Since I read this two book series back-to-back (in about a week and a half — have been home sick), I figure it’s okay to post about both of them together. I first read about Daemon on Joi’s blog, and it sounded interesting enough to give a try.  

[Semi-spoilers below. If you like cyberspace thrillers, you probably want to read these -- and could probably go without the following paragraphs.]

Anyway, I liked them both a lot — probably Daemon a little more than Freedom (TM). They’re sort of a mix between Fight Club and World of Warcraft, with maybe some Blade Runner thrown in — lots of great ideas, lots of real implications of the technologies we all use constantly.

I will say that Daemon is the first novel I’ve ever read that included the syntax for a SQL injection attack on a web site — but maybe that’s just me.

There’s a lot of technical jargon for fiction, and lots of solid ideas about how technology works and what the future could hold — and clearly researched extremely well.

Anyway, they’re a fun couple of books — if you’re wondering what World of Warcraft grafted onto our own everyday world might look like, these are a great place to start. (That particular part gets a lot more pronounced in the second book.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately — obviously because of the developments of eBooks, but also because I’ve been home sick the past few days, reading as I get better, and just generally around all my books more of the time.

I happened to walk by a shelf in our living room filled with books from our family — mostly older books, and mostly from my dad’s mother (she was always “Grandmother” to me). When she died, I inherited a number of her Latin books, since I really loved learning Latin, and it was something that was important to her, too. For whatever reason, I picked one up off the shelf today — Cooper’s Virgil — an annotated collection of the writing of Virgil (who wrote The Aeneid, among other things).

Just picking it up, a million different things came up in my mind. Some reverence for how old it is. Fondness for the Latin work and friends I had in high school. Memories of Grandmother, always teaching, and pretty often whipping me in double solitaire, which I’m starting to teach SPL now.

Here’s the back cover page (you can click through to see it bigger):

Now the first thing you’ll notice is that the book is old. It looks like Gussie Raysor acquired it (or just signed it) on May 26, 1895, just about 115 years ago now.

Think of that. 1895 was when the first movie projector was patented. Queen Victoria was still alive, and Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t yet President of the United States. The Ford Motor Company wouldn’t be founded for another 8 years.

The next thing that I noticed was the name at the top — Laura Lilly — who is definitely not my grandmother, but instead was her sister-in-law — my grandfather’s sister. So that’s a little bit of humor there. I guess my grandfather stole the book from his sister (although I have to say that I can’t really imagine him giving much of a damn about Latin — unless it was some sort of prank, which I can imagine him caring about), and then the book got absorbed into Grandmother’s collection (given her love of language and learning and books, not too surprising). Gussie Raysor was my grandfather’s mother.

And so through this artifact that I’ve moved around several times over the past couple of decades, and that surely frustrated any number of Lillys as they tried to learn their declensions and conjugations and gerunds — through this simple artifact, a connection across the years was made. And with real impact and emotion in the present day.

That is a hell of a thing. It’s just really astonishing in simplicity and power.

Now, I’m not very nostalgic about books, I have to say. I thought I would be — I thought I’d miss their paper & binding shape with the advent of eBooks. But I really don’t — not at all, honestly. I prefer, in most cases, to read books on my Kindle now — which tells me, as I’ve written elsewhere, that what I really love is reading, not the physical forms themselves.

Still:

There’s something about physical artifacts that reaches across the ages. As I look around my own house and think about what objects with meaning will persist and SPL’s grandchildren will look at a hundred years from now, I’m not sure there are very many at all. There are lots of electronic artifacts, like this blog, even, if we can manage to keep them alive and safe from inevitable(?) bit-rot. But precious few things that will make it through the childhoods and moves and marriages and storms and whatever else that the next 100 years will bring.

So I’m glad to have these books of my grandmother’s with me. They mean something and they change who I am and how I experience the world because they’re here with me. And it’s probably time to think a little bit not in the backwards direction, but in the forwards direction, about what we want people to reflect over a hundred years hence.

I think it’s a little too early to really understand the history, and certainly the implications, of the financial crisis that we’ve all been going through over the past 2 years. But I’m quite interested in the actual people who were (and are) involved, and understanding the decisions they made, and as much as I can about how those decisions felt to them.

Sorkin’s book is very useful in that regard — he clearly had outstanding access to most of the important players, and a good sense of the relationships between them. The book is a little bit too long, I think, and reads a little like a breathy soap opera in places, but seems to me that it will be the definitive contemporary accounting of the events of 2007 and 2008, if not the definitive history.

If you’re interested in this subject at all, I’d highly recommend the book — it caused me to have a number of “a ha!” moments and helped my understanding of the system. It’s also created a bit of contempt in me for the bankers and policy makers who were involved — but it’s only one accounting, so I’m inclined to learn a lot more.

Douglas Coupland is one of my most enduring favorite authors, along with Jonathan Lethem and Haruki Murakami and Kurt Vonnegut. I’ve found him to be the voice of my generation many times — even including when he popularized the term “Generation X” for my generation — in the title of his 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

Looking back now, from 2010, it’s clear that while we felt like life was accelerated in 1991, we had no idea how much faster culture and life would get — that we’d see the fundamental innovation of the web start to take hold just a few years later, and the rate of change would just get faster and faster and faster.

Coupland’s themes have always really spoken to me — he writes about the struggles we all go through to make meaning of our lives — in his book Life After God, he explores the idea that in the past, in America, that religion and the church was the main organizing principle — the connective tissue between events & moments that ultimately shapes all of it into something coherent. But that religion, for many Gen Xers, has lost that narrative power — and so we’re all searching around for something else to take its place.

The answer, naturally, has to be that nothing can take it’s place, and finding meaning in your life was never really connected purely to religion anyway — but the structure of activity and thought that religion brought made it a little easier. Finding meaning — rather, making meaning — is more intrinsic than that; it has to come from within yourself.

But I’ve been having a hard time with Coupland’s last few books — they’ve been harder for me to believe & internalize — they’re just a little more random and less accessible than I found his writing before. Or it may be that as he — and I, and all of Generation X — gets older that the ideas of alienation and narrative and meaning are getting harder to think about, harder to see — so you have to just tell stories to try to get a glimpse at their truths.

I liked this book; it’s a little quirkier than I was hoping for, and I can’t tell yet what meaning to make from it — but think I may come back to it in a year or two to consider it again. (And it’s already caused me to pick up Life After God again.)

I’ve got a huge interest in the history of Ancient Rome, and Everitt has written 2 of my favorite books on the subject: biographies of Cicero and Augustus. Now he adds this one about the emperor Hadrian, who ruled about a century after Augustus established the empire (which was about 50 years after Cicero was at the height of his oratorical powers).

While I liked his earlier 2 books better, I really enjoyed this one, too, and it was made more real because I took my first trip to Rome in November, while I was in the middle of reading it. Hadrian was directly responsible for the rebuilding of the Pantheon, the most incredible building that I saw on our trip — and he came at a time just after the Flavians (Vespasian, Titus, Domitian), who reformed the city by building the Colosseum and much on the Palatine (not to mention, you know, the whole destruction of Jerusalem in there by Titus), and Trajan, who was as expansionist as any Roman emperor.

The time that Everitt chronicles in these 3 books is really an amazing time in Roman (and world) history — Rome was at the height of its power and influence — after Hadrian, things were mostly in decline.

Anyway, a must-read for anyone interested in Roman history (and if you are, let me know, because I’ve got a few others).

Fantastic book; loved all of it. It’s a history about the early 1500s, when Charles V and Clement VII and Henry VIII and Francis I dominated the European landscape, and Suleyman the Magnificent ruled in the East. Reston’s done a fantastic job weaving together geographically dispersed but thematically very related activities, and I found it riveting.

And, actually, the best of the 5 books he considers a cycle looking at the conflict between Christianity and Islam (and eventually between Christianity and science). It started with The Last Apocalypse, about the time period around 1000 AD, then the 3rd Crusade (Warriors of God), continued by looking at the Christian conquest of Spain (Dogs of War), through Defenders of the Faith, and concluding with Galileo: A Life.

At least Reston includes Galileo in his conception of the cycle — I found it quite different in character than the other 4.

But all 5 books are highly recommended — among my favorite histories.

A fun, quick read — sort of science fiction but could be present day — an alternate reality where we’re all super-associated with where we work (taking as last names the name of the company), everything is super-privatized and corporate.

I really love reading Klosterman’s essays, and this is a great collection, as always. Includes essays on:

• the similarities between David Koresh & Kurt Cobain
• the impossibility (and merits) of time travel — only real reason to do it is if you want to have dinosaur for dinner)
• the way the public reacts to high profile failures like Ralph Samson
• a polemic against laugh tracks
• and then lots of stuff about Abba, as per normal for Klosterman

Great, fun, smart book, and insightful about our modern media culture.

The story of this trilogy is a peculiar one — Larsson meant for the series to be longer — something like 10 books — but he died of a heart attack in 2004, after completing only the first 3 and parts of the 4th (in Swedish). He was quite an activist in Sweden, and there are personal influences pretty clearly in his characters.

I liked the first book a lot — it was really a locked room mystery — very fun. The second book centered more on a type of espionage. The third book, which isn’t yet published in the US (but is in the UK, which is where my edition came from), wraps up a lot of loose ends, but I found it a little bit boring. Lots of basic police work, lots of courtroom dialog. Satisfying as a way to wrap things up, but not as intense as the first book or as wide open as the second.

Hornby’s writing is incredibly charming, as always, and that helped the book move along, but I never felt very much affinity for the characters, so the book fell a little flat for me.

I’ve tried reading Chabon’s novels, but never been able to get past the first 100 pages or so — hopefully next time. But he’s a great writer, in any event; he’s got a great deftness with words. So I was happy when Mom sent me this collection of his essays. They’re not uniformly great, but some of them are awesome, capturing a lot about what it’s like to grow up, to raise a family, to live a life.

I’d quote some of the more interesting essays, but don’t have the book to hand (shocking! an actual paper book). But fun to read, especially if you like Chabon or are a parent.

I’ve been extremely influenced by Larry’s thinking and work and writing over the last several years, and have been hugely encouraged by the adoption of Creative Commons, which he founded many years ago. I like reading his work because it covers a number of topics that I have a deep interest in, and covers them generally from a point of view that’s original and different in background from my own. Plus, he’s an extremely articulate guy, always.

I think this is his most mainstream work to date — it’s an exploration of what’s happening in our culture today — which I’ve used the word “synthetic” for, but he calls the “remix culture.” Just the idea that modern media is all about blurring the lines between consumption and creation, and that mixing things together creates new things in the process. He articulates, quite clearly, that unless we change the way we think about creators & consumers, and adjust our social norms and laws, we risk splitting our society between young & old (at best) or criminalizing the acts of an entire generation (at worst).

There were several parts of this book that have prodded new thinking for me — one that I’ve been thinking about is related to long form reading — what we’ve always called, you know, “books.” Larry talks about how a thousand years ago (give or take), Latin was the language of the elite & educated class — but the people who spoke & valued Latin sort of missed the revolution of the masses — the rise of the “vulgar” languages like Italian & Spanish & French. Similarly, the language of today is moving from the vocabulary of words to the vocabulary of sounds and images. That seems spot on to me.

Anyway, a great book that captures a lot of the dynamic in media today — recommended for sure.

I enjoyed this story about Joseph Priestly — scientist & minister & close friend of Franklin and Jefferson — well enough, but I think I wasn’t really in the right mood for a history of science book, so it took me quite a while to get through, even though it’s very short at about 200 pages.

It’s an extremely well-written and well-research book — Priestly was very involved in the discovery of oxygen, the founding of the Unitarian Church, the conversation between Jefferson and Adams, and the start of ecosystem science — the guy did a lot of important stuff and was involved in a lot of important conversations.

So if history of science crossed with the American Revolution is your cup of tea, this is a must read. For myself, it was good but not great.

It took me a few times to get into this book, but I’m really glad that I stuck with it — very rewarding. It’s basically the story of Islam from Muhammed through Ali & Hussein, and goes into good detail on the events that led to the Sunni/Shia split.

I don’t think I have a really great understanding of things after reading the book, but at least I’m more familiar than I’ve been with the basic concepts & points of view. I hadn’t ever seen a ~200 page account of that time period, and think it’s a really great length for getting a better-than-surface-level understanding, at least as a starting point. Definitely recommended for anyone interested in Islam, of course, but also in understanding some of the foundational issues in geopolitics today.

I met Jack Horner a few weeks ago, at Adventures of the Mind, and completely enjoyed my time talking with him. He’s best known as the dino-tech-advisor expert for the Jurassic Park movies, but his day job is as a professor at Montana State University and as head of the Museum of the Rockies — his focus, of course, is paleontology.

I got to hear him talk with a big group of high schoolers — and to get them to think through in a reasoned way how we could tell how social & smart certain dinosaurs were from the fossil record — a line of thinking that he pioneered decades ago, and which ultimately lent credibility to the idea that birds are essentially avian dinosaurs.

The really fun thing when you talk with Dr. Horner, other than the fact that he’s extremely iconoclastic, is that within a couple of minutes, you can tell that he can actually see the dinosaurs in his mind’s eye — that for him, they’re very alive and active. He’d like that to be true for everyone and he’d like to see that vision made more real:

Well, paleontologists may deal with the long dead. But at the heart of all the digging and preparation of skeletons and museum displays is the attempt to reconstruct the past, to re-create moments in the history of life. What we would really love to do, if we could, is bring ’em back alive.

Anyway, the book starts out by explaining some basics of the archaeological timeline, and some specifics about the geography that Horner works in — Montana. It talks about his first finds of giant T. Rex fossils, and then an accidental discovery — once when they had to break a T. Rex femur in order to transport it, they found remnants of blood cells inside the bone — and then they started pulling on the thread.

That led them to the main story in this book, the shift from paleontology as mostly digging & reconstruction to including sophisticated genetic analysis:

It became clear to some of us in paleontology that it was time for a change in the way we did our work. We didn’t need to give up the satisfying summer fieldwork, the digging up of the past, but we did need to add new tools. And we needed to go beyond the dissecting microscope, through which we could see fine details of bone structure. We needed to get down to the level of molecules in fossils—and in living things. By the 1980s molecular biologists were already using differences in genes in living creatures to calculate rates of evolution and to date events in evolution. They had developed a new stream of evidence to compete with or supplement the fossils weathering out of the earth.

That, of course, changes everything. Much of the book is about the parallels between how fetuses develop and how evolution happens — because it’s often genetic markers turning on and off that determine whether things like tails develop.

And the big insight of that type of analysis is that if you can change how embryos develop, you can, in a way, turn back the evolutionary clock — you can do things like grow chickens with teeth (which has been done). Horner wants to do a few more things, including growing a chicken with a tail — because it harkens back to what non-avian dinosaurs must have developed like. He says this:

What I like about the idea of using a chicken that developed into a dinosaur as evidence of the reality of evolution is that it is more than an idea. It is an experimental result. And it calls out for questions. What is it? How did you do it? Is it a circus freak or a trick? What does it mean? Without staking out a position or starting a war of words, the animal would prompt a discussion that would have to end up with the mechanisms of evolution and its footprint in the genes of living animals. Even more than a fossil, it would cry out for explanation.

It’s an amazing idea, and one that we seem to be heading towards. I’ll leave the ethical & scientific discussion to Horner — there’s much of that in the book and you can decide for yourself — and just say that the whole idea is incredible. It seems clear to me that we’ll see this sort of work in our lifetimes, and it will undoubtedly raise a whole raft of new questions. Here’s how Horner ends (which is more of a beginning, really):

That would be the most satisfying lecture I could possible give. I don’t like providing answers. I never have. I like questions. I like asking them, trying to figure out answers, trying to figure out what we are really asking, and what new questions come up. For this event I won’t have to prepare any speech at all. My entire prepared text will consist of one simple question, from which everything else will follow. I’ll walk to the edge of the stage, point to the creature on the leash, look at the audience, and say, “Can anyone here tell me what this is? ”

Sort of a post-modern Harry Potter — set in current day New York — about a kid who grew up with fantasy books (sort of thinly-veiled Narnia), but pretty soon gets pulled into a Hogwarts-style school for magic, somewhere in Upstate NY. Like a lot of the novels I’ve been blogging about lately — my multiple-travel-weeks-stash-of-pulp-sci-fi — this one is a fine book to pass the time, but ultimately not that much fun and definitely not very memorable. High concept is great; execution is a little boring.

Sort of a fun, Hitchhiker’s Guide type of book — a space opera comedy — written by one of the Daily Show writers. A solid effort, but not my favorite of these books. (Although I liked it better than the Terry Pratchett taht I’ve read.)

Russo’s one of my favorite writers, but I found this one a slog. A little too New England-y for me, and a little slow. I’ll still pick up Russo’s next book, but this one wasn’t too great.

[can you tell I've been traveling a lot? many books...]

2nd book in the Landover series, which I read first about 20 years ago. Not that good; not as fun as the first one.

Let’s just say that this was not the best book ever (shocker!), and it’s best consumed, as I did, on a very long plane ride. Beyond that, I’ll let Brown’s sparkling prose speak for itself:

Langdon remained silent a long moment. “Actually, Katherine, it’s not gibberish.” His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. “It’s . . . Latin.”

Aha! Code breaking at its finest.