the world of computers. For instance, IBM's "Laser Writer E," a low-end laser printer, turned out to be exactly the same piece of equipment as their high-end "LaserWriter" --except that there was an additional chip in the cheaper version to slow it down. The most effective way for IBM to price-target their printers was to design and mass-produce a single printer, then sell it at two prices. But of course to get anyone to buy the expensive printer they had to slow down the cheap one. It seems wasteful, but presumably it was cheaper for IBM to do this than design and manufacture two completely different printers. Intel, the chip manufacturer, played a similar game by selling two very similar processing chips at different prices. In this case, the inferior chip was actually more expensive to produce: it was made by taking the superior chip and doing extra work to disable one of its features.

Also, The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil (very interesting so far, but also very long).

Middlesex by Jeff Eugenides - OK, but I've put it down a few times. So, not a page turner, but I do enjoy it when I am reading it.

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman - Just started.