Isabel Delhousie, philospher and editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith
A quote from this book made me laugh out loud:

"Was electronic memory a place? Before they appeared on the screen weren't they just endless lines of noughts and ones, or odd decimals? That she thought, was the ultimate triumph of reductionism: Shakespeare's sonnets could be reduced to rows of noughts; or even the works of Proust; although how much electricity would be consumed to render Proust's long-winded prose digital? Patient wind turbines would turn and turn for days in that process. And what about ourselves and our own reduction? We could each be rendered, could we not, down to a little puddle of water and a tiny heap of minerals. And that was all we were.  Imperial Caesar, dead, and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. Or, as binary code might so prosaically put it: 010010010110110101110000. . ."