If everyone else in the world can do a year-end wrap-up, so can I.

I have possibly the worst musical taste ever and I don’t watch a lot of TV or movies, but I do read a lot. So this is the best stuff I read in 2011.

Books

I post tiny book reviews to twitter; I’m also trying to keep up with longer reviews on Goodreads.

The Pale King: David Foster Wallace’s posthumous unfinished novel has moments that are undeniably brilliant, but it is absolutely unfinished and not so much a novel as a collection of fascinating potsherds. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last year. The good parts are just so good that even as sketchy as it is it was still worth reading.

War and Peace, Tolstoy: Yeah, I read War and Peace, and I’m glad I did. It’s an intimidating book in its length, but it is extremely readable. The characters are so well-drawn and the social problems they face seem entirely modern. There were a few times I actually put off important appointments because OMG I had to find out what happened to Prince Andrei. It is a brilliant, epic novel, and well-deserving of its reputation as one of the best novels ever written in any language.

Side note: I read this book in paperback in the Penguin edition (Rosemary Edmonds translation, two volumes, which makes it easier to hold), but I also used a free Gutenberg version on my Kindle. Having a searchable version on which I could take notes was very useful for keeping the characters straight.

Skippy Dies, Paul Murray: The best contemporary novel I read this year. I heard good things about this book for months but the title seemed off-putting to me. Ignore the title. This is one great book. It’s funny, and surreal, and poignant. It’s a big book, but it reads fast. The characters are all wonderful. Spoiler: Skippy dies.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern: I was halfway through writing this post last week when I read this book, and I had to add it. I have a warm place in my heart for long, slow, quiet, ethereal, fairy-tale influenced fantasy, and this is that kind of book. I could complain that the ending is too obvious, the metaphors a bit heavy (hello! wizard in the tree!) and that a lot of the book feels kind of light and fluffy. But this is a beautifully written, otherworldly love story, and I loved it.

Short Stories and Other Random Things

I used to read short stories all the time, but my attention span these days works best on social-networking time (10 seconds or less) or novel-span time (2-3 days). Random point of note: I’ve been trying to finish The Stories of John Cheever for almost five years.

Escape from Spiderhead, George Saunders. Ignore the fact that this is from the New Yorker. It is science fiction, it is cynical and violent and profane, and it is absolutely terrific. It reminds me a lot of the dystopian Vonnegut and Vonnegut-style stuff I used to read as a kid in the 1970′s.

Six Months, Three Days, Charlie Jane Anders. “The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.” This is the rare kind of science fiction that I love, complex literary character-driven SF.

When I look at a Strawberry I think of a Tongue, Édouard Levé. This is not a short story, and its not an essay; it’s kind of a stream-of-consciousness piece of impressionist textual memoir, but it is just astonishingly written. Do not google Édouard Levé before you read this; the last few lines and the epigraph are devastating.

Blog Posts

How to Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon. If there was one blog post in 2011 that affected me more personally in 2011, it would be this one. The subhead is “10 Things No One Told me About Creativity” and this is one of those essays with pithy and seemingly obvious advice about creativity. I’ve read tons of these posts. I’ve read tons of books about creativity. Most of them are indeed kind of obvious. And as I once said to Jason Kottke, books about creativity are like books about swimming; eventually you have to stop reading and get into the pool.

It was this part that really thumped me in the head:

3. Write the book you want to read.

Hello, obvious. But not so obvious to me. I’ve spent thirty years trying (and failing) to write a novel that I thought would be worthy of my talent. But what’s wrong with just writing a simple novel that is the kind of crappy fun book I like to read? Nothing. Nothing at all. Even if I write a crappy novel I will learn something about writing *any* novel. After this post I did actually start a novel, and although I’m not sure I’m ever going to succeed at it I’m making more progress than I have in the past, and it’s making me very happy.

Dear Sugar at The Rumpus

I wanted to come up with ONE Sugar column that I liked the best for this post, and couldn’t do it. Dear Sugar is an advice column, and much of the time it is the sort of advice to the lovelorn column you see anywhere. But the writing. The writing is so unbelievably good. For every column it seems there is always a turn of phrase, a metaphor, or an anecdote that is deeply resonant for me. I have sat in front of my computer and cried myself stupid more often for Sugar columns than for anything else this year. I managed to reduce my list of best Sugar columns to four, in reverse chronological order:

Dear Sugar #78: The Obliterated Place. “23. There is no 23.”

Dear Sugar #69: We Are All Savages Inside. On art, and success, and jealousy, and privilege. “There isn’t a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.”

Dear Sugar #64: Tiny Beautiful Things. Advice to one’s younger 20-something self. “Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.” This made me cry myself stupid.

Dear Sugar #48: Write Like a Motherfucker: Probably the most famous Sugar column. Advice to writers, and female writers especially. The last line is most often quoted, but I like this one: “Writing is hard for every last one of us. … Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” Cried myself stupid.

Final Note

My first resolution for 2012: try to write blog posts that are fewer than 1500 words and don’t take a week.

I haven’t done a book roundup in almost a year. I am embarrassed to note from this list that I didn’t read a lot in the last year. I did lose my Sudoku book midway through the year so that can’t explain it. I will note in my own defense that I am exceptionally well rested, my filing is up to date and there are no dust bunnies under my bed.

This is long so I put it after the jump. Books are roughly in the order I read them.

JPod: A Novel, by Douglas Coupland. I haven’t read any Doug Coupland in like a zillion years, not since everyone in the world in my age demographic was also reading Doug Coupland. But this book was supposedly a “sequel” to Microserfs so I bought it because I loved Microserfs. I was deceived; this book is not a sequel to microserfs. The Coupland schtick is kind of old these days. Meh.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, by Cory Doctorow. A pretty good fantasy novel. Unfortunately, its also packed full of bunches of distracting technology stuff that doesn’t fit in well, and it really kind of falls apart at the end. Parts of it are beautifully drawn, but once again I find myself disappointed in the whole.

Since Cory’s work is released under a Creative Commons license I had this funny urge to remix the book to remove all the tech stuff, move sections around to resolve the ending better and turn it into the short fantasy novel it really should be. But then I came to my senses and realized that really I should maybe be WRITING SOMETHING OF MY OWN rather than editing someone else’s stuff for NO REASON AT ALL.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan wrote the Botany of Desire, which is a great book. This is a less good book although it is a lot scarier. In this book you, too, can become completely consumed with crashing despair over your food and decide never to eat a damn thing ever again. Cheery! The first two thirds are well researched, well-detailed and well written; last third is dull and self-indulgent. It is a good read but very, very depressing. Personally I will never eat beef again, and I am now spending $10 for a dozen eggs.

A Dirty Job: A Novel, by Christopher Moore. Yay! Chris Moore! Yay! Yay! This is a book about Death. It’s set in San Francisco, like Blood-Sucking Fiends, and as a lot of the same tone. I think I like the Urban Chris Moore better than I like the Coastal Chris Moore or the Hawaii Chris Moore. (none of this will make any sense to you unless you read Chris Moore. That’s OK, move on).

The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, by Tony Bourdain. Tony Bourdain has, alas, not been terrifically funny since Kitchen Confidential. There are one or two bright moments in this collection of articles and other stuff. The short story is cute.

Try, by Lily Burana. The glorious Madame Lily is one of my tiny invisible friends who lives in my computer and this is her first novel. Try is a romance about Wyoming and rodeo cowboys. It is a super big fat fun read. There is a lot of sex in it.

The Bug, by Ellen Ullman. A literary geek novel. It is really, really geeky and really, really dark. It’s kind of an odd duck of a novel given that its great science fiction but it was published as a Literary Novel under a Literary Imprint. Thus ensuring that the lit people took one look at it, saw it was about technology and thought “ick” and the science fiction people never saw it at all. There is only a little sex in it and it is kind of disturbing.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. A quick read, kind of fluffy, and I can’t remember a darn thing about it. I do remember one of the authors was really very impressed with the other author. There is no sex in it at all (unless you count the co-authorial love).

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire. They made this book into a popular musical so you’ve probably already heard the gimmick: its the wizard of oz, told from the point of view of the wicked witch. I loved this book. It was funny and subversive and brilliant. I have more of Greg Maguire’s books on my reading list, but I have heard that he peaked on this one.

Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. I have an addiction to books about writing. I read a lot of them. Eric says that reading books about writing is my way of avoiding doing any writing. Which is probably at least half true. But if you’re going to read books about writing, this is a really great choice. Its one of the best books about writing out there. I actually read it a number of years ago and stumbled across it again just recently when I was cleaning my office, so I read it again. Its a truly great book and very inspiring.

The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life, by Julia Cameron. This book stunk. If you’re going to read books about writing, don’t read this one. Julia Cameron wrote The Artist’s Way, which was a good book for exploring creativity in general, although it was kind of self-helpy and woo woo. This book retells a lot of the same information from that book, only with more woo woo; it rambles; it is self-indulgent; it provides no insight. Readers: I didn’t like it.

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut. A couple years back I finally got around to reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and it was AWESOME. S5 is just a tremendous book and I immediately put a whole bunch of Vonnegut books onto my reading list. This was the next one and….hm. There is obviously a Vonnegut Voice and a Vonnegut Style but it doesn’t seem to hold together as well as S5. (by the way I was recently sent a link to Vonnegut’s amazing short story Harrison Bergeron. Its worth a read or a re-read if, like me, you had to read and analyze it in grade school)

Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. Now I remember why it was I didn’t read a lot of books last year, it was because it took me six months to get through this one. I won’t say that it was dull, because it wasn’t, or that it was a difficult read, because it wasn’t. I just kept falling asleep in the middle of it, and then finding something else that was more interesting to read and putting this one aside, and then forgetting who all the characters were and where the plot had twisted and having to go back a hundred pages or so to catch up and restart. It’s a good book, though. If nothing else it makes you realize just who it was that Dan Brown was copying so incredibly badly in the DaVinci Code.

You Suck: A Love Story, by Chris Moore. Two Chris Moore books in a year, an embarrassment of riches. You Suck is the sequel to bloodsucking fiends. I admit I am kind of nervous about this sequels thing (the Christmas book and now this). Also that there are two Chris Moore books in a year. Terry Pratchett had trouble maintaining quality when he started writing too fast. I have the fear. I would like fewer books and better ones. That said, You Suck is….OK. It is not as good as a Dirty Job or Bloodsucking Fiends, but it is better than Fluke. It has some really funny moments. I chortled loudly and madly at the goth kids, who, frankly, were WAY more funny than the main characters. Abby Normal STOLE this book. The ending seems kind of cop-outish. But still, worth at least a dozen Right to Writes.

Digital Game-Based Learning, by Marc Prensky. I could do a whole blog post just on this book. DGBL is a book about, uh, digital game-based learning. Prensky’s thesis is that people under the age of 40 — the “Games Generation” — learn differently from previous generations. Because this generation grew up with video games and MTV they’re used to taking in and processing information at a much faster pace and can more easily parallel-process multiple streams of information at once. Traditional methods of teaching — long lectures, followed by testing to make sure they were listening — will bore them to death and the content just doesn’t sink in. Its not that kids can’t pay attention. It’s that the teaching methods don’t work for minds that are literally wired different. Prensky’s solution, thus, is to create new learning methods for new minds that involve games and interactivity.

I ate this book up like pie. I’m not a trainer, although it could be argued that tech writing is a form of teaching. And tech writing — both documentation and books — certainly has quite a lot of the sort of hidebound tedium that Pensky talks about old-style training suffering from. Ironically it was Kathy Sierra (a former trainer) who told me to read this book, and I think her head first series has been hugely revolutionary for changing the way computer books can be designed and written — or at least doing something radically different from the same old format and the same old style. I’ve got a lot to think about from this.

Next up in the reading list: a modernist novel that I’m crawling through about a page a night; more books Kathy Sierra told me to read, a bunch of books about JavaScript, and yet another attempt at Quicksilver.

A great and funny rant. (feed readers: Youtube link.)

Six months ago I walked into Borders on a saturday after breakfast, as I do on pretty much every saturday after breakfast, and was greeted with a huge table display. The display said

NEW PUZZLE CRAZE!!

And there on the table were about 50 books for this thing I had never heard of called Sudoku.

Well, I like puzzles. I like puzzles a lot. I’m not so great at crosswords (ironic for the english major, no?), and there are some 3D spatial things I’m bad at (I’m told this is a male/female thing). But mostly I think just about any kind of puzzle is pretty darn great.

I went to a party once and I had intended to be social, really, but then someone handed me one of those old blacksmith puzzles where you have to get the ring off of the hooks or the loops or whatever and I promptly became the least social person in the history of the entire known world. Just me and the blacksmith puzzle in the corner, responding to greetings with grunts or not at all and refusing to come out of hiding until I had solved the darn thing. Days later I emerged from the corner, hungry but triumphant. I don’t get invited to so many parties anymore.

Oh, and there’s Tetris. I have this problem with Tetris. We will conveniently skip over my really bad Tetris addiction in college and I will note that I got a PSP just recently (Sony is Evil, I know, I’m sorry) and they have this game called Lumines which is like Tetris only blocks instead of lines and they flash blinky lights and play loud repetitive dance music at you all the time. Like Tetris at a rave. Anyhow I’ve been playing that game a lot and having conversations like:

Eric: Laura?
Laura: not now.
Eric: Laura…..
Laura: not now.
Eric: Laura, your hair is on fire.

But I digress.

So I picked up one of the sudoku books in the store and I thumbed through it. I read the introduction. Sudoku, in case you haven’t been assaulted by bookstore displays in the last six months, is a simple logic puzzle involving grids of of numbers. The numbers are purely symbolic; there’s no math involved. They could use random symbols but the numbers are easy to remember. All you have to do is fill in the grid so that all the rows and columns and squares all contain numbers from 1 to 9.

The book I had in my hand, the Book of Sodoku, was only ten bucks, so I figured what the hell, I’ll give it a try.

This is my really long-winded explanation for why I have only read five books in the last six months. But I’m getting really great at Sudoku.

Olympos, by Dan Simmons. Last year I read Ilium, the prequel to this book, and loved it. As I posted back then, I’m not a huge traditional science fiction fan, but Ilium was complex and well-written and just really well put together. Unfortunately, it also ended in a huge cliffhanger, and OIympos was supposed to be the book that resolved everything.

Um. Well, its a big book, and it continues all the big and complex storylines that Ilium started. But its a big fat longwinded mess. It just spins madly out of control, there are too many plots, nothing much gets resolved, and I ended the book thinking “I have no idea what just happened here.” Bah. Plus there was this big time Heinleinian Stupidity Moment: there’s this beautiful female character central to the plot, and she’s been put in a sort of suspended animation for thousands of years, and the only way she can be awakened is if the virile male hero has sex with her sleeping body. My eyes rolled so hard they popped right out of my head.

Thud! by Terry Pratchett. Yes, if there’s anything that can drag me away from an incredibly addicting puzzle book, its a new Terry Pratchett book. This one involves a long-ago war between the dwarves and the trolls, and the seething resentments that have resulted since then. Now a dwarf has been killed apparently by a troll and the Watch has to deal with it before a new war springs up.

I was kind of surprised that this book came out so soon after Going Postal and kind of concerned about it; the last time Terry P. started writing books really fast the quality suffered. And alas although this book was fun I don’t rank it among his best. It just didn’t reach out and grab me…in fact it took me a week to read it which is positively unheard of. It is definitely no Going Postal, or Night Watch.

My Work is Not Yet Done, by Thomas Ligotti. I have gushed about Thomas Ligotti before. I love this guy. He doesn’t write horror, really, he more writes dread, or loathing. He’s just immensely talented at setting a really dark mood.

In this book there are three stories of “Corporate Horror.” In the first, the dread and loathing and darkness take place in a perfectly ordinary company. The first half of the story is terrific; like some sort of horrible lovecraftian “Office Space.” The main character is oppressed by his co-workers in various tiny awful ways. His boss and co-workers conspire against him, and drive him to madness.

And then there’s the second half of the book, which turns into kind of a supernatural Kill Bill. The main character is run over by a bus and becomes an avenging spirit, picking off in various nasty ways each of his former co-workers who betrayed him. I found this second part of the book kind of disappointing, less about the dread and loathing and more straight-up horror. Its good straight-up horror but I prefer the more moody and less bloody Ligotti.

The other two stories in the book are shorter. The first, “I have a Special Plan for This World,” is chock full of mood. Deliciously so. Unfortunately the plot is also kind of muddled and I’m not sure exactly what goes on here. The last story, the “Nightmare Network,” has a unique structure: its just a series of mostly flat descriptions of ads, videos, events. Its kind of a non-narrative and I admit the style does not grab me much at all. I could not get into this story and I couldn’t tell you what it was about.

Anansi Boys, By Neil Gaiman. I suppose if you made a list of Most Predictable Books Laura Must Have Read in The Last Half of 2005 this book would be on it. Well duh, of course I read it. It was a good, fun, quick read. Not as complex as American Gods. Not as creepy as Coraline (which, despite it being a kids book, creeped the living daylights out of me). It was fun, but kind of Average Fantasy I’ve Come To Expect From Neil. I’m still waiting for the Neil Gaiman fantasy magnum opus and beginning to think maybe Sandman was it. Hm.

Spook, by Mary Roach. Gushed about Mary Roach previously, too, when she wrote Stiff. Stiff is about human bodies and the things we do to them after people have left them. Spook is about the other side of the equation: its about souls and ghosts and spiritualism; about the search for life after death.

I’ve been trying to figure out why it is I don’t like Spook as much as I liked Stiff. Mary Roach’s writing style and humor are intact, the characterizations are terrific and brilliant long-winded off-topic footnotes are just as frequent. Perhaps because souls and ghosts and spiritualism are just less shocking than corpses the subject matter is just less interesting to read. But this book just wasn’t as as much fun as Stiff. I really wanted it to be, but it just wasn’t.

Five books in six months and none of them were even all that great. Boohoo. I need to find something to read now that will blow the top of my head right off with its greatness. I’m not sure what that book might be. If you had to make the list of Most Predictable Books Laura Must Read in the First Half of 2006 you might think Feast for Crows was on there given that I am a big fantasy reader…except um I haven’t actually read any of the other books in the series. So maybe I will board that ship for my spring books list.

Right after I finish 40 more Sudoku puzzles.

I’ve had this damn post sitting in my To Be Blogged list for months now, and I haven’t blogged it for no good reason at all. Its a post from stevenf‘s blog entitled “weirdest moments in popular music history.”

It is really really funny, eg:

3. ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie

A nice little noodley, spacey bridge begins at approximately 2:43, but concludes abruptly when an apparently drunken tuba player barges into the studio 17 seconds later, and farts out four of the most incongruous notes in recorded history just before, I can only presume, collapsing onto the floor. Only Bowie knows for certain what really happened that fateful day.

And you know, I didn’t remember this farting tuba player so I had to go queue up Space Oddity on iTunes and swing the pointer over to 2:43. Now I’m never going to be able to listen to the song without giggling madly. Curse you, stevenf.

(I got it from ~stevenf.)

The Annoying Song, by the Weebls

Don’t click it. I’m warning you. Don’t. Really. DON’T. YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK.

And if you’re not permanently emotionally damaged from that one, try the Kenya song. Or rather don’t. You’ll be up all night.

I was in my local Borders Books this morning, and perhaps this sign has been there the whole time and I just didn’t notice, or perhaps its a new sign, but none the less, there is a “Popular Fiction” sign over the SF, mystery, and romance sections now.

I went around the corner:

This must be the unpopular fiction section.

I’m sorry. I do not have plans to see either Serenity nor Mirrormask this weekend. My deep abiding hatred for people in crowds just way outweighs my need to be geeky.

I am officially on vacation next week but could not get organized enough to actually go anywhere, so perhaps I will take in matinee.

4 8 15 16 23 42 – The LOST Numbers Reference Guide

An incredibly obsessive reference to the numbers on the Lost TV show.

The Faders, “No Sleep Tonight” [iTunes Music Store link]

Three or four times a year I discover some great new song and I have to listen to that song over and over again until I am so sick of it that I can’t stand it anymore. Its been that way since I was twelve; I am perpetually stuck in teenager listening mode. Woe betide you if you live in my household.

This is the current iteration of that song. Its a raucous punk-poppy little thing from a British teenage girl band. Very Donnas-like. I love it. Now that I have iTunes to keep track of my music obsessions I can let you all know that I have listened to this song 18 times in the last two days. Not sick of it yet.

I am told this song is in the iPod Nano ads, although I’ve only seen the one with the hands and this song isn’t it. Conveniently, I just bought an iPod nano (neat! new! toy!), so now I can put this song on it and listen to it everywhere I go.

BTW you link into the iTMS by control-clicking (or right-clicking) a song and choosing “Copy Music Store URL.” They use horrible weird web objects URLs that launch iTunes, but they work.

New Terry Pratchett discworld book out this week. That is all.

Here are a bunch of links I’ve been storing up for a while about self-publishing. Assuming one has experience in writing, editing, illustration, book design, and printing, or can outsource some or all of those tasks, the only hurdles one has to worry about with self-publishing are marketing and distribution. Unfortunately those are fairly huge hurdles. :/

What do you think about self published books? – Signal vs. Noise: 37Signals is working on its next book and poses this question. Lots of good advice in the comments. Especially noted that despite the general reputation of self-published books being somewhat inferior in quality, there is the tremendous exception of Edward Tufte‘s books, which are brilliantly written and beautifully printed. And self-published.

What do you think about self-published books? – Tim O’Reilly’s response: Tim posted in the comments to the question above and then expanded his comments in this post to oreillynet. This is the point of view of a more traditional publisher, albiet one that grew from a self-publisher. Some discussion on distribution here, and packaging (where one does all the writing, design, and layout, and then hands over camera-ready copy to a publisher for printing and distribution).

How to be Your Own Publisher — NYT Review of Books: article with an emphasis on POD (Print-On-Demand) publishers such as iUniverse and XLibris. Also a strong note that self-publishing is vanity publishing and thus bad. “With all this democratic activity, self-published authors have essentially become the bloggers of the publishing world, with approximately the same anarchic range in quality that you find on the Web.” :/

Jim Minatel on self-publishing: Jim is a Wrox editor who I’m pretty sure I’ve met a bunch of times at author events but you know I’ve met 40 million people and my head is full so I’m sorry that I can’t remember you Jim. In this post he criticizes self-publishing as a whole lot of work and suggests that self-published books will be of inferior quality to that of a traditional publisher. But self-publishing might be “rewarding.” I can’t argue with the more work part. But given my experiences with his list of things publishers are supposedly good at I am not, shall we say, wholly convinced.

My Life as a Lulu: Erika Driefus discusses her experiences with lulu.com, a new and increasingly popular web site that does self-publishing print-on-demand, transactions, and fulfillment. She loves it.

Seth Godin’s Advice for Authors: This isn’t about self-publishing, its about publishing in general. I can’t disagree with a single thing here. I particularly like the part about publishing being like venture capital. Like investing, where most of the stuff you invest in goes horribly wrong.

I have no conclusion to this post. Carry on.

I don’t have the energy to do those incredibly long-winded book reviews anymore, and I’m sure you’re all glad of it. Here are some books I read recently:

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynn Truss. Man, is this one terrific book. Let it be noted: I like style guides. I like grammar and punctuation books. Being a writer and, even worse, an ENGLISH MAJOR it kind of comes with the territory. But this book isn’t like those other punctuation books that lists out all the rules for the use of the semicolon. It isn’t even like books like The Well-Tempered Sentence, which uses really funny examples to basically list out all the rules for the use of the semicolon. Nope: this book is a rant. A really great rant, fully of great insults for people (“thickos”) who use grocer’s quotes (“apple’s $1″) and other punctuation abuses. I cackled with glee. It also has a bunch of history stuff that’s actually interesting. There’s a reason this book was a monstrous best-seller. This is a great book for no other reason that it taught me the word “thicko,” which I now feel I must use at least once a day.

Harry Potter and the Half-Dead Prince, by JK Rowling. Er. That’s not quite the title, but close enough. There’ve probably been too many words written on this in the blogworld already, so I’ll just add a two comments: 1. Better than the last book. 2. WAHHHHH.

Jennifer Government, by Max Barry. I had read so much about this satiric novel of capitalism (or “capitalizm” as the book calls it) run amok, and I wanted so much to like it. There are some fun ideas in here — the US owns much of the world (and has recently acquired Australia), people take the names of their companies as surnames, and corporate competition is literally war. But that’s pretty much it for the ideas, the writing is kind of uneven — some scenes are completely terrific, others are hugely boring or eye-rollingly dumb — and I only read the book two weeks ago and I can’t remember much about it at all. There’s one amazingly great scene where the girl hacker character introduces a virus into ExxonMobile’s corporate computer system. That was a great scene. Other than that…eh.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I read this book when it first came out, in 1986, when the notion of a future with a radical far-right theocratic government that enslaves women for breeding purposes didn’t seem all that far-fetched. With Things the way they are, and the path down on which Things seem to be going, it seemed like perhaps it was time to read the book again. This is what-if near-future science fiction that was really defined by its age; in lots of ways it feels kind of dated now. The religious right of this book is the religious right of the Reagan era; the hypocrisy of the evangelist-style leaders in that book reflects the hypocrisy of that time as well. It doesn’t feel as scarily believeable, like a “this could really happen” scenario the way it did the first time I read it; Things may be bad now but they have diverged along a different path of bad. Which is not to say its not a good book; its a very well-written book and the world described in it feels very real and still very frightening. Good book.

Lance Armstrong’s War, by Daniel Coyle. Yeah, I know. I know, I know. Eric bought it and told me it was good, and I was between books, and the Tour was about to start. Actually, this was a good book. It wasn’t the fawning Lance-is-so-terrific-and-did-you-know-he-had-cancer? bio that I expected it to be; Lance wasn’t portrayed all that well, actually. More interesting than the Lance parts, though, were the profiles of the other pro cyclist teammates and competitors that probably make up more than half of the book: Hamilton, Ullrich, Vinokurov, Landis, Ekimov, and so on. There were a lot of stories in here I hadn’t heard before. Interesting stories. It was definitely worth a read if you follow pro cycling, even if you don’t like Lance.

A Place So Foreign and Eight More, by Cory Doctorow. After being dissappointed by Cory’s second novel but since his third wasn’t yet out I read this book instead. Its a collection of his short stories. I think perhaps Cory is best at his short stories. I really loved these, especially “To Market, To Market (the Rebranding of Billy Bailey)” and “Return to Pleasure Island.” Oddly enough although I SHOULD like it given its hacker-l33t-coolness, I’ve never particularly liked “Ownz0red.” It has a good tone and the right language (yup, geeky) but I found the plot, and especially the ending, kind of dissatisfying. Some good quotes, though. I particularly like “A tech writer. Why not just break his goddamned fingers and poke his eyes out?”

The Little Lisper by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. No really. I reread this book every few years for two reasons. The first is that its probably one of the most unique computer books ever, with a funky question-and-answer format that’s kind of like computer-based-training put down on paper. I read it as a writer just to examine the structure. The second reason is that I always forget how the Y-combinator works and this book has one of the more accessible descriptions of it. Not that I’m ever called on to explain the Y-combinator in, say, the checkout line at Whole Foods, or anything. Obviously I’m not doing any Y-combinating much at all if it keeps leaking out of my head and I have to re-learn it every few years. But its one of those things, like rebuilding cabruretors and making creme anglaise, that I feel studly for knowing how to do. BTW the Little Lisper is kind out out of date these days, having been revised and supplanted by the Little Schemer.

Next up: Olympos, the sequel to Ilium. And then I really will get to the big pile of computer books I have to read. Really.

A few years back I went through a phase where I read everything that Amazon told me to. Recommendations, “Customers who bought X also bought Y,” I ate it up. The experiment wasn’t a rousing success; although I was never pointed at anything completely inappropriate, I never found any books or music that really truly stuck with me. OK, there’s one exception: Flogging Molly, a Pogues-like celtic punk band, was an Amazon discovery, and I am nuts for them. I can’t remember why it was Amazon told me to buy them, because its not like celtic punk is high on my must-listen list. I only own one Pogues CD and Amazon doesn’t know about it. Kind of suspicious, actually (nervous look).

Anyhow, It was during this recommendations experiment that Amazon told me to read Bill Fitzhugh. At the time there were only two Bill Fitzhugh novels to read, Pest Control and the Organ Grinders, and I read them both. They were a lot of fun, very silly, very sarcastic, light reading, a good way to pass the time on an airplane, say. Pest Control, about an exterminator mistaken for a hit man, is the funnier and faster-paced of the two. The Organ Grinders is much more dark and satiric, involving an evil biotech company that is genetically altering baboons for the lucrative illegal human transplant industry. It was still a fast-paced read, but a very angry book, and kind of preachy in its anger.

I was reminded about Bill Fitzhugh the other week, and snagged his next book at the library: Cross Dressing. This book is another dark satire, this time about religion and poverty and advertising. It concerns two twin brothers: Dan Steele, an evil corrupt advertising executive, and Michael Steele, a catholic priest just returned from Africa and now working at a halfway house. Dan gets himself in deep financial trouble, and then midway through the book Michael dies. Dan is forced to assume his identity, and chaos and hilarity ensues.

There are two big problems I have with this book: A. Its pretty predictable. Evil Dan assumes the identity of his priestly brother. You will be astonished to find out that Dan has a redemption by the end of the book and turns to the side of good. He also saves the halfway house from being repossessed by the bank (even more evil than advertising) and finds romance with a nun. OK she’s not really a nun, but that’s OK because he’s not really a priest.

B. Its a really dark book. I mean really dark. Its supposed to be dark satire, and there are plenty of parts in this book that are deliciously nasty and funny. But there are a lot of other parts that are just dark and sad and not funny. There’s a difficult balance to strike when you’re trying to engage the sympathy of your readers for as difficult a topic as poverty and sickness and death while still trying to be funny, and I’m afraid Fitzhugh doesn’t have that balance here. He’s very good at being angry about his subject, and describing it in a way that is touching and painful — but it doesn’t feel like it belongs in this book. Its a strange mix and it doesn’t quite work.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. I see from Amazon that there are four more Bill Fitzhugh novels I’ve missed, so obviously the guy’s keeping busy. But I’m not sure I need to keep reading; I like my light reading to actually be light.

So apparently there’s going to be a broadway musical based on Monty Python’s the Holy Grail. No, really. For reasons unknown to me, the musical is called “Spamalot.” OK, so I am really not that much of a Monty Python fan, but even I know that Spam didn’t have anything to do with the Holy Grail. The famous sketch was from the show, not the movie.

But besides that, and the uncomfortable realization that yes, really, they’ve made a broadway musical out of the Holy Grail, there is also a product tie-in: Spam. No, really. Hormel Foods has introduced the Collector’s Edition SPAM(TM) Golden HONEY Grail Now Available in Honor of Monty Python’s SPAMALOT.

And I quote: “SPAM(R) is the holy grail of canned meats,” says Eric Idle. “We’re thrilled to dine on SPAM(TM) golden honey grail at the round table of SPAMALOT.”

(I got it from Worthwhile.)