I pre-ordered two books I am very excited about.
First, there's Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language.
This is a dialogue between Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker (co-authors of the famed Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience) and Daniel Dennett and John Searle. The debate "encompasses a wide range of central themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body." I browsed it in Ann Arbor's downtown Borders today.
Secondly, there's Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened, by the two great New Testament scholars Craig Evans and N.T. Wright.
I just received Watchmen in the mail today. I picked it up because my son Dan got it for Christmas and told me Time magazine listed it as one of the top 100 novels of all time. Time says:
"Watchmen is a graphic novel—a book-length comic book with ambitions above its station—starring a ragbag of bizarre, damaged, retired superheroes: the paunchy, melancholic Nite Owl; the raving doomsayer Rorschach; the blue, glowing, near-omnipotent, no-longer-human Doctor Manhattan. Though their heyday is past, these former crime-fighters are drawn back into action by the murder of a former teammate, The Comedian, which turns out to be the leading edge of a much wider, more disturbing conspiracy. Told with ruthless psychological realism, in fugal, overlapping plotlines and gorgeous, cinematic panels rich with repeating motifs, Watchmen is a heart-pounding, heartbreaking read and a watershed in the evolution of a young medium."
