6 posts tagged “books”

What books are on your nightstand?

If I get through all three of these before Christmas, I'm an all-star.

This sounds cool as hell.

I haven't read this yet -- but I've been hearing about it and reading references to it for a while. Then this morning, I was reading this really interesting article in Wired, and I get to the end and find it's an excerpt from this. More than enough to lead to an eventual purchase, the next time I'm in a bookstore. (I have too much to read and insufficient disposable income to buy things I'm not ready to read just yet).

[update] so i was cleaning up some bookmarks just now, and found that the Long Tail blog was somewhere I had glanced at, liked enough to bookmark, but never gone back to. Reading it over has me more enticed. At least one tenet of the book seems to be that the capacity of the general public to publish their own content easily (thanks to weblogs, the proliferation of digital cameras, etc) leads to the public not buying mass media as much (the decline of the blockbuster). One underlying thought I've always had about media piracy is this: hey, guys, maybe your music machine isn't a zillion-dollar business anymore. Maybe the fact that you've relentlessly pushed crap on us for years, forced our social perceptions, controlled our access to what used to be our property, and held yourselves up for worship doesn't work for the rest of us anymore, or at least an increasingly bigger part of the rest of us. It's kinda like the umbrella repairman blaming globalization for his woes.

[[update]] the reason i haven't read it yet is because The Long Tail was published today. I found that out through Anil, who in addition to being a 6A person, has a lower user number than I another site we both frequent. The point being that for all the things I absorb in a day, sometimes basic facts can go right by me. And also that Anil's thoughtful posts (such as his thoughts on the book) have helped me understand a lot about the web right now, and you should check him out. [This is good]

I've been working on my book list. I used to read alot, and singehandedly brought home the BookIt! title for my fifth grade class with a whopping 83 books read that year. Now I'm in school and I read a lot more online stuff, or magazines, or short stories. I don't think I read a novel all school year. I'm on my second of the summer.

Anyway, I have kinda cool connections to two of the books on my list so far. I have a signed copy of Mother Night that I got in 1996. My freshman year Writing Workshop prof was also the dean of student affairs, and when Vonnegut came to speak at the school, she got me into both the small-party dinner the night before he spoke and an upper-level English class he guest-lectured. I chased him down after class, asked him to sign Chapter 40 (a brief treatise on motivation) and borrowed his lighter, smoking about half of my cigarrette with him before the professor he was with got a little annoyed at me and I left.

I don't have anything in particular about the Noam Chomsky reader, but a claim to fame for me is that I know he's read articles I wrote. In 2002-03, I lived in Costa Rica, and worked for a paper called MesoAmerica. We covered Central American news one country at a time, digesting the daily national papers into monthly summaries. (Going to Costa Rica in and of itself was arguably the biggest decision of my twenties, but that's for another time). Anyway, Noam Chomsky was a subscriber to the magazine, wrote blurbs for us and all, and at one time emailed commentary on one of my articles to my boss.

So I got that going for me, which is nice.

I kinda covered this in my blog qotd entry, but it's simply one of the most amazing books about the last sixty years. A mixture of fact and fiction, you'll learn alot the evolution of technology, especially cryptology, about World War II Pacific Theater history, about southeast Asia, about everything. I'm currently reading Snow Crash, which has eerily accurate depictions of the web and where its headed for a book written in 1992. Diamond Age (about nanotech mostly) is another one that has been recommended widely; I have heard mixed responses to the Baroque Cycle books.