Categories
Books Life

Semester’s on…

All my projects are behind schedule. The semester started too early! Of course I have not improved my book-reading habits, so now I have more books I’ve started to add to that long list: My Name Is Red, by Turkish Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, by Tony Judt. I will be sure to report here when I finish a book (I hope it won’t take months and months…)

On the positive side, I am enjoying making all new lecture notes for my undergraduate mathematical economics class, as it has been several years since the last time I developed my teaching materials for that. There are now many more cheap and very capable software applications for making useful graphs, for instance. Of course math and math econ don’t change all that much from year to year, but the ability to illustrate the topic better is now very tempting and, really, needs to be put to good use.

Categories
Books

Book read: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

On the trip to Florida, I read one book from cover to cover. It helped that the weather was so-so at the beginning and that the book is quite the page-turner. The author, Stieg Larsson, is no longer with us, having died in 2004 shortly after delivering The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and two more books to his publisher. This is just too sad; his approach to a murder mystery thriller is original and irresistible.

I was drawn to Larsson by a review in the Economist, as I wrote in a previous post. Now I intend to restart this again, as many details make much better sense after reading the Tattoo book. I suspect that the revelation about the meaning of “when all the evil happened” will come in the third book, which is not even published yet in English, as far as I know—OK, Amazon says it’s called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and is expected to be published in May.

I recommend Larsson’s books highly, but be sure that you have the necessary block of time to read each one right through, as you will probably be compelled to do. Lisbeth Salander, the Girl of all three titles, is truly sui generis, a terrific invention, and you can’t help but root for her to succeed (which you suspect will happen, as in all such books) and find personal fulfilment (the odds for this are even or worse).

Categories
Books Computer stuff Fun

Today’s reading

Non-work reading, that is.

  • Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, second edition, 2006. This is a very enjoyable book on how to design easy-to-use web sites. Got it as an e-book, and the clunky process of downloading Adob’e e-book reading software before I could download the book was ironically exactly contrary to the main message of the book.
  • WordPress 2.8 Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver, 2009. This version of a book I already have in hard copy covers a more recent WordPress release than the one my hard copy book covers. Pleasingly, the publishers, Packt publishing, allow you to download an unrestricted PDF, as opposed to the publishers of Krug book, who does not deserve a link here. It’s OK, book publishers, like iTunes has shown (after too long a time), there is no reason to panic and only release DRMed digital copies. Most of your buyers are law-abiding. Seriously.

You only get one guess at what my main activity revolved around for the better part of today.

Categories
Books Computer stuff

Two tricks for better reading online

I recently started using Readability (a Firefox extension) to read certain web pages. It does an excellent job in capturing the main text area on many a page (but it does not work on many, such as Friendfeed.com, which auto-update constantly). You can format the text in various ways for easy readability (apt name) and once you discover you want to keep it for future reference you can put it in Evernote by the Firefox bookmarklet.

Today I started using yet another such tool I was reading about in Lifehacker: Instapaper. For some reason I had checked it out in the summer and forgot all about it. I suspect it was because I wanted Evernote to be the default place for all my notes. But today I am seeing that instapaper can be a first-pass place for interesting sites, and items I read there are archived online automatically for me or I can grab them and stick them into Evernote in the same way as with Readability. But Instapaper has a big advantage over Readability for browsers (like Chrome) that have (on the Mac, for now) no extension capability: it is a bookmarklet and a site and it can be accessed, therefore, with any browser.So on we go: better tools, more reading online. Now to moderate that and find only the good things to read!

Categories
Books Fun

On “Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era” from McSweeney’s

This item from Robert Lanham in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency is a hilarious parody of college syllabi except when it hits close to the bone and starts hurting, which it does right now, as I just finished today a totally revamped syllabus for my undergraduate mathematical economics course for the coming semester. Writing for Nonreaders. Really. Here is a quote from the “course description” to induce you to read the whole thing, which I enjoyed (humor and hurt together) immensely:

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.

Categories
Books

Latest book arrival

Way late in the day, UPS delivered Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed. A steal at less than $11 on Amazon and, judging from the first two pages, yet another page turner, but this one about the financial crisis of the 1930s. Oh why do they keep publishing so many interesting books… Yes, they. It’s always their fault.

Categories
Books Computer stuff

Study: Rumors of Written-Word Death Greatly Exaggerated | Epicenter | Wired.com

Study: Rumors of Written-Word Death Greatly Exaggerated | Epicenter | Wired.com. An interesting look at how much more we are reading now that the (on-screen) printed word is so easily available.

Categories
Books Life

Today’s reading – Dimitrios

I have not read anything for fun yet today-:(. Of course, there is always bedtime, and Good Omens is waiting for my patiently by my bedside.

I am reading a very interesting book on networks, a forthcoming textbook on the intersection of network theory, economics, and sociology. The authors have made it available online for comments, and I have downloaded and am reading it in tandem with a colleague as a winter break project. But it’s too early to comment on the book, apart from saying that it is very good, so far, and I am definitely looking forward to the time that I can buy it as a nice hardback.

No matter how convenient the downloading of PDFs is, nothing beats a properly printed volume in one’s hands. I challenge Apple to come up with an iTablet or whatever they will call it (the rumors about it have been coming fast and furious lately) to make me change my mind!

Categories
Books Fun Life

Current reading – Dimitrios

I have tried goodreads.com and shelfari.com for tracking the books I read and would like to read, but I simply don’t visit these sites often enough and the sheer number of books I am currently (pretending to be? trying to be? hoping to be?) reading boggles my mind when I look at even the partial list I have on goodreads.com. From now on, I will try posting short snippets about my reading here and I will try to make these updates regular.

The book I am reading these days at bedtime is a paperback M got me for Christmas this year, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990, reading the Harper 2007 paperback edition). It’s quite unusual to find a book written jointly by two successful writers, let alone as inventive and funny writers as these two are! I am currently on page 68 and I have found that every night it beats the alternatives (and they are legion, just counting the two tall piles next to my side of the bed).

Some of these books in the legion, likely to be finished (but we’ll see… as always with me, no bets are safe on finishing books) are:

  • The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin, Tor Books 2009. Science fiction about a future with fantastic nanotechnology that revives the dead but also an economic arrangement that has people as corporations with the majority of any given young person owned by the state and various corporations that financed the person’s schooling. Currently on page 74. The writing is pedestrian but the idea of incorporated individuals is intriguing. I am not holding my breath about the romance between the 20th entury tycoon who is revived 300 years later after being frozen to avoid death by lymphoma and the young woman who handles his rehabilitation. Of course the romance will have a good end. However, predicting the outcome to this society of the entrance of this pre-incorporation man, who has no intention of playing by the society’s incorporation rules, is harder, so I will keep reading.
  • The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, 2008 (reading the US Pantheon hardback edition). The Romantics discover science. Joseph Banks lands in Tahiti and writes in his diary what might be the first anthropological study. Humphry Davy does chemistry. Astronomical discoveries abound. This is a wonderful book, mellifluous and fascinating in its topic. I am savoring it, which is why I am only on page 12.
  • The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson, Knopf 2009, translated from the Swedish by reg Keeland (original published in Sweden in 2006). The author was a journalist who worked too hard. He burned the candle from both ends so fast that he died at age 50 in 2004 shortly after giving the manuscript of this book and two others (it’s part of a trilogy). It’s too bad, and not only because it’s sad for anyone to die so young. The book is a fast-paced inventive thriller with a most unusual female hero. I was alerted to it by the Economist magazine, of all sources. Currently I am ready to start a new section on page 161, and waiting for a good chunk of time (waiting since the day after Thanksgiving, sadly) because once I start reading it goes really fast and demands my attention completely. Not great literature, I have to say, but a real page-turner.
  • Family Album by Penelope Lively, Viking 2009. An understated English novel with deep emotional undertones. It recounts a family gathering that shows every sign of becoming tumultuous. I have only read a few pages and will likely restart, but the book shows promise and will probably merit the very good words I read about it in the Economist when I am done with it.
  • The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 by Chris Wickham, Viking 2009. I got this in the summer on the recommendation of Tyler Cowen in marginalrevolution.com. I cannot hope to match Cowen’s super-fast reading, but I can still benefit from his recommendations. I have managed to reach page 176 on two trips and I should manage to finish this book (and maybe one or two from the preceding ones) on our forthcoming quick trip to warmer climes in January, shortly before the semester starts. Wickham gives a perspective on the decline of the Roman empire and how what the Romans had established pervaded the succeeding societal structures that I had not encountered before. Just reading a few pages makes me feel I understand the development of what we now know as Europe much better than I did before.

I’d better end here. I could go on and on, and this long list of unfinished books is embarrassing enough as it is. My promise is to post here daily about my recreational reading. It’s this, or being so swamped with all the work and web-design projects I have scheduled for myself that I will not be able to read for fun and general illumination at all. So I promise: more on my non-work reading tomorrow. An the day after. And so on for the whole new year.