Inspired by Tim Bray:
From We Interrupt This Broadcast by Joe Garner:
The Potsdam communique arrived in Japan on July 27.
Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions, and point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.
So yeah, I took the weekend off from blogging. Ran out of steam, I guess; I didn’t even read any other blogs on Saturday, I was engrossed in finishing up Kiln People. Sometimes it’s just plain nice to take a break.
Ugh, it looks like I’m taking a blogging vacation. Time to try to get back on track. Tonight, since I’m reading one of his latest books, I thought I’d provide some links and commentary on David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction authors.
The book I’m reading is Kiln People, and it’s really good so far. Brin has a knack for taking some of the most out-there, implausible-sounding ideas and turning them around into fascinating, believable premises. Kiln People is a good example; the premise is that future society will be transformed by the ability to create temporary, clay copies of yourself (called “dittos”) that essentially operate as a proxy version of you, and at the end of the day you can “inload” all the memories from the copy—in effect, experiencing and remembering everything the ditto did without risk or effort to yourself. I put off reading this book for a long time because it sounded a bit absurd, but once I got into it, it’s entirely engrossing and convincing.
Brin also excels at portraying alien points of view. Brightness Reef is the best example of this I can think of, jumping POVs among half a dozen different alien species fluidly. That sort of writing is hard work, but it pays off when done well. Which Brin does.
Herewith my thoughts on the essential David Brin reading list; if you haven’t read any of his books, start with these.
:)And, if anyone’s counting, my least favorite Brin novel is Glory Season. Why? It was just too long for me, and the ending was far too ambiguous for my tastes—it didn’t leave me with any real sense of closure, just left me feeling unsatisfied.
I was browsing at Barnes and Nobles this evening and found a book that looks very interesting (so I bought it): Frontier Doctor: Observations on Central Oregon and the Changing West. It’s the autobiographical account of a doctor during the formative years of Bend.
Urling Coe came to the new town of Bend, Oregon, in 1905, a young medical student graduate seeking adventure and opportunity in the West. Frontier Doctor, Coe’s autobiographical account of his thirteen-year residency, details the extraordinary experiences of a young physician in frontier Oregon and offers a vivid social history of town and ranch life on the Oregon high desert.
Cool! Looks very much like a fun and interesting read.
Didn’t post anything yesterday because I was wrapped up finishing American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Amazing, fascinating book. Absolutely worth it.
The book Advanced PHP Programming is out, by George Schlossnagle. Looks like it might be pretty interesting; there’s certainly a scarcity of good PHP books that cover advanced topics—most of them are targeted at the beginner and the basics, and don’t have anything to offer me.
(Quick disclaimer: some of the Wrox books actually look like they might be decent, but I haven’t had my hands on a Wrox PHP book since the first couple they published.)
There was a time when I wanted to write a PHP book. It was going to be an advanced book, called “PHP Secrets” and cover all sorts of topics. I never really pursued it, though, largely because of a general disillusionment in the computer book industry: you spend a year or more writing a book on a subject, and by the time it gets published it’s obsolete.
Thinking about it now, though, maybe a better venue for such a thing would be online, like what Mark Pilgrim did with his Dive Into Python book. That might be kind of cool; a live work-in-progress that I could (theoretically) keep up-to-date. Hmmm.
One of the big online stories over the past couple of days is Amazon.com‘s weeklong glitch that “suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews” (New York Times article here). Turns out a lot of what was revealed was that authors were anonymously writing glowing reviews of their own books, and getting family and friends to do so too—and conversely, anonymously panning rivals’ books. This “glitch” exposed a bigger issue:
…many people say Amazon’s pages have turned into what one writer called “a rhetorical war,” where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.
Amazon called this “an unfortunate error.” Yeah, right.
Consider: these “anonymous” reviewers are not anonymous at all, Amazon clearly tracks who they really are and can, at any given time, follow exactly who is saying what about any book. Confronted with the questionable antics of these reviewers and the growing “rhetorical war,” I know what I would do to try to put a stop to it. (Here’s a hint: it’s basically the same thing that happened to Amazon.)
Some neat book-related links tonight. First, Locus Online has published a 2003 recommended reading list of science fiction and fantasy novels, novellas, short stories, anthologies, etc. It looks like a good list, I noticed several items coinciding with my reading wishlist.
Next, the big news: Cory Doctorow‘s new book, Eastern Standard Tribe, is out! And, like his previous two books, he is making the novel free to download from his website. Gotta love this. Which means, over the next couple of days, I’ll download the plain text version and convert it to the Palm Reader format for my ebooks page. Don’t worry, though—you can still buy the book if you want a paper version. I sure will.
Does this seem counterintuitive? I’m currently reading The Story of America, by Hendrik van Loon, published in 1927. First edition, too, I think. Why? Because I wanted to get a perspective on American history from nearly 80 years ago. This was a time when the booming Roaring Twenties were in full swing, before the Great Depression and World War II, when there was only one “Great War” and there were still people alive that had lived through the Civil War.
This wasn’t a planned excursion, mind you; I’d had this book on my shelf for quite awhile (I probably picked it up at a garage sale or a thrift store for cheap) and picked it up when I was looking for something to read.
On the whole, though, it’s an interesting and engaging read. Being written in 1927, it’s still under copyright for a few more years, but I’ve noticed that Hendrik van Loon’s earlier book The Story of Mankind (1921) is available on Gutenberg. Perhaps I’ll convert it to a Palm ebook.
Come on—who wouldn’t want The Complete Far Side for Christmas?