Category Archives: Books

November wrap-up

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Much of November was uneventful—it mostly consisted of the usual routine for the first few weeks minus a kid’s birthday—but for the week of Thanksgiving we visited Burbank to spend the holiday with my brother and his family.

That trip started out slightly awry, as we tried to leave town on Friday the 18th, right after work, and only managed to travel all of 50 miles or so to Crescent before being stopped for several hours only to learn that the road (Highway 97) was closed entirely. See, that was the night of the big statewide winter storm that dumped snow and ice everywhere. So instead of getting to Redding that Friday night we ended up turning around and coming back home (after about 5 hours on the road) and left again the next morning. That was more successful; there was still snow on the roads but it was daylight and the road was open, and once we crossed over into California the roads were pretty much cleared up.

So we drove all the way through to Burbank (north of Los Angeles) in the one day. Which isn’t as bad as all the way to San Diego in one day (we’ve done that one too) but still makes for a long drive all in one sitting.

The rest of the holiday week was good; we drank a lot of good beer, toured the Warner Brothers Studios lot, checked out Burbank and the area a bit, and had a nice Thanksgiving.

Coming back was easy in some respects—as far as the drive went as we split it out over two days—and hard in others (whaddya mean I gotta go back to work?). We got back Sunday relatively early which left time for unpacking and cleaning and such but not a lot of decompression time before going right back into the routine.

Let’s see, what else went on in November… read a good book that I’d recommend, Ready Player One, which has its flaws but is a fun, clever, engaging read. It’s essentially a caper novel masquerading as a near-future/video game/pop-culture/MMO sci-fi adventure, set some 30 years in the future and mostly taking place in an online game/virtual world. And it heavily mines the pop culture of the 80s (and 70s to a lesser extent), particularly that of music, movies, and videogames, which makes it catnip to the contemporary Gen X geek who spent a lot of time playing with computers and videogames during the 80s.

Hmm… is it bad when that’s all I have for the highlights for the month? The rest has been filled with work, and the family stuff—a school concert and other school functions, birthday parties, the usual kind of things.

But! We’re going into the Christmas season, which is one of my favorite times of the year. That always livens things up!

Top 10 books lost to time

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Just ran across this Smithsonian.com article: The Top 10 Books Lost to Time. Neat read, rife with possibilities; every link I’ve seen pulls a quote from the #4 selection, Inventio Fortunata, which does have a bit of a Piri Reis-sounding mystery to it; but the “lost” Shakespeare work of Cardenio interests me more:

Cardenio has been called the Holy Grail of Shakespeare enthusiasts. There is evidence that Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, performed the play for King James I in May 1613—and that Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his collaborator for Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, wrote it. But the play itself is nowhere to be found.

And what a shame! From the title, scholars infer that the plot had something to do with a scene in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote involving a character named Cardenio. (A translation of Don Quixote was published in 1612 and would have been available to Shakespeare.)

Kind of sounds like the ultimate Elizabethan-era crossover.

New books

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Got some new books from Barnes & Noble that came last week (online order via gift card):

Also a set of three “cahier” Moleskine notebooks—the pocket-sized ones (in black). And I’m waiting on two more books to arrive: Brewing with Wheat (Stan Hieronymus) and Yeast (Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff).

Yes, there is a certain irony in the fact that I’m linking to the Amazon pages for all of these items, despite purchasing them all from B&N. What can I say, I have an Amazon affiliate code—if you click through I might earn a few cents.

I’m Just Here For the Food

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I don’t know why exactly, but for some reason I always think in terms of buying and owning a book when I want to read it. And if the money’s not handy (it usually isn’t), I resign myself to possibly getting the book as a gift for my birthday or Christmas. Ironically, I almost never think of the library, so it’s always pleasant to “discover” how good and useful the library is.

Today I picked up I’m Just Here For the Food from the library, a book I’ve been coveting for some time now but (of course) hadn’t been willing to shell out the $32.50 (ouch!) for. (I just started it but so far, it’s a really good book. It already answered one of the main questions I have from Alton Brown‘s TV show—why does he use kosher salt all the time?) And since I rediscovered how nice the library is, I’ve already added 3 other books to my account to keep an eye on via the online interface.

Online? Yeah, the Deschutes Public Library website has a complete catalog interface that lets you do, well, anything via the web that you can do in the library: search the catalog, request items from other libraries, place holds… okay, this isn’t news to people who are, well, literate and visit the library. But I still think it’s pretty nifty.

So go visit a library! They rock!

Doctorow on DRM

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So, I’m a little behind on this: Cory Doctorow‘s Microsoft Research DRM talk that he presented on June 17 and subsequently made available online for free. Very good. Though I do differ from this opinion he gives on ebooks:

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things….

First, screen resolution is an issue, because I have yet to see a device small enough to be casually portable that has a resolution that I could stand to read for more than a few minutes. (My Clié comes close, it has a decent display, but it’s too small, so you have to scroll a lot more, which breaks the comfortable reading flow.) The resolution on a desktop monitor, or even a laptop? Sure, those are good enough—I stare at one all day and read everything from plain email to colorized snippets of code—but I ain’t lugging my 17-inch CRT to the couch with me to read.

Second, I think the “tactile” argument for real books that he points out here is really about why real books will never go away, not why ebooks will fail. Seems hollow, doesn’t seem to ring true here. Odd.

But then he’s right back on track:

New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list….

 

Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you’re done.

Excellent article. Get on over and read the whole thing.

The Da Vinci Code

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Jeez, it looks like I’ve taken a blog sabbatical around here. July must be that kind of month. Anyway…

So, probably against my better judgement, I read The Da Vinci Code over the last week. (My parents loaned it to me.) It wasn’t nearly as earth-shattering as some people would have you believe (especially since I already read the source material, Holy Blood, Holy Grail a number of years ago), but overall I found it mostly, well, amateurish—poorly written.

I mean, the writing just doesn’t follow the rules for good writing. Things like showing versus telling, dialogue, triangulation, stuff like that. It’s distracting, sloppy. And yet—and yet—this book is a huge bestseller. Huge. So what’s the formula?

Short chapters that are quick and easy to read, keeping the pages turning. Characters that are easily identifiable. Chase scenes. And of course, a conspiracy, everybody loves a conspiracy. Especially one with a lot of religious iconographic mystery behind it.

I don’t know if this points more to the state of bestselling fiction today or to the level of the average reader. But on the bright side, it should give hope to all aspiring writes of bestsellers out there.

Beer for Dummies

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Amusingly, at the library today I picked up Beer for Dummies. Not because I need to learn more about beer (well, not entirely; beer is one of the few topics I have some in-depth knowledge on), but because I like the “Dummies” books and want to see how well the topic of beer is treated. A quick survey of the contents reveals a decent spread:

  • Ingredients
  • Brewing and homebrewing beer
  • Cooking with beer
  • Serving and tasting
  • Travel
  • Breweriana

Should be an interesting read.

Balance

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I found this passage from Frontier Doctor to be particularly interesting:

When I came to eastern Oregon in 1905, all of the beautiful pine timber was an open park-like forest, without any underbrush, where game could be seen for a long distance. Each summer there were many forest fires, the vast majority of which were caused by lightning. As there was no underbrush, these fires consumed nothing but the dead pine needles, cones and twigs that had been blown to the ground by the winds. The little blaze, only a few inches high, crept slowly over the ground and cleaned the floor of the forest of all debris, killing the pine beetles on the ground, but did no damage whatever to the green trees. There were a few dead trees scattered through the forest that had been killed by the pine beetles. These dead trees almost invariable took fire and burned up and the beetles with them. It was these annual fires which had existed for centuries that had produced the beautiful open forests free from dangerous underbrush, and killed so many of the pine beetles that they were held in check. The tiny blaze of these fires was not hot enough to injure the pine seed. When the timber was cut off and the sun was allowed to strike the ground, these little pine seeds began to germinate and a new second growth of trees immediately sprang up.

 

No one tried to put these annual fires out, as they were known to be a benefit to the timber. When the big lumber companies began to buy the timber, their representatives in the field saw to it that their holding were burned over every year. If the lightning did not start enough fires, the timber men started more of them.

Nearly one hundred years later, I’ve never known these forests not to be thick with underbrush, and the “normal” forest fire is a raging inferno that destroys everything it touches.

What happened? Ignorance. As usual.

Chickens and Books

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A couple of links I found interesting. First is to All Consuming, “a website that watches weblogs for books that they’re talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis.” Kinda cool. The other is to an article on Kuro5hin titled “Raising the Humble Chicken,” which is kind of random but good. I grew up with chickens; if we didn’t live inside the city limits, I think I’d try to convince my wife to let me get some.