No Mod Required

ppk on JavaScript, 1/e (VOICES) Another excellent introductory book. I got this mostly as a way of thanking Pete Paul Koch for all of his invaluable work over the years at quirksmode.org, but reading it was still a worthy way to spend my time. Not surprisingly (since he knows his stuff backwards and forwards) it’s an excellent book, well written, easy to follow and very thorough. I’m going to recommend it going forward to anyone looking for an introduction to JavaScript programming.

O’Reilly Media — Search Engine Optimization More of a monograph than a book, this intro to SEO is a nice little primer on the sorcery that is Search Engine Optimization. A lot of it I knew already, but it’s still nice to get a complete overview like this. If you’re not familiar with the techniques and concepts, then I heartily recommend this thin download.

The Design of Everyday Things I’m embarrassed it’s taken me this long to (a) start reading this book and (b) finish it. It’s been on my radar for several years and it was only earlier this year that I got off my butt to read it. Once I started it, it would continually get pushed to the back burner by work or other reading (fiction, mostly,) so it took something like four months to work through. In hindsight this is the sort of book I should have just locked myself in a room for a weekend to read maybe a decade ago. It’s really that good, especially since I’m supposed to help advocate for the user as part of my day-to-day existence. The book is basic, but still iinsightful and helps to clarifies many concepts that float around in the world of usable design but might not be fully understood, even by people bandying the concepts around. Want to know what the jackass down the hall is really taking about when he vaguely goes on about “affordances?” This book is for you

Highly recommended.

Sandworms of Dune Disappointing. At least a a piece of literature. If I hadn’t read most of it during 14 hours of plane flight and it wasn’t theoretically the culmination of something like 10,000 pages of the Dune stories I would have just thrown the thing away. It was boring, meandering, and, probably most damning, relied on a heaping helping of deus ex machina to tie it all together in the end. The kernel of something cool was there, which is probably what kept me going, but it was my least favorite of all of the Herbert/Anderson novels. considering this is the culmination of the entire Dune experiences that’s a hearty bummer.

Oh well.

Spook Country I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to be disappointed by this book. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. That’s for certain. I guess the question is- can a book that is merely good be a disappointment? After chewing on it for a couple of days, I think the answer is yes.

This is a good book. The thing is, for my money at least, most of Gibson’s output has been better than good. The first book in the Bridge Trilogy, Virtual Light, and this, his latest, are probably the only exceptions. That this book followed (and is set in the same universe as) Pattern Recognition, certainly doesn’t help matters. Pattern Recognition is one of my favorite books of the decade so I had really high hopes for this one. While Spook Country has its moments, it really can’t hold a candle to Pattern Recognition by any measure you care to apply to it. The characters are pretty cool, but no one stands out like Cayce Pollard, and the mystery is pretty interesting, but is nowhere near as engrossing as the story of “the footage.” Even ignoring the (probably unfair) comparisons to Pattern Recognition, there’s the plain fact that this book never really grabbed me by the balls. Gibson’s book generally do that. This one? It took me maybe a week to read it. I think I read Neuromancer in 24 hours.

Hopefully, this, like Virtual Light before it will improve with time as other books fill in the spaces around it. Once I’d read though the Bridge Trilogy once and then later revisited the books, I found that my appreciation of Virtual Light grew. It still wasn’t great, but it was better and maybe that’s what we’ll see happen with this one.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) I just realized I’d never noted this. I read it over the first weekend (mostly on Saturday night) and, drumroll please, I really enjoyed it. If I go into more depth than that I won’t stop and then Google will be polluted with all my spoiler filled ramblings. And we don’t want that… Maybe after the Deathly Hallows movie comes out I’ll just go buck wild and go into every geeky depth that I want to plumb.

I’ve got William Gibson’s book coming up this weekend. I can’t wait. I’m going to go pick it up on Saturday, then I’m going to plant myself on my back porch with a bottle of wine and read until Mother Nature puts the lights out. Sunday, I’m going to go to the gym and then do it all again (except maybe with a series of Hendrick’s Gin and tonics.)

Hannibal Rising I’m a complete geek for the first two books in this series- Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. I’m also a complete and utter fool for the film version of Silence of the Lambs. I think it’s complete genius.

In other words, this is a book I should like. I did, but only a little. Really, it should have been so much better. My biggest problem with this Hannibal Lecter:Year One style tale is that it just doesn’t feel all that connected to the later stories. There are touches of Hannibal the Cannibal, but a lot of times it felt like another character entirely. Of course, I seem to remember having a similar reaction to Hannibal, so I guess this shouldn’t be a total surprise.

And yeah, I’ll still end up watching the movie at some point.

Doors of Perception Huxley actually argues in this book that we should transition off of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, etc. and onto mescalin.

How awesome is that?

I really enjoyed this book. There’s not that much literature of this quality written from this perspective so for that it’s a really interesting read. He connects a lot of dots that you might not expect a book about a mescalin experience to connect. Being an art nerd I thoroughly I enjoyed his altered trip through viewing art and art history. I especially enjoyed his appraisal of Vermeer.

The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest While not quite the work of literature that Jon Krakauer’s book is, it does offer an interesting perspective on the tragic, dramatic events of May 1996. Everest is a fascinating topic for me in general and the tragic events of that night are especially so.

Solaris: Better than both films combined. There’s some fun, pure imagination at work here. Lem’s imagery is brilliant in the same way that Jodorowsky’s is- it pulses with pure infectious creativity. The pure poetry of the ending is really what pushed this book over the top for me. It’s a wonderful chapter.