Books Read in 2008

This was a quick-and-dirty vacation read. I enjoyed the fast-paced plot and didn't mind suspending my disbelief for most of the outlandish sci-fi premise, which involves a government conspiracy, a symbiotic alien species, and a bunch of run-away-from-the-bad-guys action. The writing is in an awkward first-person viewpoint, and the prose is fairly dull. I can't recommend it, but I didn't hate it.

Matilda tells the story of a precocious 5-year-old girl with horrible parents. She tortures her parents (they deserve it), befriends her schoolteacher, stands down her evil headmistress, and lives happily ever after. It's very engaging and entertaining, and has just enough outlandish bits to make it really fun. I found it a little strange that Dahl spends most of the novel describing Matilda and her environment, and it's only in the last quarter that the real story arc takes place, but that didn't bother me.

I read Matilda aloud to Kevin (age 6) over the course of a dozen nights' bed-times, and he loved it (especially the "beams-out-of-the-eyes" parts) and wasn't put off by the many British-isms in the language. It was one of the best reading experiences we've had together.

Timescape won the 1980 Nebula Award, and it is viewed as a very successful example of blending hard sci-fi with detailed character development. The setting is split between California in the early 1960s and England in 1998. Scientists in the latter setting are attempting to use faster-than-light particles (tachyons) to send a message to scientists in the earlier setting, so that an ongoing global climate disaster can be averted.

Benford's protagonists are much more nuanced than typical sci-fi characters, and for most of the novel, I thought that his handling of time-travel paradoxes was brilliant. The climate problems ring amazingly true today, especially for a novel that was written 30 years ago. Unfortunately, the ending didn't quite work for me. I'm reluctant to say much for fear of spoilers, but I will say that JFK's assassination isn't quite the same singularity for my generation as it was for Benford's.

Water Music is a playful re-imagining of the adventures of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer who attempted to chart the course of the Niger River in Africa. His story is interwoven with the stories of Ned Rise (a British scalawag with great talent for nearly getting killed) and a handful of other colorful characters. T.C. Boyle's prose is inventive and anachronistic, and he has a knack for crafting one or two sentences that jump off of each page.

I wanted to like Water Music a lot more than I actually did. The plot is surprisingly tedious, and the regular bits of clever wordplay weren't enough to save it. I quite liked the Ned Rise character, and would have enjoyed a novel about him alone, but the frequent changes of viewpoint gave the novel a start/stop rhythm that was hard to get into.

I'd like to try another of Boyle's novels because this one was almost in my sweet spot.

Starship Troopers is a lot better than I expected it to be. I haven't seen the movie, but from what I'm told, it couldn't be more different from the book. I was expecting a lot of fighting action and high-tech gadgetry, but this novel is actually about military psychology, philosophy, and politics. There are cool gadgets and alien "bugs", but they are peripheral to the story of how the protagonist, Juan Rico, progresses from clueless high-school student to an officer in the Mobile Infantry (an Army Airborne-like fighting unit that drops from spaceships instead of helicopters). Along the way, there is a lot of fairly deep discussion of how and why the military works the way it does. It reinforced much of my scant knowledge of the military and gave me new respect for the command structure and the way that the armed forces manufacture "brotherhood".

Heinlein has been criticized by many for the way he seemingly glorifies the military (the Wikipedia entry is extensive and worth reading). I choose to think of the world of Starship Troopers as a possible end result of a particular line of thinking rather than any kind of ideal.

This book is very relevant to the war in Iraq as well. It brings harsh criticism to "chickenhawk" leaders like Bush and Cheney who eagerly rushed into armed conflict sacrificing many thousands of lives without ever having served in the military themselves.

So it turns out that this novel has almost exactly the same plot as Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine, except it works much better (this one won the Hugo). It's a much tighter story arc (and more plausible from my limited physics background). It tells the story of Private William Mandella, a conscript in the war against the Taurans. The war takes place deep in space, and the relativistic travel speeds cause time-dilation for the soldiers. When they return home, they have aged little, but most of the people they knew have grown old and died. Each time Mandella returns from the front, Earth society has changed tremendously.

Like each of the other Haldeman novels I've read, this one becomes a love story, but here the ending is "believable" as a consequence of the story and feels more satisfying.

My sci-fi reading background is haphazard and skews pretty far away from space opera, but I'm interested in going back and reading some of the other Hugo and Nebula award winners that are regarded as classics. I think Starship Troopers will be next.

This is one of the most frustrating books I have read. I'm very interested in personal information management, and I've spent a substantial amount of time building tools that allow me to keep project details and other information out of my head so that I can focus wholly on the task at hand (this was the most important lesson I learned from Getting Things Done). The reviews and blurbs on this book led me to believe that the author has some insights and solutions in this area.

Boy was I wrong. This book is little more than bloated, wordy, warmed-over common sense. It has a lovely graphic design, but every point is articulated at least three times (this is what I'm gonna tell you; this is me telling you; this is what I just told you...if I wanted that, I'd go watch some corporate powerpoint presentations). There are no solutions here, just a framing of the problem that some imaginary designers could perhaps use to design an iPhone or something.

I want my money and my time back.

I liked this a lot more than Red Thunder, but it still doesn't live up to Varley's more imaginative short stories. This is a fairly standard time-travel confection with a couple of nice touches in the way the "time machine" works, but Varley happily lives with some of the obvious paradoxes of time travel, and for that reason the novel frustrated me.

This novel takes the standard sci-fi conceit of body-snatching aliens and turns it into a complicated love-triangle with more consciousnesses than bodies. The pace is annoyingly slow but tolerable. At the same time, it seems designed to be made into a movie. I believe this is the author's first adult fiction novel, and having read it, I'm not that interested in trying her very popular young-adult work.

The protagonist in Camouflage is the changeling, a being that has wandered Earth for centuries (millennia?), masquerading as various sea creatures, and finally comes ashore as a human in the early 20th century, where it struggles to learn about human nature and fit in. Also on the scene is the chameleon, a different type of creature that can instantly mimic any human male, and has done so since the dawn of human history, taking joy in the carnage of war and generally acting like a psychopathic predator. Camouflage follows their paths as they converge on an unusual (extraterrestrial?) artifact and ultimately have the inevitable confrontation.

Haldeman won the Nebula for Camouflage, and I enjoyed it a lot more than The Accidental Time Machine. Haldeman seems to have a bit of a problem with endings if these two novels are any indication. Both cut off rather abrubtly—this one with a fairly unbelievable love story (really!). Still, I had a lot of fun reading it, and I'll probably check out The Forever War, which I hear is regarded as Haldeman's best, soon.

This is another book I would never have read if not for my book club. It is also the third (that I'm aware of) annual book chosen by the Hopedale library as a book for the whole town to read (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and To Kill a Mockingbird were the much superior first two).

I did not enjoy this book. I'm interested in the underground railroad and the history of the United States leading up to the Civil War, but this book is ridiculously melodramatic. The bits about quilting in the modern era are contrived, and the way the protagonist suspensefully reads in short bursts the memoir she finds is ridiculous. The memoir itself doesn't sound very authentic, and the big twist ending is telegraphed halfway through.

It doesn't help that I'm annoyed by people who are proud of the accomplishments of their dead ancestors. I'm descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, but you won't catch me talking about it at parties. No one has a right to be proud of anything but their own accomplishments. Get out and do something to make your country greater instead of bragging about how great it is. Wave your flag somewhere else, and shove your family history up your ass. Be a good person now instead of talking about how great your grandpappy was then.

After reading James and the Giant Peach, I was in the mood to read something else by Roald Dahl. I had borrowed a Sony ebook reader and Dave had The Witches as an ebook, so I gave it a shot. At Rod's suggestion, I read this myself rather than read it aloud to Kevin, though in retrospect, I'm sure would have liked it, so I may give it a go sometime after we read Matilda.

I love the way Dahl's child characters always outwit the adults and the way the endings aren't quite as neat as you expect from a children's book. This is good stuff.

This book presents an overview of several machine learning techniques that are very useful for creating intelligent systems. It presents "working code" in Python accompanied by fairly superficial explanations of how the algorithms work. It is clearly intended as a cookbook rather than a rigorous introduction to the subject.

That said, I'm impressed with how quick and easy it is to get some initial results with these algorithms in Python, even if the implementations presented here are not robust and won't scale well. This is no substitute for a book like Duda & Hart's Pattern Classification, but it's a reasonable way to whet your appetite.

Kevin and I chose this after finishing Stuart Little, and we both liked it a lot more. Roald Dahl's prose here is very easy to read aloud, and the story is whimsical and very engaging. The illustrations are very cool in a twisted sort of way, and they occur with sufficient frequency to help maintain a kid's attention. I'm looking forward to trying some Dahl's other books too...maybe Matilda next.

Peopleware, as its subtitle states, is about creating productive projects and teams. The authors present good data about how important the physical work environment is to knowledge work (like software development), and their observations about corporate "space planners" hit the mark perfectly. I'm fortunate to have a private office with a view, but many of my coworkers are stuck in cubicles or cramped shared offices, and there doesn't seem to be much of anything that a manager can do at my company to improve the work areas of his/her employees. It's very frustrating, and the work suffers for it.

The parts about getting a team to "gel" are descriptive, but the authors offer precious little along the lines of positive actions to take. They do, however, describe some pitfalls to avoid.

This is a straightforward, well-written book with worthwhile content, but I have to take the authors to task for their botched application of entropy as an analogy for uniformity in the workplace—they get it exactly backwards (entropy is a measure of disorder, not "sameness")!

Robert Glass comes across as arrogant. Sure, he's been working in software since before most programmers were born (myself included). And yeah, nearly all of the "facts" in his book are correct. However, he comes across like a petty whiner ("those academics...they just can't do anything right").

There is good material in this book, but it's painful to extract. I struggled to finish the book, in part because of the author's voice, and in part because the forced structure (each "fact" has Discussion, Controversy, Sources, and Reference sections) breaks up any sort of flow. The presentation would almost work better as a page-a-day calendar.

The Alchemist is a parable about a shepherd who pursues his dream of seeing the world. Coelho tells the story in very simple language, and he conveys some simple but profound life lessons: life is in the journey (not the destination), follow your dream, there is no past or future (only the present), etc.

If not for my book club, I probably would not have read this novel. I can see how it could have a big impact on a lot of people, but honestly I didn't get much out of it. I have already learned those life lessons many times over (though I suppose it doesn't hurt to be reminded).

Pillars of the Earth was a departure from Ken Follett's usual spy-thriller novels, but it has endured as his most beloved work. When I was in college, I read at least ten of his novels including Pillars, and I quite enjoyed them. It was good escapist fiction on a level with Michael Crichton's sci-fi thrillers, though perhaps somewhat better-written.

It has been fifteen years since I last picked up a Ken Follett novel, but I'm glad that I picked up World Without End. It's a massive book, weighing in at over 1,000 pages, but it moves quickly. In the first fifty pages, Follett introduces all of the major characters and sets the plot in motion. There are about a dozen key players, all fourteenth-century residents of Kingsbridge, the site of the cathedral built in Pillars of the Earth, and the novel focuses on the web of interrelationships between the players over the course of forty years.

This is a very carefully plotted novel. When I reread the first fifty pages after finishing the whole thing, I was awestruck at how orchestrated the whole thing was. My biggest criticism is that nearly all of the characters are a little too one-dimensional; each can be summed up in a single sentence. Secondarily, I found that the pace was a bit uneven—a little slow in a few places early on and too fast at the very end. A good yarn nonetheless.

When I decided to reimplement 96db.com to run under Django, I read Castro's HTML, XHTML & CSS Visual Quickstart Guide, and it fulfilled the "visual quick start" portion of its title—it got me up and running quickly with reasonable results. However, after several frustrated hours spent tweaking style parameters, I still had trouble getting the layout and presentation I wanted for my site.

In Don't Make Me Think, Krug strongly recommends Eric Meyer's writing on CSS, so after finishing that, I sought out CSS: The Definitive Guide on Amazon. I'm glad I did.

Meyer's book is perfect for programmers. It describes the models that underly CSS thoroughly, along with the algorithms that browsers use for layout. Much more so than Castro's book, it leaves me confident that I know what's going on.

While I was reading, I tweaked a few bits of my site's CSS, and I got a lot closer to my original intent. If you really want to understand CSS, this seems to be the book to get.

This is a short and sweet introduction to usability, targeted specifically at web design, but generally applicable to broad areas of interface design. I picked it up because it seems to be commonly cited as a classic of the field. It's a well-designed, straightforward book that hammers home the point that there's nothing complicated about usability and user interface design—it really is just refined common sense.

Krug's three laws of usability are well-taken, but the most useful parts for me were the chapters on informal usability testing and accessibility. For the latter, there appear to be some good references for further reading. This is a very quick read, and there isn't a lot of depth, but it seems like a decent overview.

I was very sad when Kurt Vonnegut died last year (so it goes). He has been a hero to me for more than twenty years (since high school, when I discovered his novels). I had some reservations when I heard that a posthumous collection of unpublished stories and essays was being released, since if these pieces were worthy of his canon, Vonnegut probably would have published them on his own.

My fears were realized when I read this collection, but I'm still glad that I had the opportunity to read these pieces. A lot of Vonnegut's best writing drew heavily—though often tangentially—on his experience as a POW in Dresden, Germany during World War II. This collection contains several short stories that are explicit reflections on that experience, and the overall effect is almost a holographic recreation of those events. It's a bit of a mess creatively, but it hammers home just how much that experience shaped Vonnegut's world view.

Goodbye, Kurt. I miss you a lot.

I was skeptical when my book club chose Prodigal Summer because my previous exposure to Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible) didn't end well—indeed, I couldn't finish it at all. Happily, I fared much better with this one.

The themes of Prodigal Summer strongly echo those of Richard Powers's best work. Like Powers did in The Gold-Bug Variations, Kingsolver entwines multiple story lines with unifying threads taken from biological science. Here the unifying threads include a lone coyote den, the extinct American chestnut, and pheromones.

The novel has three human story lines that circle around each other and eventually interconnect. All take place in a rural county in Appalachia. There's Deanna, a fiercely independent park ranger, Nannie and Garnett, an aging pair of neighbors, and Lusa, a newly-married transplant caught up in family politics.

What strikes me about this novel is that all of the characters are compelling, and each of the three story lines is worthwhile on its own. Kingsolver's women are all strong and independent, but her men are a little disappointing in their ignorant stubbornness. Her dialogue and her powers of description are strong.

This is the most enjoyable book my book club has chosen to date. Recommended.

Every night, Lisa or I read a bedtime story to Kevin. Left to his own devices, he usually wants to read a Goosebumps book or something with even less redeeming value. I have been trying off and on to introduce him to some of the classic children's chapter books, so when it's my turn to read, we usually read a few chapters from a longer book. Since Charlotte's Web was such a success, I thought we might try another of E.B. White's novels.

For the most part, Stuart Little held Kevin's attention, but it wasn't nearly as enjoyable as Charlotte. Where the language and subject matter of Charlotte's Web is almost timeless and the sentences simply roll off the tongue, Stuart Little feels very dated and awkward, both in language and content. Charlotte has a beautiful story arc that starts on page one and doesn't fully pay off until the end. Stuart winds all over the place and leaves the reader hanging at the end.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret just became my favorite children's book after Charlotte's Web. I read it to Kevin over the course of a week, and we both loved it.

Hugo Cabret is a terrific mash-up of a children's book and a graphic novel. It's more than 500 pages long, but most of the pages have few or no words. Instead, they have beautiful, atmospheric, full-page pencil drawings.

The story is fabulous: A young orphaned boy lives inside the walls of a Paris train station during the 1930s, maintaining the mechanical clocks and secretly rebuilding an automaton to discover it's secrets. His life becomes intertwined with a young girl and mean shopkeeper, and he has some adventures and some close calls.

If you have children between ages 5-10, read this with them. If they're older, buy them a copy. It's that good.

This is a fairly dull overview of the science behind the concept of "emotional intelligence", and there's very little here that can be put into practice.

This is a solid introduction to speed-reading techniques, complete with exercises for self-evaluation. I'm already at a point where I don't subvocalize, and I already read groups of words with one saccade, so I didn't increase my reading speed dramatically by reading this book, but I can vouch that these techniques do work. Most of the time I choose to read at a relaxed pace, but occasionally it's very helpful to be able to power through some reading material.

I'm a regular reader of Seth Godin's blog, and I value his insight into marketing (it certainly jibes well with the way I think about product development in my day job). I have read two of his books now, and I'm finding that his writing doesn't translate well to book form. He's very good at taking a single insight and turning it into a solid blog entry, but his books seem very light on content. This book would make a really great blog entry (or two).

This is a good source of inspiration for making your ideas/concepts/products more memorable. I've worked in two places where "demo or die" was the motto, and I've learned some of these lessons the hard way. This book captures a lot of those insights and presents them in a way that won't tell you how to make something more memorable, but it will show you where your presentation is weak.

The Personality Code is a warmed over presentation of DISC personality profiling. There's some value in the material itself, but there was virtually nothing here I didn't already know from a 30 minute discussion with a co-worker about DISC. There's probably a better reference on the topic.

A little over a year ago, my book club read The Kite Runner as its first selection. I didn't care for it that much, and I certainly didn't want to endure Hosseini's amateurish writing again, but I was overruled and the book club picked A Thousand Splendid Suns.

I was pleasantly surprised. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a much more compelling book than its precursor. The characters are more nuanced, the story has a better-structured arc, and the descriptions are richer. I think Hosseini may actually be a good writer and The Kite Runner simply suffered from being exploded from a short story into a full-length novel.

Pastoralia is a collection of disturbing, thought-provoking speculative-fiction short stories. Saunders had been recommended several times over the past few years, and I'm glad I finally checked him out. I'll probably go back and read his first collection, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, at some point.

The Accidental Time Machine is a time-travel novel that mostly manages to avoid the paradoxes of time travel (it does a good job until the very end). It's breezily written and fast-paced, and I enjoyed it somewhat (especially the parts set at M.I.T. in the future), but it's a minor work at best.