Books of the year - 2010

Given that my last post about the books of the year was pretty meager, i decided to update my reading list (note to self).  Thus, my favorite books from 2010 were:

- Steinbeck, "The log from the "Sea of Cortez" (1)
- Weick, "Social Psychology of Organizing" (2)
- Hofstadter, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" (3)
- Polanyi, "The great transformation"
- Kornberger "Brand society"

A very diverse bunch, but all very interesting indeed - from anthills to Mexican sierra, from English peasants to imagining organizations and brands as an interface between production and consumption.  One has to read them to give them justice - but some good quotations go like this:

"This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul.  His spirit and the tendrils of his feeling are so deep in a boat that the identification is complete.  It is very easy to see why the Viking wished his body to sail away in an unmanned ship, for neither could exist without the other. (1, p. 14)"

"No one is ever free to do something he can’t think of. (2, p.193)"

"The resolution [of Epimenides paradox] involves abandoning the notion that a brain could ever provide a fully accurate representation for the notion of truth.  The novelty of this resolution lies in its suggestion that a total modeling of truth is impossible for quite physical reasons: namely, such a modeling would require physically incompatible events to occur in a brain. (3, p. 585)"