The Wish List—Eoin Colfer
Recommended to me by my daughter Ceilidh. From the same author as the excellent Artemis Fowl.
This is an enjoyable romp of a book. Preferably to be read at a single sitting [out in the sun]. Good lol bits, heroes and anti-heroes, fab baddies and an appeal to the geek in me.
As with all the best kid/young person/teenager books there’s a healthy dose of anti-authoritarianism in there too. The TV studio scenes are the most enjoyable in the book for this reason.
Though this is a good book, you’re better off reading Artemis Fowl. I dare say a few thoughts on the second in the Fowl series before too long, as soon as I pry it out of Orfhlaith’s hands.
One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel García Márquez [translation from es—Gregory Rabassa]
I’ve had this particular tome on my shelf for years and somehow never quite got round to reading it. It’s odd because I knew it was going to be good. In my head García Márquez has always been linked to Salman Rushdie and I’ve devoured [and for the most part loved] what he’s written, coupled with my love of things Spanish/Latin, it’s inexplicable to me that I haven’t got round to it before.
What did I think? I absolutely loved it. If the cliché about translation is true this must be one of the all-time greats in Spanish [I’ll let you know in about four years when mine is good enough].
As with Rushdie, García Márquez writes the unbelievable as the most natural thing in the world. The transition from descriptions of normal, everyday behaviour in the blinding sun to fantastic, bizarre scenes is seamless. I found my self rereading passages to try to work out where things starting going odd, but never quite managed it.
The pace and breadth of the thing is one of its delights. From the monstrously long broad-ranging paragraphs to the bending and stretching of time through the narrative, the experience is a distortion of the real.
Definitely one to reread, I’m sure it’s one of those that reveals more of itself on subsequent readings. I’m going to start hunting round for second-hand copies of his other books.
First of all I came across this item—Self-modifying hardware via distributed genetic algorithms—on the intermittently marvellous Boing Boing.
It interested me enough to look at original website—Distributed Hardware Evolution Project.
Now I’m a fan of distributed computing projects. I’ve been running SETI@home for over four years—here’s my SETI@home stats.
I’m also looking to expand my unix/linux knowledge as I’ve recently got a G4 Dual 1.25GHz as my main machine at work. So in conjunction with the excellent Mac OS X in a Nutshell, I’m taking on little Terminal projects.
I therefore installed the client for this project. Want proof? Look at the stats page.
I’m proud of myself. Having now successfully installed Movable Type and now this, I’m feeling a little more confident in the Terminal.
First of all I read this article in TidBITS, that piqued my interest in the BookCrossing project. Those who’ve been reading for a while will already know of my involvement in Project Gutenberg and I think it’s fits very well with that.
For those interested, you can view my [as yet very short] bookshelf.
More on this later I expect.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
An oblique reference was made to Project Gutenberg by aland in a comment really innovative on the trollyd sound system.
For more information on PG see my Project Gutenberg favourites page.
He mentions 1,000 books on a CD. This was a giveaway CD that PG produced last year at an College American Football game [attendance: 100,000], hence “The Million Book Giveaway”. I have a copy of the ISO image which hesitate to put on because of bandwidth issues [gz of 640Mb CD image about 250Mb].
I am however more than happy to burn a CD [which will work on Linux, Apple and other [I believe there are other] OSes] for the cost of a blank CD [approx 20p].
If you’d like a good proportion of pre-1923 classic literature [and much much more], let me know and I’ll burn you one.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.