What Happened to 2011?

How quickly a year can go by and without a word from the egotists. If my confederates are anything like me then they got bogged down with their own daily lives and had trouble summoning the energy to do anything at the end of the day more than play video games and watch old seasons of TV shows on Netflix.

Honestly, I did think of posting on current events or random thoughts from time to time, but they just never seemed quite important or relevant enough to follow through on. So I never did. It will probably happen again, but I'm going to try and be less selective of the stuff I put up here, in an attempt to breathe some life back into the blog.

So for today I decided to post on what I've been reading lately. This last gift giving season was one of books and eBooks for me. I have joined the world of smart phones, iPads, and eReaders. I already had a significant stack of books on my shelves that I hadn't gotten to yet, but instead of reading those  I dove into new ones.

Last year George R. R. Martin finally published the fifth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. In anticipation of its release and the premier of the HBO series based on the books I worked my way through the first four books for the second time. These were the first books I got for my iPad, mainly because the hard-backs I own are thick and heavy and impractical for travel. Once I finished them I was finally ready for "Dances with Dragons". I picked up the eBook and devoured it in a few short weeks. I was satisfied, although still longing for some resolutions which will continue to elude us for some time.

Over the summer my wife and went to The Amazing Meeting 9, a science and skepticism convention in Las Vegas, and I picked up a few books. While there and on the trip home we both read "The Physics of the Buffyverse", by Jennifer Ouellette, and "The Physics of Star Trek", by Lawrence M. Krauss. They were entertaining and interesting, but there was quite a bit of overlap in them.

The last book I completed was "The Most Human Human", by Brian Christian. This was a surprisingly good read. It blends computer science, philosophy, sociology, and poetry in a mind-expanding way. It definitely changes the way I look at human interactions.

Right now I am just starting several books at once. I haven't really settled into one in particular yet and alternate reading a chapter in each. On my nightstand are "Catch-22", by Joseph Heller, "Just a Geek", by Wil Wheaton, and "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: a Work of Fiction", by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. The last one is an interesting work, in that it is self referential. The main character is an author who wrote a popular book by the same title, and had become the new face of atheism. The book's success is due to the appendix in which the author catalogs 36 typical arguments for the existence of God along with critical analysis, pointing out logical fallacies, and responses to each one. The actual book includes this very appendix, which is a great resource.

That's it for now. What did you read last year?