Railroaded: The Transcontinentals And The Making Of Modern America - Richard White. Focuses a bit more on the wheelings and dealings than some histories of the same thing. Has thesis the transcontinentals caused more harm than good by being built too early.

Crofutt's Transcontinental Tourist's Guide, 1872 edition - George Crofutt. A guide from the era of the towns and sights you'd see on the Central Pacific Railroad.

Various editions of The Commercial And Financial Chronicle from the 1870s. Lots of railroad financial data. (Google Books has tons of this kinda thing!)

The Book: Playing The Percentages In Baseball - Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, Andrew Dolphin. For a website project I'm working on.

The Second Machine Age - Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew Mcafee. Theories on what's happening to society now and in the future thanks to the things tech people are doing.

The Year's Best Science Fiction, 2013 - Gardner Dozois, ed. I'm writing and submitting sci-fi short stories these days, so keeping up with what's out there.

Einstein: His Life and Universe [0] My first experience in reading a biography book (after skimming through Steve Job's one). That's an amazing journey into the mind, work and life of Albert Einstein.

Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python [1] Going through it as an introduction into Data Science and ML, that are hot topics now. As someone whose daily job is building infrastructure to process sensors' data, I would like to learn more how to make sense of them.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10884.Einstein

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25407018-data-science-fr...

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - as the title says, a short version of the whole human history. So far very interesting.

The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick - how Social Engineers work. A bit more boring than Ghost in The Wires, but still pretty cool.

Please keep up the book club, I love this kind of topics!

Library of worlds best mystery stories[1] and The oxford book of American essays[2]

[1]http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12758/12758-h/12758-h.htm

[2]http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40196/40196-h/40196-h.htm

<rather late book report>

Principles of Program Design, Michael Jackson. I found a very good copy with free shipping for less than $5.00. It is absolutely brilliant. It is a conventional technical book style presentation of the many software engineering principles SICP presents using new journalism techniques. One of the cool things is that Jackson dogfoods his methodology to illustrate deeper computer science concepts (e.g. the necessity of a start state for a state machine) with practical examples rather than theory. It does more showing than telling.

</rather late book report>

The relief staff in the bullpen includes:

Programming Clojure, Stuart Halloway.

Elements of ML Programming, Jeff Ullman.

Extreme Programming in Practice, Newkirk and Bob.

Winner Take Nothing - Hemingway

It's a great collection of short stories.

Dialogues and Letters -- Seneca

Once a Hero -- Elizabeth Moon

Shaman -- Kim Stanley Robinson

Probably Approximately Correct -- Leslie Valiant

Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet -- Kerryn Higgs

Prosperity Without Growth -- Tim Jackson

"Rich Man, Poor Man" by Irwan Shaw. Classic - I have been staying up way too late recently. I can't stop reading the damn thing.

Brothers in Exile: Sons of the Starfarers by Joe Vasicek

Was a free book on my new Kobo Touch, bought the next two books in that series and now in the middle of the second book. Nice plot and writing.

Trigger Warning - Neil Gaiman's short story collection.

Trying to finish it before next week when I will drop everything to read:

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson

which comes out on Tuesday.

Cialdini: "Influence: Science and practice"

The Defining Decade - Why your twenties matter and how to make the most of them now by Meg Jay

I've Got a Message for You and You're Not Going to Like It by Andrew Blossom

after the future - bifo

https://smackernews.com/item/9543693 HN