Books I'm Currently Reading (November 2009 Edition)

It's been about four months since I last revealed what books I've temporarily released from their shelf space, which must mean that I'm overdue for a new list. I still have The Batcave Companion on the go from the last group, but also am now in the middle of:

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman - While not quite as engaging a read as his later work, The Conscience of a Liberal, this is an interesting explanation of what happened to the economies of Japan, Brazil and others that should have served as a warning for what lurked within the financial world going into the second half of 2008. I think Krugman was one of the economists who saw the current crisis coming, though... for all the good it ultimately did anyone.

An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore - I bought this because I'm such a fan of the film, but to be honest there's not a whole lot of difference between the two. Still, it's a good reference source to have handy that doesn't require loading a DVD into a player to use!

Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn - I received my personalized, signed copy from Mr Cohn himself last week, and have been enjoying it since then. I'd read (and provided feedback) on most of the chapters in it previously, but it's still a fun read and should prove to be an invaluable resource for any organization that decides to "go Agile" from here on out. Too bad it wasn't around for us three years ago! Not surprisingly, I've noted several things in this book that we did wrong in our Agile adoption in 2006 - 2008, and each is something that eventually bit us in the ass.

Calculus with Analytic Geometry by Howard E. Campbell and Paul F. Dierker - It turns out that I've forgotten nearly everything I ever knew about Calculus! That was the bad news; the good news came when I remembered that I kept all of my university text books after I'd finished with them, and shortly thereafter found this book in the basement. I may not get all the way through it, but at least it's providing a good refresher on what all this nonsense is actually about (slope of a tangent line to a curve! Who knew?) And that's good to know, just in case I end up with a Grade 12 student at some point and need to understand it.

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham - This is my 4th Wyndham novel this year, as I whipped through The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes and Day of the Triffids before opening this one. I realized fairly quickly that I've never read Midwich before, and that it's quite different than any movie version I've seen (in whole or in part). I like it for Wyndham's attention to detail and the matter-of-fact way his villagers take on the burden of being "cuckold", but its pace wouldn't exactly set anyone's heart a-flutter. My favourite of the Wyndham books so far is still Kraken, which I could imagine reading again (for the 3rd time) in just a few short years.