my mind on books

The Dec 2007 issue of Scientific American highlights a selection of books “especially appropriate for holiday gifts,” including Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind.

Link to the book’s website

I haven’t succumbed to the temptation of the Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device, partly because I’m afraid those quick book downloads at $9.99 or more could develop into an expensive habit (“crackberry” for bibliophiles?) – or else I’d be reading lots of free first-chapter samples. I have come across a couple of posts recently that delve into the Kindle in depth:

“Why Amazon’s Kindle is revolutionary” – looks at some of the Kindle’s lesser known features

“Getting serious about the Kindle” – Geoff Arnold reports on three weeks of using the device and a decision he recently faced over whether to buy a hardback or Kindle edition of a book.

Santa did stop by early to drop off an ASUS Eee (4G Surf model), which I’m using right now to type up this post! It’s a small but pretty full-featured “sub-notebook,” weighing under 2 lbs and costing less than $400. Though lacking a CD or DVD player it does have slots for an SD card and two USB 2.0 ports. I’ll be able to slip it into my purse and carry it with me to read e-books, listen to music, watch movies, surf the web, play games and more. Our pet name for it is “Tripeee.”

ReadMe is a MetaFilter Wiki page collecting (and organizing) all the book-related topics from Ask MetaFilter, usually book recommendations on specific topics.

For example, filed on the wiki under “Science & Math: consciousness” – there are two entries: 1 (“recommend books about consciousness”) and 2 (“what to read after Dennett’s Consciousness Explained?”)

Also “recent books on cognitive science”

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Another good source of book lists is the site Lists of Bests, where I found “Mindpapers: 100 most cited works in the Philosophy of Mind”.

I’m looking forward to reading The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren, especially after reading this review in the SF Chronicle, which concludes:

Reality, in other words, may be more malleable than we’d like to think. Pain may cease to be a part of it for the hypnotized surgery patient. Thunderclaps may fade to whispers for the man in a meditative trance. The only constant is our mind, but as Warren discovers on his mental journeys, “there’s just no telling what it will get up to.”

[The review actually appeared in the Sunday 12/16/07 Chronicle.]

More on The Head Trip at Google Book Search

The “Library Problem” sounds like some kind of logic puzzle, but it’s actually the title of a wonderfully detailed post from Hackito Ergo Sum about organizing a home library, with lots of comments. This post was yesterday’s “Library Link of the Day” (12/12/07).

For the record I’ve used both LibraryThing and ReaderWare and can recommend both – ReaderWare is fine if you want a self-contained database on your computer; I’ve mentioned LibraryThing many times here – it’s a great web-based cataloging solution with lots of extra features, plus a good source of book information even if you don’t want to catalog your books there.