Because… well, you should just see for yourself.
- Michael Moats
Category Archives: Book of Today
Book of Today: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.
Because of all the authors out there, Jonathan Franzen is one of the few who probably knows that today is National Bird Day.
- Michael Moats
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Book of Today: His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman.
Today is the birthday 405th birthday of the poet John Milton, who wrote the line “His dark materials to create more worlds” in Book II of Paradise Lost, the great work from which Philip Pullman took his inspiration and his title in writing the His Dark Materials trilogy.
Reportedly, Pullman was attempting to write a version of Paradise Lost that would be accessible to teenagers. Whether he managed such a feat is debatable, but the results were good enough to be our Book of Today.
- Michael Moats
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Book of Today: Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills.
I realize we’ve used Garry Wills before, but there really is no better book to read on the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It’s almost certainly the finest book ever written about one of the finest speeches ever given.
- Michael Moats
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Book of Today: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Today in 1942, a group of Americans boarded a beached German U-boat, the U-559, and recovered information that helped the Allied forces crack the German Enigma encryption.
The incident and the Enigma code — and code cracking in general — play a major role in Neal Stephenson’s excellent novel Cryptonomicon.
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Book of Today: Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas
Today is the 71st birthday of Hungarian author Peter Nadas, who wrote the extremely long and extremely well-loved book Parallel Stories. It was the best book I didn’t read in 2011. Same for 2012 and almost certainly 2013 as well.
If, like me, you are totally planning to someday get around to reading it, perhaps today is the day.
This was also the day in 1322 that Robert the Bruce won a decisive battle against England, forcing King Edward II to recognize Scottish independence. So you if you are looking for a different long but relevant project for today, you can just watch “Braveheart.”
- Michael Moats
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Book of Today: Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris
After yesterday’s tribute to people who are not smart, today we recognize those who are extremely smart.
This morning the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”
Or in other words:
For a great explanation of everything that led to this latest breakthrough, you can’t do better than Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way, a comprehensive history of the people and ideas that shaped scientific discovery in the centuries leading into our present day. The Nobel is one of the best science awards you can get; Coming of Age in the Milky Way is one of the best science books you can read.
- Michael Moats
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Book of Today: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
Today in 1996 marked the first broadcast of the Fox News Channel.
For more on A Confederacy of Dunces and John Kennedy Toole, check out Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory McLauchlin.
- Michael Moats
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