Books abandoned

For some time now, I have been maintaining a list of books that I am reading and books that I have read recently. Why? One, to keep a record of books that I read that month. Two, because I find similar lists maintained by others often quite helpful. I have read books I won't have read otherwise, if it had not been for reading some blogger's sidebar, and I hope that my sidebar helps too. Three, is thanks to my self-indulgence and pretentiousness.

Prompted by Ashutosh who talks highly of John Casti's Paradigms Lost, I picked up his other book - Five More Golden Rules. I must say, I was gravely disappointed. The book is something in between a text-book and a popular book on mathematics and this approach has led to a really boring book. There are anecdotes and applications interspersed with theorems and hard-core math theory. The irritating part was that Casti after building up the excitement performs the worst escape trick by stating, " ... the details are too complicated to mention here, please see the References." References?! Still I persisted, but after reading 3 out of the 5 Rules, I felt that this book should be abandoned ASAP. Hopefully, Paradigms Lost will be better.

This incident set me thinking. Should I add a Books Recently Abandoned column on the sidebar? or rather Books to Abandon. As I write this, I see the Chomsky sitting on my shelf taken from the library on a 6-month loan (renewed once!). So there should be another category - Books Abandoned With a Sense of Guilt!