Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (fiction)

Date Read:  April 2009

Rating:

Length:  short (224 pages)

Date Published:  1999

Comments: 

Hard Sell by Jamie Reidy (memoire)

The Evolution of A Viagra Salesman

Date Read:  April 2009

Rating:

Length:  short (224 pages)

Date Published:  2005

Comments: 

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (non-fiction)

The Story of Success

Date Read:  March 2009

Rating:

Length:  short (304 pages)

Date Published:  2008

Comments: 

Dry by Augusten Burroughs (memoire)

Date Read:  February 2009

Rating:

Length:  medium (293 pages)

Date Published:  2004

Comments: 

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (fiction)

Date Read:  January 2009

Rating:

Length:  medium (252 pages)

Date Published:  2005

Comments: 

Identity by Milan Kundera (fiction)

Date Read:  January 2009

Rating:

Length:  very short (176 pages)

Date Published:  1998

Recognition:  national bestseller

Comments: 

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (fiction)

Date Read:  September 2008

Rating:

Length:  long (529 pages)

Date Published:  2002

Recognition:  pulitzer prize for fiction

Comments: 

Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen (fiction)

Date Read:  December 2008

Rating:

Length:  medium (335 pages)

Date Published:  2006

Comments: 

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (fiction)

Date Read:  October 2008

Rating:

Length:  medium (384 pages)

Date Published:  2007

Comments: 

Marley and Me by John Gorgan (memoir)

Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog

Date Read:  September 2008

Rating:

Length:  short (320 pages)

Date Published:  2008

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments: 

Date Read:  August 2008

Rating:

Length:  medium (400 pages)

Date Published:  2003

Recognition:  national bestseller

Comments: 

Date Read:  August 2008

Rating:

Length:  short (288 pages)

Date Published:  2005

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments: 

Belief in an Age of Skepticism

Date Read:  July 2008

Rating:

Length:  short (320 pages)

Date Published:  2008

Comments: 

A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution

Date Read:  July 2008

Rating:

Length:  long (368 pages)

Date Published:  1999

Comments: 

A Childhood Lost in Chaos

Date Read:  May 2008

Rating:

Length:  medium (352 pages)

Date Published:  2006?

Comments: 

Three Daughters of China

Date Read:  May 2008

Rating:

Length:  long (544 pages)

Date Published:  1992

Recognition:  British book of the year 1994

Comments: 

Date Read:  April 2008

Rating:

Length:  very short (144 pages)

Date Published:  2006

Recognition:  national bestseller

Comments: 

An Advanced Poker Guide

Date Read:  April 2008

Rating:

Length:  short (328 pages)

Date Published:  2005

Comments: 

Date Read:  March 2008

Rating:

Length:  very short (208 pages)

Date Published:  1988

Recognition:  BBC most read top 100

Comments: 

A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

Date Read:  March 2008

Rating:

Length:  short (294 pages)

Date Published:  2007

Comments: 

A Secular Theory of the Origin of Rights

Date Read:  February 2008

Rating:

Length:  medium (261 pages)

Date Published:  2005

Comments: 

Faking It by the writers of College Humor.com (non-fiction)

How to Seem Like a Better Person Without Actually Improving Yourself

Date Read:  January 2008

Rating:

Length:  short (288 pages)

Date Published:  2007

Comments: 

Date Read:  December 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (227 pages)

Date Published:  1952

Comments: 

Date Read:  December 2007

Rating:

Length:  very short (118 pages)

Date Published:  1945

Comments: 

Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa (non fiction)

From Dating, Shopping and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire -- Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do

Date Read:  November 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (252 pages)

Date Published:  2007

Comments: 

1984 by George Orwell (fiction)

Date Read:  October 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (268 pages)

Date Published:  1949

Recognition:  new york times 100 best English-language novels since 1923

Comments: 

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (non fiction)

Date Read:  October 2007

Rating:

Length:  long (384 pages)

Date Published:  1976

Comments: 

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max (memoir)

Date Read:  September 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (288 pages)

Date Published:  2006

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments: 

Failed States by Noam Chomsky (non fiction)

The abuse of power and the assault on democracy

Date Read:  September 2007

Rating:

Length:  medium (320 pages)

Date Published:  2004

Comments: 

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (memoir)

Date Read:  August 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (320 pages)

Date Published:  2005

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments: 

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (memoir)

One woman's search for everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia

Date Read:  July 2007

Rating:

Length:  medium (352 pages)

Date Published:  2007

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments: 

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom (non fiction)

Date Read:  June 2007

Rating:

Length:  very short (196 pages)

Date Published:  2003

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments: 

He's Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt & Liz Tuccillo (non fiction)

The no-excuses truth to understanding guys

Date Read:  June 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (176 pages)

Date Published:  2004

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments: 

How Doctors Think by Gerome Groopman (non fiction)

Date Read:  May 2007

Rating:

Length:  medium (320 pages)

Date Published:  2007

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments: 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon (fiction)

Date Read:  February 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (240 pages)

Date Published:  2003

Comments:  Amazon.com

Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich (memoir)

The inside story of six MIT students who took vegas for millions

Date Read:  February 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (272 pages)

Date Published:  2002

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments:  Amazon.com

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (fiction)

Date Read:  January 2007

Rating:

Length:  very short (128 pages)

Date Published:  1895

Comments:  Amazon.com

The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton (non fiction)

The common sense guide to successful financial planning

Date Read:  January 2007

Rating:

Length:  short (197 pages)

Date Published:  1989

Recognition:  all-time canadian bestseller

Comments:  Amazon.com

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (non fiction)

Date Read:  December 2006

Rating:

Length:  medium (270 pages)

Date Published:  2001

Recognition:  new york times bestseller

Comments:  Amazon.com

The Roaring Nineties by Joseph Stiglitz (non fiction)

A history of the world's most prosperous decade

Date Read:  November 2006

Rating:

Length:  long (336 pages)

Date Published:  2003

Comments:  Amazon.com

Chaos by James Gleick (non fiction)

Making a new science

Date Read:  September 2006

Rating:

Length:  medium (317 pages)

Date Published:  1987

Recognition:  the national bestseller

Comments:  Amazon.com

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (non-fiction)

Think you know what makes you happy?

Date Read:  September 2006
Rating:
Length:  short (238 pages)
Readability:  very easy and entertaining & informal
Date Published:  2006
Comments:  This book shares the same style and format as Freakonomics, but deals mainly with psycology rather than economics.  The question raised is:  why do we so often fail to predict what will make up happy in the future?  The author talks a lot about human nature.  His main point was that our memories are full of holes, and our imagination is used by our brain to actively reconstructs the mental image.  This is necessary for many our daily functions, but the problem is that it takes place so quickly, quietly, and effectively that we're usually not aware of it.  When we remember the past, we remember things subjectively and selectively, and when we try to imagine the future we are abound our immediate present circumstances.  We are fooled in both instances by our own mind.  The author discusses why sighted people would pay more to avoid going blind than blind people would pay to regain their sight, why patients remember long medical procedures as being less painful than short ones, and why most people who have been left standing at the alter would remember the event as "a good thing" but everybody who have never experienced this event would consider it "the worst thing that can happen".  Author claims there might be psycological explainations.

China Inc. by Ted Fishman (non fiction)

How the rise of the next superpower challenges America and the world

Date Read:  August 2006

Rating:

Length:  medium (352 pages)

Readability:  easy, clear & direct

Date Published:  2005

Comments:  The author provides detailed insights into the Chinese business culture through his perspective as an American economic commentator.  What I especially love was his detailed description of my home town Shanghai, which I have seen with my own eyes the amount of change that have taken place in the past decade.  The book describes China's booming economy, fueled by its huge consumer market as well as a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor.  I mean, my god, the Chinese companies are putting Mexican, Philipino, and Indonesian companies out of business, not to mention American ones!  Whatever China buys, the price soars, and what ever China sells, the price plummets.  Shanghai city scene looks like New York -- it houses 400 of the world's Fortune 500 companies.  The impact on the US and the world is tremendous, and the book describes many examples of China's effect.  It tries to answer to such questions as:  what makes China's emerging corporations so dangerously competitive, what would happen if China becomes capable of manufacturing everything (from computers, cars, jets, and pharmaceuticals) at half the cost, and how is China becoming increasingly more polarized between the rich and the poor, and the contrast between the image of the shiny sky scrapers presented by the government to the rest of the world and the vast rural farming communities still living under third world conditions.

What We've Lost by Graydon Carter (non fiction)

How the Bush administration has curtailed our freedoms, mortgaged our economy, ravaged our environment, and damaged our standing in the world

Date Read:  August 2006

Rating:

Length:  short (352 pages)

Readability:  easy, clear & direct

Date Published:  2004

Comments:  This book is so peppered with thousands of facts and statistics on the Bush/Cheney administration that even if a small fraction were true, really worries me when I think about the future that my children and I will inherit.  The author certainly has a liberal bias, but much of the content is straight facts in bullet form with references, so it doesn't read quite like an editorial.  It covers the Bush administration up to the 2004 election, on topics which include the growing military industrial complex, the environment of secrecy within the government, the economy, education, health care, the judiciary system, the environment, and most interestingly the reputation of the US:  In the wake of 9/11 the world was in state of widespread solidarity and sympathy for the US, but as the war in Iraq progressed, a recent Newsweek poll of people from 44 countries ranked the US as the 4th most dangerous nation (less dangerous than Israel, Iran, and N Korea, but more dangerous than Iraq and Afghanistan).

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner (non fiction)

A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything

Date Read:  August 2006

Rating:

Length:  short (242 pages)

Readability:  very easy and entertaining

Recognition:  the new york times bestseller

Date Published:  2005

Comments:  This is one of the most entertaining books I've ever read.  Although I don't agree with all of the author's opinions, it does bring up some very interesting discussions with clear and logical arguments.  In one of the more controversial chapters, the authors proposed that the Roe v. Wade decision for legalizing abortion led to the decrease in a generation of unwanted babies and therefore the reduction of crime in the US two decades later.  Other chapters describe how and why real estate agents, sumo wrestlers, and school teachers cheat, how much does good parenting matter in comparison to genetics, what caused the KKK to lose their popularity, and how are children's futures affected by having predominantly "black" names like Leroy, Tyron, and Jamal as opposed to predominantly "white" names.  The topics themselves are extremely interesting to begin with, and they deal with everyday things that we typically don't think about and don't associate with economics.  And the authors certainly do a terrific job describing their research on those topics.

The Odd Body by Stephen Juan (non fiction)

Mysteries of our weird and wonderful bodies explained

Date Read:  July 2006

Rating:

Length:  very short (304 pages)

Readability:  very easy

Date Published:  2004

Comments:  The author is a doctor who patiently answers about a hundred curiously weird and silly questions about the human body.  I didn't find all of the questions and answers worth reading, like why doesn't our belly button ever heal over, so I just scanned it for some of the more interesting ones, like why do we get chills when chalk screechs across a blackboard.  However, there was one interesting chapter that I might revisit when it becomes more applicable -- it describes at what age does a human baby develope its senses of hearing, sight, taste, touch, etc...

Buddhism A Very Short Introduction by Damien Keown (non fiction)

Date Read:  July 2006

Rating:

Length:  very short (152 pages)

Readability:  medium

Date Published:  1996

Comments:  All of the books I've read so far from this A Very Short Introduction series have been pretty good, even though they are written by different authors.  Knowing almost nothing about Buddhism, this book gave me a pretty good summary of its history, classifications, and core beliefs.  Especially useful was a comparison of Buddhism to other major religions, since as a religion Buddhism isn't really "theistic" and it isn't really "atheistic" either.  In that respect, I feel the author did a great job widening the definition of a religion and describing how Buddhism fits in.  All the discussions were very concise, and the book was very compact.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (non fiction)

Date Read:  July 2006

Rating:

Length:  medium (560 pages)

Readability:  very easy and entertaining

Recognition:  the national bestseller

Date Published:  2003

Comments:  This was a very popular book, recommended to me by a number of my lab mates.  The author summarized literally hundreds of books, scientific literature, and interviews from around the world to produce a near chronological account of major scientific discoveries and earthly events.  The adventures includes the formation of our universe, beginnings of life on earth, evolution and extinctions, astronomy, archeology, geology physics, chemistry, zoology, and genetics -- pretty much in the order of how these disciplines came into popularity in gentlemen societies.  The reoccuring theme is some poor sap makes a brilliant discovery ahead of his time that was unappreciated, ridicules, and rejected by the scientific community, but later realized to be very profound and useful.  It has a good mix of history and science, although it doesn't go into the science very deeply.  One of the more interesting points made by the author was that we shouldn't flatter ourselves in thinking that we're the pinnacle of evolution -- we're actually more of a fluke.  Many other species like the dinosaurs have existed on this planet for much longer than we have, surviving through numerous natural catastrophes and fierce competition.  Our time on earth, as in the amount of time we've managed to survive, is so incredibly miniscule that in so many ways, we're not the "fittest" species.

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang (non fiction)

The forgotten holocaust of WWII

Date Read:  June 2006

Rating:

Length:  short (328 pages)

Readability:  easy narative, extremely graphic

Recognition:  the new york times bestseller

Date Published:  1997

Comments:  The Japanese invasion of mainland China was something my parents and grandparents told me about when I was growing up, but I didn't know much about this particular event before reading this book.  I strongly believe that this book should be read by EVERY Chinese and Japanese person and to research the event further for themselves.  The Japanese occupation of Nanking took place near the end of 1937, as the Japanese Imperial Army pushed deeper into Mainland China while China is in the midst of its civil war.  The book draws many comparisons between this event and the Halocaust in Europe.  In terms of the rate of the massacre, while 6 million Jews were killed in the Halocaust over the course of 7 years between 1938-1945, and 300,000 Chinese civilians were slaughtered just over the course of 2 month.  And while the German people acknowledge this terrible act and established laws against commending the Halocaust, the Japanese government have never acknowledged their atrocity and have even tried to rewrite history by depicting  the Japanese army as liberators of China in school textbooks.  The book is narrated from three different perspectives.  The most interesting one is from the journals kept by a group of westerners living in Nanking during this event, who stayed in Nanking during the entire occubation and saved thousands of Chinese people by forming a safety zone within the city during the occupation.

A Public Betrayed by Adam Gamble & Takesato Watanabe (non fiction)

An inside look at Japanese media atrocities and their warning to the west

Date Read:  May 2006

Rating:

Length:  medium (464 pages)

Readability:  easy, clear and direct

Date Published:  2004

Comments:  This is a very well written book, documenting the history of corruption in the Japanese news media as well as painting a thorough picture of Japanese culture in general.  In Japan, the readership and circulation of news papers far exceeds that of North America, but journalism ethics are rarely applied as news papers compete for subscribers.  The book describes 5 case studies where the media:  knowingly vilifies innocent victims of terrorist attacks, denies the Holocaust and supports anti-Semitism (even though Japan has virtually no Jewish citizens), wrongfully smears the reputation of a prominent Buddhist leader, whitewashes and denies the Nanking Massacre, and defames the WWII Japanese sex slaves.  The book draws many parallels with the news media in the United States, and warns that Japan isn't an isolated example of a strange and distant exotic culture, but that the United States is heading in the very same direction with its own news media.  I recently understood what the the authors were talking about when I read a study where people were surveyed about what news channels they watched and what they know about general current events.  In comparison to people who watched other news networks, a significantly higher percentage of people who receive their news from FOX believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and that the world supports the war in Iraq.  FOX is owned by conservative Rupert Murdoch (see wiki) and George Dubya's first cousin John Prescott Ellis, who was responsible for Fox News' declaration of Florida's result in the 2000 election (see Fahrenheit 9/11).  This kind of mainstream outlet for government propaganda is pretty scary.

The Worst-Case Scenario by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht (non fiction)

Book of survival questions

Date Read:  January 2006

Rating:

Length:  very short (288 pages)

Readability:  very easy

Date Published:  2005

Comments:  My cousin bought me this book for Christmas, which is part of the popular Worst-Case Scenario book series.  It's got a lot of interesting scenarios like how to escape from an avalanche (if you are Vin Diesel, just snowboard faster than the avalanche), what to do when stuck in quicksand, and what to do if you're attacked by killer bees.  The book is definitely entertaining partly because most of the situations seem pretty far fetched, but if I'm ever stuck on top of a moving train, I'll know how to get to the front of the train to stop the terrorists.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (non fiction)

How little things can make a big difference

Date Read:  January 2006

Rating:

Length:  short (304 pages)

Readability:  very easy and entertaining

Recognition:  the national bestseller

Date Published:  2000

Comments:  My buddy Eugene got me this book for Christmas, and it was the first book I actually read in about two years.  This is a very well written book about how little things can make a big difference such as whether a restaurant becomes successful, how diseases spread, and how crime rates can dramatically change (although regarding crime rates in the US, Freakonomics provide a different explanation).  The book offers numerous examples and case studies to make its point.  One of the most interesting chapters discusses smoking -- about why smoking is attractive to teenagers, how people can have different responses towards this addiction, and why current anti-smoking efforts have not been successful.  The book discusses many studies in psychology, one that I found absolutely fascinating was the one about the good Samaritan, and how people's actions are so strongly influenced by their immediate situation in comparison to other more long lasting factors like their character and beliefs.