Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Books

  • The (Easter egged?) book on tonight’s Lost

    I’ve been informally keeping track of the books that appear on Lost, so of course I caught tonight’s little Easter egg. Anyone else catch the title of the book Locke was shaking through when Sawyer found him in the hatch? The text on the cover read “Owl Creek Bridge”, and a quick sweep on Wikipedia reveals:

    “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is a short story by Ambrose Bierce originally written in 1886…. [It] is the story of a man who is sentenced to death by hanging at the Owl Creek Bridge of the title.

    You can go to the page to read the spoilers about it, I won’t reveal them here. What’s interesting is, I remember seeing this on an old episode of The Twilight Zone!

    I don’t know if it’s supposed to fit into the show’s mythology, or the writers just liked the book enough to put it in there and mess with people’s heads. I suppose that could go either way…

  • Strangely enough, it’s a real book…

    It’s amazing what they’re publishing in For Dummies books these days… I almost wish I had made this up:

    Pit Bulls for Dummies... no joke!
    Pit Bulls for Dummies

    This just makes me laugh. The fact that it’s for real just makes this that much more irrationally funny to me…

  • Open astronomy book

    An idea, and a question (or the other way around). I’ve always liked astronomy; growing up I had several astronomy books and a small telescope, I eagerly consumed news and information about space (I had a newspaper photo clipping of Saturn as taken from Voyager taped to my wall), and I took Astronomy for my physics elective in college, and one thing that always struck me was how outdated the various books I had were, even though they were relatively new (at the time I got them). You would read some theoretical composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere even as data was coming in updating and contradicting the old information.

    So I was thinking the other day of the planet Pluto and how it has three moons now (I don’t remember the context), and how this information could potentially change some fundamental conception of the solar system, and yet it would probably take a year, maybe 18 months before this would make it into the latest and greatest book on astronomy. And I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if there was an open (as in open source) astronomy book online somewhere, maybe like a wiki, that was textbook-quality and was kept up-to-date with the latest discoveries? People could freely access it, print it out, download a copy, whatever, and it would always be relevant.

    The question: Does such a thing exist already? Now, I’m familiar with Wikibooks, the self-described “open-content textbooks collection,” but their Astronomy book is paltry at best. (It might make a good starting point, though.) So does anyone know of something like this?

    If not, I might start it myself. It would make a neat hobby, at the very least.

    (And if it worked, this would make a good model for other books that could be open and possibly wiki-fied. I’ve got a few ideas.)

  • It’s the 2nd already!

    No, my title doesn’t really have to do with anything… I just thought I’d use the first thing that popped to mind when I started this entry. This is pretty much a plain-vanilla blog entry, with some ramblings about books and such.

    I’ve been reading Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson lately, getting close to the end. It and Red Mars—great books. I’m not sure if I’m going to start reading Blue Mars (the final book in the trilogy) right away, or start something else; I’ve been anxious to start Quicksilver, of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, but that’s a monster book in its own right… Plus, I’m halfway through How the Mind Works, by Stephen Pinker, and that’s pretty interesting stuff, too.

    What’s sad awesome is I went and bought a bunch more books with my gift card and Christmas money. I’d better get reading!

    I’ll have some more 2005 wrap-up stuff written tomorrow, too. And I’ll do another “Chuggnutt Zeitgeist” chock-full of stats and trivia. Perfect for all the navel gazers out there. Executive summary: traffic was up from 2004. Nice, eh?

  • Sherman Alexie

    Just finished up reading The Toughest Indian in the World, a volume of collected short stories by Sherman Alexie (wish he had a blog). It’s quite good; I’d never read any of Alexie’s work before, and I figured it was time I’d rectified that.

    …by that I mean that for the four years I spent in Spokane, I was aware of Alexie as the Local Writer Becoming Well Known and more than once I had the opportunity of attending a reading and/or book signing by him. I kick myself nowadays for not taking such an opportunity (though I did attend a reading and signing by Douglas Adams… that’s a different story, however).

    And while it’s not likely I’ll read any of his poetry anytime soon (gasp! I’m more of a fiction man, myself), I can’t help but respect anyone who wins something called the “World Heavyweight Poetry Bout” four years in a row.

  • Self-publishing thoughts

    Since Shannon desperately wants me to update the blog so she doesn’t see the freaky mugshot picture right away, I thought I’d just write down some random observations and questions about the business of print-on-demand self-publishing.

    Of the various on-demand, self-publishing services, the only ones I’ve seen that don’t charge for publishing your books are Lulu and CafePress. I did a quick survey on a bunch of others, and they all require that you pay $200 or more up front to get your book published; Lulu and CafePress are true print-on-demand services that are free to setup.

    I’ve mentioned both before. In general, Lulu seems to have cheaper prices on regular books, and they definitely have a much larger selection of books to buy.

    Question: are there any print-on-demand services for comic books?

    You can do comic books on both Lulu and CafePress, but the price break definitely favors big, collected works or graphic novels. If you wanted to do “traditional” comics—folded “saddle stitch” covers—then CafePress is the better alternative (one of the few times they’re cheaper than Lulu). But it’s still spendier than a real comic book, hence my question on comic book print-on-demand.

    Any ideas on the actual editorial quality of self-published books? Lulu has a rating system but it seems kind of rudimentary…

    A neat experiment would be to take a bunch of classics from Gutenberg and package them up nicely—perhaps with custom artwork, commentary, things like that—and see how they fare on both sites. Or even how they fare at all.

    Or even do a classics mashup… or crossover, a la League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic, not the movie). Mashing up War of the Worlds with The Scarlet Pimpernel might be fun…

    I suppose fan fiction would be a big no-no on these sites… but man, if you could take the really good stuff from FanFiction.net and bookify it, you could be on to something.

  • Dumbing down literature

    Does this sound like a good idea?

    Woe un2mnkind! The text message is trying to summarise the great poet John Milton and a respected academic thinks this may be a smart new way to teach literature.

    A company offering mobile phones to students has hired Professor John Sutherland, professor emeritus of English Literature at University College London, to offer subscribers text message summaries and quotes from literary classics.

    The hope is that messages in the truncated shorthand of mobile phones will help make great literature more accessible.

    So butchering the classics into text-messaging shorthand that are barely understandable will make them more accessible? Oh, this is so, so wrong.

    First of all, there’s no “teaching” of literature going on here; you might as well be getting summaries of last night’s episode of “Lost”—only reading “MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus” would not entice me to pick up Jane Eyre.

    Second of all, what does a professor emeritus of English Literature even know about text-messaging shorthand? Jeez, I don’t know much, but the examples they give seem contrived even to me.

    Third, what self-respecting teen would subscribe to this service? Here’s a hint—those of us who, as teens, were into literature and could quote from various works really, really weren’t a part of that crowd. If you wanted to be part of that crowd, well, you wouldn’t be getting literature on your phone, as it were.

    Via Slashdot.

    Update 11/17: CNN has a better article which has more on the pushback against the service.

  • I was in Ft. Lauderdale and forgot about Travis McGee

    Okay, if that isn’t an obscure title I don’t know what is. Basically, I’m a little stunned and disappointed with myself for not remembering that Fort Lauderdale is the home of Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald‘s beach bum “salvage consultant” who lived on a houseboat, until after we got back home. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d remembered; perhaps visited Bahia Mar marina or something.

    I love those books. Time to bust them out again.

  • The Ringworld Engineers

    Blogging has been light lately because I’ve been reading The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven, and just finished it up last night. It was a decent enough novel, and a decent sequel to the original Ringworld, though I think I liked the original better.

    Niven does a great job of building a complex, consistent universe and then coming up with logical, consistent solutions to the puzzles he throws at his characters. And the Ringworld—and his Known Space universe—is a compelling one to play in. This story is no different. He brings back most of the characters from the first book, 23 years later, and drops them on the Ringworld with a seemingly impossible task: save it before it crashes into the sun. (The first book merely had them explore and ultimately escape when things went wrong.) He pulls this off in a satisfying way.

    One of things I thought was weak to the point of distracting was the overuse of interspecies sex. Niven contrived this practice among the Ringworld natives as a bargaining tool, to seal deals, to avoid mating within a species, and just as a general titillating contrivance. Yeah, odd, and unconvincing. It smacks of “dirty old man” syndrome, or a cheap male fantasy (a world with free no-strings-attached sex!). There’s nothing explicit or pornographic—it’s just annoying. There’s no real point to it, it just seems gratuitous, and that makes weak writing.

    In general, I like the stuff Niven and Jerry Pournelle produce together better than just Niven’s work alone—although granted, I’ve only read these first two Ringworld novels, and he has quite a body of work that I haven’t touched, so it may not be a fair comparison.

    Overall, Engineers is a good summer read. Watch out for sequel-itis, though: you defintely need to read the original Ringworld to follow what’s going on. (And speaking of sequel-itis, I observe that there are two more sequels in this series… good grief…)

  • A Fire Upon The Deep

    The latest book I’m immersed in (one of them, anyway) is A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge. So far I’m hooked (I’m about a quarter of the way into it), it’s totally compelling science fiction. And it’s a refreshing reminder that there’s really no limit to what you can do, story-wise, with well-done sci-fi.

    Ah, it’s always nice to have the “summer vacation” from TV and have time to catch up on my reading :).