Tolkien at Bedtime · Our eight-year-old reads perfectly well; mostly childish trash, of course, which is perfectly appropriate. But he still likes his bedtime story, so we’ve been tackling larger works. We spent the last few months working through The Lord of the Rings, and finished it this evening. I’ve certainly enjoyed it, although sometimes the endless descriptions of pastoral beauty can drag a bit in spoken-word format. Herewith a nifty Middle-Earth resource and a quotation from the book that touched me ...
The Big Switch · Clearly, Nicholas Carr disapproves of much of the culture in which I’ve immersed myself and which I nearly-wholly embrace, to which I would apply labels such as “online” or “Web” or “Internet” or “Twenty-first century”. (Carr and I have written back and forth already on the generalities.) So it would be reasonable to suspect me of bias in writing about his recent The Big Switch—Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google. And indeed, I do think that several of its key arguments are, well, wrong. But it’s a good book anyhow; well written and extremely apposite ...[5 comments]
Censoring Homer · Our son, now eight, can read perfectly well (in three languages) but still requires a bedtime story, which is OK because Lauren and I both enjoy reading them. Given the fact that he can now read all the cheesy pictorials he likes for himself, I’ve been enforcing Big Serious Books. So recently it’s been the Odyssey, which actually hasn’t worked out that well ...[17 comments]
All About Electric Text · This is not exactly a review of Yannis Haralambous’ Fonts & Encodings; that would be the work of years, and I doubt there’s anyone in the world qualified to discuss the whole thing, except its author. This new O’Reilly book is about a thousand pages in length. It’s impossibly ambitious, irritatingly flawed, and probably only comprehensible to a single-digit number of thousands of people world-wide; but for those people it’s an essential book, you just have to have it ...[3 comments]
Spook Country · This is the latest novel by William Gibson. It’s set in early 2006; there is some overlap with the penultimate Pattern Recognition. It doesn’t depart substantially from the Gibson idiom. I liked it a whole lot, but I was cheating ...[7 comments]
The Color · The world outside the restaurant’s windows, beyond words in a red plastic Cantonese neither of them could read, was the color of a silver coin, misplaced for decades in a drawer. One guess whose new book I’m reading ...[21 comments]
Shorter Potter · People who’ve read Harry Potter and the Battle of Hogwarts Deathly Hallows will probably enjoy Potterdammerung. Those who haven’t: stay away, spoilers from end to end. Not to mention coarse language, emo jokes, and a dim view of Harry’s intelligence.
Harry · I don’t know about you, but I think it’s a fine thing that a noticeable proportion of the whole world is going to stop what they’re doing this weekend and read a book instead ...[3 comments]
Two From David · I’d like to encourage you to read two things featuring David Weinberger. I’ve been meaning to post about his new book for some time, but just recently ran across his “Web 2.0” debate with Andrew Keen over at the WSJ Online, and if you care at all about this here Web thang, you really ought to go take it in. Not because it’ll educate and inform you (though it will) but because it’s good fun. I find the Net-centered life sufficiently fulfilling and self-supporting that I wouldn’t take the time to react to a provocateur like Keen, but it’s nice that David does so, while entertaining us ...
Finding Things · That’s the title of my chapter in Beautiful Code, which seems now to be out, not that I’ve actually seen a copy. What’s amusing me today is that Finding Things is the chapter they’ve picked to post as a free PDF download. So, in the event that you’re interested in the subject but don’t care about what Kernihan and Bentley and Petzold and Stein and Dongarra and Cantrill and Matsumoto and all the others have to say, you can avoiding buying the book and doing Amnesty International a favor. I have to say that the Table of Contents looks pretty impressive.[2 comments]
NetNewsWire, Children, and Caesar · The problem is, these days, that my input queues are jammed up. I’m reading Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy and it’s very good, but it’s awfully big and thick and dense. And my time for reading is tight because, after all, I’m married with two children and also I’m trying to read the Internet, or at least that huge little piece of it where people care about the things I do. And on that subject, once again I just have to plug NetNewsWire. I’ve tried a ton of newsreaders on a ton of platforms. Google’s blog reader is pretty good, and so are a couple of the other clients, but NetNewsWire just shows you more stuff in less time with fewer keystrokes. Years ago I predicted that feed-reading would have been sucked into the browser by now, but I was wrong. So between that and Caesar, and day-to-day job work, and a grungy unexciting complicated fill-a-hole-in-the-ecosystem programming project, well, I have Wikinomics and Everything is Miscellaneous and RESTful Web Services and the Programming Erlang PDF staring accusingly at me from the shadows. Blame Julius Caesar and Brent Simmons.[7 comments]
Hofstadter’s Loop · This is about I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter; my discussion is picky and pedantic and probably far too long for any but his devotees; but then, their number is many ...[9 comments]
Grief Lessons · This is a recent book by Anne Carson, a poet and scholar of whom I’d previously never heard. The subtitle is “Four Plays by Euripides” ...[1 comment]
Anansi Boys · This is the latest paperback from Neil Gaiman. I read it on the plane back from DC and it’s good enough that I had to sit up late doing some work that I’d planned for the plane. Gaiman’s novels don’t Shift the Mass Understanding Of The Human Condition or Plumb The Depths Of Postmodern Subtextuality, but the people in them are always real interesting and the things that happen to them are entertaining and plausible (well, in the sense that stories which routinely involve gods and alternate universes and the working of magic can be plausible). He’s got a decent blog too.[6 comments]
Hot Kid, Tonto Woman · I’d kind of gotten off the book treadmill, what with trying to read the Internet in real time. But for some reason I’ve read a stack of books in recent weeks. One of them was The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard, who, Wikipedia tells me, has been publishing novels since before I was born. It’s pretty good and, like every book Leonard’s ever written, has flows of dialogue that pull you along and make you smile just at the joy of written spoken English, done well. It’s a pre-Depression gangster novel; the main characters (and they’re all well-done) are synthetic, but Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Jay McShann, and other real people of the period hover around the edges. I enjoyed reading it but have a gripe; too much real dumbass gunplay, a big piece of the flying-lead plot is about Our Hero’s ability to draw faster than the bad guys. Therefore, a pointer to another Leonard, 1998’s The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories, a collection of nineteen short-form Westerns written between the Fifties and Eighties. The violence is implicit, threatened, scary, off-stage, and very real, but it doesn’t happen much in the actual narrative sequence. The prose is amazingly lean; pared down almost to the level of a haiku. If you open this one up leave yourself two or three hours before you go to bed, because you won’t be closing it.
Sebastian and Fred · That would be J. Sebastian Bach and Frederick II Hohenzollern (AKA the Great) of Prussia, who famously met in 1747. The King proposed a Royal Theme and asked Bach to extemporize fugally; Bach did so on the spot, somewhat, and a few weeks later sent Frederick The Musical Offering. This episode appeared at the beginning of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and now finds itself at the center of another book: Evening in the Palace of Reason by James R. Gaines, of whom I’d never previously heard. It’s pretty good; read on for some remarks on the book, Frederick, Sebastian, and the Offering ...
Next Gibson · Over on his very-intermittent blog, William Gibson is apparently floating fragments of whatever it is that he’s currently writing. Atmospheric, as always.
Two Lives · This is the latest by Vikram Seth, best known for A Suitable Boy. Seth is one of only two or three authors whose new works I buy on sight, without waiting to read reviews (mind you, since he only publishes every decade or so, this is not an expensive habit). I have on several occasions said that I think that Seth the greatest living writer of English, and may say so again. This book, a double biography of his Indian-born dentist uncle and Berlin-born Jewish aunt and the middle-class English life they built on the wreckage of terrible war wounds, physical and spiritual, is not perfect, but it’s very good and you probably won’t regret reading it. Herewith some remarks on the book and a funny story about the time I met the author ...
Feeling Sad? · Or, if you’re not, have you noticed people around you acting kind of gloomy? Particularly young people? Have you recently found a picture of an attractive Englishwoman in your bookish child’s room, with “Murdering bitch!” or “Avada Kedavra to you too!” scrawled on it? Which is to say, the latest Harry Potter, well, it’s not cheerful at all. That awful Englishwoman remarked insouciantly that she was thinking of starting on the sequel next year... in the interim, she is a major Bringer of Unhappiness to Children of all ages, and I think she should get a move on. And if she can’t engineer a happy ending I urge the House of Commons to impose a really frightful punishment. Something medieval, involving dank mossy dungeons and rusty iron implements.
Iron Sunrise · This is the latest from Charlie Stross, and it’s what space opera ought to be. It’s got interstellar Nazis, a star maliciously blown up starting on Page One, detailed descriptions of how you go about dying when your star blows up, killer robot dogs, a whiny but appealing teenage Gothick chick named Wednesday, a first-rate deus ex machina, a hard-drinking intergalactic warblogger (no, really, he gets the girl even), uh did I mention the really really evil Space Nazis? And you know what? The suspension of disbelief holds. Plus, the characters are appealing and the story moves right along. OK, well maybe the denouement is a little forced and overextended, with U. Portia Hoescht out of character. Compared to the previous Singularity Sky, the atmospherics are maybe a little weaker, but the storytelling is a lot stronger. Plus our friends Rachel and Martin from that book are back; plus there are obviously lots of sequels in the pipeline. I sure enjoyed reading it.
FSS: Aberystwyth At Dusk · Friday Slide Scan #3 is from 1988: a dark waterfront in Wales, and a side-trip into the Black Book of Carmarthen ...
Singularity Sky · I’ve noticed that there’s some Net buzz building around Charles Stross, author of this 2003 sci-fi novel, which is pretty good, but I bet he can do better. [Update: Devin Dawson provides a link to Stross’ blog, and Kellan Elliott-McCrea to A Colder War, a nifty online novelette] ...
Strange & Norrell · That would be Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, an immensely large novel whose stylish white-on-black and black-on-white covers are occupying miles of shelf-space everywhere. Summary: it’s a good book. Herewith notes plus ramblings on travel and reading ...
Lustre-Lustrous · I am the lucky owner of one of the plates used to print the original 1928 version of the Oxford English Dictionary, a trophy of the years 1987-89 when I worked full-time on a sideshow of a sideshow of the production of the OED Second Edition; this fragment’s title is the range of words that were on that page. Herewith a brief visual essay on the plate, which surprisingly includes a curvy fashion shoot ...
Cabinet · This is about a magazine that you’ve probably never read, but might want to have a look at ...
Chaitin! · Following a pointer from Slashdot, I found a review of Gregory Chaitin’s new book Meta Math!, a copy of which he’s placed on the Web. Herewith three reasons why I’m going to have to buy the book ...
Wolfe’s Latest · I just finished reading The Knight, by Gene Wolfe, one of only two or three living authors whose works I’ll pick up without regard to reviews or word-of-mouth ...
Moneyball · I suspect I’m one of only 100 literate baseball fans in the world who hadn’t already read Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, but now I have, and if you’re one of the other 99, you should too. A few words on the book and on books and Lewis and the A’s and orthography and all that ...
3 Views of Mount Fuji · What happened was, tired in an airport looking for lightweight reading, I grabbed The Last Defender of Camelot, collected late works of Roger Zelazny, who was at the centre of the SciFi universe a few decades back. It has a piece called 24 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai which won a Hugo in 1986 and as a story is only OK but as a narrative wrapped around a famous set of pictures it’s awfully good. On impulse, I typed “hokusai 24” into Google, to discover that there are 36 pictures in the original series, but that Tim Eagen, back in ’98, poked around the Web and assembled the 24 images from the Zelazny story; a fine piece of curatorship and really an essential companion to reading the story. Looking at one of them, I thought: I’ve been there. There’s an amusing narrative to accompany the views ...
History of the Present · That’s the title of an excellent 1999 book I’m now reading, by Timothy Garton Ash. It is real-time reportage focusing around the great transition from pre- to post-Cold War that happened so unimaginably fast, starting in 1989, before our watching eyes. But the History of the Present is what bloggers are writing, too; and Ash says some things that anyone who’s doing it should consider very carefully ...
Surprise! · Just got back from seeing Master and Commander. The theatre was jam-packed; mind you it was Saturday night, but still, the movie’s been out for ages. I’m pleased it’s doing well because it’s very good indeed. Herewith a few notes on the movie, and more on the books behind it; if there are any book-lovers reading this who haven’t yet discovered Patrick O’Brian, do yourself a big favor and read on. Plus I close with the obligatory geek-interest side-notes. [Update: The Gunroom lives!] ...
Slowsilver · My personal reading metabolism has been suffering for quite some time from severe constipation induced by Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. This book is very large and not a snappy read and I felt guilty about starting other things until I’d finished it. Now I have ...
Entropy · In this universe, life in general constitutes a losing battle against entropy, with intelligence perhaps our best tactical asset in that struggle. Recently we launched a domestic counter-offensive; herewith some battlefield reportage ...
Xenophon · A few months back I talked up Herodotus; on today’s Classic Authors Hit Parade is Xenophon, whose Conversations of Socrates carried me most of the long way from Vancouver to Heathrow today (these new Powerbooks get two hours max, four if you turn the screen off and use it as a music box). The Socrates is a bit of a plodder, but herewith an unabashed rave over his Anabasis, a totally unbelievable true story well-told, and some general remarks as to why you might want to read these long-dead writers ...
The 1975 Idea-Futures Market · There’s been much ado in recent days over DARPA’s notion of setting up a futures market where people could speculate on the likelihood of geopolitical events: terrorism, rebellion, death, and so on. The oscillating waves of opinion were kind of amusing: initial puzzlement, followed by reflexive horror and denunciation, with recently a few quiet voices saying “Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea.” This note is to point out that the idea goes back at least as far as John Brunner’s 1975 scifi novel Shockwave Rider, which some of you might enjoy reading for its own sake ...
Jesus’ Son · By Denis Johnson, published 1992. Stories lavishly praised by everyone including John Updike, some published in the New Yorker no less, deranged narratives out of alcoholism and drug psychosis shot through with veins of the purest gold, golden language I mean. William Burroughs territory here, only West Coast rural not Manhattan, and kind of linear. But once is enough ...
Archie and Nero, et al · I whiled away several quiet hours this holiday (in Canada) weekend reading three of Rex Stout's “Nero Wolfe” novels that I ran across in a used bookstore that leapt in front of me during a routine shopping trip. For the huge number of people too young to know about Archie and Nero, an introduction. For the aficionados, if any, a scholarly investigation of The Office Layout Issue, and a pointer to a real DVD bargain ...
Sahara Unveiled · Sahara Unveiled, by William Langewiesche, is a fine book. He traveled around and across the Sahara by local transit and writes about it beautifully. He likes the people and respects but does not romanticize them. This is a harsh unbeautiful landscape and the writing is often that way. There are surprising illustrations of petroglyphs ...
Carl Hiaasen and Meta-Journalism · This note is to recommend books by Carl Hiaasen, with a brief reflection on the future of journalism provoked by his latest, Basket Case ...
Herodotus · For some time now, Herodotus' Histories, in the Aubrey de Sélincourt translation, has been my bedside book, and I just got to the end; this is my second time through the Histories, and I wouldn't be surprised if I visit it again. I think there's lots in here for just about everybody, but anyone who cares about history in the large would I think be mesmerised. I'll describe the book briefly and outline some of the reasons I like it so much. Also I'll trace a line of descent into some excellent contemporary fantasy writing, and wonder about parallels with the current Middle East imbroglio ...
Iraq: Blame it on Lawrence's Bosses · I saw the picture below in some online publication, and it struck me that quite likely, very few people know where Iraq came from. The picture shows the delegation of Emir Feisal at the Versailles conference post-Great-War; the fellow just over Feisal's left shoulder, with two bands around his kaffiyeh, is T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia. And therein hangs a hell of a tale ...
"Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson · You have to credit Gibson with, if nothing else, extreme courage. He has a proven gift for inventing alternate realities that huge numbers of people are willing to buy his books about, and after a couple of decades of that, here he is with a linear-narrative type thriller set firmly in 2002 ...
