In the last few weeks I’ve been on a bit of a reading bend.  Between trying to get my baby daughter to go to sleep, finishing up work-related projects and editing thousands of photographs, I managed to read eight books, four of them definitely worth mentioning.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
I’m not a huge fan of the mystery genre, but this book was excellent.  A journalist who though that his career was over because of a lost libel suit suddenly finds himself with a strange job offer – writing a family history of a wealthy Swedish industrialist and finding out the details of a mysterious disappearance of a girl from 30 years ago.

Old Man`s War by John Scalzi.
I am not even going to go into the details or the plot – there are simply too many.  I read this book in one night – if you like space exploration-style sci-fi, you should definitely check out any/all books by John Scalzi.

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran.
About a month ago one of my co-workers sent me a link to the University of Pittsburgh library website (http://pittcatplus.pitt.edu/).  If you run a text search, the left-hand side of the page displays a great visual representation of your search results and how close/far other articles and/or search terms are related to it.  I wanted to see if I could reverse-engineer this little application, so I went to see my grad school advisor, Dr. Spring (http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~spring/).  After I explained what I wanted to do, he told me that I should read Segaran’s book.  It was the best technology book by far that I’ve read in a long time.  Not only did I find a great overview of all algorithms needed to accomplish my task, I learned quite a bit about developing “intelligent” Internet applications.  The only negative thing that I can say about this book is that all examples are in Python, and I’m not a huge fan of that particular programming language.

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.
This book is about the never-ending conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Instead of delving into the minute details of the politics and how we can “fix” things, Filkins presents a series of short stories about his experiences in the Middle East from a very human point of view.  Even if you are not interested in politics or what’s currently happening in the Middle East, I think that everyone should read this book just to get a better understanding of the whats and the whys of decades of violent conflicts in that part of the world.