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Ehrenreich takes a hard, sarcastic, and unblinking look at wage slavery in the United States by joining the ranks of low-wage workers for several months and writing about her experiences. Eye-opening and highly recommended.

A very dark novel about unemployment (a condition I’m experiencing right now) and what one man did to get a job. This book is quite unnerving.

The deservedly famous science fiction novel about the extremes of human behavior during war.

You might think a talking, saxophone-playing bear would make for a silly story. You would be wrong. Once again, my sister Kathy comes through with a good book!

If the Gods of myth (Greek, Norse, etc.) came to America, what would they be like? Read this book to find out. If you haven’t read Gaiman, well, you ought to.

This is a collection of articles by technologists and thinkers in the “Peer to Peer” movement. This book was published at the height of the peer-to-peer buzz and introduces many of the projects and technologies that comprise (or comprised) peer-to-peer. There are articles about specific projects like SETI@home, Jabber, Gnutella, Freenet, Groove, and many others. There are also articles about concepts that are import in peer-to-peer like metadata, privacy, trust, performance, and reputation.

The articles are primarily technical, making this book feel something like a conference proceedings. Also, much of the book’s emphasis is on wide-scale, anonymous publishing and file-sharing, with little treatment of small-group collaboration. Also, in the passage of time since this book was published, several of the represented projects and companies have become defunct. Nevertheless, this is a very good introduction to peer-to-peer.

A short little book about Darwinian evolution. Dawkins uses the metaphor of a river of information (the information being the genetic sequences in all life on Earth) to explain the workings of evolution and natural selection. Good as usual, although lighter than his earlier works.

I normally don’t read modern horror, but this was recommended to me, I think by Amy. Very, very good. Spooky.

Note to self: when you want to get a book on a technical subject, go with geek-oriented publishers like O’Reilly.

This book is terrible. It has a few good insights about building P2P systems, but the collective wisdom of this volume could easily fit in a book less than a quarter of the size. The rest is filled with rambling prose, condescending and superfluous metaphors, and atrocious grammar. Bleh.

I like to think of Stephenson’s work as the succesor to cyberpunk. It has a lot of the grimey-future aspect of cyberpunk, but with more optimism, humor, and nuance. Good stuff.