There she goes, my beautiful world
Reviews of books
I somehow never got to reading any of Raymond Chandler when I was younger. I suppose it’s too much pulp for High School English. I suppose this is not really great literature, but I’ll say this for Chandler: the guy had a way with words.
> I went upstairs again and sat in my chair thinking about Harry Jones and his story. It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.… Read the rest
Of the three Vinge novels I’ve read, I think this is my third favorite, which of course sounds as though it was disappointing. It was not. With intriguing ideas, well-thought-out scenarios, multidimensional characters and keen pacing, I’d recommend *The Peace War* to anyone I liked.
Yet, some of the themes were certainly familiar, the characters were perhaps not all as fleshed out as they could have been, and nowhere did the clever ideas make my mind reel from forced paradigm shift … Read the rest
This is a highly entertaining, if breezy, collection of anecdotes that amounts to a teary-eyed bit of hero worship. Hayes loves his superlatives and never misses a chance to point out that some things, like American lager, will never be improved on.
Hayes seems stuck between two agendas. It’s imperative to paint the Boozefighters MC in as admirable and harmless a light possible, so that no one could doubt that «the media» wrongfully exaggerated the events in Hollister in 1947… Read the rest
I think I’ve written before that Vernor Vinge has restored my love for science fiction. For years I’d been mourning the genre and then came across *[A Fire Upon The Deep]([canonical-url:2005/03/27/what-sci-fi-oughtta-be])*, which surprised me by not talking down to me. As much as sci-fi writers are wont to make assumptions about the readers’ knowledge of technology and science, rarely do they break out and assume the ability to read and infer the way perhaps … Read the rest
I read this in hopes that it would magically make me a better developer, but alas, there is no silver bullet.
The articles were interesting and some of the material is applicable to the kind of work I do, but most of the book really is aimed at planners of large-scale projects involving thousands of programmers. «Scaling down» to modular 10-person teams doesn’t help when you’re pushing to get a third part-timer on your team.
Nevertheless, this book is better … Read the rest
… Read the restWhat I am is a heretic who’s recanted, and thereby in everyone’s eyes saved his soul. Everyone’s eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.
I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they’re convinced, you get out. If I hadn’t
Yeah, reading nothing but motorcycle-themed books these days.
But Hunter S Thompson’s Hell’s Angels is more than a book about a motorcycle gang. It’s a great piece of journalism. Even when HST goes on a literary rampage here he skins away the layers of lies and lays bare something authentic. There’s a real difference between this and some of his later works, like Generation of Swine, for example, which may have been amusing and pointed, but did not have the … Read the rest
The combination seemed perfect for me: a true-crime story about an agent infiltrating a motorcycle gang. This kept my attention well, and for good reason. Queen has a lot of stories to tell and the tension in the telling is palpable. Sometimes I wondered if he were exaggerrating for effect, but I never doubted that he told the story as it happened from his perspective.
Sometimes Queen tended to get upon a high horse and approach from a place of … Read the rest
A delightful memoir with abundant doses of historical tidbits about motorcycling. Yeah, I know. I’m diving in, and even when I’m not on the bike now I’m reading about riding. Well, so be it. Next on my reading list is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I read a long long time ago, and Hell’s Angels. But I might finish up some of my other books first.
I had an amused moment when I read Pierson’s description of the … Read the rest
I tried to describe what I liked about this book by telling my father, «it’s confusing.» I’m not sure that I made any sense then, but this is what scifi should be. Vinge presents us with alien races and theories of galactic organization almost entirely without exposition. There’s no «The Kzinti were a razor-toothed warrior race resembling eight-foot tall cats» or anything like that. One alien race the reader is introduced to entirely through first-person accounts from the aliens’ perspective. … Read the rest