Some Favorite Books

Science Fiction

Robert A. Heinlein

Time Enough for Love
During his 2000 years of misadventures, Lazarus Long has loved and lost and loved again. And don't miss To Sail Beyond the Sunset (the life of Lazarus Long's mother).

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Manny and newly sentient Mike free luna from tyranical Earth rule by throwing rocks (among other things). The little girl, Hazel, later grows to Grandma Stone in The Rolling Stones.

Have Space Suit, Will Travel
Kip isn't satisfied with winning a spacesuit in a soap contest. He has to get it into working order, and into outer space.

Tunnel in the Sky
When Rod's final exam in Advanced Survival goes wrong, he and his classmates are stranded on a faraway planet.

The Star Beast
John Thomas Stuart XI has a pet, Lummox, who has grown to large proportions by snacking on a few too many cars and other steel tidbits.

The Menace from Earth
This short story is part of a collection by the same name and also in the anthology The Past Through Tomorrow. The heroine of the story is Holly Jones: "I'm very intellgent, but it doesn't show, because I look like an underdone angel. Insipid."

Jules Verne

The Purchase of the North Pole
The plan is to set off explosions that will tilt the Earth's axis enough to turn the polar regions into prime real estate.

Isaac Asimov

The Bicentennial Man
This is my favorite Asimov robot story, soon to be a full-length movie. The title character is the robot who wishes to be human. I also enjoyed The Positronic Man, coauthored by Asimov and Robert Silverberg.

Philip José Farmer

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
You think you know the story of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg and his 80-day trip around the world? Think again!

Kilgore Trout

Venus on the Half Shell
Kilgore Trout is Kurt Vonnegut's author of sexy science fiction. Has Kilgore Trout really come to life to write such a book? Probably not, but Philip José Farmer will make you think he did.

Orson Scott Card

Enchantment
A modern-day graduate student and polyglot finds the real Sleeping Beauty.

Fantasy

Orson Scott Card

Enchantment
Young Ivan, a polyglot graduate student, returns to Russia for the first time since his childhood, waking a modern-day Sleeping Beauty.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Hobbit
Bilbo Baggins is the reluctant final member of a group of adventurers. For years I stubbornly avoided The Hobbit, but I loved it when I finally gave in. Now, how many more years will it take me to come around to the ring trilogy?

For the Young at Heart

J.K. Rowling

All the Harry Potter books
I wanna be Dumbledor!

Richard Adams

Watership Down
Hazel-Rah, Fiver and the other rabbits enjoy nothing more than a well-spun adventure story full of the trickery of rabbits. But now they are the adventure as they travel across miles of open space to their new home. (Last year I also enjoyed the follow-up collection Tales from Watership Down.) y

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The Yearling
Young Jody Baxter finds a pet and a friend in an orphaned fawn.

Sterling North

Rascal
The true story of Sterling North's childhood and his raccoon friend.

E.B. White

Charlotte's Web
Charlotte the spider plots to save Wilbur the pig. White's other two books are also wonderful: The Trumpet of the Swan and Stuart Little.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Little House in the Big Woods
Laura and her family grow up in the big woods of Wisconsin before moving to the Prairie.

Jean Webster

Daddy Longlegs
A mysterious benefactor sends an orphaned girl to school with the requirement that she write to him every week.

Mark Twain

The Prince and the Pauper
Poor Tom switches places with his look-alike, the heir to the thrown of England.

Paul Berna

A Hundred Million Francs
Why is there a sudden interest in the children's wooden horse? Could it have anything to do with the recent train robbery?

Eleanor Cameron

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet
Two boys follow mysterious directions to build a spaceship that takes them to an even more mysterious planet.

Gerald Durrell

My Family and Other Animals
Young inquisitive zoologist Gerry grows up on the Mediterranean island of Corfu.

L.M. Montgomery

Anne of Green Gables
Exuberant orphan Anne comes to live on a farm on Prince Edward Island.

Erich Kästner

Emil and the Detectives
Emil and his gang of children detectives must track down the thief who stole Emil's grandmother's money.

Other Favorite Fiction

Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
A man and his son take a cross-country motorcycle trip, where they find more than scenary and motorcycle maintenance.

Nevil Shute

Trustee from the Toolroom
Keith Stewart, an honest writer for a miniature mechanics hobby magazine travels halfway around the world to recover his niece's inheritance.

Beyond the Black Stump
A man travels from Oregon to western Australia.

An Old Captivity
A man flies from Scotland to Greenland, but finds himself part of an original Viking settlement.

Computing

Edsger W. Dijkstra

A Discipline of Programming
The theory and practice of how to prove that a program does what you say it does.

Michael R. Garey and David S. Johnson

Computers and Intractability
How to recognize NP-complete problems, which nobody knows how to solve efficiently (and, by the way, nobody has yet proved that they can't be solved efficiently!)

Michael Barnsley

Fractals Everywhere
The mathematics of fractals and their use for image compression.

Dan Richardson (Send email to the author)

Create Stereograms on Your PC
Those silly blobby pictures in the shopping mall really do contain 3D images. Here's how to create the images yourself.

Laura Lemay

Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week

Todd Stauffer

HTML by Example
Teaches basic HTML including tables and an introduction to CGI programming.

Douglas Hofstadter

Godel, Escher, Bach
Essays on recursion, self-replicating programs, halting problems.

For Programmers

John R. Hubbard

Schaum's Outline of Fundamentals of Computing with C++
A book for first year computer science students who want to see more examples and problems.

Nicolai M. Josuttis

The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference
The only reference you'll need for the 1999 STL.

Stanley B. Lippman and Josée Lajoie

C++ Primer Third Edition
The only reference you'll need for the rest of C++.

Peter van der Linden

Just Java 1.2
My favorite introduction to Java for programmers.

Whatever Else is on My Mind

Jim Leckie, Gil Masters, Harry Whitehouse, Lily Young

More Other Homes and Garbage
Alternative energy, gardening, thoughts about living on our Earth.

Nick Herbert

Quantum Reality
Best layman's introduction to quantum physics.

Norman Lewis

The Comprehensive Word Guide
My favorite thesaurus.