Articles in books
December 30, 2008 at 09:15 PM · Posted under books, family, learning, programming, television
Hey, I’m managing to take the time to write at least one more blog post before 2009. Woo!
My paternal Grandmother died this week. She was an amazing lady and I’m sure she’s much more comfortable now. I always think of her when I hear a piano playing. I don’t know that many grandmas could transpose songs to different keys on the fly just for kicks.
Speaking of music, one of the things I got for Christmas was a five string banjo and a new guitar. Edward loves to play with the banjo strings and I find it to be a most enjoyable instrument to learn. The first string is the highest pitch, the standard G tuning is a little weird coming from a guitar, but it all somehow comes together to make picking out seemingly any combination of notes sound really good. I’m focusing on getting used to the fingerpicks and the four finger rolls.
I’m also flooded with computer books from the Pragmatic Programmers, yay! I’m current enjoying learning about linear vs. rich brain processing with “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning” and will either dig into computer science concepts with Python, a book on crunching data, or a book on Clojure after that.
Work continues to go well, getting paid to think is nice.
Edward can, when he puts his mind to it, manage to pull himself up to standing from sitting. We will have to baby-proof sooner rather than later.
Sarah and I are finding School Rumble to be highly hilarious. It’s kind of a Scrubs/High School Romance silly anime.
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September 02, 2008 at 11:16 AM · Posted under books, tech
I just downloaded Lexcycle’s excellent Stanza for the iPod Touch/iPhone and, wow! Hundreds of free books all downloadable from the app itself, very nice. The ereader is nicely customizable (fonts, font size, margins, text/background color) and feels very polished. There’s even feed versions of big newspapers / magazines available.
If that wasn’t enough, there’s a desktop program (Stanza Desktop) that allows the conversion and importing of books from other formats, notably PDF. I’ve already imported some of my Pragmatic Bookshelf. The formatting gets a little screwy, but very nice overall. The great thing is that this also opens up Stanza to Project Gutenberg
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March 28, 2008 at 11:38 AM · Posted under books, movies, quicklinks
How awesome is it that the World War Z movie script is written by J. Michael Straczynski (writer of Babylon 5)? I’ll tell you: so awesome.
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January 11, 2008 at 10:51 AM · Posted under books, recently
Review: 3/5
More interesting than Prince Caspian, but what story still suffers from C.S. Lewis’ writing. Like Prince Caspian the plot is very straightforward and unsurprising. All of the characters are completely flat, although Reepicheep is amusing. Eustace is the only character that changes at all, and he only in a very predictable manner.
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January 10, 2008 at 10:04 AM · Posted under books, recently
Review: 4/5
A fascinating retrospective of Playboy from the fifties to the new millennium. Before this book I didn’t know that Playboy has contributed so much to our literary culture. A small list, Playboy: discovered Shel Silverstein; published The Fly, Fahrenheit 451, and much else; published Ron Kovic’s memior Born on the Fourth of July; helped Alex Haley (who was a longtime contributer) compile his widespread research into the epic work Roots; assigned Cameron Crowe to review The Who (which got him his job at Rolling Stone) and later published his Fast Times at Ridgemont High; conducted the last interview with John Lennon.
Unfortunately (in the case of the articles) this book is a pictorial retrospective and so contains pictures of the first page or artwork for the article and a description of it, but not the full text.
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January 08, 2008 at 09:12 AM · Posted under books, recently
Review: 2/5
Beautiful artwork, but the writing and storytelling were unfortunately lacking.
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January 01, 2008 at 11:39 AM · Posted under books, recently
Review: 4/5
Practically an antithesis to Atlas Shrugged. The writing style in Fight Club is much more readable than in Atlas Shrugged, engaging and exciting instead of dry and tedious.
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December 27, 2007 at 07:57 PM · Posted under books, recently
Review: 5/5
A fantastic retelling of the epic Ramayana set over a thousand years in the future. The story is exactly as it should be from the brooding Rama to the terrible Asuras. Very well done.
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December 27, 2007 at 07:27 PM · Posted under books, design, recently
Review: 4/5
A great book on the theory of design for webpages. The book covers key design principles for layout, color choice, textures, typography, and imagery.
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December 20, 2007 at 09:16 PM · Posted under books, recently
Review: 2/5
The story was decent enough, but it was over almost as soon as it began. The characters weren’t fleshed out at all, we are told what happens more than we are shown, dialog is extremely matter-of-fact, and the Aslan as Christ allegory is more than a little heavy-handed. I never realized just how good Harry Potter was to the world of children’s literature.
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December 16, 2007 at 11:35 AM · Posted under books, recently
Review: 1/5
The worst book I’ve ever read to completion. This was my Everest. After 1000+ pages of horrible writing, interminable dialog, and philosophical ideas that can’t even properly exist in a fictional construct designed to promote them I feel like I can get through anything. I’m giving it a generous .5 for nifty 50’s era science fiction and .5 for a mildly interesting plot about “important” people suddenly vanishing. More thoughts on this book in an upcoming blog post.
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September 04, 2007 at 12:31 PM · Posted under books
Re: Brent’s September 3rd post (Brent’s September 2007 posts. No permalinks to individual posts Brent?) in which he postulates that there are four “primary dimensions” of fiction writing: 1) World building, 2) Character Building, 3) Density of prose, 4) Storytelling and that:
Frank Herbert was a master at dimension 1, Terry Prachett’s amazing at dimension 2, Ray Bradbury’s a perfect example of dimension 3, while J.K. Rowling’s real strength is in dimension 4.
First I suggest that #3 should be clarity of prose. Further, I submit that a true master of all four is one George R. R. Martin. George R. R. Martin is my favorite author and A Storm of Swords is my favorite book. I say both of these things without pause or hesitation. He’s just that good. His worlds live and breathe and genuinely affect his characters, rather than merely serving as a stage for them to play on. His characters exhibit real dimensionality, even after hundreds of pages and personal insight a character can still surprise and I get the real impression that the characters surprise themselves with what they are capable of. His writing is superb: clear, descriptive, and never boring. His storytelling, though, is his grandest achievement. The stories that he tells are epic and ordinary, fantastical and political, legend and myth and reality all mixed into one huge, chaotic, yet logical plot. This is a world richer than Tolkien’s merely for the fact that it lives. Tolkien will always be the master of background information: languages, cultures, and the like (although Martin is no slouch here) but Martin’s world is so full of experiences and detail that it truly seems real.
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