Books

If you listen to the TrekWest5 podcast, you know we’ve been promoting the podiobook trilogy "7th Son" for some time now. I’m really glad to announce that as of Oct. 27th, you’ll be able to buy this book in print (in fact, you can preorder it now). To quote the email JC sent me:

This is huge news for me (the trilogy was also optioned for film development by Warner Bros.), and for podcasting. Considering that 7th Son was rejected by dozens of publishing pros before I released it as a podcast, we have accomplished something extraordinary with its publication.

To celebrate the release, he’s announcing a number of new promotions that I wanted to make all of you aware of:

- A brand-new podcast recording of the "print edition" of the novel (with new scenes, twists, and character tweaks)

- A prequel audio short story anthology called 7th Son: 7 Days. (I am currently listening my way through this and am really enjoying it)

- Serialization of the novel in PDF and and the text at Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing.net

There’s a lot to like about the 7th Son series of podiobooks, and for those of you not inclined to partake of them in the audio format, I hope you’ll pick up a copy of the deadtree edition.

I saw Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris back in 2005, and thought it looked interesting – especially because he was a local – but never bothered to pick it up. I didn’t hear the name again until he was selected by James Rigney’s widow to finish The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series I’ve long held dear. When I heard that Harriet selected him based on his Mistborn series, I decided to get them on audiobook and listen to them.

Six hours into the audiobook, I was crushed. THIS was the style of writer Harriet chose to finish my beloved Wheel of Time? The story is disjointed, with great swaths of time passing between pages. The dialog is overly-simplistic, as if the author were writing to the Harry Potter crowd – which, OK, I have no proof that he WASN’T, but it’s certainly not a style of writing I find enjoyable. I never even finished the Harry Potter books, having put down Book 6 and realized “I’m not enjoying this, why do I keep reading it?”. The quality of characterization is uneven, with secondary characters like Hammond or Breeze being far more entertaining and vibrant than the “main” characters of Kelsier and Vin. All hope for a pleasant ending to the Wheel of Time faded from me, and I became a bitter and angry fan.

Then, my good friend Peter suggested I read a book called The Name of the Wind – perhaps the best new work of fantasy I’ve read in the past 5 years. I started following the author’s blog, which eventually led me back to Brandon Sanderson’s blog, which – to my astonishment – I found I thoroughly enjoyed.

So, it is with no little trepidation that I bring you links to the free, online copies of Brandon’s upcoming work, Warbreaker. I have not yet read it myself, but here’s the piece of Brandon’s entry on the book that really caught my attention:

How would [being transformed into a deity] affect a person? What if they, themselves, didn’t believe that their powers made them a god—yet everyone else did believe it? Could you have a god who didn’t believe in his own religion?

I’m willing to give him another shot, and maybe even go back and finally read Elantris, which some people have told me is quite good – of course, they also really liked Mistborn…sigh

[Edited on 2009-07-13 to include link to Radar’s original article, as I just noticed I never linked to it directly]

[If you don’t know how Watchmen ends, stop reading now. This is a good rule of thumb for my blog: I have no qualms about “spoiling” – if you’re reading an article discussing a subject, you’d darn well better be familiar with the material.]

Let me start here by pointing out something I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned. I owe The Mad Giggler a deep debt – back when The Homestarmy looked like this, asked me if I would be interested in writing a Guest Post on his blog/web site, thehomestarmy.com. To that point, I didn’t get it – the whole concept of blogs escaped me – and frankly, pissed me off a little bit. (Hmm…sort like Facebook and Twitter do today – no, no; don’t chase that particular dragon right now, Joey, you’re going somewhere with this post…). If it weren’t for him encouraging me, I might have missed out on a number of incredible things, including the two blogs I write on, as well as my podcast with The One Named Peter. Thank you, MG.

Last night, or early this morning, over at The Homestarmy (as it is TODAY), Radar posted what I believe is his longest entry to date

[
    wait, let’s just check that…

    select title from blog_entries where authorid = 8 order by length(body)+length(extended) desc;
    16305: Where I Boldly Went
    11273: The Watchmen: Novel or just Graphic?

…discussing graphic novels in general, but focused mostly on Watchmen. Radar made a lot of apologies for the quality of his writing (which turned out to be entirely unnecessary, man), so I’ll follow his pattern – the main body of this article was written between the time Radar posted his article (around 01:00 on Thursday) and the time I went to bed. In between putting my thoughts down here, I was also working, and so wasn’t giving the care I usually prefer to give to my writing. However, at this point, I’m so late in publishing this response, I’m more interested in getting it out than in quality-checking it, so I’m sorry if there’s anything wrong, rude, offensive, or dumb.

Here are the last of the “leftovers” from the project:
Squeak by Example
The WikiBook ‘Practical PHP Programming’
Basics of Algebra and Analysis for Computer Science
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming [pdf]
.Net Book Zero
Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++

There’s plenty more still to come, and if you apply a little bit of your own energy, there are many out there to be found.

If you do find something you really enjoy, drop me an email or let me know in the comments here.

Some books we didn’t have time for:

Getting Started with awk
Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4
Logic, Programming and Prolog [pdf]
The Scheme Programming Language
A Tutorial on Pointers and Arrays in C
The OpenGL ‘Red Book’
Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl

Also, here’s an entire “directory” of online SciFi novels.

We’ll end the project with a list of Python books :

• Dive Into Python
• The Standard Python Library
• Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
• The Django Book
• Building Skills in Python and Building Skills in OO Design

Another great handbook to have around – The Handbook of Applied Cryptography

John Sundman dropped by my blog a few weeks ago and mentioned that his new novel, The Pains is also available now, as well as his novella Cheap Complex Devices

Jeff Zeldman writes, regarding The Pains:

The Pains is a story of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata.

Data Mining with R – R is an interesting language which recently made the New York Times.

Peter Watts has made his entire backlist available, but I recommend starting with Starfish.

Note: I had someone challenge the past few entries, suggesting I was running out of ideas for ‘recreational’ books – I can assure you, those are books that are very dear to my heart, and I would rather recommend them than any of the 15+ other books I have on my list because I do love them so much.

I repent! I never decided on a video for the “Sunday Special”, and the article self-published before I realized I had forgotten it. To make it up to you, I’m posting several:

Brian Cantwell Smith, dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto Smith, the author of “On the Origin of Objects,” combines degrees in computer science and philosophy and is an expert on the interdisciplinary convergence brought about by digitization. His talk is titled, “And Is All This Stuff Really Digital After All?”:rtsp://video1.c-span.org/project/digital/digitalfuture013105.rm

And a couple of items from the brilliant folks over at archive.org

From the National Film Registry comes His Girl Friday, a classic screwball comedy from 1940 starring Cary Grant.
Suddenly, a quirky thriller from 1954 starring Frank Sinatra.

The Internet Archive did a blog post a few years ago that points to all of Frank Baum’s works that they’ve categorized.

Another textbook, this time from MIT – How to Design Programs

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist Learning with C++ – also available in two Python editions, 1st and 2nd.

Little Women is another great classic that I really, really enjoy.

My Antonia is a very important book for me – when I read it in 3rd grade at the urging of a teacher, I was convinced there was nothing worth reading in the ‘Classics’ – they seemed likely to be dry and uninteresting compared to the scif/fantasy fare I was more fond of. It’s something like 24 years later, and the beauty of this book still haunts me.

Algorithms, a forthcoming textbook from the fine professors at Berkeley, is the more “technical” half of today’s post

Programming Ruby – The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide
H. G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine is worth a read if you like SciFi at all.

As of the time this post is being written, Robert Finn’s Underlife is the most downloaded book at the excellent free-book portal Manybooks.

Programming in Lua has a similar place in life – it’s popularity is under-appreciated. Sure, Lua’s not what most people would call a “mainstream” programming language. On the other hand, it’s the programming language for writing addons to the massively popular “World of Warcraft”, so…

Practical Common Lisp, which makes a great supplement to Day 9’s On Lisp, and 1633, the first sequel to Day 5’s 1632