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Books

Off the Grid

I’ve been off the grid most of the weekend, as I took the family home to Wisconsin to visit the in-laws.

My father-in-law has a wireless broadband connection (supposed to be about 1 meg down, but feels much slower). It’s connect to a Linksys 802.11b router. I’ve been unable to to get my Toshiba laptop to connect to the net, though my work laptop running XP didn’t have a problem nor did my wife. My Toshiba gets an IP address and saw the nameservers on the wireless (eth1), but has horrendous packet loss. Pinging google.com resulted in 66% packet loss, and web pages wouldn’t pull up at all. I don’t know if it was a Linux thing, Foresight, or the ISP itself.

It has reminded me how much I loathe not being connected. So much for tackling learning docbook this weekend for the Foresight user guide or the blog theme on WordPress MU.

Having some time on my hands, I did do some shopping yesterday, stopping at a local bookstore, who hosted John Scalzi just over a week ago. I missed him in Minneapolis last week, and was able to pick up an autographed copy of his latest book, The Last Colony, which oddly isn’t featured on his Books page yet. The Last Colony is the third book in his Old Man’s War trilogy.

On a recommendation, I picked up You Suck by Christopher Moore, which was good and as funny as promised. I finished it yesterday, and I love books that make me laugh out loud, which this did a few times. An odd note about the book: One of the characters is from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, about an hour north of where I am visiting right now in Milwaukee. I was born in Fond du Lac, and most of my extended relatives live there. It’s fairly small with about 40,000 residents, and I was surprised to see it in a book. (But not as surprised when Oconomowoc, where I am right now, was featured in Cryptonomicon).

I also picked up a nice hardcover edition of four Philip K. Dick stories – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik and The Man in the High Castle. I own a number of his short stories, and since it was featured on Boing Boing, the Total Dick-Head blog has been a favorite of mine to read, so it was good to pick up a couple of Dick’s classics.

I enjoy supporting local bookstores, it’s always worth the premium I pay in my mind. I enjoyed visiting Harry Schwartz Bookstores. They had a fairly good collection of books in all genres, and had recommendations for books by their employees all over the store, which I loved.

Now it’s off to lunch and a 6 – 7 hour drive home today.

Dreamhaven Books

Dreamhaven Books on Lake Street in Minneapolis is one of my favorite bookstores that I’ve ever been to. Dreamhaven specializes in science fiction, comic books, and fantasy and horror. Not only does one of my favorite authors frequent there, they have a great collection of new and used books, with some of the deepest catalog selections you’ll see in a book store. They have very rare books, and a large selection of author signed books.

Unfortunately, Neil Gaiman writes on his blog that Dreamhaven was broken in to Saturday. From the email he received from Greg Ketter, owner of Dreamhaven:

We had a break-in on Saturday night. They got a bit of cash but wreaked

terrible havoc on the store and my office. Damages will be costly but

insurance should cover a lot of it. But after the lull in current

business, this really will hurt. I don’t like charity but if you could

encourage people to maybe buy an extra book off us soon, it may help.

Three bookstores have closed in the Twin Cities in the past two months and

I don’t want to make it four.

Hit up Neil’s blog for more info. Dreamhaven was the bookstore that sponsored Neil’s reading and showing of Mirrormask late last year for the launch of Neil’s latest book, Fragile Things. This was where I won a very rare copy of Mr. Gaiman’s Angel’s & Visitations, that was published by, who else, but Dreamhaven books.

I get to Dreamahaven a couple of times a year – and I was just there last Friday spending my birthday money a day before the break-in. Looks like I’m on my way back to pick up an extra book or two to help them out in their time of need.

Geek Mafia

Welcome to the first in a new ongoing feature, “Recently Read”. Brief reviews of books I’ve just finished reading, Recently Read starts with G33K Mafia by Rick Dakan. I’ve been taking recommendations from Cory Doctorow, and reading books based on his recommendations and reviews he posts at Boing Boing, and he hasn’t done me wrong yet, starting with Geek Mafia.

Geek Mafia

Geek Mafia tells the story of Paul Reynolds, a former comic book writer who co-founds a gaming company, and is let go from the company he co-founded a few years later. Paul, while wallowing in his sorrows, meets Chloe, and together Chloe helps him hatch a scheme to get back at his former company. Paul’s adventures continue with Chloe, who leads a small band of con artists, and Paul soon finds himself involved in the underground world of hackers and con artists.

The book is fast paced, and you quickly come to care about the characters. Trying to figure out who’s conning who, Geek Mafia gives you an insider’s view to a seedy side of Silicon Valley you never thought was possible.

After reading Geek Mafia, I visited Rick Dakan’s home on the web, and was surprised to learn he self-published Geek Mafia (which explains a lot of the typos found in the book) and that the book was semi-autobiographical. Rick co-founded Cryptic Studios, makers or City of Heroes, and was also let go before the game came to fruition. Rick is currently working on a sequel and blogs frequently at Rickdakan.com.

Alan Moore interview

Mile High Comics has a two-part interview (Part 1, Part 2) with Alan Moore, a giant in the comic book industry. The author of well-known works as League of Extraordinary Gentleman, From Hell, V for Vendetta and Watchmen, a Hugo award winner.

In the interview he talks about his anger for DC Comics for letting his books be turned into poor movies, not owning his own works, and the industry in general. Agree or disagree with his thoughts, you have to respect him as he stands for his convictions.

My Christmas Present

Kelly got me one of the best gifts I’ve got in a long time, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes Collection.

Weighing at just over 22 pounds, the collection consists of 3 hardcover bound books, with every comic done by Bill Watterson. Kicking off with a 14 page foreword, which was worth it a lone, as Mr. Watterson discusses his love of comics, and touches on why he never granted interviews or went ahead with merchandising.

Each book contains 3 years worth of strips, interspersed with water color paintings that take up a whole page. The comic strips are laid out in order, and the background color of each page is an off-white that really makes the strips stand out. Each page has the dates the comics on the page were originally run.

I love Calvin and Hobbes – not only does it take me back to my childhood, but those strips still make me laugh out loud as I was reading them this weekend. It truely is one of the timeless classics.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Harry Potter

I have never read a Harry Potter book. As avid a reader as I am, once something hits the mainstream, especially so ferociously, I just have to be different and not do it. (I’ve never seen Titanic either).

With that said, I took Alex this morning to Target post-haste and we purchased Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

A number of years back when Harry Potter was just starting to become popular, my wife bought a couple of the books and read them to decide if we could read them aloud to Alex or let him read them when he was older. She loved them, and he has loved them for the past couple of years.

Which led to being a good little American consumer this morning. I figure I won’t see Alex for a day or two until he’s done reading it.

William Gibson gets it

William Gibson is another one who gets the remix culture.

In an article on Wired, Gibson writes of some of his early influences, including William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, one of the first authors to use sampling in literature.

Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the ’40s and ’50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me.

By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever it was he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Experiments with audiotape inspired him in a similar vein: “God’s little toy,” his friend Brion Gysin called their reel-to-reel machine.

It will be interesting to see if Mr. Gibson follows up on what he says he believes here, and introduces any type of Creative Commons licenses on his books or how it affects him going forward.

Required Reading

My new favorite magazine and website is brought to you by the geniuses behind Make Magazine.

From their website:

The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration.

It’s like Popular Science was, except for the 21st century.

The MAKE Blog is fantastic, updated often with lots of DIY tricks and links.

I even downloaded two of their Podcasts last week, and those were pretty good too.

The magazine is fantastic – it’s a quarterly, nice and thick, with information on what others are out there hacking on, one project with detailed step by steps per month, and tons of cool other articles.

O’Reilly has done it again.

This week's purchases

A bunch of good stuff this week:

Books:

  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. A cow-orker lent me this to read last week and it was fantastic. A must read, review coming soon.
  • Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Stranger than Fiction; all by Chuck Palahniuk. Author of Fight Club, Mr. Palahniuk’s writing style is very unique, and Stranger than Fiction are some non-fiction stories from his time on the road.
  • A Spell for Chameleon, by Piers Anthony. An author near and dear to my heart from my childhood. Last year I picked up the Incarnations series and Bio of a Space Tyrant series from my favorite used book store. A Spell For Chameleon is the first Xanth novel, published in 1977. I’m going to re-read it and see if Alex is ready for the series.

Music:

  • Gorillaz, Demon Days: Special Editon. From one half of the team formerly known as Blur, Gorillaz’ Demon Days is a fantastic alternative rock album flavored with a bit of hip-hop.
  • Audioslave, Out of Exile. The sophomore effort from Chris Cornell and the former bandmembers of Rage Against The Machine.

Movies:

  • In Good Company. Topher Grace is Dennis Quaid’s boss, and tries to date his employee’s daughter as well.
  • The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Wes Anderson’s (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) third film, with an ensemble cast. I think the Royal Tenenbaums was one of the final straws for my friends in movies I recommended and made them watch that they hated.

We the Media

I finished We the Media by Dan Gillmor last week on the flight to Atlanta.

It was a great book, and extremely topical at this time. Published last July, the book’s focus is grassroots journalism, through mainly, blogs. While the first third of the book is very high level, it’s a great starting point for folks who aren’t necessarily steeped in technology daily. The book shares some interesting history, just in the last few years, of how blogging and grassroots journalism can help hold Big Media accountable.

It also covered the ongoing fight around copyright, Big Media, with a focus on professional journalists and their role in the evolution of journalism.

Mr. Gillmor makes the point a few times that really sticks with me: most of the hundreds of thousands of blogs are too self-centered, nothing more than online journals. It’s those blogs that find a topic, and become experts through commentary, analysis, or news that really make a difference. And he’s right – those blogs I have bookmarked are exactly that, where my blog is nothing more than an online journal.

It was a very good book, easy to read, and the timing is definitely right. Mr. Gillmor has also released it under a Creative Commons license, so you are free to read it on the web without having to buy it in a bookstore. That’s putting your money where your mouth is.