A consequence of doing a lot of flying around on weekends and trains for work means that I have been able to get through a few books quite recently. One of my most recent reads was the classic science fiction book, Dune written by Frank Herbert. Despite being published in 1965, its classic qualities that made it popular back then still hold true today. It is a truly captivating and strange world with deep characters and numerous plots that drew me further and further into their world.

Most of the book is set on a desert planet that is valued for its prized spice hoards but is renown for its harshness with the lack of water and the monstrously sized worms that roam around consuming anything and everything in its path. A couple of Family Houses vie for control of the planet because the source represents an invaluable income due its extravagant uses throughout the galaxy, all while plots of deceit unfold and a legend of old is fulfilled.

After reading the book I’m not at all surprised by the number of off-shoots this book created. The author wrote numerous sequels detailing other aspects of other cultures touched in the book, several computer games were developed alongside a movie and TV mini-series.

I really enjoyed reading this classic book and I’m now reading the rest of the books before I see the movie and mini-series.

One of the books that has been on my list for a while is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. This short book written by Malcolm Gladwell helps you think about the way that you think and the role that your subconscious thoughts play. The book describes many scenarios in which over-thinking problems leads to problematic solutions and other examples demonstrating that only a short amount of information is enough to make the best decisions.

I like the way the author gave many examples but I found I came away without a clear message about when you should follow your “instincts” or when searching for additional information can help. The book left me with an impression that when you are an expert in sometime, there are subtle nuances that allow you to make quick choices about them, and trying to reproduce them by artificial means (such as a process or a program) is near impossible.

It’s a great book and admittedly easy to read. I feel I need to read it again to get a better insight into how I can apply this in every day life but I feel I can still recommend it.

TheKua.com Rating: 7 out of 10

A few years back, I read the book ‘Fat Land.’ that dealt with the eating habits of mainly American society leading to greater and greater levels of obesity. Even though it discussed mainly American society, I thought it still readily applicable since their influences reaches many other countries. Fat Land focused especially on the effects of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a by product so sweet and cheap it is used everywhere but with the hidden cost of excessive amounts of calories.

After reading that book, the book named ‘Food Politics’ jumped out on the shelf. Food Politics compliments Fat Land by covering the “how” industry manipulates the government and the law, instead of the “what” result we have today which the latter book covers. The author, Marion Nestle, also a nutritionist writes about her observations and conclusions after serving on a variety of government boards and committees including the most well known Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I count her as a courageous author, with apparently many others involved in the industry unwilling to publish their opinions in such an open and industry-challenging manner, especially in a litigation friendly country as the United States.

She covers a wide range of topics reaching back to when the government first started advising on the food that the general public should be eating, and the number of events that changed the landscape too what it is today. She discusses the huge amounts of money industry spends on government lobbying, as well as the lesser known and certainly less desirable ways in which companies achieve their objectives without regard to the cost of safety of public health. She writes about the use of fear, confusion, and mass hysteria fuelled through misinformation or conflicts in information to pressure the government into easing their tight regulations as well as the marketing campaigns used to develop wider groups of consumers for their products, specially targeting children and low income earning groups.

It is a tough topic to describe since so many factors affect the choices of people’s food intake including cultural backgrounds, health priorities and financial states. Though not particularly surprised by what Nestle covers, I am sadden by the degree to which companies effectively handicapped the Food and Drug Administration’s capabilities and the result is glut of unhealthy and excessively over-nutritious and under-balanced products saturating the market.

I found it interesting the way in which companies use fortification to get around tight restrictions and responsibilities for ensuring the safety of their foods to boost their bottom line, and more importantly their influence on government with every guideline never recommending “eat less” but rather “eat in moderation”

The author researched the book extremely well and easily cross referenced hundreds of published sources of information. I found the book well balanced in the amount of dry data it offers together with the intimately detailed stories told and fills in a much needed gap not readily available to the public. Though I don’t recommend this as light reading, for answering the question why we have the products we have in stores today.

TheKua.com Rating: 7 out of 10

My last read in terms of a horror novel was the series of Ann Rice books on which they based the movies Interview with a Vampire and the Queen of the Damned. My latest read in this genre, Dark Water by Koji Suzuki, really caught my eye as I was perusing the horror section because I knew a movie had been created based on it. I am in no position to compare the two though because I haven’t actually seen the film.

Dark Water is actually a collection of short stories, that like the title of the book, are all related to water in some aspect. Though classified by the library, as ‘Horror’, I disagreed and found the stories focused more on the eerie side of human behaviour with a number of supernatural aspects adding to the strangeness of each story.

Each story was actually quite easy to read, and I found myself running through them at a very fast pace, probably heightened by fact I was flying out on a night flight. I think the magic in Suzuki’s book is the way that he describes very natural circumstances in a very unnatural way, with less emphasis on the traditionally ‘scary’ side and more on the ‘chilling’ one.

I’d definitely be keen on seeing the movie and working out which story was actually the basis for it.

TheKua.com Rating: 6.5 out of 10

One of the great things about long distance travelling is that you have plenty of time for reading. I managed to finish two and a half books on my first leg of the trip, borrowed from my local library, with one of them being one of the most popular books at the moment, Freakonomics.

Successful writers in a technical area tend to be those that have great expressive powers by communicating ideas in a way that everyone can understand. The success of this book is a typical example, tackling real life subjects that all people from all walks of life can relate to, but analysed in economic terms and distilled in a way that the majority of the popular can understand.

The authors wrote the book extremely well and though some may argue there is no continuous theme throughout the book, I found it more like a book of short stories that may actually appeal to some people. For people like me that have to finish a book when they start it, it is a refreshing style and its simple language and expressiveness had no obvious impact on the flow of the book as I read it.

I took away a number of things from this book including the lesson that we should always challenge (appropriately) conventional wisdom and the amazing observations you can make simply by accumulating large sets of data over a long time (another blog entry coming soon). I found the book was more importantly humorous in its approach and the conversation had an overall light-hearted tone that I think will appeal to a broad range of people. More importantly anyone of any background can read this book and come away with something, if not just a little bit of laughter.

TheKua.com Rating: 8.5 out of 10