Posted at 15:01 +1000 (edited 1 Jun 2007, 23:06)
A couple of months ago, I mentioned the Hugo award nominees. A post over at John Scalzi's blog reminded me that I'd been intending to write up something about each of the books nominated in the novel category. So here goes (everything here should be free from meaningful spoilers, I hope)...
Topics: books/reviews
Posted at 15:41 +1000 (edited 16:44)
Random follow-up to a random post: Justine Larbalesteire's Magic Or Madness book (the first one in the trilogy I reviewed) won the Andre Norton Award last night for best Young Adult Science Fiction/Fantasy Novel in 2006. That's part the YA version of the Nebula Awards (details here), so kind of a big deal.
See? Other people thought it was good too.
Topics: books
Posted at 15:35 +1000
Go and read this post over at author Maureen Johnson's blog. Ignore the fact that the blog is very pink and the post titles are in all-capitals and the pictures of headless women in the left column. Read the content. Now pick your jaw up off the floor.
I am astounded that the type of logic that led to the banning of one of Maureen's (or anybody's) books is considered acceptable anywhere. Okay, we're only hearing one side of the issue, but the other side would have to be pretty overwhelming to outweigh the side we read about there.
It's not unexpected that some adults hold extremely conservative views about what is appropriate for their child. Or that they think these values should be projected onto everybody else. Or even that they think kissing between two girls risks pregnancy (although one wonder how they became parents in the first place if this is their understanding of the mechanics). What boggles the mind is that a "committee" of reasonable high school teachers and librarians couldn't or wouldn't see through the obvious problems in the argument.
Topics: books
Posted at 00:02 +1000
Why I'm reading a young adult series has a bit of a back story, explained below. Why I'm reviewing it is just because I haven't seen a lot of reviews of this series around and it deserves some wider coverage, at least in Google searches.
Why?!
Amongst the numerous blogs I read regularly are half a dozen or so by professional authors. Some of these are people whose books I read and enjoy — I've mentioned John Scalzi here before, for example. Others are people I've come across in one way or another, usually via an author's site I'm already reading. These blogs add a nice extra layer to books, because you can see them being developed, watch the author's excitement as they are released and read the readers' comment. Over the past couple of years, I've probably bought maybe a dozen books based on recommendations or curiosity from these writers.
For various reasons (mostly because they're interesting), some of the author sites I'm reading are"young adult" authors. Now, I'm not particularly young any longer (mid-30's-ish these days) and I'm not even particularly adult. However, having read along as Justine Larbalestier finished the third book of her trilogy and seen the eager comments from her young (I assume) fans, I thought I'd find out what goes into a good young adult novel these days. It was more of an curiosity satisfier than looking for a good book.
The Australian release date for Magic's Child came and went without it appearing in my local Border's — they still haven't got it on the shelves when I checked today — so I did what every decent person with a credit card would do: ordered the series of three books from Amazon.
The Books
I figured you can't just dive in and read the third book of a trilogy, so I read all three, Magic or Madness, Magic Lessons and Magic's Child. They were great fun.
Short version: 8 or 9 out of 10 from somebody way outside the target demographic.
I read fairly fast and at 270-odd pages each, the books felt very short, but I guess this isn't atypical for the genre (based on a rough sampling of books in the teenage section of the local bookshops). Since the timeline of the entire trilogy is only one and a half weeks (with the exception of a jump right at the end of book three), reading one book a night didn't feel like I was rushing the story at all.
Very hard to give much of a synopsis of the storyline, since so much is revealed in a way that is contrary to where you think it is going as you read along. However, generally, the books follow the adventures of three teenagers who have magical powers, but in a universe where magic is not a wonderous gift, but more of a curse — both using it and not using it have grave consequences. There seems to be not a lot of upside to having magical powers in this particular world, beyond short-term gratification, so the concept gives support to a great story about the three protagonsists learning about the wider implication of their "gift" and each dealing with it in their own way. The trade-off between short-term pleasure and long-term responsibility is at the front of the decisions throughout and I think Larbalestier has done a great job of capturing how people of that age might try to deal with the problems. They want to be grown up, but sometimes they just want to be kids, too.
The three main characters were just annoying enough that I figured they had to be well written. Likeable in most places, but you want to throttle them every couple of dozen pages or so. Pretty much normal teenagers, from my experience.
The books are set jointly in New York, USA and Sydney, Australia. Larbalestier is an Australian, married to a Texan (Scott Westerfeld), who lives in both cities. I usually cringe a bit when I'm reading Australian writers writing about Australia for overseas readers (or worse, movies that try to do the same — some of them are just plain awful). However, in this case, I think she's captured the differences between the countries without making either culture seem freaky. There's even some quite realistic-sounding scenes about life in Aboriginal camps and outback townships. The protagonsists tease each other about their different ways of speaking, but it highlights the differences without making them seem wrong. I am (clearly) not a writer, so it's hard to capture quite why this works in this case, for me, and not always in other books.
Since I travel a bit between Australia and the US for work and I love New York (and live in the northern suburbs of Sydney), the descriptions about the differences between Manhattan and Sydney really resonated. It's a lovely city, but it's so different in many ways. Their (the United States peoples') love of all-day breakfasts and serving sizes that could feed a small family of four alone, is something that I have pegged as iconically dentifying about that country and it's one of the many small differences brought out as the characters move between the two countries.
I've been struggling for a few days to put my finger on exactly why I like these books. The storyline isn't particularly complicated. I think it's the characters. Setting aside the slightly flukey setup that all three of them met up in the same ten day period that they had to make life-and-death decisions, which I found a little contrived at first, they are basically very human people. They have real and different interests: The boy, Tom, has an interest in fashion and creating clothes, which is unusual but doesn't feel out of place. One of the girls, Reason, keeps order in her thinking through mathematics and problem solving, so the Fibonacci sequence and perfect numbers put in a regular appearance (making this another entry on my list of books with cool female lead characters who are mathematicians in some sense). The other girl, Jay-Tee is the American and more of a nightlife and party girl. Each characters interests and thinking was consistent and fit in with their behaviour throughout. I like characters with a some depth, but I hate it when they seem to have been brought up with ridiculously improbable and fortuitious things happening in their childhood or present. Okay, in this case, some of the characters have magical powers and that's bordering on the improbable. But the rest of their experiences weren't completely far-fetched. The short verison is that I prefer intelligent, ordinary background characters to Ritchie Rich-style protagonists.
I also really enjoyed the frequency with which I would just start to draw conclusions about one of the characters and my assumption would be challenged (and turn out to be wrong). The timing here was uncanny — I think Larbalestier has a good intuitive sense of how fast the reader is going to form an impression, let's it just start to take root and then has a good laugh to herself as she removes the chair you're sitting on. Either that or she needs to get out of my head, because it was uncanny. This wasn't so apparent in book three as in the earlier books, though, so either I was becoming more wary, or by the time the third book was written, we already knew too much about the characters for much to be surprising. Still, there were a few nice moments of timing even in the third book and it's a writing style I'm going to want to think about a bit more: how does it work so effectively here?
Recommendation
Would I recommend reading this series? Absolutely. I really enjoyed them a lot more than I expected to.
Would I recommend buying them? Harder to say. If you're me, maybe not worth it. Books are not cheap these days and these three were a bit short for three volumes. On the other hand, if I was a teenage me, I would beg somebody to buy them for me or save up my money and go for it (of course, how would I know I liked them so much in that case? And wouldn't Justine Larbalestier be too young to be a published author back then... hmmm). If I was a parent looking for a present for my well-behaved, all her homework done on time, child: definitely.
Topics: books/reviews
Posted at 22:55 +1000
The Hugo award nominees for 2007 were published yesterday-ish. I was looking through the list of novels and realised I had only read one of them and had only peripherally heard of two of the other authors. Normally I have a slightly better batting average than that. Must have been a bad year. More likely, I'm getting old and unadventurous in my reading choices — I have noticed I've bought a lot less science fiction this past year.
This called for a spontaneous visit to the local bookshop so that I can mix with the cool people at cocktail parties and talk about the plot twists of each novel. For future reference, if you're going to go to a bookshop to buy the various nominated books, it's a good idea to know what they are! This may sound obvious, in hindsight, but it was an important first step that I did not make. So I'll be going back tomorrow.
For future reference, too, Naomi Novik's book is published in Australia under the UK title of Temeraire , not the way cooler Her Majesty's Dragon title. I'd actually only heard of this book a few days ago because of some randomness on Justine Larbelestier's blog. So Novik was one of the two author's I'd heard of but not read. The other is Charlie Stross, which is an oversight on my part, because I keep hearing good things about his books.
Topics: books
Posted at 21:29 +1000
A couple of weeks ago, Bill de hÓra published his updated list of ten books for the working programmer. There are other such lists around, of course. Bill's list was the one that most recently crossed my eyesight and reminded me I've been meaning to publish my own list.
It's not completely clear what the rules of this game are, so I had to invent my own a little bit. I've stuck to Bill's choice to be language and platform neutral, as much as possible. Rather than try to pick ten books I think everybody should read, I wrote a list of books I currently use regularly and find useful in my day-to-day work. I've added a few near-finalists and some other interesting books at the end, too.
Any list like this is going to be swayed by the experiences and interests of the author. I realised my list is a bit more skewed towards process than practice than it might have been five years ago. This is partially a reflection of the fact that I've done a lot more project and team management in the last few years than at any previous point. All the books on this list are ones I either consult regularly as a reference, or try to re-read every now and again to keep the thoughts moving around in my head.
In no particular order:
First obvious difference with other "top 10" lists: mine only has eight items. Life's like that sometimes.
I'm surprised that Introduction to Algorithms doesn't get more words written about it. Sure, it's a pretty fundamental book. However, it includes a lot of the basic thoeretical underpinnings about the algorithms and implementation differences for algorithms that just isn't written down in other places. I don't use this book every day, but when I need the details of many algorithms, it's the first book I'll reach for. Still, this really is a fundamentals book, whilst the Algorithm Design Manual is more educational and thought provoking for real world, large information set problems.
I often work around problems that require security of various levels. Practical Cryptography is a bit like Introduction to Algorithms, albeit at a slightly more mathematical level, in that it gives a very solid theoretical grounding in the fundamentals of hashing and encrypting. It is futile to enter a discussion about the security of one approach over the other if you don't know this information and can't back it up with a reference to a book like this. Cryptography being a fast moving area of reasearch, a four year old book is going to show some dating by now, but it's still something I use regularly to back up my hunches or as a citation source.
Most of the others should be self-explanatory if you've read them. There appears to be some genuine controversy about whether Scott Berkun's book on project management is great or gross (see the comments on Bill's post, for example). I was surprised to see that my take was almost identical the thoughts Bill expressed in a comment — the Berkun book is very practical.
I'll just mention, too, that most lists like this include Steve McConnell's Code Complete (usually meaning the 2nd edition). I'm not a great fan of that book. It's a nice read and I have no argument with the content or approach. It's just not a book that I've found helped me a great deal. The McConnell book in my list above, Rapid Development is one I get more use out of as a way of translating between my brain and a more professional, standard way of presenting ideas. Using McConnell's approach and terminology eases the presentation to more formal project managers and decision makers.
There are some near misses. Mostly books that I have gotten a lot of education from, but no longer use on a regular basis because I feel I have absorbed their lessons. All of these books still sit on my shelves, though, and I would give them to versions of myself that were five or ten or 15 years less experienced (not all at once, some require more experience than others to be useful):
The Friedl book on regular expressions makes a lot of peoples' lists, but I've never really struggled with regular expressions, so once I'd absorbed the lessons on optimisation and testing in different engine types, I found I wasn't going back to it too often. I recently re-read the latest edition and didn't feel I'd forgotten much. I may be weird in this way, though — I enjoy regular expression munging and use it a fair bit, so it stays fresh in my brain.
The other two books are of a much more practical, professional nature. As I worked in different organisations (or even the same organisation with revolving reporting charts), I needed to work a lot more on my pragmatism. I didn't (still don't to some extent) handle bad working conditions well when I'm trying to produce technical product, or manage other people to do the same. So this was an area I needed to put a lot of learning into over the past five years. These books would have been useless to a ten-year-younger version of me, but came along at the right time when I needed them.
Finally, some books that, whilst not indespensible, have been a great inspiration for learning more and thinking in different ways about my areas of expertise:
De Marco's book is a great presentation — via fiction — about why project management is hard in the real world. Knuth's book on writing is special because it covers specifically technical writing about theoretical, logical work and focuses on presentation and differing approaches. Although about mathematics (obviously), which was how I first discovered it, a lot of the lessons transfer well to theoretical computer science presentations as well. Maybe not useful to the intensely practical programmer, but more than once I've had to prove that a program or approach worked and document that. The ... Programming Gems books are just a good source of short algorithm fragments and can make learning fun. If you can't have fun in this industry, you're just not reading the right books.
Posted at 16:48 +1100
The UPS delivery man brought me my copy of Introducing Character Animation With Blender this morning. I've been hanging out for this book for months — ever since Tony Mullen started dropping hints (and then a clear announcement) on the blenderartists form that he was writing it.
Having taken an early lunch today — and spent a couple of hours this afternoon — to flick through the book and read a large portion of it, I think Tony has written a very nice piece of work. I obviously haven't worked through all the examples and tutorials yet, but the order in which he presents the information and his selection of material looks great.
Topics: software/graphics, books/reviews
Posted at 17:30 +1100
Working from home for myself has advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that if you are having a package delivered, you are a hostage of the delivery company, required to stay at home for half a day or more until they show up and deliver (or not). I have no receptionist (that I'm aware of) to accept packages on my behalf.
Until recently, every time I had a package delivered from Amazon — and I tend to buy multiple books at once, so using priority delivery to Australia doesn't add that much to the total and it's often still cheaper on average than purchasing in Australia — they would use UPS. The UPS website was usually very up to date about the package status, so I knew what day it would be delivered; the delivery man usually arrived about the same time each day, he waited a couple of minutes if I didn't answer immediately, etc. All in all, a tolerable experience.
Recently, though, Amazon seem to be favouring DHL a bit more for their deliveries to me. Sadly, DHL's service is not really up to the UPS level, in my experience. Their online tracking is often a bit behind the times, so it might look like my package is stil in LA or in the air between LA to Sydney, when it has, in reality, landed, cleared customs and been sent out for delivery — only to have me out of the house when it arrives. Or, as in today's case (and sadly this is not an isolated incident), I have not left the house except for a quick five minute trip to the local coffee shop at 09:30 this morning. According to DHL, they gave the package to the delivery man at 1:30 this afternoon. At 4:40, he recorded it as "delivery attempt; nobody at home." I call BS! I have not left the apartment. My intercom/video phone to let people into the building is not broken. I have not suddenly lost my hearing. And, amazingly, he didn't even leave a card to say he attempted delivery (which they're required to do). The delivery man is confused about which apartment he rang or mistaken about what "attempt delivery" means. And this is not the first time this has happened. A recent phone call to DHL on this issue received the response that "we're sorry sir, but that problem does not happen. The delivery agent will have only left when you did not answer." So I guess that settles it — I am confused about reality.
I wish Amazon had a way to let me choose the courier company. It would almost be worth paying a slight premium. Until then, I can only record my tail of woe and look forward to being trapped inside for another four or eight hours tomorrow waiting for this package to arrive.
Posted at 18:12 +1100
I had not heard about this idea before: a few libraries in Europe are lending out people for a 45 minute conversation, rather than just books. It's the Living Library project. What a great to learn about something and get to fill in the details you might be interested in!
There was an interview with the organiser of one version in Malmo, Sweden on Enough Rope (which I've talked about before) last night. The transcript and audio are worth a few minutes.
Posted at 23:33 +1000
Whilst looking for something in the Blender forums tonight, I stumbled upon a reference to the latest CGChallenge competition. Creating artwork around Greg Bear's novel Eon. Cool!
I've mentioned previously that Eon is one of Bear's books that I like a lot. In fact, it is probably my favourite Science Fiction book. I clearly remember first reading it during mid-year vacation during year 12 at high school (so mid-1988) and I've read it countless times since then and still enjoy it. So this competition, particularly the competition to create a movie trailer for a hypothetical Eon movie, will be fun to watch. There's no way I will have time to compete, but hopefully some people who have read the book and truly enjoy it will be able to show off their skills (a lot of the forum chatter over there so far is from people who haven't read the book, which is a hole in their education to date as far as I'm concerned).
They've even asked Greg Bear to help judge the competition and he's agreed (along with David Brin). So the judges will have taste, too.
Topics: books, software/graphics