New book! Yummmm

I got a new book at Costco tonight. Mmmm, shiny. The Shadow of the Wind is blurbed as being reminiscent of Borges, Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The first chapter is titled "The Cemetery of Forgotten Books." I read it standing in the noisy, cement-floored aisle, leaning against stacks of paperbacks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A "Pope of the Living Dead" Moment

Image
Yesterday morning I picked up the newspaper outside my door and saw this: Woah, hold onto your brains! Zombie Crisis in the Vatican! Anyway, after I took it out of the wrapper, the full picture emerged. Don't things like this make you wonder if the people doing front-page layout are awake, asleep, or trying to make us spit our coffee all over the paper?
Read more

What future? I don't even wear a watch.

I just finished reading The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us--Instead of the Other Way Around . This one is for a class, so it's outside the range of my usual reading list. Basically it's a manifesto on how computers could be made easier to use by making them more "human-centric" -- fitting the computer system to the way people need to use them, instead of forcing people to learn how to work to fit the computer. The author, Michael Dertouzos, was head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, so his examples are filled with his own actual experiences using (guinea pigging?) experimental computer applications developed by colleagues. There's a flight-reservation system that operates on speech recognition technology instead of keyboard input, and a "meaning processor" that attempts to spider information as you use it and tag meaning on your behalf to create an ever-expanding index. The ideas are interesting, but they
Read more