Book recommendations by Fredrik Jonsson

The important things I learnt have come from people, life and books.

I have read more or less everything Asimov have written. I just love science fiction and Asimov is the world maestro of science fiction. This is the last book of the Foundation series and it will be no more since he left us in 1992. He is most famous for the Foundation Trilogy and the Robot storys. The three Laws of Robotics by Asimov.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

”At computer giant Microsoft, Dan, Susan, Abe, Todd and Bug are struggling to get a life in a high-speed high-tech environment. The job may be super cool, the pay may be astronomical, but they're heading nowhere, and however hard they work, however many shares they earn, they're never going to be as rich as Bill. And besides, with all the hours they're putting in, their best relationships are on e-mail. Something's got to give…” (From the back cover, I could't do it better). ”Q: What animal would you be if you could be an animal? A: You already are an animal”. ”My body is my hard drive”. ”We may not achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves out of the gutter with them”. Are you convinced yet? Then read it!

What is the origin of life? We dont know yet but Davies explains what we do know and what he and others belive. All life on earth share the same DNS structure and a cell works the same way in an a single cell organism as in a human. A single cell is vastly more complex than most people know. Davies use several pages in this book to give a quick overview of how a cell works, it's truly fascinating.

Eco i probably most famous for The name of the Rose. Foucault's Pendulum is almost as good and much more bizarre, in a good way. His latest book, The Island of the Day Before, is in my to read pile.

Pictures from the Globe is what the title translate in to English. Forssell has travled around the world several times and given his Swedish audience a warm and very humane view of the world through his books and television programs. He has put words to many of my own experiences in Asia.

Gibson invented the word ”Cyberspace”, cool or what! I have read all his books from Neuromancer to idoro and I long for his next book. Page for page Gibson presents for us a possible future. ”– I don't feel like talking, Lo. Not to a software agent, anyway, sweet as he might be. – Easy. He shot her that catlike grin, his eyes wrinkling at the corners, and became a still image. Chia looked around, feeling disappointed. Things weren't quite the right size, somehow, or maybe she should've used those fractal packets that messed it all up a little, put dust in the corners and smudges around the light switch. Zona Rosa swore by them. When she was home, Chia liked it that the construct was cleaner than her room ever was. Now it made here homesick; made her miss the real thing.”

I'm now reading this book for the second time, it's that good. This time Gibson take us to a future that is just around the corner if it's not already here. We are yet again brought to Japan and that is ”Because Japan is the global imagination's default setting for the future. The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line. The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort of fiction I write behoves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese.” – William Gibson, Modern boys and mobile girls, The Observer

A brief history of time, from the big bang to the black holes. Taste that title! ”In this book are lucid revelations on the frontiers of physics, astronomy, cosmology and courage. This is also a book about God… or perhaps about the absence of God. The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein's famous question about whether God had any choice in creationg the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do” - from the introduction by Carl Sagan.

Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of extraordinary ingenuity and complexity, and a murderer who is prepared to kill again. This is a classical English detective story by the master of the genre. The language is wonderful, the story is thrilling and the description of the settings is fascinating.

The book cover states that ”This book will change the way you think and feel about your life”. Big words, but I tend to agree because this is a very special book. When I read this book a lot of things fell in to place. It's not like the whole truth is in this book (no book or person can claim that!). It's more like when a friendly person took the time to explain the rules of cricket to me and I finally understood all the funny things they did (I still think cricket is a boring game . When you read this book take your time, it's not a book to rush through.

Nearly two decades after Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance Pirsig continue to point out different ways to look upon reality in Lila. He puts the Metaphysics of Quality above the subject-object metaphysics and make it thereby possible to understand many of the conflicts in our society. Well, that my opinion at least. He develops many ideas from his first book and sometimes he takes a steep back before he moves forward. Your first attempt (or second or third) isn't always right. ”Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level of evolution, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control.”

I was a bit suspicious against this book, to much new age for me I thought. It turns out that Redfield is very open and has some really interesting ideas. The way he presents them in a detective (like) story is refreshing and even quit enthralling. As I understand he belives science is necessary as a base but that it doesn't seem to be able to answer the question ”Why?”. I agree with him there and his books is good contributions to the search for answers.

In the late 1970's, when I was in my early teens, I saw Carl Sagans TV serie Cosmos. It made a deep impression on me. One day I will walk among the stars.

This is a awe-inspiring story. The human race recive a message, The Message more precisely. Who has sent it? What does it mean? What effekt would it have on us? Sagan (who sadly died a few years ago) give us his imagination and it's a wonderful gift! ”It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. The circle had closed.”

I didn't know how to describe this truly amazing book so I just copied some paragraphs from Amazon.com.

Neal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types thanks to Snow Crash, which so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self- fulfilling prophecy. But if his cyberpunk classic was big, Cryptonomicon is huge, gargantuan, massive - not just in size but in scope and appeal. […] Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail and so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto - all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). –Therese Littleton, Amazon.com

The subtitle is ”Liberation Through Understanding in the Between” (closer to the original I belive). You could say it's a practical handbook about death that deal with life. Buddhism is a religion I can respect (I have a hard time with many others), I even find it appealing. In the foreword The Dalai Lame say that this is one of the most importent books the Tibitan civilization has produced. ”We Tibetans have a reputation of being very spiritual, though we usually consider ourselves quite down-to-earth and pratical. So we think of our systematic study and analysis of the human death process as a cautious and pratical preparation for the inevitable. After all, there is not a single one of us who is not going to die, sooner or later.”

Future shock, The third wave and Power Shift is Tofflers Trilogy about our changing society. Toffler are one of the this centurys most influential writers in his field. If you have any intrest in what happining around you this books should be in your to read pile. ”At rare moments in history the advance of knowledge has smashed through old barriers. The most important of these breakthrough has been the invention om new tools for thinking and communication, like the ideogram … the alphabet … the zero … and in our century, the computer.”

I don't think Tolkien and his books need any presentation. The Hobbit and The Ring Trilogy are my favourites. ”In a hole in the ground ther lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

The opening lines in this book hooked me, reading it was a profound pleasure.

From the book: The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it's a kitchen, if it's a place where they make food, it's fine with me. Ideally it shold be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!). I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction - vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom. Strangely, it's better if this kind of kitchen is large. I lean up against the silver door of a towering, giant refrigerator stocked with enough food to get through a winter. When I raise my eyes from the oil-spattered gas burner and the rusty kitchen knife, outside the window stars are glittering, lonely. Now only the kitchen and I are left. It's just a little nicer than being alone. When I'm dead worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen. Whether it's cold and I'm all alone, or somebody's there and it's warm, I'll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If it's a kitchen, I'll think, ”How good.”

What physicists do is really quit simple. They wonder what the universe is realy made of, how it works, what we are doing in it, and where it is going, if it is going anyplace at all. In short they do the same thing that we do on a starry night when we look up at the vastness of the universe and feel overwhelmed by it and a part of it at the samt time. How they do it on the other hand can be very complicated. This book deals with the What and not the How. Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics. Most physicists belive that sooner or later they will construct an overview large enough to incorporate them all. If you want to get a grasp about physics and quantum mechanics in particular then get this book.