Recommended Reading
This week's star is the mongoose
Another entry in the "cute carnivore" series, we have the mongoose. Some mongooses are fairly smart and can learn simple tricks. They can be kept as pets to control vermin. (Your landlord will love you.) Mongooses giggle when mating. (I haven't tried that myself but I suspect it wouldn't go over so well.) One of their coolest features is that they are immune to snake neurotoxins because they have acetylcholine receptors! I guess that's why mongooses are sometimes used to hunt or fight venomous snakes.
I tend to read a lot, and mostly anything I get my hands on. Some of the books I've read recently:
- How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, by Toby Young
- Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynn Truss
- A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
- Software, by Rudy Rucker
- Taming the Skies, by Peter Pigott
- Pure Fiction, by Julie Highmore
- Yoga Mind and Body, by Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center
- The Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell
- The Way The Crow Flies, by Anne-Marie MacDonald
- Signal To Noise, by Eric S. Nylund
- Steel Beach, by John Varley
- Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
- Trojan Odyssey, by Clive Cussler
- One Door Away From Heaven, by Dean Koontz
- Talk To The Hand, by Lynn Truss
- Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken
- Essential COM, by Don Box
- The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown
- Will They Ever Trust Us Again?, by Michael Moore
- The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
- Odd Thomas, by Dean Koontz
- Company Man, by Joseph Finder
- Worlds That Weren't, by Harry Turtledove et al
- Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
- Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
- Appleseed, by John Clute
- A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
- Lamb, by Christopher Moore
- Dreamcatcher, by Stephen King
- Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman
- Playing With Fire, by Peter Robinson
- An Illustrated Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright
- Iron Council, by China Miéville
- The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery
- The Know-It-All, by A. J. Jacobs
- The Heroin Diaries, by Nikki Sixx
- The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon
- Bush Pilots: Canada's Wilderness Daredevils, by Peter Boer
If I wasn't so lazy/busy/pick some excuse, I might actually write reviews of these, but hey - you can just go check them out at Amazon!