Adam

Not as amazing as the first one, but tackling more interesting problems. If you listen to the Freakanomics podcast, most of this will be familiar.

On an episode of the Think Relevance Podcast, a book was mentioned where monk chants were used to convey and solve mathematical problems. That was the first I'd heard of Neal Stephenson, and knew I had to check it out. The Anathem world is different from our own. It's a world where scientists and mathematicians live in the equivalent of buddhist monasteries with limited access to the outside world — some only interacting with it every 100 years. The abundance of made up terminology takes some getting used to in this book, but it's worth the ride.

Never has a book been so good and so bad all at once. After finishing the first two in the Speaker series, I couldn't wait to read the conclusion. Although I did thoroughly enjoy the overall story, the pacing and focus was too spread out for me to enjoy this one in the same way.

Speaker for the dead asks more questions than it answers. Xenocide and Children of the Mind are all about answering those questions. Although Children answers more questions, Xenocide has more heart.

Just as good if not better than Enders Game. A very different story, but I can see why this won a Hugo award for best novel. I was impressed that OSC was able to draw us into a completely different world for Ender and still empathize with the characters.

After hearing about the religious controversy surrounding this series, I was interested. After the Catholic League described it as “Atheism for kids”, I added it to my list. The movie (which is OK, aside from rewriting the ending, and removing all mentions of religion) didn't do it justice though. If the thought of children going off to kill god in parallel universes sounds interesting, check these out.

My favorite book of the series, but I was reluctant to like it at first. It does a great job of introducing new characters and expanding the world without losing the momentum from the first book.

At only 3 hours, this is a short introduction to Zen in the form of a collection of talks.

As biographies go, this one was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, nearly every anecdote was something I'd read before, but there was still much in Jobs Next and Pixar years that was great to learn about.

If you don't want to be spoiled on Game of Thrones on HBO, you probably need to read the books. Book 3 is still my favorite, 4 least favorite. #5 is somewhere in the middle. Don't want to spoil anything, but to say it follows a lot of my favorite characters.

Beans character is an oddity. I enjoyed the character in this one, but less so in the political intrigue that came up later in the Bean series. For the Enders Game story though, this one was impressively fun. The thought of reading the same story from another character was not at all exciting to me, yet this was a fun read.