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Hiassen is funny. Not as funny as Pratchett or Wodehouse, but still funny enough.

A damn good novel about youth and poetry set mostly in Mexico City in the ’70s.

Smolin surveys the current state of fundamental theoretical physics and finds some problems. String theory has dominated the field for decades but has yet to produce a new experimental prediction. Furthermore, there is no real string theory as such, but rather an enormous number of possible theories which may or may not be unified under the even more speculative M-Theory.

Smolin challenges the scientific community to embrace alternate approaches to fundamental physics and introduces a number of them, some he has worked on and others he has not.

A collection of papers authored by Hofstadter and the members of his Fluid Analogies Research Group, this book presents the results of many years work in cognitive science research.

Also included are a couple papers pointedly criticizing some other approaches in the field, the main criticism being a failure to model human cognition in a realistic way.

Hofstadter is always worth reading and this collection is no exception to the rule.

Sam Shotter gets the girl. P.G. basically writes the same set of stories over and over, but he does it so incredibly well, I never get tired.

The first woman joins the Unseen University. I don’t know why I waited so long to read Pratchett. The man is funny.

This was one of the main inspirations for the movie “Miller’s Crossing”, for which Hammett received some writing credits. Good stuff, too.

A collection of short stories from different Wodehouse universes, interspersed with ‘Our Man in America’ dispatches. And a bonus, an essay where Wodehouse explores, just for a bit, the topic of humor.

A modern author’s account of the principle naval battle in Herodotus’s history, and the central figure behind it, the Greek Themistocles.

The Father of History recounts the invasion of Greece by the Xerxes-led Persian Empire. Edited by Robert B. Strassler and translated by Andrea L. Purvis.