Wow. It’s a wonder that I have time to get anything done. Of the 1,001 book you must read before you die I’ve read:
2000sOn Beauty – Zadie Smith
Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (which was shockingly […]
I was pretty down on my previous review on Word Made By Hand. This is in large part because I had such high expectations of it, and I was incredibly disappointed at the anti-technology stance that it took. I still rather think things like permaculture and the make movement (if that’s the right […]
I really enjoy doom and gloom stories about how the world is going to end. Almost two years ago I wrote a post about it. Part of the reason that I’ve been so interested in Permaculture is that in the back of my mind, with peak oil, the lack of long term thinking […]
From the wikipedia page on John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding and friend/mentor to the likes of Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, before driving them off with his “winning personality”.
His father was a cold, impersonal, and unaffectionate electrical engineer. His mother, Dorothy (née Strahern) was warm but changeable of character and had an […]
From the BLDGBLOG interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote the Mars Trilogy:
BLDGBLOG: I’m interested in the possibility that literary genres might have to be redefined in light of climate change. In other words, a novel where two feet of snow falls on Los Angeles, or sand dunes creep through the suburbs of Rome, would […]
This book is a collection of stories written by people who live and work on Antarctica. Cooks, mechanics, go-fers, scientists and even a writer or two have some haunting stories. The life that they describe in this book is pretty crazy, pushing people to the edge of a healthy mental environment. Living […]
I just signed my sister and I up for the permaculture course this spring so we can turn Starlight into a productive farm again. And I just finished reading the second book in the Mars Trilogy, which is really a series about a planet. And then I find this poem, and am not […]
… but farmers make up on 10 percent of the population. Cassidy decribed them as free-marketers when it comes to property rights. “They would prefer no development, but if it is to happen, they want the option of selling their land.” This transaction is sometimes referred to as “the last harvest.”
What ever […]
Robin and I rented The Waiting Game a while ago — which I don’t recommended — about a group of actors waiting tables trying to make it in the big in New York. (Waiting for their big break, waiting on tables… get it? You can extrapolate the rest of the movie from there. […]
Ira Glass, host of This American Life has put together a book of his favorite non-fiction writing. It’s hard to describe the pieces in this book. He toys with the idea of calling them “literary non-fiction” before tossing out that phrase as being insufferably pretentious. Ira Glass was recently interviewed on The […]
To be honest, I judge books by their covers. It speaks both to how much weight I give to what I read and to the level at which the author is planning on entertaining me. It’s not that elegant covers are better, or that typography is the be all and end all, but […]
I read a lot of computer books, and the Processing Handbook is one of the best ones I’ve ever read. Processing in a graphical programming environment which is targeted for not programmers, and as a result Reas & Fry have spent a long time working out how to best teach graphic programming in a […]
Math is such a strange subject. In my mythical idea of when scientists meet they seize each other up and figure out where they fit in the pecking order. It’s based upon subject, something like “theoretical physics, applied physics, chemistry, biology, sociology” etc. until you get to the “non-science” sciences, namely those with […]
My introduction to this book was the blurb by Arthur C. Clark (whom I’m going to assume you know)
A staggering book… The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written… It should be required reading for the colonists of the next century.
What a great idea. The best novel on the […]
I read a fair amount on the business of software, and there’s a couple people out there who are as thought provoking as they are a little frustrating. The people whom I’m talking about, Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky and now Michael Lopp all have (semi) regularly published articles on their personal websites which end up […]
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