[jyl]

I'm interested in hearing some of your recommendations for good books that you've read or are reading. Share some ideas for the next bedside read, and let's find out a little about what fellow PP'ers are interested in.

Please post Title, Author, What's it about, Why do you like it? If it's a particularly hard-to-find book, please mention the source. Doesn't have to be car-related (although one I'll kick this off with just happens to be). Fiction, fact, fantasy, anything goes. (And a prize for the first manly-man to fess up to Memoirs of a Geisha.)

Okay, here's two I've been reading lately. One is a must-have for motorsports fans, the other is specialized enough to fascinate a few and put everyone else to sleep.

Title: Formula 1 Technology
Author: Peter Wright
What: Exploration of F1 technology, with some history (author was aerodynamicist at Team Lotus who developed early ground effect cars, T87, T88 etc.) but concentrates on current (2001) state of the art.
Why: Lots of fascinating details, from how F1 rain tires work to the simulation software used by the teams. The section on banned technologies shows why F1 designers had to be constrained, lest F1 become a war of 300 mph robots with the drivers smothered under 6 g loads while software packages compete for victory. But intead F1 design has been shunted down an evolutionary dead-end, with each year's cars just more exhaustively refined variants on a fixed theme with almost no relevance to road car design. You can tell the author doesn't like the current situation, and it gets you to thinking about alternatives.
Also: Get it from the SAE website for a discount.

Title: Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events In Complex Financial Systems
Author: Didier Sornette
What: In-depth discussion of research, mostly by the author, on financial market bubbles and crashes.
Why: Well, you've got to be really interested in the topic . . . this is one of those books that is read in fits and starts, because it's really too dense for me to plow through in one sitting. Anyway I'm finding that I need to absorb one concept, and then think about it for a while. For example, one early claim is that market crashes are preceded by periods of extremely high serial and pair-wise correlation - prices are climbing day after day, with seemingly no distinction between assets with strong or weak fundamentals. This spring in the stock market was an interesting time to think about that claim.