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Our son, now aged nine, still enjoys a bedtime story, and I enjoy reading them. He’s perfectly literate but his reading-for-pleasure repertoire is along the lines of Harry Potter, Asterix, and Garfield. So I aim higher: Tolkien, Homer, Le Guin. Recently we started on Huckleberry Finn. Before we dove in, I spent a few minutes on a capsule history of the slave trade, the Civil War, the Jim Crow years, the civil rights movement, and so on. He seemed to get it; as evidence, he picked right up on it when I pointed out that some of these storylines extend forward to right now, as in the Obama/McCain that’s on every TV these days. I also explained that “nigger”, which appears in every other sentence of Huck Finn, is super-ultra-rude and just isn’t used any more. I haven’t...

I have always for some reason, been sweet on donkeys. I’ve published some fetching donkey photographs in this space, and have visited the Donkey Sanctuary in Devon on three separate occasions. Herewith a donkey-centric book review, travel recommendation, and French word that needs a better English translation. Donkey Wisdom That’s the book: in full, The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World by Andy Merrifield; a present last Christmas from my Mother, who knows I like them. Merrifield likes donkeys a whole lot, perhaps more than I do, and has wrapped a thin and enjoyable (note that I do not say “but enjoyable”; thin is good) philosophical discourse around the species. He has plentiful recourse to every literary and scriptural donkey that you’ve ever heard...

Aleksander Isayevich was for me the most influential living writer. Influential on me I mean, not on literature or the world. I was born into a house full of books and read incessantly starting at age six or so. I could always read exceptionally fast. In my teens I settled into a diet of high-velocity pulp; sci-fi mostly, and not the best either. But whatever, as long as the plot moved right along and it had sex or violence or shiny machines. I can’t remember how, or in what year of high school, I picked up One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I can remember sitting in the school library, entirely entranced while a corner of my mind wondered why; there were no gunfights or rockets. Only twice in my life have I finished a book and immediately turned back to Page One to start...

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 Map I wanted to print out a map so the boy could follow the action along; Tolkien’s own are really inadequate. Fortunately, there’s the “MearthMap” Map of Middle Earth, and it’s astounding. It’s in vector format (a 1.2M PDF), which means effectively infinite scaling, which it...

Clearly, Nicholas Carr (hereinafter “Carr” for succinctness) 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 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. Outline The book embeds three themes, quite loosely intertwined. First, on the Really Big Analogy between Electricity and Information Technology. Second, on...

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. I picked the T.E. Lawrence prose translation (signed “Shaw” of course) because I’m a Lawrence cultist, and it’s not perfect, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that large parts of Homer are boring and other large parts are horrendously violent and still other large parts are sexually explicit. So maybe it wasn’t the best choice. On the other hand, it’s been good mental exercise as I have to compose...

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. Language Shift I was most of the way through the 25-page Introduction, not having looked at the front or back cover very carefully, and I thought “This is translated from French.” True enough, and fairly flowery French at that; for example: For computerized typesetting is based on mechanical typesetting,...

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. Just the Facts The central plot device is, as in almost every other Gibson work, three small groups of characters pursuing story-threads in parallel (very close parallel in one case). Hubertus Bigend and Blue Ant are back, and the enigmatic magnate retains the services of a troubled woman to pursue a poorly-defined goal. Gibson’s done this before, twice; but Hollis Henry is stronger and less fucked-up than either Marly Kruschkova or Cayce Pollard, which makes her (for me anyhow) more empathetic. Also Bigend has become less menacing and oblique; it...

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......

Today we have chipmunks and hats and earnings and a novel. Chipmunks People who haven’t been in the woods in the right part of the North American West. Think of a smaller, cuter, faster, striped squirrel. Anyhow, economist-blogger Brad DeLong has a witty and thoughtful conversation with one in Three Miles East of East Inlet Trailhead, Rocky Mountain National Park. Hats I have previously written here on the merits of Akubra hats; they come from Australia, are stylish and tough generally just the thing. Unfortunately, they’re kind of hard to buy, even in Australia. Well, an online retailer named David Morgan has an online Akubra store. I’ll have to give it a try. Earnings Following on Sun’s online earnings release, Dominic Jones at IR Web Report has penned The truth about...

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......

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......

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. Also, you should read David’s Everything is Miscellaneous. I finished it a couple weeks back and have been struggling for a review angle. You should see my copy, there are scribbled-on...

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......

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...

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”. I read about it in some magazine, picked it up since I’m a sucker for the classics, and I’m glad I did. The prefaces and interludes by Ms Carson are quirky and interesting and worth reading, but not nearly as good as the four plays translated between them: Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos, and Alkestis. They are tragedies, and three of the four are particularly tragic tragedies, with vengeful gods stirring a thick brew of incest, madness, and murder. But the words are stripped down and stripped down and stripped down again, their edges sharp as the those on the swords that shed the blood, and there’s lots of that, albeit mostly offstage ....

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......

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...

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. Bach There’s really not that much new to learn about Bach, but I think Bach newbies would enjoy Gaines’ narrative, and this Bach obsessive did too. If you want to read one book about Bach, that would be...

Over on his very-intermittent blog, William Gibson is apparently floating fragments of whatever it is that he’s currently writing. Atmospheric, as......