March BOM Candidates

I'm sad that I can't convince myself to find the time to re-read one of my favorite authors of all time (Douglas Adams).  But if you've read Dirk Gently and Hitchhikers, and are now so obsessed with Adams that you need more insight into the man, may I recommend the post-humous collection of his ramblings entitled "The Salmon of Doubt."  I once heard him say that he considered himself more of a philosopher than a comic, but I had dismissed the claim as disingenuous until reading "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish."  I now think he honestly considered himself a philosopher, but was trapped by the realization that he was much better at being a comic--i.e., that he was much better at finding absurdities than reconciling them.

As for the March(ish) book of the month, in traditional PVS fashion, I have narrowed the list to three candidates, in order of the number of characters in their respective titles:

1) Life of Pi

2) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

3) The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

If anyone has any preferences or thoughts on the list, let me know.  Otherwise, I will choose one early next week.

Other candidates receiving votes: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (doesn't seem like a good choice for a book on tape); I Am America (And So Can You!) (the "surprise me" pages off of Amazon were pretty funny, but Colbert's style can get old pretty quickly); The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (heard the author on a radio program once and was impressed, but a quick thumb-through made me think I should read it before recommending it); Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual (seriously, though, raise your hands if you've pulled something like this out of a box of childhood belongings in your parents' attic, and actually reread a few pages just for the memories.  wait.  I can't be the only one).