Books Read in 2011

Disappointing. This reads like one of Stephenson's pseudonymous efforts, though it isn't quite as good as "Stephen Bury"'s The Cobweb. I found it a little amusing that Stephenson can spend pages writing about the intricacies of a gun collection, but that he refuses to invest more than a vague paragraph on a plot-relevant sexual encounter between two of the main characters.

I think at this point that I have to grudgingly admit that I don't know what I saw in his writing in the first place. It's ambitious, but more and more I think a lot of it is pretty dull.

Thank you, David Mitchell, for restoring my faith in literary fiction. After a terrible experience with Nicholson Baker's House of Holes and a middling reaction to Richard Powers' Generosity, I was a bit afraid that my tastes had shifted away from beautiful prose and toward plot-driven speculative fiction. Though I do greatly enjoy the latter, thankfully I now know that I still have a taste for the former.

Black Swan Green is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel set in England in the early 80s. The narrator, Jason Taylor, is the same age as Mitchell, and about two years older than me, and although I grew up in New England rather than the U.K., I recognized enough of Mitchell's music and pop culture references to see and value how real and appropriate they are. I identified strongly with Jason, especially with the distortions the adolescent mind places on the significance of life's minor but formative events.

Mitchell is a versatile writer. You'd have a hard time finding three books in three different genres as uniformly excellent as Mitchell's Black Swan Green (bildungsroman), Cloud Atlas (literary speculative fiction), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (historical fiction). In all cases, the writing craft is meticulous, but in the case of Black Swan Green there are sentences in each chapter that I wish I had conceived and written, metaphors that jump of the page — to the point of being aphorisms.

I'm eager to read Mitchell's earlier novels, though I am tempted to hold off a bit and save them for just the right time and place.

This is by far my least favorite Nicholson Baker book. It is indeed raunchy, but it has a horrific flavor to it (the first "episode" includes a dismembered forearm feeling up a girl), and if there was anything of value to be found in the overall structure, I missed it.

Yuck. The season eight comics were in no way worth the time and money, except for the occasional passing chuckle.

An interesting premise with promising elements, but I was very put off by having multiple viewpoints all told in the second person.

[These notes are very light on spoilers — there's nothing here that would ruin your enjoyment of the novel.]

The long awaited, much anticipated Dance with Dragons has finally arrived, and I finished my re-read of the first four books of the series just in time to dive in. Having now spent the past two and a half weeks reading through it, I have mixed feelings about finishing it.

On the plus side, the early part of the novel advances several plot lines significantly and brings back the great POV characters that were missing from A Feast for Crows, namely Dany, Tyrion, Jon, Arya, and Bran. Bran's adventures advance quickly (with a satisfying twist) but end rather abruptly. Arya's thread is terrific, but there isn't enough of it.

On the down side, Dany sits around and boringly deals with politics for most of the novel (though she does have a couple of great scenes toward the end). Tyrion wanders around a lot, but doesn't really seem to get anywhere, and Jon ends on one of the most contrived cliffhangers I've ever seen.

A few presumed-dead characters turn out to still be alive, which is actually starting to be a problem. Part of what was great about the first three novels in the series were the sometimes unexpected mortal consequences of the plot. Martin has seemingly given up on killing anyone, and he now has too many characters to keep in motion.

A Song of Ice and Fire really needs to start getting into plot-resolution mode. Hopefully the next book won't be half a decade in the making, and hopefully it'll start to bring the many diverse plot threads back together. I'll keep reading this series, but I'm a little bummed out after finishing this chapter.

Flashback is my favorite Dan Simmons novel in more than a decade (since The Crook Factory).

It is set in a dystopic near-future, and the characters blame the U.S.'s fictional collapse on poor policies by Obama. This is a political view I hope I will never share, and I attribute it to the bleak fictional setting rather than to Simmons himself, in contrast to many of the reviewers on Amazon. But really, the interesting gambit here is the invention of a cheap drug called flashback that allows many Americans to live entirely in the past by re-experiencing high-fidelity memories of their choosing. The protagonist is a seemingly hopeless flashback addict, who must overcome his addiction to solve a set of murders and reunite with his son. It turns into a thriller where he gradually realizes that he is a pawn in a larger game and needs to find a way out.

Simmons is always worth reading, and this is the best combination of readable and compelling that he's achieved in a long time.

I liked this better the second time. The POV characters here aren't my favorites, but there's plenty of interesting stuff going on, and A Dance With Dragons is right around the corner.

I'm continuing to quite enjoy rereading this series.

I am continuing my reread of A Song of Ice and Fire in conjunction with the airing of the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones adaptation, and in anticipation of the publishing of A Dance With Dragons.

In the second book of the series, magic begins leaking in around the edges of the narrative, but the prose maintains the gritty realism and character-driven action that make this series great. This time around, I'm enjoying all of the point-of-view characters (including the newly-added POVs of Theon and Davos). I loved Theon's introduction to Asha as well as Tyrion's role leading up to the Battle of the Blackwater. And I'm having fun speculating how they'll cast Melisandre and Asha on HBO next year.

Even if this series is never completed, it's a damn fine creation.

I have been using the techniques of David Allen's Getting Things Done since 2004. OmniFocus has been my "trusted system" for about three years, and I can't possibly recommend GTD in general and OmniFocus is particular highly enough. Although OmniFocus has features to cover nearly every possible GTD strategy, it has a reputation for being nearly impenetrable. In spite of this, I've managed to adapt it to my needs pretty well over the years, and I've developed a reputation at work for never letting anything slip through the cracks.

I bought this ebook (at the astounding $30 ticket price) based on a couple of very strong recommendations from OmniFocus veterans. I did manage to learn a few things from it, and have since improved my workflow in a couple of ways (mainly in making better use of Perspectives), but I can't say the price tag was worth it for me.

If you are new to OmniFocus, Dini's presentation is very clear and has everything you need to get up and running with a solid GTD implementation, though you will very likely experience information overload and need to reread portions of the book sometime down the road. For a new user, $30 is actually a pretty good deal because you'll quickly see a lot of really interesting approaches that would take you months or years to discover on your own.

If you are a hardened OmniFocus vet, you would probably do better to read Dini's online articles instead.

If you're somewhere in between, use your judgment. Compared to the cost of putting OmniFocus on your computer, iPhone, and iPad, $30 isn't a huge investment.

In WWII, Bill Mauldin was deployed in many of the same places as my grandfather, and though my grandfather was in the quartermaster corps (i.e., supply line) rather than at the front, their experience overlapped. This book collects many of Mauldin's editorial cartoons (originally published in The Stars and Stripes), accompanied by a lengthy essay explaining some of the context and references. Nearly 70 years after the depicted events took place, these textual clues are essential for a lay reader. This first-hand view of the war is quite different from any other viewpoint I've seen, and is, I think, a hugely valuable piece of history, if only for illustrating the war from the vantage of a dogface on the front line.

Through this book, I had hoped to gain more insight into my grandfather's experiences. That didn't really pan out, but it was a worthwhile read nonetheless.

This is a solid and reasonably comprehensive guide to using SQLite, the fabulous free embedded database engine. I now understand the full array of JOIN commands for the first time, and I think I've got all the knowledge I need to use SQLite well.

This book belongs in a "for dummies" series rather than in Apress's "From Novice to Professional" line. The examples are very basic, and I learned little that can't be derived from "if the same information is represented more than once, you're probably doing something wrong".

I acknowledge that I'm not the right audience for this book, and I should have spent more time checking out the table of contents and reviews before purchasing it, but if you know the first thing about databases, this is not the book for you.

I'm rereading A Song of Ice and Fire in conjunction with watching the HBO series Game of Thrones and in anticipation of this summer's release of the fifth book in the series, A Dance With Dragons.

I enjoyed the series a lot the first time I read it (about five years ago), and I've conveniently forgotten many of the plot points. I'm also soaking in the details and greatly enjoying some of the characters I didn't care for the first time around. I have found that the HBO series is adding to my enjoyment — they've done a splendid job of casting, and although they are telegraphing some elements that don't happen in the books until later, they are staying extremely close to the source material.

This is a masterful series, and I hope to see it completed some day, but even with just the first four books in hand, it's well worth the journey.

The Poisoner's Handbook is a professional biography of Charles ("Chuck") Norris, who was New York's first forensic medical examiner. Each chapter is named after a particular poison and includes a case study of its use and detection. The formula feels forced at the end and wears a little thin, but this was an enjoyable and informative read.

I've loved some of Richard Powers' previous novels, but this one was a bit of a struggle for me, in spite of the fact that many reviewers have dubbed it his "most approachable novel to date". As with many of his previous novels, Powers focuses on a specific domain of science (here: what makes us happy) and creates characters that explore that area. In this case, Powers weaves in a metafictional element that makes it hard to know who the narrator really is (and how much of the plot is meant to be "real"), and that distances the reader from the main characters. This alienated me a bit — although I can appreciate the authorial gymnastics, they made the novel too easy to put down.

This is the first Powers novel I've read in several years, so I'm not sure if I've grown away from his writing or if this particular novel just didn't work for me.

It was interesting to revisit this classic after some 25 years, mostly because it's a lot more terrifying to read as an adult, knowing that it's a truly realistic depiction of how average adolescent boys would act in such a situation. As someone who places a high value on rationality, I identified with Ralph, Simon, and Piggy, each in a different way. Human nature is frighteningly bipolar, and the scared little boys in this book aren't very different from our contemporary politicians. This book is worth revisiting if you haven't read it since high school.

Okay, now that I'm done with the whole series, I can take a step back. The Merchant Princes series is multiverse science fiction initially disguised as fantasy. There are about a dozen significant characters, and by the end of the cycle, each one has his own thread and viewpoint. This creates a certain richness, but also leads to some uneven pacing and occasionally awkward jumping around.

Spoiler alert: At the beginning of book 6, several nuclear bombs are detonated in Washington, D.C., killing thousands of people including then-president George W. Bush. Cheney (dubbed WARBUCKS) is sworn in, but shortly thereafter dies of a heart attack. I think Stross took a certain pleasure in those particular plot points, and I must admit I did too. Cheney really deserved it, after all.

Clearly this is outlandish fantasy, but it's a fun read.

Somewhat uneven pacing and another cliffhanger. Still, it's keeping me turning the pages.

This is not as good as Lopp's Being Geek, but his wisdom still rings true.

This series is getting richer and more complex as it progresses, and I'm quite enjoying it.

I read this aloud to my daughter (6), who enjoyed it but didn't get as much out of it as her brother (9). It's a terrific little story about kid empowerment — perfect for 3rd and 4th grade readers.

Michael Lopp is better known as Rands, author of the Rands in Repose weblog. He's a software-engineer-turned-manager with battle scars from Silicon Valley startups, and he writes very well for an audience of fellow engineers. That means short chapters, casual but witty prose, and no punches pulled. Being Geek is a collection of his wisdom and writings, loosely arranged around the career lifecycle of a software engineer.

I've been a programmer for almost thirty years (I started writing text adventure games on an Apple II in fifth grade) and employed as a software engineer and then manager for the last twelve years, and everything in this book rings true to me. The chapters on giving a presentation are more concise, witty, and on-point than Berkun's Confessions of a Public Speaker, and the book as a whole is a good read.

I recommend this book to anyone starting out a career in software engineering, or to anyone making a transition from engineer to manager.

This was better than I expected, given the drop-off in ratings between books 2 and 3 on Amazon. The pace is a little slower here, and the protagonist (Miriam) is held powerless for most of the duration. There is very little evolution of the rules of Stross's universe in this volume, but the political machinations have ramped up, and the ending is another cliffhanger. I'm enjoying this series, but I am reluctant to recommend it.

This was occasionally entertaining, but held little advice that was useful to me. The helpful bits boil down to:

1. Know your audience
2. Be concise
3. Practice

which is good advice, but not enough to hang a book on. My mistake was thinking that this book would help me be a better public speaker, when in fact it's more about what it's like to be a professional public speaker.

Clearly some of the gap here is that I've been giving demos and talks for more than a decade, first as a grad student and then as an engineer. I'm not great at it, but I've already learned to work around most of the rookie mistakes. If you are new to public speaking, your mileage may vary, but I'm still guessing there's a better book out there for you.

Note: There is a newer edition of this book titled Making Things Happen.

I've had this book on my shelf for five or six years and finally decided to plow through it. It's full of good practices and advice for project managers, and it lines up pretty well with the best practices I've observed and applied over the years, but it's very densely written and a bit of a slog. I'm curious how the new edition differs.

The pace picks up a bit in the second entry of Stross's world-hopping series, and it ends on another cliffhanger. I enjoyed this a bit more than the first entry, and I guess I'm now committing myself to reading the whole cycle.

A journalist discovers that she has a hidden ability — she can step between worlds — and it turns out that, in the other world, she is part of a royal family. The premise is similar to Zelazny's Amber series, but I like Stross's version of the trope a lot better so far.

The biggest difference lies in the plausibility of the fictional universes. Zelazny's is an infinite multiverse with almost no rules, whereas Stross's universe is so far very limited in scope. Stross takes hopping between two worlds as a starting point and maps out a series of plausible consequences, turning it into a novel more of human political intrigue and adventure than one of shaggy-dog fantasy. Sure, the Amber books have plenty of politics, but Zelazny's characters are detached and superhuman, where Stross's feel more believable.

That said, I found the pacing to be uneven, and some of the political knots were a bit too hairy for me to untangle. I didn't love this book, and I haven't yet dived into the next entry, but I'm pretty sure I'll continue with this series, given my increasing admiration of Stross.

More shaggy-dog storytelling. Amusing for my kindergartener, but barely readable. I hope she doesn't want to keep reading this series!

Tim Ferriss is as over-the-top as they come. He has spent more than a decade trying dozens of different techniques for reducing fat, increasing strength, adding muscle, and (ahem) producing orgasms. This book compiles his best tips for all of these areas and more.

Is it credible? Perhaps. Nearly all of Ferriss's recommendations are based on small studies and self-experimentation, and the documentation of his self-experimentation is obsessive. He goes to great lengths to explain why he thinks his techniques work (including some of the scientific rationale), and many of them probably do, but it's crucial to approach this kind of thing with a big dose of skepticism.

I'm starting with a few small changes to make my diet more conducive to fat loss and my workouts more effective, but most of the recommendations in this book go beyond what I'm willing to try for now. However, if I succeed in dropping a few pounds of fat and improving my aerobic capacity, I'll probably be back for more.

I don't know how to classify this novel. There are horror, thriller, and noir elements, but there's nothing supernatural about it, and it turns out to be primarily about the protagonist coming to terms with a horrific event that happened in the past. The writing is highly stylized, with non-standard punctuation for dialogue and no explicit reference to which character is speaking at any time, and it's gritty, gross, vulgar and violent. I liked the development of the central character, but didn't care for some of the trimmings. Overall I liked but did not love this novel, which puts me on the fence about reading something else by Huston.

I read this novella on a flight, and I was grateful to be able to absorb it in one sitting. Ted Chiang is a gifted author — one whose prose reads effortlessly — and he knows his subject deeply. In this case, the topic is artificial intelligence, and every detail of the future that he describes is utterly believable and completely consistent with what we know today about business, software, society, and intelligence itself. I found myself caring both for the human characters and the "software objects" of the story's title. Very little of the plot is predictable, but it is entirely logical and self-consistent. It's simply a damn fine read.