Books Read in 2005

I adore Kurt Vonnegut. I share a great deal of his personal philosophy (as I've been able to glean it from his writing), and it turns out that I share much of his politics as well. In spite of the dire subject matter here (in large part modern politics and the "war on terror"), Vonnegut manages to make me laugh in nearly every paragraph. His writing is absolutely masterful — there are few if any writers alive today who can match his seeming simplicity while packing in such wry insight. Mark Twain is a possible historical comparison. Absolutely brilliant.

My boss gave me a copy of Age of Empires III for Christmas so that he'd have an opponent to play against online. We played AOE II with a few other cow-orkers a couple of years ago and had lots of fun, but I hadn't played in a long time, so this seemed to him like a good excuse to get me started again. Unfortunately for me, I get addicted to real-time-strategy games rather easily, and I've been playing AOE III too much recently. So far, I'm undefeated against my boss (maybe not the best career move, but wtf), and I owe my quick startup in gaming strategy to this book. It does a better job of outlining the differences between the various civilizations than the AOE III manual, and it provides some useful tips for getting a strong economy going quickly at the beginning of a game.

This is a solid book about color management for digital photographers. I've struggled for several years to get my digital prints to look like what I see in my viewfinder and onscreen. Grey reinforces many of the lessons I've learned over the years and, for those who haven't yet figured it out, provides a good step-by-step guide. I was already using a sensor to calibrate my monitor and have been using ICC profiles correctly, and now I've decided that I'll continue to use Printroom to make my prints rather than go through the time and expense of calibrating my own printer. Once I understood ICC profiles and calibrated my monitor, my results with them have been quite good and increasingly predictable.

This is another very good novel by Jonathan Carroll, who is becoming a favorite author of mine. It's more of the usual magical fantasy blended with compelling characters. Good stuff.

Barabasi does a very good job at making his research accessible. In the course of this book's two hundred pages of core content, he lucidly presents a handful of ideas about network theory that were groundbreaking not all that long ago. The presentation is padded with a lot of biographical and historical background of the people who made the discoveries, which may appeal to some readers (but not me).

I probably should have read this three years ago when it first came out. At this point, many of the ideas presented in it have diffused into almost common knowledge. I didn't learn much about network theory here, but it was nice to see examples drawn from many different domains, and as a result, I expect to see applications of the ideas in a lot of new areas. One obvious application that has interested me a lot recently is the bittorrent protocol, which embodies nearly all of the ideas presented in this book, plus a few very clever extensions.

I came across a recommendation for this book in Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools . It's an extended philosophical argument for participating in an "infinite game". In Carse's parlance: "A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game. An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game."

Carse's writing is frustrating. He specializes in twist-round sentences, where he repeats the same phrase twice, but switches two words around the second time, inverting the meaning, kind of like "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". It's clever the first few times, but it gets to be incredibly annoying.

The copy I read boasted a cover blurb from Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If Pirsig's worldview as articulated in that book appeals to you, Carse's likely will as well.

Incidentally, I borrowed this book from a library instead of buying a copy. It's the start of an early New Year's resolution to spend less money on media that I don't intend to archive.

Cloud Atlas is an ambitious novel structured like a set of nested Russian dolls. There are six interrelated narrative threads. Each of the first five is interrupted half-way through to begin the next, and then they are finished in the reverse order. The stories range over time from a businessman in 1850 to a goatherd in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, and each has connections to the next. Each is told in an entirely different narrative voice from the others, and Mitchell does an admirable job of writing them all credibly.

I enjoyed some of the threads more than others, but the effect of the whole was quite good. I was very happy that there wasn't any kind of goofy sci-fi connection between the characters, because that would have ruined what turns out to be a really interesting meditation on time, the written word, and to a lesser extent race.

Bridge of Birds is a new "folk" tale of ancient China, invented by a Westerner, but told in a style that — at least to a Western reader like me — feels very Eastern. I've never read anything quite like it, and I enjoyed it, but I'm not going to go looking for other works like it.

Of the four Perez-Reverte novels I've read to date, The Fencing Master is my favorite. Don Jaime Astarloa, the titular protagonist, is complex and well drawn — he is one of the last vestiges of a simpler and more honorable time, and when he is drawn into a murderous plot by a mysterious woman, the reader is also drawn in. The pace is perfect and the resolution satisfying. It may not be great art, but it's a ripping good yarn.

Nick Hornby is a serious music geek. This was obvious from reading High Fidelity (gah, has it been nine years already since I read that!), but this collection of essays on music makes it explicit. My music taste overlaps substantially with Hornby's, but that's not at all a prerequisite for enjoying his musings on 31 songs and 15 albums. The enjoyment comes from listening to a gifted writer convey his enthusiasm for a subject he deeply loves.

Coincidentally, the cover artwork features headphones made by my employer.

I borrowed a galley proof of this from a cow-orker. It's a collection of thirty three short essays aimed to bust the reader out of his complacency and get him fired up about making a difference. A bit too "rah rah" for my taste.

Anonymous Rex is a fantasy twist on a hard-boiled private-eye yarn. In Garcia's world, dinosaurs live among us hidden in human drag. His protagonist is a velociraptor PI.

If your eyes are now glazed over, this is not a book for you. If you are willing to suspend your disbelief this far, you may find Garcia's novel entertaining. I fall somewhere in the middle — moderately amused but not enough to fully recommend this novel.

The Innovator's Dilemma examines the difference between sustaining and breakthrough technologies and attempts to explain why companies with good management tend to be good at exploiting the former and terrible at the latter. It goes on to explain how important it is for these same companies to figure out a way to get better at working with breakthrough technologies, lest they go out of business when start-ups steal their customers out from under them.

The presentation is a bit dull and repetitive, but there are some good points here that I would do well to understand as my career develops.

This is my least favorite of the three Perez-Reverte novels I've read so far ( The Flanders Panel is the best to date). The plot centers on a priest sent by the Vatican to Seville to investigate a pair of deaths in a soon-to-be-demolished church. The priest, Father Quart, becomes involved in the complicated struggle between those who want to preserve the church and those who want to erect a mini-mall in its place.

It's slower than the other novels, the mystery isn't very compelling, and the big "reveal" at the end is a joke, but it was still enjoyable.

Market Forces is a departure from the ultraviolent distant future of Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels (I highly recommend Altered Carbon, BTW). Here, Morgan takes a step back in time to the near future, and the violence — though still present — is more in keeping with present-day technology. In this future, the vision of Bush's neocons is extrapolated into a society where 90% of the population live in abject poverty and 10% maintain and expand their wealth by prompting and investing in third-world skirmishes.

It's a fast-paced ride, certainly worthwhile for fans of Morgan's other books.

War for the Oaks is enjoyable urban fantasy with a rock 'n roll backbone. When I opened the book, the first thing I noticed was that the chapters are all named after pop song titles. The protagonist, Eddi McCandry, is a singer and guitarist, and many passages in the book focus on the process of rehearsing and playing with a rock 'n roll band. Bull gets the details down accurately (and colorfully), but it's still true that "writing about music is like dancing about achitecture" — it's just not possible to convey in words what it's like to create music.

I enjoyed the book, but in the same genre, I liked Goldstein's Dark Cities Underground a bit better, and I'd recommend most of Jonathan Carroll's novels over this one.

Thanks, Jeff, for recommending this one. It was fun.

Imagine that Dracula is a real historic figure, that Bram Stoker got a lot of the details right in his novel, but that Dracula himself is still alive (er, undead) in the present day. That's the premise of The Historian. The story is told mostly via letters from a historian to his historian daughter, explaining his multi-decade search for Dracula's tomb, and leading her to a climax (get your head out of the gutter — not that kind of climax) with the vampire himself.

The Historian is compared a lot to The Da Vinci Code, but the comparison is misleading, and the two books are likely to appeal to very different audiences. True, both focus on stuffy academic protagonists who travel to exotic locations that house historic artifacts. However, where Dan Brown's writing is fast-paced to a fault, Kostova's is much more ornate and "writerly".

That said, in spite of its more obvious flaws, I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code a little more. Kostova places far too much of the plot inside correspondence, and it's impossible to imagine anyone writing letters like these — they wander around for hundreds of pages without getting to the point, in spite of the fact that they are intended to serve as a warning to author's daughter.

The Historian is an impressive first novel, and with a more assertive editor, it could have been great. As it is, it's a solid historical literary thriller, but be warned: if you think it might be too slow for you, it will be.

This slight book contains fourteen of Nick Hornby's monthly columns from The Believer magazine. In each article, Hornby starts off by listing the books he bought and the ones he read during the past month (as it is with many book lovers, the former list is often quite longer than the latter). Hornby goes on to describe the highlights from each month of reading, much in the way you might chat with a friend over a cup of coffee. The result is conversational, entertaining, and oddly satisfying. The only real downside is that Hornby was prevented by the editors of The Believer from writing anything negative about the books he's read, so several books are referred to only as "Unnamed Literary Novel". I give it three stars only because it's more of an appetizer than a meal.

Hmm. Writing colloquial reactions to books you've read shortly after reading them. Not a bad idea.

One of the biggest problems with massive multi-book arcs is that, if you read them as they are published, you have to wait a long time between installments. In this case, it was nearly two years between books, and although I thoroughly enjoyed Ilium, I read nearly 100 books between the day I finished it and the publication date of its followup Olympos.

My opinion of Olympos suffers greatly as a result. I had lost my familiarity with the characters and the setting, and I found that in the second installment, I was never able to care much about the characters or the massively complicated web they inhabit. It took me more than two weeks to read the first 300 pages, in part because I was bored enough to put it down midway and read Harry Potter instead.

At any rate, I can report that the many loose ends at the end of Ilium are tied up in Olympos, but I don't have much else to say. Olympos is almost certainly a better book than I'm giving it credit for, but I'm massively disappointed in one of my favorite authors, and I'm going to be a lot more careful in the future to avoid starting multi-book series until they've all been published.

Spolsky is a highly experienced programmer — he cut his teeth at Microsoft working on Excel and later formed Fog Creek Software , whose bug-tracker, FogBugz, is used and loved in my group at work. He also writes the popular weblog Joel on Software, which is the original source of the material in this book.

The essays in this collection are very entertaining, and they offer solid advice. There are a lot of little tidbits here I hadn't seen in other places, which was a very pleasant surprise. I, for one, am changing the way that I interview coders, and I expect to enjoy some lively discussion with my group about some of the other topics.

If you want to sample Spolsky's writing, or just want to avoid paying for a dead tree, all of the book's contents are available on his site.

Don't follow this link if you don't want to read any spoilers, but I'm pleased that my predictions (made in 2003) for the events of book six were spot on. I predicted who would die and (kinda sorta) who would be the killer.

Okay, no more spoilers. What would be the point, really? Nothing I write here could possibly affect your decision whether or not to read this book. This novel is pretty much more of the same as the previous Harry Potter bricks, and you either like them or you don't. I enjoy them as very lightweight entertainment and don't expect very much of them. This one is about as good as the previous one, and I'm down-rating it only because it would have been nice to see some more evolution either in the characters or in the world. I'm a bit apprehensive about book seven, because the set-up at the end of this book could lead into a very dull finale (where Harry has many adventures on his way to joining the 4-H club — if you've read book six, hopefully that makes sense to you).

How much do you wanna bet that the deceased character comes back as a ghost to offer Harry bits of wisdom?

It's difficult to evaluate the middle novel in a trilogy, especially when you like the author but pretty much hated the first book in the series (Quicksilver). That said, I liked The Confusion. It focuses on the most interesting characters from the first book, Jack and Eliza, and it has a much more consistent level of action than its predecessor. Although the prose is still full of baroque detail, there's a lot more momentum here, and the plot is more self-contained. The Confusion changes my rating of the overall series from two stars (pretty much don't bother) to nearly three stars (worth it if you like the genre).

If The Baroque Cycle can be viewed as a massive, nearly 3,000 page story arc, perhaps the problem with Quicksilver is that the curvature at the beginning of the arc is too small to be detectable — it's all setup with very little development and no payoff. Continuing this line of thought, The Confusion contains the peak of the arc, and things develop at a pace that mostly fits inside the reader's head. This would suggest that the third installment, The System of the World will consist mostly of resolution. There are plenty of threads remaining to tie up, so this could be the case, but I'm a bit concerned that the remaining loose threads aren't so much the interesting ones (except, perhaps for the mystery that is Enoch Root).

I've got two new massive books (Dan Simmon's Olympos and the new Harry Potter) to read before I consider picking up the conclusion of this series, but I doubt I'll wait the 18 months I took between books one and two.

Sam Bayer is a bestselling author of thrillers. Frustrated with writer's block, he returns to his childhood home of Crane's View, New York, to write the story of a decades-old unsolved murder from his childhood.

It starts out like any other Jonathan Carroll novel, with artfully drawn, deeply involving characters. Any reader accustomed to Carroll's writing would expect that after fifty or so pages, some strange — possibly supernatural — events would occur, but in this case the magic realist twist never arrives. Kissing the Beehive turns out to be a straight murder-mystery-slash-character-study, focused on Sam Bayer and his outlandish lover, improbably named Veronica Lake. The whole affair holds together terrifically, twisting until the final page.

It's one of Carroll's better novels, which is saying a lot.

This is another solid entry in Carroll's canon. Following his usual formula, he begins with a seemingly ordinary love story (this time a triangle) that becomes complicated by a few supernatural elements. The "magic" forms a colorful tapestry against which Carroll plays out the transformation of the protagonist.

It's great that Orb is bringing some of Carroll's earlier novels back into print. Collect them all!

I picked up this out-of-print personal productivity book on the recommendation of one of the GTD blogs. In my opinion, this is the worst kind of productivity book — one that basically tells you to work long hours and forget about enjoying things outside of work (like your family). I strive to be better organized so that I can accomplish more in less time, and thereby spend more time on other things. I love the work I do, but I love lots of other things too! There are a few possibly useful tidbits here, but nothing not already covered by the superior Getting Things Done and The Now Habit.

This is an occasionally interesting bridge between the American transcendentalists (e.g., Thoreau and Emerson) and those who embrace technology. I enjoyed the first two thirds of the narrator's backstory, especially the ways in which it intertwined with the present-tense road trip. There are several great passages about troubleshooting and the mindset that one needs for it, but on the down side, there are some really long and boring passages about the narrator's fixation on rhetoric and the early Greek philosophers, and it turns out that the relationship between Phaedrus and the narrator doesn't offer any kind of real payoff. Meh.

The Time Traveler's Wife is the most enjoyable novel I've read in more than a year — at least since Replay in early 2004. Like Replay, this novel plays with time travel, but instead of reliving a portion of his life over and over, the protagonist here experiences "episodes" in which he drops out of his natural timeline and pops up in a different time and place. The episodes typically last between a few minutes and a couple of hours, and they often occur in a time and place that is significant to his life.

The novel chronicles the relationship between Henry, the time traveler, and Clare, the titular wife. Because of Henry's chrono-impairment, he first meets Clare when he is 28 and Clare is 20. Clare, however, first met Henry when she was 6 and Henry was 36. It sounds confusing, but the success of the novel rests on Niffenegger's considerable ability to weave the frequent discontinuities of time and point of view into a steadily progressing narrative. She excels at slowly disbursing key plot elements and revealing both the rules of the novel's universe and their consequences. There's a tremendous sense of suspense and forward motion as various episodes are told from one point of view and then later from another, and there are big payoffs when the full meaning of earlier events becomes clear. The novel is humorous, erotic, tragic, suspenseful, and touching, and the prose is clever but seemingly effortless.

I can think of only one sour note in the entire affair, a very short chapter that occurs on the morning of September 11, 2001. It is the only event of historical significance referenced in the novel, and there's absolutely no reason for it. The novel would have been better if those 2-3 pages had simply been excised. That, however, is a microscopic criticism of what otherwise is a nearly perfect novel.

Highly recommended.

Never Let Me Go is a sci-fi thought experiment presented as a fictional autobiography. The narrator is a young woman remembering her upbringing at what appears to be a boarding shcool. She spends most of the novel describing interactions with the other students, both at the "school" and in their lives afterwards. There is a bigger picture that the narrator doesn't see, and some of it is gradually revealed over the course of the novel, and then spoon fed to the reader in one of the final chapters.

I didn't like this novel very much, mainly because of the narrator, an immature girl who is (forgiveably) unreliable but (unforgiveably) dull. Most of the gutwrenching horrors that have been performed on her are only hinted at, because she herself has no context in which to see that they are horrible. I hated the inclusion of the "reveal" at the end, and would have liked it much better if the big picture had been metered out over more of the novel. Ishiguro succeeded at making me think pretty deeply about the tacit subject matter, but he failed to create a book that I can recommend.

This book is an overview of several topics that programmers should master to progress from amateur to professional. It touches on programming style, algorithms and data structures, design and implementation, interfaces, debugging, testing, performance tuning, portability, and "notation". None of these are covered in very much depth, and the focus is very plainly on C/C++, in spite of token efforts to include other languages (there are a handful of examples in Awk (!), Java, and Perl — does anyone under 40 still use Awk?).

I picked up a few useful tidbits, but each topic in this book truly deserves a full book of its own. This was a useful reminder of some areas I've been neglecting, but not much more.

This is one of those books that seems to just be common sense, but apparently isn't. It is clear that businesses that are 100% efficient cannot be flexible or innovative, and that it is not a good idea to be "lost, but making good time". However, it's not clear what concrete steps can be taken to improve the adaptability of a company in today's world. I'll certainly be giving it a lot of thought, and this book points a few fingers at areas to investigate, but few if any answers are given in its pages.

If "hard" SF is created when a writer centers a story around plausible technology and real science, then I dub Red Thunder a prime example of "flaccid" SF.

I used to like John Varley a lot, but having recently reread some of his stories in The John Varley Reader, and having suffered through this, his most recent novel, I'm forced to conclude that he really isn't very good. Red Thunder is an implausible mess. Think of the movie "Space Camp", except that instead of accidentally launching the Space Shuttle, the misfit kids instead build a spaceship out of junk and travel to Mars to rescue the crew of a doomed mission. And without the benefit of Kelly Preston and Kate Capshaw.

Bottom line: don't bother.

We've been haphazardly trying to get our son out of diapers for several months now. He's a very bright and very stubborn kid. He's capable of using the toilet, and knows when he needs to go, but he finds it more convenient to use a diaper. About a week ago, I threw my hands up and decided that we needed a better plan. So I looked around on Amazon and settled on buying Toilet Training in Less Than a Day, 'cause hey, if it can be done in a day, sign me up!

This book has been in print for about 30 years, and the cover claims that more than 2 million copies have been sold, so I guess you could call it a classic of the potty-training genre. At any rate, it's short — I read it in under two hours — and it's to-the-point.

The approach outlined in the book is based on techniques that were developed to teach mentally retarded adults to toilet themselves. It makes use of several techniques from learning/teaching theory, including reinforcement learning and learning-by-teaching. As part of the regimen, the child "teaches" a doll to go through the process of urinating while sitting on a toilet. At first, the child is praised for using the toilet, and gradually the praise shifts from the toileting process itself to the goal of keeping the underpants dry and clean. It all fits together with what little I know about child psychology.

One caveat that must be mentioned is that the "Toilet Training" in the title isn't what I thought it was. It doesn't refer to the ability to go without diapers — it refers to the ability to use the toilet without help from an adult. Getting to the point of not needing diapers can take more than a day, depending on the development of the child.

In our case, I worked with my son intensely for about 90 minutes on Sunday morning (the book suggests it can take four or more hours, but Kevin already knew the mechanics), and then kept him in underwear for the rest of the day, asking him periodically if his underwear was dry (and praising him effusively if it was). He had only one accident all day (including a 2.5 hour nap and an hour or so outside with the neighbor kids). This obviously made all of us very happy. However, on Monday, when I went back to work, things didn't go so well: he had — count 'em — six accidents. And in the process he nearly drove my wife to tears (and did drive her to the laundromat, where she had to wash our king-size comforter). On Tuesday, he had four accidents, including one really nasty one that I won't describe. The good news is that on Wednesday, he made it a full 24 hours with no accidents, including going to school for three hours, and sleeping for nearly 10 hours. And so far today, he's also accident-free.

I don't think we're out of the woods yet, but I'm definitely glad we got this book.

Update: After those two rough days, we've had eight straight days of dry underwear — no accidents, except for one minor one during a nap.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the quintessential American novel. It works on several levels: boy adventure story, social commentary, and coming-of-age character study. It's written in the voice of Huck Finn, and although it takes a while to get used to the various dialects, once you get the hang of it, it feels completely absorbing and authentic.

Short shameful confession: when assigned this in high school, I read a massively abridged version (aced the test though, baby!). I'm glad I finally got around to reading the real thing. At any rate, it's a different (and better) novel now than it would have been at age 16.

I have never been much of a baseball fan, but Michael Lewis has me interested. Moneyball is an extended case study of the Oakland A's as run by general manager Billy Beane during recent years. Beane and his advisors were saddled with one of the smallest budgets in Major League Baseball, yet managed to win more games than any other team. They did it by using statistical analysis to identify the qualities of players that were undervalued by the market (i.e., the other GMs). By doing so, they were able to assemble a successful team made up of players nobody wanted. A few years later, the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox are using similar strategies with good success (though the Red Sox have a huge budget in comparison).

Lewis is an excellent writer. The book is part thriller, part history, part biography. It's very much in touch with the human elements of the game and of management strategy, and it's a page-turner to boot. It reveals why batting average, RBI and ERA are not useful statistics for evaluating players, and points out that 90% of the teams in baseball don't want to hear about this approach at all. It's amusing to see that the oldtimers are willfully ignoring information that would help them win more games. I'll be keeping an eye on the Oakland and Toronto this season, and rooting for the Red Sox (even if they can't honestly be called underdogs any more).

As part of my research on stress management, I looked into the Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. When I found out that this book describes the entirety of their program in great depth, I decided to check it out. The Stress Reduction Program employs breathing, meditation, and yoga with a goal of achieving mindfulness in everyday life. The Stress Reduction Program has a long and celebrated history withing the medical community because these techniques work extremely well for those patients who have the patience to follow the program. Kabat-Zinn's book gives enough detail about the program to enable a willing reader to pursue the same program without the rather expensive tuition. I chose not to follow the program myself, but I'd recommend looking into it if stress is a big problem in your life.

This week, I attended a one-day seminar given by Edward Tufte, the noted Information Design guru. The seminar was excellent. Tufte is a gifted and entertaining speaker, and his appreciation of and enthusiasm for good design is contagious. I've previously scanned through his books, but now I'm motivated to study them in greater depth.

On the commuter rail ride home from the seminar, I read The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Tufte's most recent (and least valuable) publication. In this 24 page essay, Tufte rails against the lightweight and often disturbingly misleading presentations that are endemic among users of PowerPoint. The centerpiece is the dissection of a slide presented by Boeing to NASA during the time between the final launch of the space shuttle Columbia and its fatal atmospheric reentry. Tufte points out several ways in which the slide is misleading, some of which are partly the result of PowerPoint's templates. The end result was an executive decision that mistakenly concluded that there was little risk for the Columbia's crew.

It's easy to point out that it's the presenter's responsibility to make a good presentation, and PowerPoint is only a tool. And there's a lot of truth to that statement. However, it's also true that PowerPoint's laser focus on bullet-point sentence fragments (not to mention its dreadfully limited capacity for displaying information) stack the odds strongly against speakers who use it. I certainly agree that one must be exceptionally careful when using PowerPoint to make presentations of scientific or engineering information, and that good presentations rely on much more than computer slideshows. That seems pretty obvious, but apprently it wasn't obvious to Boeing and NASA at the time.

First a confession: I was one of those kids in high school who thought the English teacher had her head embedded in her nether regions when she talked about symbolism and allusion in literature. I bluffed my way through class, but at the time, I didn't buy into the idea of authors carefully crafting their language to convey messages on multiple levels. Of course, I was quite wrong, and though much of what I read today is light on craft, I've begun to appreciate some of cleverness that goes into good writing.

Foster's book may not entirely change the mind of a doubter, but it is — as advertised — "a lively and entertaining guide" to some of the things that go on beneath the surface of great writing. Foster's tone is jovial; he's the easy-going professor all the freshmen love, and his book reads as if firmly aimed at a high-school AP or college freshman audience. This approach was a bit facile for my taste. I would have preferred a wider range of topics in place of some of the conversational glibness.

Overall though, I'm glad that I read Foster's book. As I read it, I saw connections in the books I've read recently (e.g., Sean Stewart's Dante in Resurrection Man was a Christ figure — falling in the frozen river was his baptism). It's given me some desire to go back and read some of the classics. I actually did pick up Huckleberry Finn straightaway — it's too early to tell if this is a blip or the start of a trend.

Resurrection Man is about coming to terms with death, and it's a meditation on what it means to live. The anti-hero, Dante, is an "angel"; his brother Jet is a man without a soul. The setting is a world where angels and ghosts have just begun to proliferate in Western society, where rogue minotaurs terrorize the suburbs. It opens with Dante's discovery of his own corpse, and it follows his metaphorical descent into Hell. It's a bizarre premise, but it mostly works.

Sean Stewart has become a very good writer. His most recent novels, Galveston and especially Perfect Circle are excellent, and he was one of the chief creative architects of the A.I. web game (remember that?). Resurrection Man predates these by several years, and although it bears some signs of his later greatness, it isn't quite as good.

Stewart's fiction is a brand of magic realism; in his novels, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are part of the fabric of reality. In his more recent work, the ghosts are almost unremarkable — they create tension in the novel's universe but they usually play second fiddle to the protagonists. In Resurrection Man, Stewart hadn't quite perfected the balance of magic to realism, and the novel is a bit awkward because it focuses too much on the supernatural aspects of the characters. Seek this out only if you've become a fan of his later work.

I recently started looking into stress-reduction techniques to aid with a recurrence of insomnia. This is a brief, to-the-point, non-religious, practical guide to meditation, and it serves its purpose of being a no-nonsense, easy-to-follow introduction.

Light is intensely challenging. It follows three characters in different places and times: Kearney is a contemporary scientist/serial-murderer; Seria Mau is a distant-future pilot of a K-ship; and Ed Chianese is a former pilot, also in the distant future. Each plot line contains several unexplained components that only make sense through repeated exposure to their use in context, and the connections between the characters are very slowly revealed. There are several secondary characters who turn out to be merely tangential.

The juxtaposition of the three plot threads was well executed, and the prose is often quite artful, but I remain frustrated that the main characters' motivations were only sketched. I believe that the novel would be much more clear on re-reading, but I hate re-reading, so that will remain a hunch.

On Intelligence is a worthwhile book in spite of its flaws. Although there is little here that is truly new, the material is very well presented and is nearly convincing. Hawkins purports to be presenting a "comprehensive theory of how the brain works". In truth, the book is a bunch of autobiography, a slanderous attack on the fields of AI and Speech Recognition, twenty pages of dense, impenetrable description of wiring in the neocortex, a few pages of genuine but not terribly original insight, and a few rounds of self congratulation.

The core idea is that the ability to make predictions about the future is the crux of intelligence. The neocortex specializes in this, and a large neocortex is what separates humans from other animals, allowing us to learn complex patterns and make far-ranging predictions. I agree completely with this viewpoint. Back in the mid-90s, my grad-school research group came to the same conclusion. DAn Ellis's 1996 thesis, Prediction-driven computational auditory scene analysis, showed how such an approach could solve difficult low-level perceptual problems in audition. My own 1999 thesis, Sound-source recognition: a theory and computational model, showed how hierarchical models of sound-sources predicted (and matched) human performance in a recognition task.

What Hawkins presents is not a recipe for intelligence; it is descriptive but not prescriptive. Many of the elements he describes are likely to be necessary components of intelligent systems, but they aren't the whole story. Even if we can build hardware that is capable of intelligence, we still won't know how to teach it. Our human cultures and DNA programming are highly evolved to teach children the skills they need to survive, from the way that a mother's tone of voice captures the attention of an infant onward. Emotions likely play a crucial role in intelligence (one that Hawkins dismisses), helping us determine where to focus our intellectual efforts and breaking us out of unproductive cycles (among other things). And surely there are other prerequisites for intelligence that I can't think of off the top of my head.

On Intelligence is good in that it may point neuroscientists in new directions to look for answers to how the brain works. I hope that it inspires the Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning research communities to develop general hierarchical learning algorithms (I struggled to no end with this subject when I was working on my thesis). It seems unlikely that directly copying biological "circuits" is the only way to build machine intelligence, but it's a great place to look for inspiration.

I'm personally inspired to take another look at Stephen Grossberg's research and to flip through Minsky's Society of Mind again. This is heady stuff (pun unintentional), and Hawkins is to be commended, if only for getting more people to think about the topic.

Jennifer Government is a satirical look at a near-term future where corporate interests have completely taken over, taxes have been abolished, and the government is more ineffectual and a lot less powerful than today's. The plot follows a handful of previously (mostly) unrelated characters who become entangled when one of them makes a big power play.

Barry's style is lightweight and humorous, with the emphasis on lightweight. There's no character development here — they're all pretty much cartoons. It is a satire, so that's okay, but Barry doesn't provide any real substance to make this more than a trifle.

Scrum is one of the current buzzwords in software development. It's part of a family of "Agile" processes (another buzzword) that aims to make software development more productive and predictable.

Here's a bit of context: I lead a small team of developers in an Advanced Development group at my company. We build proof-of-concept prototypes, develop novel algorithms, and try to transition our work smoothly to Product Development groups. In an environment like ours, Agile processes are crucial. We can't specify all of the requirements of our prototypes and algorithms ahead of time; our requirements change and evolve a lot over time as we better understand the problems we're trying to solve. However, we are accountable for delivering our work-product to other teams. Without some structure to our process, it's hard for us to work as a team, and it's hard for us to meet our deadlines.

Scrum is a process that should be good for managing projects like those that I'm involved in. It would take more space to describe the way Scrum works than I'm willing to give it here, but I will say that having read this book I'm sufficiently impressed with the process to implement many of its components with my team (we will have fixed-duration Sprints with clear goals; we will maintain Product and Sprint backlog lists; and we will have Daily Scrum meetings). Happily, it looks like a couple of minor modifications will make my pyGTD tool perfect for managing the task and requirement backlog lists that are part of the core process.

As a process, Scrum looks very useful. As a book, Agile Software Development with Scrum is a mixed bag. The information is there, but the structure of the book is a mess and the writing isn't great. The book needs to be organized more coherently, with optional material and digressions relegated to appendices, and with improved (more terse!) summaries of the components and benefits of Scrum.

At nearly 800 pages long, Susanna Clarke's first novel is a behemoth. A novel of such length is a fairly serious time investment, and for the most part, Clarke makes it worth your while.

I most often hear Jonathan Strange& Mr. Norrell compared to Jane Austen and Harry Potter . The first comparison may be appropriate (though admittedly I've not yet managed to read even Pride and Prejudice); Strange & Norrell is largely a novel of English manners, set at the turn of the 19th century. The Harry Potter comparison, however, is pretty far from the mark: where Rowling's books are page-turners, Clarke's is a bit plodding; where Rowling's main characters are bonafide protagonists, Clarke's are bumbling anti-heroes; where Rowling drenches her creation in humorous and semi-clever magic, Clarke's world is bleak and mysterious.

The first 500 or so pages of Strange & Norrell are lengthy exposition. There are minor gems found on nearly every page (mostly in the dialogue between the characters), but mostly it reads like one of Mr. Norrell's longwinded meandering speeches about magic: there's interesting stuff there, but it can be hard to sit through. The final 200 pages are much tighter. Clarke aptly ties together the various threads, packing all the actual plot into the final act. I think that Clarke would have benefitted from a more aggressive editor, though I'm certain others will find charm in the stuffy Britishness of the endeavor.

Frankly, though I was satisfied with the overall reading experience, I'm glad to be rid of this albatross. I'm certainly not tempted to pick up Stephenson's The Confusion next, though it is precariously perched near the top of my README pile.

When I delve into a new subject area, I like to try to get a balanced view by reading more than one book on the subject. Often this pays off by increasing the breadth or depth of knowledge that I'm exposed to, but always it helps me choose which book to recommend on a given subject. So let's start by saying that Emmett's slim book is markedly inferior to Neil Fiore's The Now Habit.

I try not to be an intellectual snob (hah!), but one of the clearest differences between the two books is that Fiore's analysis is based on solid science, and Emmett's is more a collection of folk advice. Where Fiore provides convincing explanations for why some of us procrastinate, Emmett gives short anecdotes from attendees of her seminars.

I can imagine that there are readers who would respond better to Emmett's style, but I'm not one of them.

Like many other readers who loved Altered Carbon, I think that Broken Angels is an inferior book. That's not to say that it's bad — I still enjoyed it quite a lot.

In Broken Angels, we again join Morgan's anti-hero, Takeshi Kovacs, in an action-packed thriller/mystery. Here, the McGuffin is a Martian portal that leads to a valuable miltary/scientific artifact.

Morgan is at his strongest when Kovacs is actively solving problems and driving the action. Things bog down during the middle third (or so) of the novel, when the characters are waiting for external events to move things forward.

Perhaps this is a slight sophomore slump for Morgan, but I'm certainly interested in reading his third novel when he writes it.

[Update: Martin helpfully points out that Morgan's new book Market Forces is already available in the U.K. Alas, it won't be published in the U.S. until March 1, so I don't feel too bad not knowing about it!]

Will "Dead" Kennedy sees dead people, a simple McGuffin that forms the backbone of a beautiful novel. In his early thirties, Will is divorced, the father of an estranged 12-year-old daughter, and a willful slacker. Other than age and a passion for music, I don't have much in common with Will, but I felt intense compassion for him, and I was fully drawn into his story.

As in Galveston, Sean Stewart writes seemingly effortless prose, weaving magical elements into what is otherwise a character study. I chuckled at some clever turn of phrase on nearly every page, and I enjoyed the frequent but never annoying pop-culture references. There's nothing here that will change your life, but it's very well crafted, and I'll definitely be seeking out more of Stewart's novels.

One of the things I've learned by watching myself use the Getting Things Done system is that I too easily let myself get intimidated by large projects, with the end result that I procrastinate. This book actually meshes quite well with GTD, and many of the techniques mentioned at the end of this book seem like they could be straight out of Allen's book.

One of the key things I learned on my own during the last few months is that it's crucial that the "next physical action" for each project be a small-enough chunk to be accomplished in less than a couple of hours — the more intimidating the project, the smaller the chunks should be. The Now Habit echoes this lesson and provides a handful of additional strategies for breaking out of the habit of procrastination.

I intend to try Fiore's "unschedule" technique, to see if it will help me get more done by focusing more intensely in smaller spurts. I intend to post an update in a few weeks with the results.