I went to the bookstore tonight instead of the gym. Because you gotta work out your brain, too! On the recommendation of Scientific American, I picked up On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee. This hefty volume is a cookbook-slash-chemistry textbook, sure to be well received by fellow fans of “Good Eats”-style cooking shows. I’ve read the first dozen pages or so and it appears to be thorough in scope while maintaining an accessible, conversational style. I also snagged Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer-winning Interpreter of Maladies. I don’t normally go for collections of short stories, but Lahiri’s novel The Namesake was easily the best book I read last year. The first story in Interpreter, like Namesake, manages to vividly capture intense emotion without trying too hard. Hopefully the rest of the book will follow suit.
So I came across this Lessig book, Code. After all of the group hugging going on at boingboing (the Backwards City excerpt, by the way, was truly bad), I thought about giving it a go. But then I looked on the back and the sole quote to sell the book was credited to slashdot.org. Thanks publishers: you made it easy to leave that one on the shelf!