Category Archives: Books
Review: Makers by Cory Doctorow
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 [...]
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Review: Where Men Win Glory
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 [...]
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My Best Books of 2009
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 [...]
Bringing Something to the Party
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 [...]
LibraryThing, Books, and Planning
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 [...]
Too fast for futurism.
Charles Stross is one of the best near future writers I’ve ever read, and he’s having a problem.
The present is eating his plots. He recently wrote a book about crime and banking in massively multiplayer role playing games and it was great stuff. He started the sequel, but
“one of last year’s major news [...]
What I’ve been reading in February
February has been a banner month for reading. A bumper crop of beaming books brought me a bounty of smiles.
I started out with autism and ended with the midwest.
First I read One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey ‘The Kid’ Ungar, a biography of the best poker and gin player ever. [...]
Books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson’s Anathem has been called a space opera, but that seems inaccurate. The characters eventually make it out of the atmosphere, but time is the subject of the book – not space. Some of the best parts are about contemplation, piecing together puzzles and following the threads of deductive logic through to a conclusion. [...]
Books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I finished the book and put up a longer review of Anathem
When I got home from going San Francisco and the Caymans this Sunday I had a pleasant surprise. I had a nice advanced reader’s copy of “Anathem”, the upcoming novel by Neal Stephenson*. I’d heard reports that it was either post-apocalyptic or [...]
Books: The City and the City by China Mieville