h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

After making a suggestion - "Wouldn't it be nice if there was a guide to popular science books...", and being unexpectedly called on it "Why don't you...?", I ended up writing a list of some of my favourites, sorted by science category, intending it to be a list for me to use when working out what to write about.

My list then quickly became *the* list, and after a short play around, it seemed useful to have a second article holding book summaries, linked to from the index page, and to have full reviews in individual articles, also linked from the main index page.

When it became clear it was a pain to manually rewrite the pages for each entry, I then wrote a program to generate the index and summary pages, producing all necessary links automatically, at which point it became clear that making a page listing all the authors would be pretty trivial, (again with relevant cross-links) so now I don't have to do any more manual page-coding.

However, faced with an index of books mainly without reviews or summaries, I have now started on a fairly heavy summarise-and-review binge in an attempt to make the page less bare.
I managed 5 reviews on Friday, but found it hard to do any yesterday, with my mind seemingly chock-full of ideas from numerous half-read and skimmed-through books all competing for attention.

I have done a couple so far today, and hope to be able to plough through some more in the next few days, but also that other people start suggesting, reviewing *and* summarising books.

So is there a place where others can find your list of science books? You mentioned to me a while back in a different conversation that you'd read The Fabric of Reality and found it "thoroughly excellent." Based on your comment, I've purchased the book and am just getting well into it now. My preliminary reaction is consistent with yours. Deutsch clearly is an original and creative thinker. Reminds me a bit of Richard Dawkins in that regard. Thanks for the tip.

The book list is at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A4166336

I really should write some more reviews - I started off OK but then real life intervened, and it didn't seem like many other people wanted to write anything, however, I do have some things I really should add to the list.

Thank you for this update. Your list looks to be potentially very useful, I'd say. Some good titles there. As time permits, I'll read through some of the related conversation threads. I'm sure you're thinking of adding The Fabric of Reality; I just finished it and, like you, think it's excellent. Thanks again.