Monday, July 17, 2006

Yet Another Reading Update

Reading is a very important element in m life. Without it, I feel reather incomplete and without having learned as much as I could. My interests, for those of you that have followed this blog for a while, are pretty specific and general at the same time. I am a big fan of paleontology and its related fields. I love reading about Rome and the Byzantine Empire. I enjoy scifi, some fantasy, and alternate history. I read some politics and economics. Space science and rocketry attacts my attention too. Biotech has some interest for me (heh), but honestly I only read CS related stuff for work or possible projects, not for fun. I also like architecture books, but I am crash coursing my way through what people pay lots of money to get educated in as well for construction and architecture for the obvious reasons.

I have continued to read despite having my wonderful family back. It's at a slower pace, bceause now I have my daughter to play with and my wife to charm and flirt with as well. However my reading still continues.

I recently finished Insulating Concrete Forms Construction: Demand, Evaluation, & Technical Practice. It read more as an advertisement than anything technical, but it was worth it to get an introduction. The book I am reading now Insulating Concrete Forms for Residential Design and Construction is an earlier work by one of the same authors of the previous read, but it has a lot more technical detail in it even if it is a decade old and somewhat dated. The order of reading was perfect.

I also read The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives. A couple of the reviewers nailed this book. One stated that it was somewhere between a coffee table book - with regards to all the illustrations - and a technical report. THe other said this was obviously a labor of love. All I can say is amen. It was lighter on some of the evolutionary trends and pontifications, but heavier on snapshots of particular groups. I recommend reading this as an introduction to anything about fossil felines.

The next book is likely to be Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History to wrap up my reading on the Permian Mass Extinction...at least for now. Then I'll see about another construction or architecture book.

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