Tag Archives: Books

The Colophon

Books, Design, ,

Entering the Fjord
A special thing in this world: the little note at the end of a book about the typeface. Sometimes there are little stories. At the end of Carl Hiaasen’s “Star Island” you find this:

A Note on the Type

This book was set in Janson, a typeface long thought to have been made by the Dutchman Anton Janson, who was a practicing typefounder in Leipzig during the years 1668-1687. However, it has been conclusively demonstrated that these types are actually the work of Nicholas Kis (1650-1702), a Hungarian, who most probably learned his trade from the master Dutch typefounder Dirk Voskens. The type is an excellent example of the infulential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England up to the time William Caslon (1692-1766) developed his own incomparable designs from them.

Composed by Creative Graphics Inc.,
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics,
Berryville Virginia
Designed by Virginia Tan

What a tale! Kis, who travels from Hungary to study under Voskens. The conclusive evidence produced by some painstaking type researchers that establishes the true founder, long forgotten.

These stories at the end of stories are like swimming in a river, then hearing on shore the history of the water, the movements of the glacier that the water flows from, the land that it traveled over.
Approaching the Glacier after a Stormy Sunrise

Book Review: “Star Island” by Carl Hiaasen

Books, Reviews, ,

You have a friend who you see rarely, but always in a time loop. You tell the same stories, the same jokes, you laugh and drink the same beers. It sounds lame, but really these are some of the best friends to have.

Every Carl Hiaasen book is the same book and they are all great. They have righteous rage at evildoers and they have a strange hero that stands strong where others cower. They have a few good people and many many scum. They are funny as hell and they are full of violence and tragedy.

In Star Island you see Skink, the ex governor who lives in the everglades again, but he isn’t at the center of the book. He’s barely in it. There is a good woman, named Ann, and she’s in danger, sort of. There are a bunch of scum, and they behave poorly to each other and the world. A real estate developer has a sea urchin strapped to his scrotum. It’s a Carl Hiaasen book, how could that not happen?

 

Let’s call it a night after this beer, I’ve got to get going. But I hope to see you again next year, buddy.

Book Review: “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnson

Books, Reviews, , ,

Steven Johnson writes about great subjects. “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” is a very good subject as it is about the patterns that underlie greatness.
Steven identifies a few key patterns that come up again and again with good ideas.

The adjacent possible – Good ideas are of their time, not ahead of their time. They are an extension of what is already around us. You see this in how great ideas seem to spring up from multiple people all at the same time in simultaneous invention. The example of a great idea failing because it is too far ahead of its time is Lord Babbage’s Analytical Engine – the idea was sound, but the technology of the world couldn’t put it into place.

The Liquid network. Ideas get better when they rub against each other – the reason so many good ideas come out of places like NYC and SF and the coffee houses of the renaissance isn’t that these places are magical or that the people there are smarter. People are talking to each other more in those places. There are more informal networks and ideas being passed back and forth among multiple disciplines.

The Slow Hunch: Sometimes ideas have to bake. We all applaud the dream that James Watson of the double helix structure of DNA. It fits our Romantic notion of great discovery happening as a flash of genius. The reality is that you need to study for ten years, immersing yourself in a subject, nursing along a hunch, before the flash of insight can come. You don’t know what is important until later, so it is important to keep track of those little hunches for later – revisiting them with new information can help them bear sudden fruit.

Now, the book contains more patterns, but the meat is all there in the first three. The idea of exaption is contained within the adjacent possible, serendipity and error are contained in the liquid network. What this book is good for – it contains some good description of the real history of ideas and idea making, dispels some of the romantic and disruptive myths of ideation, and prescribes a few practices that make good ideas more likely.

“If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them”

It is, as are most books these days, overlong. Brevity is still a good idea, but I think the market demands that books be a certain size.

Books: The City and the City by China Mieville

Books, Reviews, , , ,

The City & The City is a noir mystery set in an Eastern European impossible city. Two cities, Bezel and Ul Qoma, exist intertwined in a strange custom where they pretend to be separate. The custom is enforced by a mysterious entity known only as “Breach”.

I think of this as a novel set in one of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities“. For those beautiful little shorts, a setting is enough, but here in the novel you need a full plot and characters to keep moving.

In the run-down city of Bezel a body is found. It quickly becomes clear that the murder actually happened in the ascendant “wolf” Ul Qoma. Our hero begins to investigate from one city to another, contrasting the cities and the people who make them separate.

The concept is fantastic and it gets explored well, sometimes more than the story does. The atmosphere is beautiful and you begin to feel the psychology of “Breach” and crowds that must be unseen because they exist in another city. Well worth the time, more for the city and the city, less for the story.

Review: Makers by Cory Doctorow

Books, Reviews, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , ,
I loved this book.
Forget my review and go get it now, it’s wonderful. If you don’t have the scratch right now, that’s ok:  Cory Doctorow walks the talk and has published his book under a creative commons license.  You can get “Makers” for free at his site as a pdf, as html, ePub, or as an audiobook.  Just go get it and read it. Why?
The characters felt right and true and good and wonderful, like people you’ve always wanted to be friends with.  It’s the story of people playing around and doing the creative work that felt right to them, pushing to stay free and work on beautiful things.  Their hard work takes a damn beating from the world around them and they rise up after that beating.

I was sad closing it, because I wanted more from them, more for them, and another thing…

I always wanted to be Perry, but I looked in that book and I’m Sammy.

Review: Where Men Win Glory

Books, Reviews, Uncategorized, , , , ,
I’ve finished Jon Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory: The Oddysey of Pat Tillman” in the air above the middle of America and I’m furious.  This story begins with the hero dying and it ends with his betrayal by the people who promised us all they would put our interests above theirs.
Krakauer builds a sculpture out of words, and it is an angry art.  In a flat, journalistic style he begins with the creation of Pat Tillman, the birth of the Taliban, and the disturbing story of their meeting in the Graveyard of Empires called Afghanistan.   Instead of the hero meeting his enemy and vanquishing or being vanquished, he is destroyed by the common fuckups of scores of lesser men. He is part of a string of other common tragedies and Krakauer pulls together the infuriating betrayal of Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman and scores of other men and women of the US Armed Forces by their leadership, carving a bleak relief of giants mired up to their knees in a vast, broken septic system.
The horrible coverup of his death is a crime that’s gone unpunished, and it’s only come to light because Tillman was a famous football player.  Joe and Jane Smith get no such scrutiny, and fall into the trash heap of history.
If you care about honor, this is a good book. If you care about truth or valor, this is a good book.  It’s well written, with a slow, burning build up that leads to an ashfield.  Because this is a story about real life, the villains are not caught, the hero isn’t crowned and the story doesn’t end at the climax.  If you’ve got friends in the US Armed Forces, please make sure that they read this.  When we send our heroes to war we know that they might die, but we don’t expect that they will be used so cheaply and with so little respect.

My Best Books of 2009

Books, Pals, Reviews, ,

I like to read.
Here are the best books I read this year.

Nonfiction

Born On A Blue Day & Embracing the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammet

Yes, it’s two books, but it’s really about the same subject. Daniel Tammet is an autistic gay savant synesthete. He won the unusualness lottery. The first book is his life story and the second is a tour through what he’s learned about the human mind. An amazing amount of good neuro and cognitive science in here, presented in a clear, non-technical way. You can read more about it in my earlier review.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright

It’s brilliant. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, examines all of human history through a single lens, in this case win-win games.
The thesis is that human life and all progress comes about as a series of non-zero sum interactions, games where both parties win.

It gets a bit repetitive some times – when a story begins you can start predicting how it will end because there is only one theme in the book, but it effectively demonstrates the idea and shows you the impact throughout history and applications for the future

Authentic Happiness : Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman

When I was a kid, my answer to “whaddya wanna be when you grow up” was always “Happy.” 1 I had noticed how often adults didn’t seem to be happy and how often they weren’t doing anything about it. Seligman is no snake-oil guru, he’s a past president of the APA and an experimental psychologist who worked on some of the great experiments of the 20th century. His explanations of happiness are based on actual study and experimentation and the recipes for success seem to match up with my personal experience. While I haven’t read his book on Learned Optimism, I’ve heard similar praise for it.

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater

Pure poetry. Laura uses the structure of foundational experiments in social psychology to raise deep questions about medicine, free will, obedience, and the ethics of experiments that involve conscious beings.
I’ve reconsidered long held ideas because of this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough for people who are unfamiliar with how brains work but don’t want to wade through the dry details. Where Daniel Tammet is explaining the big picture, Laura is giving you the impact of these experiments.
If Mary Roach wrote about psychology, but actually had something to say, she might write this book.
Worth reading just to learn what happened to the subjects after the Milgrim experiments in obedience to authority.

The Complete Manual of Woodworking by Albert Jackson

I’m just a beginning woodworker, but this is a great resource.
It’s full of huge, gorgeous shots of wood, cuts, examples and tools. It covers the wide range of methods and materials with great detail but remains accessible.
Reading this book is also worth it for someone uninterested in actually doing any woodworking. It shows you how the furniture and tools around you are made, how the character of wood shapes the architecture of the things around you. I certainly look at my kitchen cabinets with new eyes. You’ll find out why in this book.

Fiction

Litttle Brother by Cory Doctorow

Loved this.
Sent it to my dad. Recommending it to everyone. It’s about how smart courageous kids deal with adults giving up on freedom after a terror attack.

Well written, fast paced, and filled with real characters – something the SF genre doesn’t always get. This isn’t far future fiction, this is about right now.
The technology is all homemade and usable. Heck, they even have DIY instructions for elements of Little Brother up on instructables. Doctorow is a smart thinker about the problems of security, terrorism and politics. He’s an editor on the wonderful BoingBoing blog and is kind enough to provide you free electronic copies of Little Brother under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. That means you can give it away and make new things with it, but you’ve gotta make those shareable, give Cory credit, and share your results under a CC license.
Get it, give it to a kid, and hope.

Crystal Nights and Other Stories by Greg Egan

Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

Greg Egan can’t stop writing things I enjoy. I’ve read so many rehashes of the same ideas and Egan never does that. Every story contains at least two ideas completely foreign to me. He piles them on into a delicious meal in each story. What’s in there: completely alien life 2, the ethics of evolutionary algorithms 3 , and a hundred other things you’ve never thought about, all packaged in exciting, well plotted stories.
Egan is consistently the best hard SF writer working.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories by John Kessel

This is a little bit of weirdness that I read on my new Droid phone. It’s a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 story, so you have no excuse whatsoever for not reading it. The stories are good and whip-smart.
If you’ve ever read a certain Flannery O’Connor story, you’ve got to read this for the perfect “Every Angel is Terrifying”. Set right after the O’Connor story ends and tells you just what happens next in the smartest way.  “The Red Phone” was a delightful story of phone sex, romance, and telecommunications for the deaf
I also enjoyed a series of stories about a matriarchy on the moon. Each story opens up more and more thought into the society – a lovely little bit of world building.

The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson

This is a bit of a complement to Crystal Nights. Egan’s book is full of bright sharp ideas and this one has warm comfy stories with great characters.
Beautiful little short stories that interconnect at strange tangents. Strange booksellers, impossible books, and the first story I’ve read where information visualization plays a powerful part in the story.

I’m looking for more from this author on the basis of these stories.

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan

Wonderful. A beautiful classic noir mystery set in a place where bodies are a commodity and life is cheap and possibly permanent.
Sex, death, betrayal and crime for the cyber set.
This is SF for those who thought they didn’t like it because all of the flashy SF ideas are just layered onto a really strong closed room mystery, but one that couldn’t have been done in any other setting. To check out if you think science fiction is stupid but you love Lawrence Block or Robert Parker mysteries.

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

I finished this book 24 hours after picking it up, and didn’t read anything else till I had finished. It’s fantastic.
Fastest book I’ve read since Palahniuk. Similar style and rhythm – full of secret knowledge about medicine and mobsters, great amounts of violence, pain, and gross-out.
It’s a book paced like a punk song about a hitman who becomes a doctor. Yes it’s a cliche to have a hitman who gets found by the mobsters he flipped on, but I couldn’t care less while reading this. It’s fun and furious and a damn fine read.

  1. OK, sometimes it was burglar or policeman, but generally it was happy.   (back)
  2. alien alien, not like the sexy blue elves of avatar   (back)
  3. it’s also a covert of indictment omniscient, omnipotent, but uninvolved deities.   (back)

Bringing Something to the Party

Books, Hacks, Pals, , ,

I just noticed that Paul Carr has released his new book, “Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore” as a Creative Commons BY-NC  licensed download for the US. And the, um, rest of the internet.

I’m going to read it on my hot new Droid phone, but there’s only a PDF version and an HTML version. I want ePub format, so I converted it.  You can download the ePub version of “Bringing Nothing to the Party” here.

It looks like Paul has put a CC-BY-NC license in his blog post, but has put also ND in his text.  He’s also been thankful for a derivative work before, so I think he really means BY-NC.  Regardless, if he asks me to take down the ePub, I will.  You gotta make sure CC licenses actually match up with what you want.

LibraryThing, Books, and Planning

Books, morelight, Reviews

I’ve been using the excellent librarything to keep track of my books. I’ll be building a self-hosted version of it Real Soon Now, but until then, I’m putting what I read in there. I’d gotten a bit of feedback from my vast hordes of readers that they are interested in what I read, so you can see reviews as they happen over there on the sidebar of mah blurg. Why librarything instead of GoodReads or Visual Bookshelf or the like?  Because they will export your library back out for you.

If I decide to change over to a new system, I’ll want an easy way to get MY data back out.   Always consider your exit strategy.