I finished Reading Bruce A. Hathaway’s Organic Chemistry: The Easy Way. I can hardily recommend this book to anyone who needs a study guide for this subject. I would tend to typify his presentation as "mechanism-based", which to me seems the best way to teach it for a class interested in synthesis and drug design. He also has a good section on aromatic benzyl activating and deactivating groups. In addition, the books layout is clear, the editing seems crisp and I found no typographic errors (!). All-in-all, this is the best book I’ve read in a long time, and I’d rate it 4.5 out of five.

I thought I would take on E. F. Shumacher’s Small is Beautiful next, but after reading the first couple of chapters, I got distracted. His main points, that (a) ecological costs and other externalized costs should be included in economists’ analysis and (b) the scale of current corporate entities and their basic paradigm of growth über alles is not particularly conducive to life here on the mudball, are fairly widely acknowledged, even by many economists. Ultimately, I was not hearing anything I didn’t already know and the presentation, though workmanlike, wasn’t particularly exciting. Basically, I got bored. I will probably make my way back into the book at a later time, just to make sure I haven’t missed any insight in later chapters, but it might be a while.

In the meantime, I read The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite by Anne Finkbeiner. It’s an OK book, but given the subject matter and the reluctance of the subjects to talk about still classified information and projects, there really is little insight to be gained from this book. If you’re interested in the structure or basic history, this is the source. If you’re interested in insight, I don’t think there’s any to be found anywhere. The book was disappointing to me, so it only gets a 2 out of 5 rating.

I'm not sure what’s going onto my reading list next. Of course, I am always reading something, but I’m not sure if putting books on the reading list that didn’t come from the library is kosher (more on my own account, because I'm pretty sure the library doesn't care much). I will let you know as I figure out what to read next.