James Gleick – Faster

Faster, by James Gleick, is not really a book about time.  That’s too ambitions for any popular bit of science writing, as Mr. Gleick is famous for producing.  It is more a meditation on the changing nature of the pace of human life, as (appropriately) measured by our ever-faster technology.  Said meditation produces a number of effects, as meditations are wont to do, but none of them are very meaningful except to sharpen the sense that, as time is ill-defined, so our sense of it must also be vague.  Gleick is one of my favorite authors for his choices of subject, mostly;  I am a geek, after all.  I enjoyed the listening but I’m not sure I learned anything (except that lately most changes to the rules of major league baseball have been made to speed up the game.  I would never have known that, since I only started watching baseball for the Giant’s Series wins).[Go Giants!—editor]

Still, if you like some soft popular science this would be a relaxing book.  It is certainly a well-researched book and I did like it.  Astoundingly, the price of the CDs containing the audiobook are for sale at the link above for $128.18 and the audible version is $17.95, a pretty easy choice.  Makes one wonder how Amazon calculates their markup, doesn’t it?