The Books Are Winning

Yesterday I was in the library for twenty minutes and left with 9 books.  I even know how it happened.  First, I was just going to pick up a book in the 003’s (Systems) and the 004’s (Data Processing and Computer Science), so I did – easily grabbing just the one book which stood out to me in each section.  Then I thought, surely my blog readers would like to hear a little about why I picked the books I did and it should be easy enough to write about the very few other books available.

In the 003’s, the book The Black Swan – The Impact of the Highly Improbable was the first book to jump out at me – an attractive cover, a New York Times best seller, and related to my first book (Wrong) by its discussion of experts’ inability to predict the most important but least likely events.  However, the other book in the section Chaos, also looked too interesting to leave behind.  It talks about such subjects as predicting the weather and modeling wildlife populations, as well as offering explanations of common buzz words like “The Butterfly Effect”.

In the 004’s it was more a matter of picking the least objectionable book of the three there.  One book was clearly a history of computers and of no interest to me and a second (The Good, The Spam and The Ugly) sounded like a guide to using e-mail for an older generation.  The third was called Small Pieces Loosely Joined – A Unified Theory of the Web and talked about the way the internet and the real world relate.  As a beginning blogger this seemed like a good topic to think about and although the book was published in 2002, the topics mentioned in the synopsis still sounded relevant.  So I had found my 004 book.  Until closer inspection revealed the The Good, The Spam and The Ugly  turned out to be the story of one man getting even with many internet scammers and con artists.  I’m pretty sure I read something about this guy around the time his book was published (some time in 2007) and it sounded way too amusing to pass up.

Finally, I decided I needed some fiction to lighten things up and walked out with an entire 5 book series.  One of my pet peeves is finishing a book in a series and being unable to get the next. This means I’m often that girl staggering out of the library with a stack of books as tall as my head, but some sacrifices are worth making, haha.  So, stay tuned for lots of exciting book reviews coming up.  I can’t wait to get started!