books books books

I'm a reader: magazines, newspapers, cereal boxes, flyers. But I love books. Love the heft of them, the smell of them. Old hardcovers with the ragged paper edges; silky trade paperbacks, where the silkiness seems to rub off on my fingers; cheap mass markets I buy at the airport to divert me from the un-reality of jetting across the globe.

Love those books. Here's what I've been reading lately.

File under books Tue Dec 21 14:50:00 CT 2004

Target Market

More fun spam from Amazon's usually accurate marketing machine. Quoted here verbatim:



If accurate, I don't know what that says about the kind of people who buy MySQL/Perl books. Or dog books. I don't own a dog. Perhaps relatedly, I no longer use MySQL either.

File under books Tue Oct 23 21:47:34 CT 2007

Amazon

So if you have ever purchased anything via amazon.com you've likely gotten a targeted marketing email sometime later, based on the supposed demographic your purchase represents. Fair enough.

Interesting how their algorithm must work: I got an advert for home schooling based on the fact that I bought a book about parenting. The logic must be: anyone who cares enough to read up about good parenting practice will also be interested in home schooling their kid(s). Given the social trends, I guess that makes sense. Parents who abandon the public school system do so (at the very least) because they are actively trying to provide a decent education for their offspring.

But in this case, the target demographic missed me wide.

File under books Thu Jun 7 21:23:59 CT 2007

Men and Women

Favorite books from both sexes.

File under books Wed May 10 08:07:00 CT 2006

Ambient Findability

There has been a significant media blitz lately for Peter Morville's latest book, Ambient Findability. There's an interview here. Slashdot did a review. I think I saw one more lately but can't find it now.

I haven't read it yet. But it's definitely on my list.

File under books Fri Jan 13 10:29:04 CT 2006

Post-Rapture Radio

Russell Rathbun's book is funny, thoughtful and crazy ... in a good way. I was reminded of the off-balance depths of Douglas Coupland's best writing.

Full disclosure: Russell is a friend, and I was a member of his congregation for over seven years. Yes, most of the sermons in the book I've heard before. They actually come across better in print, or at least, in the context of the whole book. He's done a good job weaving these parts together.

I especially liked how dis-integrated/confused the identities of the character(s) got in the second half of the book. The levels of identity kept shifting on me: was it a typo? did he really mean Rathbun, not Lamblove?

That sense of keeping the reader (listener) off-balance is what I've always enjoyed about Russell's sermons: in the space that opens when I'm off-balance or caught thinking in a different direction, the shock of the twist, the unexpected feint, in his stories, is where I feel the wind move. Flannery O'Connor did that well (there's a nice allusion to her in the closing line of one story); so did Kierkegaard, Walker Percy -- other great writers to whom Russell is indebted and to whom he will be compared. He deserves the comparison.

File under books Sun Sep 11 20:14:25 CT 2005

Recommended to me

I've had the following books recommended to me by people I respect:

• Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner
• The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson
• anything by Dan Chaon
• 'The Circus in Winter' by Cathy Day (short story)

File under books Fri Jul 15 09:14:47 CT 2005

The Water-Method Man

Not as good as Owen Meany or A Widow for One Year but there are some very funny parts. I'd never really noticed before Irving's talent for slapstick. Some scenes are so visual, I feel like I'm in a Marx Brothers movie.

File under books Thu Jun 30 10:34:46 CT 2005

Blink

Overrated.

File under books Thu Jun 30 10:33:04 CT 2005

Best American Short Stories of 2004

We've been enjoying this series for quite some years now. Lorrie Moore picked this collection, and a very nice one it is. Stories I especially liked: "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie, "Intervention" by Jill McCorkle, and "All Saints Day" by Angela Pneuman.

File under books Thu Jun 30 09:02:40 CT 2005