after the quake Haruki Murakami
I’m in a book group again and this is our first book. Funnily enough when we all brought our picks to the first gathering there were two Murakami suggestions – the other being A Wild Sheep Chase. We chose after the quake as our first book (it was short and a short story collection – a [...]
Blink Malcolm Gladwell
This book is just plain cool and it’s actually hard to say precisely why. Humans think and make decisions very quickly without knowing we do this, or even understanding how we can do it.
There are two immediate rammifications:
If you know a field well, and I mean very well. If you’ve studied it, trained in it, worked and [...]
Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie
Dense, detailed, loud, intense and, in a way, unrelenting. The world is swirling around you and you’ve got no idea where to look but you want to look everywhere right now! I’ve never been there, but this book is what I imagine India is like. I don’t think that’s unreasonable either as Rushdie seems to be wanting [...]
The Mythical Man-Month Fred Brooks
Everyone knows this book; everyone knows the core points and Brooks’ recommendations and laws, even if not everyone has read it. This is one of the few true classics of computing. I’m not going to waste anyone’s time repeating those assertions.
The Mythical Man-Month is now, unfortunately, hilariously anachronistic. And, the anachronisms are starting to damage the [...]
Dreaming in Code
Scott Rosenberg
Rosenberg is one of the co-founders of the online magazine Salon.com, a magazine I’ve been reading on and off since 2000. After having a bad experience with internal software development, he became interested in how, after more than 50 years experience, we still find, in the words of Donald Knuth, that ’software is hard.’
In the interests of [...]
Atonement Ian McEwan
This is simply an excellent book. It doesn’t go in for any special literary tricks, there’s no special effort to make some obvious point: it’s a really good story, told very well. There’s some intimations of other layers, but feel free to ignore those. One thing that this book does pull off is an unsympathetic main character who [...]
The Player of Games
Iain M. Banks
That ‘M’ is important and very distinctive. This is a completely different author to Espedair Street; even though both books list all Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks books. No? Don’t believe me? Well, yeah. His fiction is published as Iain Banks and his sci-fi as Iain M. Banks. Strange, but that’s the way [...]
Orlando Virginia Woolf
Another literary fantasy novel. AFter the disappointments of Jordan, Martin and, most of all, Feist, I’m happy to be looking to Marquez, Updike and now Woolf for my fantasy fix. As I’ve said before, any story is by definition a fantasy, so why restrict your scope to only the events that can take place in this prosaic world we [...]
Espedair Street Iain Banks
A very good writer, his sci-fi (under the name Iain M. Banks) is consistently original, but his non-genre fiction is also very good. Dead Air is worth reading for the head-butting alone and The Wasp Factory is bizarre, unexpected and simply amazing.
The strength in his fiction is the characterisation. Danny Weir, in Espedair Street, is a great [...]
The Timeless Way of Building Christopher Alexander
For the past year or so, this was my bus book. That’s a surprisingly long time, and it probably shouldn’t have taken me that long to read. Late last year, about 50 pages from the end, I paused in my reading; and then took several months to pick it up again. This seems unfair [...]
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