John’s Blog

Liked the latest from Neal Stephenson, but didn’t love it. As per usual, he really needed a stronger editor for the last half of the book. The book was pretty fun, and a departure for Stephenson, in that it’s not really science fiction, but something that can happen today (if a little, you know, cyber-y).

The first half reads a little bit like a World of Warcraft tutorial (believe it or not, that’s actually a compliment, although I know it won’t sound that way), and the last half is a bit of global chase.

Pretty good, very fast to read and I enjoyed it.

This book may not be for everyone. But if you’re in the right frame of mind, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. It’s more or less the whole Twitter transcript of @MayorEmanuel, the fake chronicle of Rahm Emanuel on his quest to become the mayor of Chicago.

If you like sustained, over the top profanity and imaginary vignettes about Axelrod in a bear costume tailgating with Rahm Emanuel dressed as a bottle of Jack Daniels at Bears’ games, but only in 140 character chunks (with some mild annotation), this one is for you. 🙂

But I thought it was pretty damned funny — Kathy thought I was losing my mind:

“@MayorEmanuel: My giant bottle of Jack costume is too tall to fit on the L. Fuck. If you see a huge bottle of whiskey walking down Milwaukee, that’s me.”

“@MayorEmanuel: I’m in my giant Jack bottle knocking people down Urlacher-style and yelling “YOU JUST GOT JACK’D.” Then we do a fucking shot.”

And if you’re not into that kind of thing, then yeah, maybe not for you.

As I’ve written about a ton of times before, I’m a font nerd. Love them. Could talk about them forever. Could spend 2 days screwing around with my blog looking for just the right look. So I tend to read histories and essays about them whenever I can.

I liked this book, but didn’t love it, honestly. Told lots of stories about how fonts have evolved, the various points where things shifted, etc. As much as anything, I liked reading about some of the subtle letterform differences and breakthroughs that various designers made.

So I recommend this for fellow type nerds, but hard to recommend more generally than that, I think.

I really enjoyed this book and really recommend it to anyone who grew up in the 1980 with D&D, Intellivision, War Games, Tempest, Rush, and on and on. It’s great fun.

It’s set 30 years in the future, and the premise is that we all spend a huge majority of our time in a virtual world called the OASIS — a creation which netted its inventor billions of dollars. When he died, he set up a massive scavenger hunt across the OASIS — the winner, who successfully navigates a series of quests based on the classic nerd fare from the Eighties, would inherit the founder’s fortune.

Not the best work of literature ever produced, and some flaws & predictability in the book.

Still, I really loved it. So much of my childhood and coming of age is in the cultural references, and I read it greedily and quickly.

Fun book!