On and off, I've tended to read quite a bit. So, I thought I'd put up some reviews of books as I read them. In time, I may go back and add reviews of some of the books I read in the past. Not massively exciting, but I suppose it may be of interest to someone, somewhere (perhaps).
Every Hand Revealed - Gus Hansen
I am a sucker for poker books.
As my favourite piece of applied game theory, I'd like to play a little poker, but there's no way I can get the guaranteed uninterrupted time. So, I get a little vicarious living through reading books instead.
This should be a deadly dull book. It's a hand-by-hand account of how Gus Hansen won a major poker tournament. It should be about as interesting as a ball-by-ball account of a major cricket match. However, I found it much more interesting than that. Part of it is the discussion of the overall structure of the event - seeing how a major poker tournament unfolds. Most of the interest is in the individual hands, though. Some bits are dull, but mostly it's got some life to it.
I think that this is a combination of Gus's writing style, his personal analysis of his approach, and the fact that you do want to see how the game unfolds. The analysis is very interesting - you could view it in parts as a tutorial by examples. This is to Harrington what Harrington is to Sklansky. It also, unlike many abstract examples, gets across how you can win a hand playing badly, or lose a hand playing well.
One of the things particularly interesting about his analysis is that his approach is madly loose compared to the tight play normally recommended in books. This means it's not just the same old advice packaged in a different format, but is also at least a little thought-provoking at the same time.
I thought I was weird for enjoying a book as dull-sounding as this, but all the Amazon reviewers seem to like it too. Fun.
Permalink. Posted 05:09, Thu, 02 Feb 2012.
In Search of Stupidity - Merrill R. Chapman
Back in the early Eighties, In Search of Excellence was written. It took the business world by storm and millions of copies were sold. It was about companies that succeeded by just being darn excellent all through. Lots of high-tech companies were mentioned, as they were trendy and cutting-edge.
Unfortunately, a number of them then went bust. The author of this book argues that it's not so much being excellent that makes you successful, it's more a case of just avoiding boneheaded moves. Rick Chapman worked in the computer industry during the '80s, so he saw it all up close at places like MicroPro and Ashton-Tate. He really knows his stuff, and it's really very interesting and insightful. He identifies all the stupid moves which killed companies off.
More specifically, I should say, he mostly worked in marketing (although he had enough of a technical background to get the techie details). It seems that most of the really stupid decisions can be phrased as bad marketing decisions! I never really got what marketing get up to, but reading this book, in the mind of Rick Chapman I can see what you want out of a good marketer.
I guess a prime example is this book. An honest title would be 'Computer marketing mistakes, 1980-2000'. How much catchier is it to have a title suggesting it's a compelling critique of one of the most famous business books of all time?
Anyway, it's all rather amusing to see when marketing insight fails to turn into a crystal ball. I've read the first edition, so this may have changed in the second, but one of the later chapters talks about dot com madness and how Amazon was stupidly over-valued, before crashing down to a more sensible level. The stock's now worth more than ever! He consistently needles Apple as being a minor niche player. Oh, how things have changed!
Anyway, overall it makes a fantastic book, at least to an audience like me. It couches business insight in examples that I recognise. The overall message, in comparison to In Search of Excellence is very sane: As Brooks says, there's no silver bullet. Instead, it's just a matter of not being stupid.
Permalink. Posted 22:32, Thu, 26 Jan 2012.
AntiPatterns - Brown, Malveau, McCormick and Mowbray
Having massively enjoyed The Systems Bible, I thought I'd read another book on How Not To Do It. The first time I saw this book in a bookshop I was disappointed that the antipatterns were mostly at the level of architecture and management, rather than being detailed, low-level ways of getting things wrong (cf the level of patterns in GoF). Since then, I've ended up doing more managing and designing, so it seemed more interesting.
I was wrong. Even if there are antipatterns at these level, this book makes the discussion dull and lifeless, despite the horribly poor cartoons. You could say that the rot starts when the antipatterns they describe have 'refactored solutions', so it's not just all negative. I'd say that's a bit overly harsh - I subscribe to the systemantics view that sometimes things get sufficiently complicated that you can't just glibly say 'here's how we'll fix it', but some hints in that direction are not unreasonable. No, I'd mostly say that, despite the names given to the antipatterns, the main problem is the descriptions are vague and bland enough to be mostly meaningless.
Having said that, I wouldn't be so annoyed if the book weren't so padded and the advice so cheesy. The book starts by saying that one of the complaints about pattern documentation is the verbosity. The book then tediously develops a decidedly uninteresting model before writing out the horribly pedestrian antipattern descriptions. The book also has the sensible advice that there are no silver bullets, and that trendy technologies keep changing, and being tied in is a bad thing...
So, they keep suggesting proper object-orientated architecting as the solution to the various woes. And for the technology, well, they keep suggesting you specify your interfaces in OMG IDL. Which isn't at all tied into the then-trendy CORBA. The fact that this book is a little over 10 years old does help to highlight the trendy ideas of the time it pushes, thus demonstrating the disconnect between what it says and does, in terms of suggesting timeless solutions. In that respect, it compares very badly with The Mythical Man Month, for example.
Naff. I bought it cheaply, and still feel ripped off.
Permalink. Posted 22:45, Thu, 19 Jan 2012.
Private Eye: The First 50 Years - Adam MacQueen
We enjoy a Private Eye subscription (especially the crossword!), so I was delighted when Caroline got me this for Christmas. Last week we saw the associated Private Eye exhibition at the V&A, and this book really helped put it into perspective.
My first thought, having read this, is that it should be essential reading for journalists and historians (which I guess is effectively the same job on different time scales!). It shows how malleable the truth is. There are the scandals which Private Eye broken. The accusations that Private Eye made that were wrong. The accusations made that were found libelleous in court, only to be found true later on.
But there's more! Interviews with pretty much every key player in the history of the magazine seems to disagree vehemently on key points in its history. Add to this that so many friendships turned sour, and extracting the truth and a coherent view of things is actually surprisingly difficult.
'Difficult' and 'angry' seems to describe the early days of the Eye, and the people working on it, so it's not surprising the there was a fair amount of falling-out. In the early days, being angry seemed to suffice, but eventually being right and angry made the difference. I think this has been Ian Hislop's strength - while the Eye does seem to regularly get things wrong (although certainly less so than in most other journalism) or pick up the wrong end of the stick, they do at least care about it!
It really is a fun book. While presented in an A-Z fashion, the choice of labelling's not obvious, so interesting things pop up all over the place, making it quite reasonable to read from front to back. Unsurprisingly, there's plenty of coverage of the court cases and letters about libel. It's in areas like this that the Eye's long-running antipathy to certain people is explained. Fascinating.
In summary, what a lovely present!
Permalink. Posted 23:00, Sun, 15 Jan 2012.
Essential .NET Volume 1 - Don Box with Chris Sells
I still have essentially no practical experience with .NET. What I was particularly uninterested in doing was reading about it from the 'C# is a clone of Java' angle of things, or even the more abstract '.NET is a bytecode platform, rather like the JVM' view. So, I got this book.
Don Box wrote the canonical COM book, and the nice thing about this book is that it tries to treat .NET as a super-extended COM. Apparently, all this busines with exposing lots of .NET types in assemblies is really about making the interface self-describing, in a way that COM interfaces aren't. The complexities of assemblies and how to load them are a reaction to the DLL hell of COM objects. Viewed from this angle, the .NET bytecode is nothing more than a mechanism to avoid having to specify the low-level details of how components communicate, by allowing the JIT compiler to decide on the fly!
In other words, .NET isn't a Java competitor, but just the second-system effect applied to a (relatively simple!) interop mechanism! In the wider context of MS's reaction to Java, this is not entirely plausible, but it does have a certain consistent internal logic.
The book cannot avoid the fact that large chunks of the CLR do feel like a slightly improved JVM, and those bits (the majority of the book, in fact) do get rather tedious. The start and the end are the most fun. The start because it introduces the CLR as an extended COM, and the end because it shows how the CLR is actually constructed, including how it can be used as a COM component - closing the loop, as it were.
The book's rather long in the tooth now - it was apparently released before a final production version of the CLR was available, which gives you a bit of an idea. Things may well have moved on - as I said, I have little practical experience with .NET. On the other hand, it's great to read a book which breaks open the abstraction layer and gets its hands dirty on this kind of architecture. I'm not sure how many of the other books dare to do this. Weakly recommended (a lot of it's still tedious!).
Permalink. Posted 22:29, Sun, 15 Jan 2012.
Knights of the Rainbow Table - Cory Doctorow
A few years ago, having enjoyed Boing Boing, I read a book by Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). This was a foolish move, as the book was utterly dreadful.
Recently, Cory posted an ever so subtle "vote for me" entry for the Hugo awards, listing his eligible stories. He appears to have previously won some awards. Had I been too hasty to condemn his sci-fi writing? After all, I'd only read one book.
Knights of the Rainbow Table is a freely-downloadable novella. The title sounds fun and cryptographically literate. I had a go at it. It's a story about the possible future of security. The problem is, it's utterly technologically ignorant, but completely fails to realise it. There's some nice jargon, but unlike, say, a Charlie Stross book, it quickly becomes clear that it's just not backed by actual understanding.
It's clear that Doctorow doesn't understand, amongst other things, algorithmic complexity, cryptographic algorithms and the economics of HPC systems. Or maybe he's just decided to completely ignore them for the sake of dumbing down a story. In any case, it utterly undermines any point he was trying to make.
Otherwise, the characters are basically the same morons who populated his Fear and Loathing in the Magic Kingdom. Their geeky behaviour is paint by numbers. Otherwise, I think it difficult to find any redeeming features in this writing whatsoever, beyond being able to use "I read and enjoyed Knights of the Rainbow Table" as an instant way of identifying an idiot.
Permalink. Posted 23:42, Sat, 07 Jan 2012.
Dave Gorman vs. The Rest of the World - Dave Gorman
The first of my Christmas books! I like games. I like Dave Gorman. So, this books must have been a bit of an obvious one. I don't play a huge amount of games now. I used to play a lot of go, and have played various other games and puzzles (generally enjoying them quite a lot). Indeed, I try to avoid playing too many games, since a) I'm a bit too competitive for my own good, and b) if I weren't careful I'd end up using all my time on games. Caroline was kind enough to get me Carcassonne for Christmas. Yay. I also like Dave Gorman as he's a geek comedian. Well, you'd have to be to write a comedy book about playing games, wouldn't you?
This book fits nicely into the Gormanesque category of 'Do something a bit odd for fun (often a silly bet), then write a book about your experience'. In this case, he was feeling at a loose end, so he invited people to play against him at random games, and this is the result. It's categorised under 'Travel' on the back, and that seems appropriate. Dave goes all over the place to play people, and to a fairly large degree the games (though described well) take back seat to people, places and just general incidental knowledge. It's apparent that lots of games have been elided, to concentrate on the best stories (perhaps rather than the best games?).
Apart from a rather strange and unexpected punchline, it's all predictable enough and simply enjoyable fun, with a few laugh-out-loud moments. There are several games that sound plenty of fun (and many that don't!), although I very much doubt I'll find the time to play them. Overall, though, it's the characters he meets that stand out. Light, fun reading.
Permalink. Posted 18:00, Sat, 31 Dec 2011.
The Systems Bible - John Gall
This book is the perfect kook book. There are plenty of Capitalised Expressions, and
Seriously. The typesetting is often dodgy, but that's explained by the fact that the whole thing is self-published. Nutter probability is approaching 1, and then you finally reach the text itself. It's basically paranoid ranting, and not terribly logical ranting at that, if you stare hard enough.
The scariest, nuttiest thing of all, though, is that this book is right. It's accurate and precise and matches reality in a way that no other book on the subject dares to.
I guess I better explain what the book's all about. It's about "Systems" in all their great and varied forms. From computer programs to research programs, to governments, to aeroplanes and nuclear reactors. Any man-made artefact, physical or procedural, that's complex enough that you can't comprehend it all at once.
The view of the book is that such systems will suck, they'll break in totally unexpected ways, and our attempts to build them are mostly hubris. Example upon example is wheeled out. The view may sound excessively dystopian, but on the one hand a sense of paranoia is the only thing that can make your systems have a hope of functioning appropriately. On the other hand, all the systems I deal with at work do have numerous faults described in this book.
This is not to say that the book is just a diatribe against those doomed to create unworkable systems. It does cover a variety of ways to work to give yourself the best sporting chance of being successful with an incomprehensible system. It is somehow a rag-bag of useful coping strategies, combined with the mindset that one-size-fits-all standardised solutions won't work (yes, I know that's somewhat self-contradictory).
To give a flavour of the text, from a passage I rather liked, "The diagnosis of Grandiosity is quite elegantly and strictly made a on a purely quantitative basis: How many features of the present System, and at what level, are to be corrected at once? If more than three, the plan is Grandiose and will fail." It matches my experience scarily accurately.
In summary, this book should be required reading for so many people. Highly recommended.
Permalink. Posted 22:38, Thu, 29 Dec 2011.
Defeat into Victory - Field Marshall Viscount Slim
Military history is not my usual cup of tea. However, I had a rather strange recommendation. Management books were being discussed on a site I read. 'Sun Tzu!'... 'Clausewitz's On War'... 'Stop being pretentious, what you need is Slim's Defeat Into Victory - now that's a real, practical example of leadership, and none of that stupid theoretical stuff'.
So, I read it. It's fairly chunky, at 600 pages, and covers the Burma campaign in WWII. Summary: Allies get beaten badly, train up, get properly prepared, and sweep back through Burma. The defeat is not terribly informative, and the forward sweep feels a little samey after a while (!), but there are several things I took away from it.
First, I did have a bit more of an idea what generals actually get up to! Most of my exposure to military literature and film is fiction depicting the horror of war. That tends to focus on the grunts, and generals are inevitably seen as horribly out of touch and missing the point. This book really opened up to me what the strategic elements were for. The aim was never just mindlessly grabbing land from the enemy, and indeed it was hardly even to control strategic points such as major cities and ports. Mostly it was to drive the enemy back so hard that they became disarrayed to the point of being unable to fight.
This brings me to the second point, which is the importance of discipline and morale. In bitter parodies, the higher-ups seem to favour tidiness and morale at the expense of pretty much everything else. Slim makes it seem sensible - he puts the major requirements of an army as flexibility and discipline - flexibility to be able to react to plans appropriately and change as needed, but also the discipline to be able to stand and fight. Morale is incredibly important when you're trying to get soldiers to be prepared to die defending a small patch of ground. Eventually the patches of ground add up.
Actually, they add up rather quickly. The book demonstrates how much war can be based on momentum - the side that is losing loses morale, and is much less willing to risk their lives, making them more easily defeated by the enthusiastic enemy. It forms a vicious circle. Add to this that a side that is retreating in disarray can't be controlled properly to counterattack, and momentum and morale become major major features.
To this end, it explains why Slim chose his initial battles in the return to Burma to massively outnumber the enemy, demonstrate them defeatable, and build up morale. More than that, though, his preparation was fantastic. Taking forces unused to jungle warfare, he instituted all kinds of training exercises to bring people up to speed. He pushed his admin staff into gruelling physical regimes in order to make them ready, even if they're not fighting directly. Generally, he showed incredible leadership - he had the authority to make large changes, he could see the problems they were facing, and time and again he actually instituted huge changes to fix those problems.
The start of the war was an eye-opener, but so was the emd. Once the Japanese were defeated, MacArthur delayed occupation for ceremonial purposes, so that we had PoWs dying needlessly to the end. The question of the use of nuclear weapons in WWII also seems less contentious in the context of Burma. The war in Asia continued to destroy huge numbers of lives, and reaching a quick end seemed pretty sane in the circumstances.
The way that huge numbers of deaths are skimmed over by the book is strange. As I said, I'm not used to military non-fiction, and I could read several dozen pages marvelling at the leadership and planning before realising it was all in the aim of grinding away hundreds and thousands of lives (albeit in what was overall a justified cause). Another interesting feature of the writing is how polite it is, generally covering over all mistakes but those of Slim himself. Unsuccessful generals are excused by the complexities they faced, and if someone really cocks up their name is left out entirely. I'm sure it's a good way to keep friends, but gives far less insight into what fails, as well as what succeeds.
A side effect of the book is that I now know rather more about army structure and ranks. I knew that my grandfather had been a colonel, but until now I never realised quite how senior that actually was!
So, how does the book add up as originally recommended, as a management book? So so. It's interesting, but provides little conventional insight. What it does provide, though, is a great example of leadership by combining insight and thoughtfulness with bold, decisive action.
Permalink. Posted 16:09, Sat, 10 Dec 2011.
Delusions of Gender - Cordelia Fine
This book takes aim at the idea that gender inequalities in society can explained by brain structure, as revealed by MRI scans, etc. This 'neurosexism' as Fine calls it used to seem reasonably plausible to me - after all, I'd gone to school with a bunch of girls who claimed they were all about feminism and equality, but they mostly steered clear of science and maths. In retrospect, they were probably not the best people to see if they had been unduly influenced by their society.
One part of the book emphasises how the science part of brain differences between the sexes is badly understood, and nothing like the popsci view. This is a difficult one, because while it's not well understood, there does appear to be something here. The fact that violent crime is so heavily weighted towards males surely means something fairly serious about male and female differences. All the other parents I know seem to go on about how much more quickly the girls are learning to speak. The gender difference in autism rates probably means something. Or maybe, like colour blindness, the rates of occurence don't actually tell you about the main population.
However, gender differences caused by genetic effects on the brain don't matter! This is the point made by the rest of the book, which goes into great depth to show the effects of overt and unconcious sexism, and all kinds of stereotyping, on society. It's bad. I mean, really bad. 'So glad I'm a bloke.' bad. In comparison, intrinsic brain biology effects on gender differences are a drop in the ocean. This is a case she makes convincingly, and it ties in very well with her other book, A Mind of Its Own, and Gladwell's Outliers. The latter explains the historical lack of great female scientists and mathematicians - without the opportunities, intrinsic talent will be wasted, even if it's utterly brilliant.
Throughout the book, the modern 'scientific' approach to explaining gender differences is ridiculed very effectively by quoting nineteenth-century 'scientific' explanations for why the inequalities of those days were inevitable. We still have so far to go. This book is entertaining and depressing in equal parts, but if you think that gender equality is even vaguely near achieved, it's worth reading.
Permalink. Posted 20:41, Sun, 13 Nov 2011.
Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
I was extremely leery of this book, as I'd heard the main thesis was 'To be an expert in something requires 10000 hours of practice'. No innate skill? Really? In the end I grabbed a copy from a charity shop.
His argument is actually far more subtle than that. Indeed, his requirements to become an outlier seem to be a) fantastic opportunities, grabbed with both hands b) enough natural talent c) relentless practice. He acknowledges IQ, and the fact that it seems to have a large genetic component, but suggests that it's more a hurdle where a sufficient level is required, rather than something where arbitrarily more is better. He gives the example of someone with a fantastically high IQ (way more than Einstein's) who, without the opportunities, has not really produced much. He also shows how, for top students, IQ does not correlated well with later success.
Indeed, there are quite a few strands running through the book, and he somehow manages to make the idea that the super-successful only got there with lucky breaks seem insightful! Other arguments are less obvious, and while not exactly scientific, his writing is very persuasive, even if I'm not sure it's right.
It's not a long book, but it's got plenty of ideas on the nature of exceptional success. It's very readable, and my initial skepticism has been converted into enthusiasm for a book that's much more nuanced than I expected.
Permalink. Posted 10:55, Thu, 20 Oct 2011.
Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
How could this book possibly live up to its hype? Rave reviews all over Boing Boing, and a quote on its cover saying 'Here, finally, is this generation's Neuromancer'. Go look at Amazon for all the breathless reviews.
Obviously, it can't. It's a lot of fun. A big pile of fun. But depth-wise it hardly goes beyond a Neal Asher novel. I think many of the reviewers are confusing a fantastically-knowledgeable geeky reverence for the 1980s, made into a major plot point, for substance.
I read the first few chapters free online, and had no inclination to buy the full book. The dystopic backdrop of an extended depression leading to the world it showed felt laboured, unrealistic and uninviting. Fortunately, a more gullible friend bought it, and I borrowed his copy.
The main story is a straightforward adventure and pretty competent with it. There's a nice bit of twistiness, but other events are telegraphed disappointingly obviously. Mostly, though, it's this strangely 80s-tastic world that makes it notable.
Big piles of fun. Not the best thing since sliced bread, but a light read, and highly recommended.
Permalink. Posted 10:40, Thu, 20 Oct 2011.
Action This Day - Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine (Ed.s)
This book is about Bletchley Park, and the WW2 code-breaking efforts (Enigma, Lorentz, etc.). It was a present from someone who knows I have an intrest in this area. I was a bit apprehensive that it might have been a bit of a noddy introduction book, but actually it's set of chapters written by people who really do know what they're talking about, partly 'cos about half of them were present at Bletchley during the war!
If anything, it goes too far the other way, with slightly opaque explanations, and a fair amount of detailed reminiscing that doesn't help with the big picture. As there are so many authors, though, including a few who are very good at bringing it all together, it all eventually links up, and you get an impressive view of how it all worked. Just as when reading The Prize you think the war was fundamentally won on the management of oil, reading this you'll think the fundamental factor was intelligence! Oh, I'm so glad I'm not a historian, having to properly integrate and make sense of this.
One of the best things about the book is that it fits Bletchley into the pre- and post-war world, as so many other books ignore this angle. Christopher Andrew contributed a acouple of chapters, and one of the points he makes it that the importance of sigint in WW2 is now understood, but historians for the most part have ignored how sigint affected the history of the second half of the twentieth century (on the rather dull grounds that most historians don't take into account things that have been deliberately hidden!).
One fact that I think is so wonderful that it's worth repeating here is that, thanks to our code-breaking ability, we knew that in the middle of the war, every German agent in Britain had been turned into a double agent, and Germany hadn't the faintest. Marvellous.
Anyway, is this book any good? It's not a good first book on the subject. The descriptions of cryptanalysis are sufficiently terse as to require their own reverse engineering, and lot is tedious detail. If you can get past all this, well, yess, it's actually rather interesting.
Permalink. Posted 22:48, Sun, 02 Oct 2011.
JavaScript: The Good Parts - Douglas Crockford
After a few years of really being rather into Haskell, and some nasty memories of Python, I've got back into an interest in dynamically-typed scripting languages. I think it started at work, with some Lua scripting in a project that's otherwise C++-based. Lua's great for that kind of thing, and it's a rather nicely designed language. The other candidate for the role was JavaScript, and it is the language of Teh Webs.
So, I bought this book. The idea of being able to write toy programs and then just being able to bung 'em on the web to be directly usable by any modern browser seemed very cool, but I knew nothing of JavaScript. This book has not taught me JavaScript. Instead, it teaches a carefully-chosen, sensible subset of JavaScript. A quite lambda-heavy one. Having read it, 'good' JavaScript appears to be writing Lua in a grottier framework. It has better regexps, but most everything else is worse.
Due to the design of the book, I'm not exactly sure which bits of the language I'm missing, but as the book's done its thing, I don't really want to know. On the other hand, I'd probably be unable to maintain someone else's JavaScript unless they stick to the 'nice' subset too. I should probably also point out that this book tells you nothing about the DOM, AJAX or other general web integration things. It really is just about JavaScript as a language.
The book is short (150 pages), and nothing like as dense as it thinks it is (unless you're not used to tonnes of anonymous functions and lexical closures). This book has made me decide I prefer BNF to railroad diagrams. It's chock-full of railroad diagrams. The best book to compare it with, given the similarity of coverage, is Programming in Lua. I'm afraid the comparison is not favourable. The Lua book is rather longer, but does cover so much more (including all the business with C bindings), and is so much more pleasant and fun to read. It does, of course, have the advantage of being written about a coherent and sensible language.
Having said all that, this book does the job, and I have no doubt that it provides a much better introduction to the language than many 'JavaScript for web monkeys' books. Now I just need to actually start writing some JavaScript programs...
Permalink. Posted 22:15, Mon, 26 Sep 2011.
Rule 34 - Charles Stross
Another near-future independent-Scotland-based crime novel - a follow up to Halting State. This is probably my favourite of his series, outside Accelerando/Glasshouse. Despite the title, there's not really any porn in the plot, or indeed much internet meme-ing, although it's still firmly in the realm of internet crime. It's also somewhat darker.
If you liked Halting State, you're very much likely to enjoy this too. That is, if you can ignore the utterly atrocious CDS sub-plot (I guess fewer readers will be financial types than general geeks). As with Halting State, you'll probably still be scratching your head a little at the resolution. It could be that Mr. Stross is fundamentally not very good at this whole crime genre thing, but I suspect he's just trying to get across the result of a murky and confusing crime, where resolutions aren't clearcut.
Overall, pretty fun.
Permalink. Posted 22:14, Thu, 08 Sep 2011.
253 - Geoff Ryman
As I (along with everyone else, apparently) loved Air, I was intrigued enough to pick this up in a charity shop. It's an 'internet novel'. What's that? It's something first published online that has since been rejigged for paper printing. Is much added? Dunno - I haven't checked the original, but I can't imagine there's much to the transformation.
What is it? 253 short stories, in the form of character sketches, including what they look like, and what they're thinking. Each is 253 words long. The 253 people are the passengers on a tube train a couple of stops before it crashes (I guess some drama is needed!).
What does the book think it is? I guess this is best indicated by the joke 'questionnaire' at the back of the book (there are plenty of these fake advert-style interludes throughout the book - none exactly sidesplitting): 7.) As I understand it the significance of 253 is (one answer only, please): [] as a metaphor for impending death as we live life [] as a tribute to the hidden fascinating truth behind each face if we could but find it [] as a tribute to the infinite variety of London life [] as a deliberate mockery of interactivity, feedback forms etc. [] that some of it is mildly amusing [] that Geoff had a contract.
I guess 'all of the above' would be pretty fair. It's a pretty bitter-sweet book. There's some good comedy in a few of the entries, but often it's at the expense of the characters. Likewise, there are some very touching entries, but they're mostly not uplifting either. In all, rather depressing for a vaguely comic book. More fundamentally, does it work? Barely.
Permalink. Posted 21:48, Thu, 08 Sep 2011.
Batteries Not Included - Seth McEvoy
A children's book, bought for me by my sister, as it was my favourite read when growing up. To give you an idea how long ago it was when I first read it, I remember feeling very proud because the recommended age range for the book was '8 years upwards', so I was reading something very advanced. The 13-year-old protagonists were really big kids.
The plot is that Dr. Carson has created an android, and wants to test how practical it is by pretending it's his son. So, he sends it off to school, gets his daughter Becky to keep an eye on it, and hijinks ensue, across a series of eventually six books.
It's terribly strange, going back. After reading plenty of 'grown-up novels', it's surprising how many events you can fit into 150 (low-density) pages of simple prose. It's not fantastically clever stuff, but neither is it horrific to re-read.
A quick google reveals Seth McEvoy is now working as a technical writer at Microsoft. Somehow appropriate.
Permalink. Posted 12:05, Wed, 24 Aug 2011.
How Not to F*** Them Up - Oliver James
I was handed this book by my wife, and told 'read this'. It's about how to look after your children, it's by Oliver James, the Guardian readers' favourite psychoanalyst, and it's effectively a follow-up to his book 'They F** You Up'.
The book has two main strands - one is that under-threes really need consistent affection from a non-depressed carer. Sounds obvious, but means that day-care, depressed parents, too much emphasis on socialisation or education are all actually rather bad. Given the emphasis I see on day-care nowadays, I was a bit surprised. I was rather unaware of the research linking day-care to raised cortisol levels, and the effects that can have.
The other strand is about how to be a good carer, mostly in terms of understanding how you work and working with that. His framework is to categorise people as Organisers, Huggers and Fleximums. I think the framework is overly simplistic, and a lot of the content here is actually case studies of people who are supposed to fit in those categories, but like many simplifications it is useful. He emphasises that people shouldn't have to be defensive their style of parenting, as long as it's working for them and their child, despite a lot of artificial controversy in this area.
The book is clearly selling a viewpoint. Despite the numerous references (many of which are just to his previous books - nice!), I don't feel I've come away with a genuinely balanced and nuanced view of the subject. This is not to say he's not basically right. For example, he's down on CBT as a way of dealing with some of the problems parents have. As someone from the psychoanalyst end of things, this is not surprising... but it also makes sense, to avoid CBT and go for a 'tell me about your childhood' kind of psychologist, if your issues are to do with your childhood!
In summary, I will take my best pseudoscientific approach, and say that I believe the argument in this book because I agree with it anyway! Taking out the research and preaching, it's a solid reminder of what you need to focus on when you have a small child. If you're too sleep-deprived to think straight, you may need it.
Permalink. Posted 11:44, Wed, 24 Aug 2011.
Leadership: Plain and Simple - Steve Radcliffe
Whereas How to Lead really is about how to lead - the details of techniques that can be applied at a fairly specific level, this book really is 'What is leadership about?'. The answer it gives is 'Coming up with an idea of where you want to be, sharing that vision with those who'll make it happen, and then get it to happen'. Or, in the book's scheme 'Future - Engage - Deliver'.
A lot of management books stress the importance of simplicity to keep things tractable. Even How to Lead does this, but it just packs in a heck of a lot of simple stuff into the book! This really practices what it preaches on that front. 170 pages of loosely-packed content, and it still feels padded!
It does have a few other neat ideas, and the section on leadership within teams does fill things out a bit, but fundamentally, once you've got past the basic idea, I think the rest of the content could be better gleaned elsewhere.
If you're struggling to get beyond a management role of keeping things ticking over, perhaps this book will be an inspiration. If you're a completionist, having this book will give you another viewpoint. On the whole, though, I found this book disappointingly underpowered.
Permalink. Posted 22:47, Sun, 31 Jul 2011.
A Void - Georges Perec
Silly: Writing a book without using our most common symbol.
Ludicrous: Translating said book from Francais to Anglais.
This is Gilbert Adair's translation of Perec's 'e'-free novel, La Disparation. It's a silly idea carried out with gusto. The lack of 'e' doesn't actually affect the readability much. Or rather, the dense writing style obfuscates the readability problems introduced by the removal of the letter. All over the place, obscure words are used, even if the common equivalent lacks 'e's! For the most part, the missing vowel does not affect the writing style, although occasionally the author descends to long lists of vowel-avoiding words.
So, that's the character selection, what about everything else? It's unashamedly a post-modern novel. The core plot's a bit naff, but it's an excuse for sub-plots, diversions, twistiness and self-reference. In places it's fun, in other tedious. It's clever, and makes an interesting journey, but in the end... ho hum.
Permalink. Posted 22:32, Thu, 21 Jul 2011.
There is also a complete index of the books.
Mail me at random.user@arbitrary.name.