Morte d’Urban by J. F. Powers. This is a slog. I am 50% of the way thru and promised comic masterpiece has yet to really appear. Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho. Bob recommended this book, and it is good, explains […]
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. From last year’s Nebula list, a great tale of court entrigue. The Ocean at The End of The Lane by Neil Gaiman. A pretty quick read, very entrancing. Worth the accolades. Ancillary Justice and […]
Red Planet Blues by Robert Sawyer. Noirish mystery on Mars. Fun and engaging. I hope Mars is this cool when we eventually settle it. Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich. I don’t enjoy reading farce, and this was drifting that […]
OpenGL Programming Guide by Shreiner, Sellers, Kessenich, Licea-Kane. Incredibly boring in a good way. Very useful depth walkthru of OpenGL. Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson. Boring in a bad way, unreadable. The author attempts to wrap his […]
Parasite by Mira Grant. The start of a new series by the author of the Feed series, which I found to be among the best of the zombie novels I read. This is also a lot of fun, a twist […]
5 people in line waiting to pay at Barnes & Noble Bellevue vs 1 chatty cashier. 1 Nooklehead standing over at the Nook stand doing nothing while we are all trying to give the store money. I finally called the […]
Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson. YA pre-apocalyptic alternative history. Fun premise: a somewhat-intelligent organism has pervasively and surreptitiously infected the earth’s biosphere for hidden purposes, but some humans have started to trip to the fact. So fun but characters […]
The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin. Very moving tale of the last days of Jesus, written from the viewpoint of his mother. Great capturing of the anguish of a mother losing a son in terrible fashion. Vanished Kingdoms by […]
The last set of books I read had some stinkers, perhaps not suprising given that I was surfing through popular genre fictions. Decided to raise my standards a little bit: Harvesting the Biosphere by Vaclav Smil. Some random blogger recommended […]
Reality Hunger by David Shields. An excellent exploration of what we read, why we read, the evolving nature of the things we read and the things we write. I used to think I was a thoughtful reader, now I realize […]
I just discovered 507 movements, what a great resource! Back in my active Halloween days, I used to spend a lot of time figuring out how to turn simple rotary motion (as available from a myriad cheap motors) into some […]
Night Soul and Other Stories by Joseph McElroy. I just don’t enjoy short stories. These seem well-written and intriguing, but the lack of plot and character development due to the strictures of the form just doesn’t work for me. Giving […]
Trying to get smarter about image processing and computer vision — kind of a random walk of books: Digital Image Processing: An Algorithmic Approach Using Java by Burger and Burge. Mix of theory and implementation on the most basic of […]
Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton. A family is shattered by a school fire, and the critically injured mother battles to protect her kids and uncover the truth around the events. Great story about the relationship between a woman and her family, […]
Ghostman by Roger Hobbs. Excellent thriller about a world-class thief trying to thread the needle between rival criminal organizations and law enforcement. Great character. I’d read more featuring. Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. I don’t read […]
Alys, Always by Harriet Lane. A young woman witnesses a tragic accident and is then drawn into the family of the victim. Or insinuates herself into the family. I thought the tale was a little underdeveloped as either a suspense […]
On the heels of “B&N’s rumored step back from the Nook”:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/barnes-noble-weighs-its-nook-losses.html, I bet he is “more forlorn than ever”:http://theludwigs.com/2010/04/the-nook-dude-at-the-barnesnobles-looked-forlorn-today/. This was an easy one to predict. Competing in consumer hardware against Apple (and Samsung), and with an undifferentiated product relative […]
* “A Memory Of Light”:amazon by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. This series finally comes to end, about 6 books too late. Good to get to closure on the tale but I can’t recommend starting the series. The first 3-4 […]
* “Going Clear”:amazon by Lawrence Wright. A tough look at Scientology. The author does a nice job of letting the evidence speak for itself. If even a fraction of the accounts of abuse are true, the church has some serious […]
I am pushing myself a little this month. * “Real World Haskell”:amazon by O’Sullivan, Goerzen, Stewart. Functional languages have always seemed like a research toy to me. But some of the smartest guys I know are using the concepts at […]
