Read more books

The Powerbook

by Jeanette Winterson

From Publishers Weekly
Composed in tight, spare prose echoing Web communications, Winterson’s seventh novel takes its cues from the Internet, where reality is implied but never inherent. Like the protagonist of her previous novel, Written on the Body, narrator Ali is not defined by sex. An Internet writer, she/he creates stories for people, offering “Freedom, just for one night,” allowing her e-mail clients to be whoever they want to be. In return, they are required to understand that, like customers at Verde, the famous old costume shop in London where Ali lives, they may enter as themselves and leave as someone else. Such is the transformation Ali undergoes after a brief liaison in Paris with a married woman. Falling desperately in love, Ali follows the unnamed woman to Capri and attempts to convince her to leave her husband. Entwining this love story with accounts of Turkish tulip bulbs disguised as testicles, and tales of Lancelot and Guinevere, Winterson treads a slippery slope between linear storytelling and multidimensional cyberfiction. Most conventional, but also most egregious, is a digression recounting Ali’s childhood as the adopted daughter of scrap-yard owners who are terrified of straying out into the Wilderness (the real world), but still hope that one day their daughter will find the Promised Land that exists in the heart. Winterson’s dashing, sensually stylish writing is marred by heavy-handed symbolism, but the concept of transformation is adeptly juggled throughout. The brightly colored jacket, featuring two suggestively limp tulips, plays directly to the sensibility of Winterson’s many fans. (Nov. 3)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. —This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The World and Other Places

by Jeanette Winterson

Editorial Reviews
Her first short story collection exhibits the multitude of talents that have made English novelist Jeanette Winterson not just admired but beloved by her many fans. There are the surprising, fresh little phrases minted expressly to convey the delicate realities of the made-up world. There’s the humor, fierce and sly but always kind. There’s the imagination that changes gender and historical epoch at whim, and does so convincingly; and the characters themselves, a sundry bunch of men and women not necessarily successful or commendable but always, somehow, likable. Best of all, by their very diversity, these stories reveal glimpses of the smart and enigmatic woman behind the work.

In “Atlantic Crossing,” Winterson becomes a middle-aged businessman of the mid-20th century, accidentally assigned to share his second-class cabin with a young black woman on a transatlantic crossing. In the realm of event, little happens, but in its depth of perception and what it tells of the nuances of regret, the story is as rich as a novel in another writer’s hands. A few scant pages later, Winterson becomes a kind of lost female Homer, telling Orion’s story from Artemis’s point of view: “When she returned she saw this huge rag of a man eating her goat, raw…. His reputation hung about him like bad breath.” In “The Poetics of Sex,” she creates a lesbian love story that evokes her characters’ personalities as explicitly as their erotic pleasures. “The 24-Hour Dog,” the story of a woman writer returning a puppy she had thought to adopt, is remorseless as a psychological thriller in the squirmy depths it plumbs: “I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated: his heart and mine.” Read The World and Other Places twice, once for instruction, once for joy. —Joyce Thompson

The Da Vinci Code

by Dan Brown

page turner 
very well written
remember it's fiction

“The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”

-Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler (born October 3, 1928) is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communications revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity. A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact (through effects like information overload). Then he moved to examining the reaction of and changes in society. His later focus has been on the increasing power of 21st century military hardware, weapons and technology proliferation, and capitalism. He is married to Heidi Toffler, also a writer and futurist.

Three Lives (Dover Thrift Editions) (Paperback)

by Gertrude Stein

Book Description
Clear, carefully crafted stories of three women, whose relatively ordinary lives and minds Stein invests with extraordinary interest. Excellent entree to author’s later work.

Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (Hardcover)

by Michio Kaku

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Well-known physicist and author Kaku (Hyperspace) tells readers in this latest exploration of the far reaches of scientific speculation that another universe may be floating just a millimeter away on a “brane” (membrane) parallel to our own. We can’t pop our heads in and have a look around because it exists in hyperspace, beyond our four dimensions. However, Kaku writes, scientists conjecture that branes—a creation of M theory, marketed as possibly the long-sought “theory of everything”—may eventually collide, annihilating each other. Such a collision may even have caused what we call the big bang. In his usual reader-friendly style, Kaku discusses the spooky objects conjured up from the equations of relativity and quantum physics: wormholes, black holes and the “white holes” on the other side; universes budding off from one another; and alternate quantum realities in which the 2004 elections turned out differently. As he delves into the past, present and possible future of this universe, Kaku will excite readers with his vision of realms that may exist just beyond the tip of our noses and, in what he admits is a highly speculative section, the possibilities our progeny may enjoy countless millennia from now; for instance, as this universe dies (in a “big freeze”), humans may be able to escape into other universes. B&w illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
In the end, as our universe is dying, will civilization be able to move to another universe? Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, thinks the possibility of such a transition appears in “the emerging theory of the multiverse-a world made up of multiple universes, of which ours is but one.” Our universe is now expanding. “If this antigravity force continues, the universe will ultimately die in a big freeze.” That is a law of physics. “But it is also a law of evolution that when the environment changes, life must either leave, adapt, or die.” Moving to another universe is one possibility cited by Kaku. Another is that civilization could build a “time warp” and travel back into its own past, to an era before the big freeze. A third is that “an entire civilization may inject its seed through a dimensional gateway and reestablish itself, in its full glory.” Kaku is good at explaining the cosmological ideas-among them string theory, inflation, wormholes, space and time warps, and higher dimensions—that underpin his argument.

Editors of Scientific American

“You Can Change the World”

by Ervin Lazlo

Editorial ReviewsNew Living Magazine, September/October 2004
”...a groundbreaking book for healers environmental activists and pro-active citizens who see the world as a global community.”

Book Description
You don’t have to be a senator or a CEO to make a difference; the changes that can heal the planet begin with you. In this ground-breaking look at the state of the world, distinguished scientist and futurist Ervin Laszlo outlines concrete steps every individual can take right now to change things for the better. You will learn:

• The “Ten Commandments of Responsible Living.”
• How to update your belief system to survive in the 21st century.
• How to pressure government, corporations and the media to live up to their responsibilities.
• The two scenarios: Breakdown or Breakthrough. • How to start your own revolution in consciousness.

With contributions from Mikhail Gorbachev, Paulo Coelho, and Masami Saionji, this is a practical handbook for the citizen who doesn’t want to wait for government and big business to fix the problems of the world. Part political action handbook, part spiritual guide, this is a book for everyone who cares about the future of our planet.

See all Editorial Reviews

“Love Thyself, Message from Water III”

by Masaru Emoto

Book Description
“The common language that the people of the world have been seeking is found in water crystals. Water speaks for what is in our mind. Water awakens the subconscious memory in each person. . . . I now know why water is indispensable to the phenomenon of life, and why alternative therapies exist and why they’re effective. Water helped me understand religion and prayer and gave me a clue to understanding the nature of energy. It helped me understand the relationship between humanity and the cosmos. It gave me a clue to help me understand what dimensionality is. I could come one step closer to understanding the eternal theme of humanity that asks where we come from, why we are here, and what happens when we die.
“Thus, for the release of this, the third volume in my series of The Message from Water, I decided to choose what the world most urgently needs at present as a theme. That is, of course, the need to eliminate war and terrorism throughout the world. The theme I have chosen is ‘prayer.’ When I thought about it more deeply, I realized that prayer is most effectively sent when each person in the world raises their energy of love by imagining a scene where the peoples of the world are living in peace. I’ve been taught this through the process of asking water many questions.
“For this reason, the title of this book is ‘Love Thyself.’ First you must shine with positive, high-spirited vibrations, and be full of love. In order to do that, I think it’s important to love, thank, and respect yourself. If that’s the case, then each of those vibrations will be sent out into the world and the cosmos, and the great symphony of that harmonic vibration will wrap our planet in waves of love that serve to cherish our Heaven-granted lives. This is the message from water.”
— Masaru Emoto

About the Author
Masaru Emoto was born in Yokohama, Japan, in July 1943. He is a graduate of the Yokohama Municipal University’s Department of Humanities and Sciences with a focus on international relations. In 1986 he established the IHM Corporation in Tokyo. In October of 1992, he received certification from the Open International University as a doctor of alternative medicine. Subsequently he was introduced to the concept of micro cluster water in the U.S, and Magnetic Resonance Analysis technology. The quest thus began to discover the mystery of water.

“Gut Symetries”

by Jeanette Winterson

“The Heart is Deceitfull Above All Things”

by J. T. Leroy

Find it at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1582341427/sr=8-6/qid=1144009261/ref=pd_bbs_6/104-9515286-0170368?%5Fencoding=UTF8