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Due to a combination of good fortune, review copies sent by publishers and exercising wide-ranging discretion over a budget account at work, I’ve added an eclectic mix of tomes to the ever rising Antilibrary book pile.  Some of these are recommendations from readers left in my comment section last January ( working on improving my traditionally lame following -up skills)

   Alexander II The Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky

    Engaging the Muslim World  by Juan Cole

    The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader by Peter Bergen

      The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato

                          and  The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: Hegel and Marx by Karl Popper

      Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

and   Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson

            How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

    Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets 

                                 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality  

                                by Charles Murray

   Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations 

                                by Clay Shirky

   The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age 

                                  by Joseph Turow & Lokman Tsui

  Islands in the Clickstream: Reflections on Life in a Virtual World 

                                   by Richard Thieme

Engaging the Muslim World is not long for the Antilibrary, as I have already begun reading it and will review it here soon. Some of these books can be read relatively quickly, a day or two but others, like The two volume The Open Society, I expect will require a greater investment of time and thought. It pays rich dividends though.

Note, Richard Thieme, despite his past as a scholar-clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, is not t be confused with the historicist, fundamentalist, theologian, Colonel R.B. Thieme.

UPDATED!:

Ha! A good one arrived today, courtesy of Columbia University Press:

   The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity

                                        by Antoine Bousquet

For the dead-tree copy of the 5GW article by LTC Stanton S. Coerr from the current issue of the Marine Corps Gazette that the UMSC keeps locked behind a subscription firewall. Not the 21st century road to influence but maybe the Marines like the virtually few and proud readership. 🙂 Thanks Morgan!

More on the article later.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Purpleslog, we now have:

“Fifth-Generation War: Warfare versus the nonstate” by LTC Stanton S. Coerr

If you post a comment that has more than two links in it then your comment is held for moderation. This is due to spammers deluging me when the filtering setting is lowered.

A practice I’ve adopted since I’ve started blogging is to jot down ideas or questions that I get while surfing the blogosphere. Admittedly, the primary result from this habit is that my desk is usually littered with little pieces of crap on which I’ve scrawled some incoherent sentence fragments. OTOH, sometimes one of these tiny scraps of paper serves to jar my memory and I can return to a topic that interested me. Today is such a day.

A while back, I read an interesting post on “quantum libraries” – the books you read over and over again and learn something new each time. I’ve tried google and technorati to try and find the blogger who is the originator of this term but have failed ( if anyone knows, please shout out in the comments so I can properly link. It’s a great concept and one that applies to all serious readers.

Here is my “Quantum Library”

The Prince

The True Believer

The History of the Peloponnesian War

The Art of War

The Gulag Archipelago

1984

The Lord of The Rings

The Lord of the Flies

I suppose I could “tag”people but instead, I’ll just say that I’m curious about the quantum libraries of the following blogfriends: Dave Schuler, Dr. Chet Richards,  Soob, Lexington Green, Curzon, Smitten Eagle, Jeremy Young, Dr. Von,  Tim of Ubiwar, Cheryl Rofer, TDAXP, Shane and Sean Meade. Post if you have the time.

ADDENDUM:

Joining in on the Quantum Library fun…..

The Innovationist

The Committee of Public Safety

ubiwar

In mt previous  post, The Reading List of Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, I asked for reader suggestions on new additions to the list and you responded both here and at Chicago Boyz. Here is what you offered up:

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations  [ Jeremiah ]

War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage  [ Wiggins ]

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game  [ Wiggins ]

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference  [ Glenn ]

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking   [  Glenn ]

Explaining Chaos  [ Munzenberg ]

From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation  [ Munzenberg ]

The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction, and Emergence (Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Science)                        [  Munzenberg  ]

Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization  [ Eddie – can’t find his second rec on Amazon]

Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web Application   [ Jeffrey ]

The Unfettered Mind: Writings from a Zen Master to a Master Swordsman                  [ Jeffrey ]

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable      [ Adrian – this was also a Hammes rec that I missed in my last post]

Gödel, Escher, Bach. Ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band.      [ Adrian ]

Daemon             [ Arherring ]

Halting State (Ace Science Fiction)    [ Arherring ]

The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War                   [ A.E. ]

City Fights: Selected Histories of Urban Combat from World War II to Vietnam   [ A.E. ]

Criminal-States and Criminal-Soldiers       [ A.E. ]

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets    [ David Foster ]

The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth                  [ David Foster ]

Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (Financial Times Prentice Hall Books.)   [ David Foster ]

The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society      [ David Foster ]

The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations  [ David Foster ]

Order Out of Chaos   [ Shannon Love ]

And here are mine:

Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century  

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History Series) 

UPDATE:

Blogfriend and cybersecurity expert Gunnar Peterson steps up with his own list.