Korean Job Discussion Forums

[deetah]

Since I arrived, I've plowed through several crappy murder mysteries. Enough already!

Can anyone reccomend some of their favourite books- preferable available through yesasia.com or whatthebook?

Thanks!

[chiaa]

Some of my favorite reads (killing time, not thinking books):

Life of Pi
Anything by Haruki Murakami
4.000 Days (Warren Fellows)
Aquariums of Pyongyang
Around Ireland with a Fridge
Playing Tennis with the Moldovans
Memoirs of a Geisha
Fast Food Nation
Reefer Madness
Red China Blues
A Walk in the Woods
In a Sunburned Country
Survivor (Palahniuk)
A Fine Balance
Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follet)


That's all I can think of right now.

I would also like to add that Yesasia is well going to be limiting their inventory starting the first of the year. From their site:

"In order to provide better service to our customers, YesAsia will be concentrating our efforts on selective English Books with Asian interested topics and bestseller titles, while other topics will be scaled-down starting January 1st, 2005."

I would like to think that I had a small part in this.

[d503]

I think I have found most of these either in What the book, or on whatthebook.com

If you like a little thinking, or if you dig the post modern.
The Illuminatus Trilogy, Homo Zapiens, The Yellow Arrow, Here comes the Messiah

Lighter reads, still kind of off the wall
Bruno Maddox's "Little Blue Dress"
The Hitchhiker��s Guide to the Galaxy

If you like some sci-fi
Isaac Asimov's stuff isn't bad, and the Dune series is always a good read

If you like historical non-fiction
The Gulag Archipelago, I write how I please, The rape of Nanking

I'm reading now
Eco's "the island of the day before yesterday" (a bit slow but not bad)
Joyce's "Portrait of the artist as a young man"
Vonnegut's "Cat's cradle"

and I just ordered
Neuromancer
Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

[animalbirdfish]

Without a doubt, nothing passes the time like a good book (well, maybe a good lover).

Here's a few of my recent favorites...

The Koreans by Michael Breen
Coming Into the Country by John McPhee
Suttree by Cormac McCarthey
Ghost Hunting in Montana by Barnaby Conrad

[mumblebee]

Anything by Jeanette Winterson is a fabulous read...I recommend "Sexing the Cherry" and "The Passion".

[peppermint]

If you're even slightly into either Harry Potter, fantasy or philosophy, I'd reccomend the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.

Someone recommended them to me on the last trip home, and I went and bought the first one shortly after getting back. 12 hours later I was staring at the clock waiting for the bookstore to open so I could go and get the next one.

A lot of the books on Chiaa's list are good ( the others I haven't read yet)
Everyone with a sense of humor should read the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy at least once.

[Us in DC]

I don't know what you are into for books but some of my favorite books are these:

A Fine Balance (mentioned above) about two men in their 20's who leave a small villiage in India to move to Bombay and it completely changes their lives. It's amazing.

My all time favorite is My Traitor's Heart not that many people I know have ever heard of this book but it was written by a crime reporter who covered the political events/violence during the anti-aparteid movement in South Africa.

Another is Middlesex, which is about a hemaphrodite who grew up in the 60's. By the same guy who wrote the Virgin Suicides. The book made me cry a little and nearly pee my pants laughing a few pages later.

[Chillin' Villain]

I'm almost finished reading a book called Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and it's great. It's of the fantasy genre, I guess, but totally not the kind you'd think, with Dungeons and Dragons or whatever... More like an alternate reality, but still really close to our own. Mieville creates an amazing cityscape in this book. It won the Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy Awards in 2001.... Anyways, I don't know if it's available at Whatthebook, but I got it at Kyobo in Gwanghwamun...

[mack the knife]

The "Shogun" series (entire).
The "Dune" series (entire).
Those two alone will glue you to your lazyboy for the next couple months.
Any book they sell you on the street in S.E. Asia. (e.g. "The CuChi Tunnels").
"The Rum Diaries" by Hunter Thompson
Any and all books published by "Vintage" publishing house.

[SpecialK]

Hi, I just placed my first order for books through WhattheBook and I am paying by Korean Credit Card. Just wondering how long it takes to process on the screen. It has been over 10 minutes and the yellow bars just keep going back and forth saying please wait. Can anyone tell me how long this usually takes to finish?

Thanks

[Shutterfly]

hmm some of my favourites

-The poisonwood bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

Already mentioned but i highly recommend them as well......

-Memoirs of a Geisha
-A fine Balance

classics if you havent already read them...

-Catcher in the rye
-To kill a mockingbird

Uplifting or motivational for the blahhh days

-Who wil cry when you die? Life lessons from the monk who sold his ferrari
-The four Agreements
-Personality Plus is also pretty interesting

[Wangja]

No such list would be complete without "Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks.

[fondasoape]

Well, if you're tired of escapism (of the Korean frog-in-the-well variety or otherwise) and/or you want to remember that there's a world outside Korea, and that culture isn't all it's cracked up to be, I suggest

1. Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge (Edward O. Wilson)
2. Mother Nature : Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy)
3. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (Richard Dawkins)
4. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Jared Diamond)

All are in print; information on the author, books and amazon.com listings follow:




Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge (Edward O. Wilson)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/067976867X/qid=1102319100/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i3_xgl14/103-9466294-4955868?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Wilson's premise in Consilience is that a common body of inherent principles underlies the entire human endeavor. "I believe that the Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries got it mostly right the first time," he says. They assumed a lawful, perfectible material world in which knowledge is unified across the sciences and the humanities. Wilson calls this common groundwork of explanation that crosses all the great branches of learning "consilience," and he argues that we can indeed explain everything in the world through an understanding of a handful of natural laws.

The world he envisions is a material world that is organized by laws of physics and evolves according to the laws of evolution.

Wilson makes his point through a fascinating tour through the Enlightenment and the age of scientific specialization. Among his bugaboos are "professional atomization," which works against the unification of knowledge, and cultural relativism ("what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment"). In examining how a few underlying physical principles can explain everything from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions to a Mondrian painting, he offers fresh insight into what it means to be human.
Thoughtful readers with an interest in the future should consider Wilson's plea. This consilience of the natural sciences and the social sciences could equip future humankind with the analytical and predictive capacity to deal with the many changes wrought by humanity's recent global hegemony and, thereby, help "preserve the Creation." -- Harry E. Demarest The San Francisco Chronicle

Consilience is a provocative book, worth reading simply for the opportunity to spend time with one of today's great scientific minds. Nonscientists will find Wilson a congenial and approachable host. -- Paul Raeburn Business Week

In a book that is truly a magnum opus, Wilson is concerned with an even bigger project, the unification of all knowledge by the means of science, so that the explanations of differing kinds of phenomena are seen to be connected and consistent with one another--that is, to be consilient. . . . Wilson dazzlingly reaffirms the cogency and the power of scientific materialism. -- Booklist

Wilson's book sweeps across vast areas of learning in lucid, unpretentious, often eloquent prose. Consilience is an evangelical book, an arresting exposition of Wilson's religion of science and a kind of sermon . . . intended to assist in the reform of the world. -- Daniel J. Kevles The New York Times Book Review

A grand, coherent conception encompassing the sciences, the arts, ethics and religion. The reader feels lifted up to a high peak. -- Gerald Holton, Harvard University

A Harvard professor for four decades, biologist Edward O. Wilson has written 20 books, won two Pulitzer prizes, and discovered hundreds of new species. Considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, Dr. Wilson is often called, "the father of biodiversity." A childhood accident claimed the sight in his right eye. In adolescence, he lost part of his hearing. He struggled with math and a mild form of dyslexia. Any one of these imperfections might have blocked the road to a scientific career. But nothing could stop Ed Wilson's curiosity of the natural world. So, he decided to focus on the tiny creatures he could pick up and bring close to his remaining good eye. He decided to study insects, particularly ants. Today Dr. Wilson is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century."

Mother Nature : Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345408934/qid=1102319111/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i3_xgl14/103-9466294-4955868?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection should be required reading for anyone who happens to be a human being. In it, Hrdy reveals the motivations behind some of our most primal and hotly contested behavioral patterns--those concerning gender roles, mate choice, sex, reproduction, and parenting--and the ideas and institutions that have grown up around them. She unblinkingly examines and illuminates such difficult subjects as control of reproductive rights, infanticide, "mother love," and maternal ambition with its ever-contested companions: child care and the limits of maternal responsibility. Without ever denying personal accountability, she points out that many of the patterns of abuse and neglect that we see in cultures around the world (including, of course, our own) are neither unpredictable nor maladaptive in evolutionary terms. "Mother" Nature, as she points out, is not particularly concerned with what we call "morality." The philosophical and political implications of our own deeply-rooted behaviors are for us to determine--which can be done all the better with the kind of understanding gleaned from this exhaustive work.

An extraordinary body of scholarship that is as much a social and psychological history of women as child-bearersand moreas a review of male and female biology and behavior across many species, particularly kindred primates. Hrdy (anthropology emeritus/UC Davis) creates an encyclopedia of data, interpretation, and speculation on what mothers and babies are all about. Leading with a wonderful remark by George Eliot: ``Mother Naturewho by the bye is an old lady with some bad habitsshe notes that the dominant 19th-century patriarchal view saw women as baby-makers, inferior in all other ways to males. Hrdy's theme, broader and less materialistic than that of The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), is that there has always been great flexibility in the living arrangements among social groups, particularly in mammals, but also in social insects. Evolving features of human biology have helped females improve their offspring's chance of survival (concealed ovulation, continuous sexual receptivity, the enlisting of ``allomothers'' who can help in child-rearing). Further, there is no maternal ``instinct'' as such, but simply a concern that at least some offspring should survive, even it means the sacrifice of others. Indeed one of Hrdys more stunning chapters deals with infanticide, whether practiced at birth or by farming infants out to incompetent or inadequate wet nurses or placing them in foundling hospitals with appalling rates of survival. The latter parts of the book deal with survival and selection from the baby's point of view: a kind of gamesmanship in which plump, pink-cheeked newborns charm their moms. In reviewing all these topics, Hrdy steers a path between extremists of every camp and projects her own, sometimes anxious, experience as wife, mother, and scientist onto the narrative. ``Family values'' camps will be shocked, ardent feminists irritated, and psychoanalysts dismissive. For the open-minded, however, this is a breathtaking feat of scholarship that will have enduring value as an encyclopedic source of hard data and inspired speculation.

"Sarah Blaffer Hrdy graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard. She is a former Guggenheim fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the California Academy of Sciences. She is currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and the recipient of the 2003 University of California Panunzio award, honoring outstanding scholarly work and service achievements since retirement. Her books include The Woman that Never Evolved, selected by the New York Times as one of its Notable Books of 1981, and Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection, which was chosen by both Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal as one of the "Best Books of 1999" and won the Howells Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Biological Anthropology. "

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (Richard Dawkins)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393315703/ref=pd_sim_b_1/103-9466294-4955868?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

One of the most famous arguments of the creationist theory of the universe is the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley's: Just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. But as Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology at Oxford University, demonstrates in this brilliant and eloquent riposte to the Argument from Design, the analogy is false. Natural selection, the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process that Darwin discovered, has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Patiently and lucidly, Dr. Dawkins - in this book which has been acclaimed as perhaps the most influential work on evolution written in this century - identifies those aspects of the theory which people find hard to believe and removes the barrier to credibility one by one.



" Richard Dawkins, is a British zoologist, born in Nairobi, in Kenya. He currently holds the position of Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, and is one of the most prominent biologists alive.

He is probably best known for his popularisation of the concept of the selfish gene (see "Williams Revolution"), described in his book The Selfish Gene. As an ethologist, interested in animal behaviour and its relation to natural selection, he popularised the idea that the gene is the principal unit of selection in evolution. This gene point of view also provides a basis for understanding kin selection which was originally suggested by J. B. S. Haldane and expanded by W. D. Hamilton.

Dawkins has been one of the major proponents of sociobiological theory and coined the term meme, which spawned the theory of memetics. In the controversy over the interpretation of the theory of evolution that is colloquially called the Darwin Wars, one faction is often named for Dawkins and its rival for Stephen Jay Gould. This reflects the pre-eminence of each as popularisers of the contesting viewpoints, rather than because either is the more substantial or extreme champion of these positions. Dawkins acquiesced in this role from the time of his scathing review (published in January 1985) of Not in Our Genes! by Rose, Kamin and Lewontin.

He is an ardent and outspoken atheist, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and vice-president of the British Humanist Association. He also writes for the Council for Secular Humanism's magazine Free Inquiry and serves as a Senior Editor. In his essay "Viruses of the Mind", he uses memetics theory to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and the various characteristics of organised religions, such as the punishments awaiting non-believers.

Dawkins is a prominent figure in contemporary public debate on issues related to science and religion. He topped Prospect Magazine's 2004 list of the top 100 public British intellectuals, as decided by the readers, receiving twice as many votes as the runner-up. [1]"

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(Jared Diamond)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393317552/qid=1102319881/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/103-9466294-4955868?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

In G,G&S, Diamond sets himself "the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for peoples of different continents? This problem has fascinated me for a long time, but it's now ripe for a new synthesis because of recent advances in many fields seemingly remote from history, including molecular biology, plant and animal genetics and biogeography, archaeology, and linguistics."

JARED DIAMOND is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Until recently he was Professor of Physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which also is the winner of Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.

Dr. Diamond is also the author of two other trade books: The Third Chimpanzee, which won The Los Angeles Times Book award for the best science book of 1992 and Britain's 1992 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize; and Why is Sex Fun? (ScienceMasters Series).

Dr. Diamond is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship ("Genius Award"); research prizes of the American Physiological Society, National Geographic Society, and Zoological Society of San Diego; and many teaching awards and endowed public lectureships. In addition, he has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies (National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society).

His field experience includes 17 expeditions to New Guinea and neighboring islands, to study ecology and evolution of birds; rediscovery of New Guinea's long-lost goldenfronted bowerbird; other field projects in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. As a conservationist he devised a comprehensive plan, almost all of which was subsequently implemented, for Indonesian New Guinea's national park system; numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund; founding member of the board of the Society of Conservation Biology; member of the Board of Directors of World Wildlife Fund/USA.

I regard these as four of the most important books I've read in the past 10 years, and among the most important written in the past half century. They, and their work, is probably going to be around long after Chomsky is overtaken by fMRI studies of language acquisition.

[kylehawkins2000]

For the Classics Buffs: (a few of my favorites)

The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
The Three Muskateers - Dumas
Les Miserables - Hugo
Moll Flanders - Dafoe
Robinson Crusoe - Dafoe
Great Expectations - Dickens
Oliver Twist - Dickens
Crime and Punishement - Dostoevsky
Sons and Lovers - DH Lawerence

[hari seldon]

I just finished reading a fascinating history of Korea, 'Korea's Place in the Sun' by Bruce Cumings. If you like reading history or simply want to get some insight into the makeup of Korea and Koreans, I'd definitely recommend it.