FuzzyCo

In Cory Doctrow's new Young Adult Novel Little Brother it's the very near future and a teenager sneaks out of school to play an ARG at the same time as terrorists attack San Francisco and in the ensuing chaos is picked up the Department of Homeland Security. With a friend secretly imprisioned and the DHS tightening control of San Francisco, our hero decides to fight back and bring down the DHS.

The book is equal parts politcal screed, hacking and culture jamming HOWTO, and David and Goliath adventure story. I've been reading about the book on BoingBoing and elsewhere for months and I think I read it far too critically to get the sense of how someone coming in fresh, or say in the target demo, might experience it. For now, I'll just say that it's certainly an interesting book.

Note: like all of Doctrow's works, you can download the book for free.

FuzzyCo grade: B

I've never seen Jackie Brown, but now I've read Rum Punch and if Tarantino just avoided messing with the story too much, I'm sure it's a great movie. Because it's a great book.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Charlie Stross' Accelerando is available for free download and that's the version I read, on an open source ebook reader running on a lightly-hacked consumer electronic, no less, which felt very Strossian. At least, like the first few near-future chapters, until the run-away pace of technology (hence the book's title) took the characters and the plot far off into post-singularity weirdness.

FuzzyCo grade: A-

Jason Shuga's Bookhunter imagines a world where the special Library Police investigate book thefts with SWAT Team-level firepower.

FuzzyCo grade: A.

(via Making Light)

Born Standing Up is Steve Martin's memoir of his stand-up career. That career was, more or less, "I worked really hard for years and had a couple of lucky breaks along the way and then I got famous." The details are, of course, what makes the story and Martin provides engrossing ones. Also fascinating, especially in my usual "casting about for my artistic purpose" state, is that Martin was pursuing an "avante-garde" comedy by age 20. The passage where he decides this also provides my favorite piece of advice from the book:

[As a postscript to a letter to a friend, Martin writes:]
I have decided my act is going to go avant-garde. It is the only way to do what I want.

I'm not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements. Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I really enjoyed the first two Jumper books by Stephen Gould and so I was a little nervous about the upcoming movie adaptation (as was Gould himself last year). I mean, a bad movie doesn't actually hurt the books, of course, but you don't want something you like dissed by a terrible adaptation. So it was interesting to discover that Gould had gone in an new "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" direction with the latest Jumper book.

The movie, as might be expected, changes some of the 'rules' of teleportation and history of the world that Gould had established in the books. In the books, Davy Rice is (probably) the first teleporter in the world and his interactions with the authorities reflect the uncertainy they have coming to grips with his unusual abilities. In the movie, teleporters have been around for centuries and there exists a secret organization dedicated to killing them. Davy is introduced to the new world by another Jumper who has already been fighting back at that organization. So the new book, Jumper: Griffin's Story, inhabits that new world entirely and is the backstory of that new character.

There's a certain degree of similarity of Davy and Griffin's stories -- I suppose partly because they're both, essentially, coming of age stories. But it was still a great read and I'm actually excited to see the movie now -- I want to see what Griffin's like after all he went through in the book!

FuzzyCo grade: A

George Pelecanos is one of the writers of The Wire and The Night Gardener, while not actually set in the same universe (as we'd say in the scifi world), feels very much The Wire-esque. Of course, Pelecanos has been writing these sorts of books for longer than The Wire has been on the air, so I suppose The Wire is very Pelecanos-esque. Whichever and whatever, I'm really glad to have discovered his writing--it'll be another way to satisfy my Wire fix when the series comes to it's all-too-soon end.

The Night Gardener is set in Washington, DC and suburban Maryland (not far from the seedy Baltimore of The Wire) and follows some just-trying-to-do-their-jobs homicide cops as they try to solve several murders. The death of a young man might be connected to some decades-old serial killings, but this is no flashy Bones or CSI and these cops are on no great crusade.

"How do you solve a murder? Tell me. 'Cause I'd really like to know."

"What are you talking about?"

"Would finding the killer raise those kids back from the dead? Would it bring closure to the families? What would it solve, exactly?" Ramone shook his head bitterly. "I lost the idea a long time ago that I was accomplishing anything. Occasionally I put assholes away for life, knowing they can't kill again. That's how I speak for the fallen few. But as far as solving goes? I don't solve shit. I go to work every day and I try to protect my wife and kids from the bad things that are out there. That's my mission. That's all I can do."

We also get to see things from the perspective of criminals and school children (just like on The... alright, I'll stop now).

FuzzyCo grade: A

I've been intrigued by Mike Figgis since we saw Time Code during the rehearsals for A Day in the Life -- it's a flawed movie, but an incredibly interesting idea. And Leaving Las Vegas was gut-wrenchingly good, so I knew he had chops. So I was looking forward to reading Digital Filmmaking. And indeed there's some practical advice here and some broad opinions about the future of film and the possibilities of cheap filmmaking. But most importantly, it had me itching to get my hands on my camera and get filming.

Before I say anything about Kissing Snowflakes you should know that a) I am not in the target demographic for this book, being neither a teenager nor a girl and b) I'm friends with the author, Abby Sher (improvista, essayist, and now novelist). Having gotten those caveats out of the way: it's wonderful. Sam(antha) Levy is headed to a Vermont ski resort with her brother, father, and brand-new step-mom, and without her best friend. Can anything good come out of the trip? Maybe Drew, the handsome, blond ski instructor? You'll find, in alphabetical order, art, betrayal, caddish behavior, a dog, drinking, friendship, kissing, literature, mom-issues, (talk of) sex, and some skiing.

FuzzyCo grade: A

I confess I have a weakness for 'factoid' books like The Reverend Guppy's Aquarium -- a collection of essays about "how everyday items were named for extraordinary people". This one has perhaps a bit more depth than the usual bathroom book -- Dodd gives deft biographical sketches of all of his subjects, beyond the simple circumstances of their language-enhancing exploits, and he also does his research, penetrating past oft-repeated hearsay to find the truth. Reverend Guppy, for example, was not actually a Reverend, but hated tying ties and so affected a collar of his own design that later biographers assumed was a clerical collar.

One nit, picked: Dodd's previous claim to fame was being the "as told to" of the Rolling Stones' autobiography and he name-drops Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at rather odd moments.

But I'll forgive Dodd any self-agrandizement for relating these two maxims from Jules Léotard's (the original "daring youing man on the flying trapeze") Mémoires (published at age 22 -- the quick celebrity autobiography has been around since the mid nineteenth century, it seems):

Never judge a man by his mustache.

and

Make sure you never catch typhoid fever if you have something else to do.

Words to live by, my friends.

FuzzyCo grade: B+

Fried Chicken is the first in a short series of books by John T. Edge exploring iconic American foods (donuts, hamburgers and fries, and apple pie are the other subjects). There are short sketches of distinctive fried chicken cooks and histories of several regional variations, and each chapter ends with a recipe. I was impressed that despite the fact that Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance that he starts the book off with the thesis that "fried chicken is best served without a side of provincial bluster" and gives equal weight to Guatemalan and New York fried chicken, for example. But most impressive to me was that I made it to page 100 before I took a trip to Popeyes. Love that chicken!

FuzzyCo grade: B

I've been hearing a lot about this manga (which is also an anime and a live action movie, now) so I took the opportunity at Erica's cousins' to read Volume 1. So, yes, I can understand the appeal to high school misfits -- Japanese high schooler Light Yagami finds a "Death Note" dropped by a Shinigami ("death god") and decides to use the powers of the note to cleanse the earth of evil doers. Half the book reads like a late night 'philosophical' discussion as Light tests the increasingly detailed rules governing the use of the Note.

I guess this was the first translated-but-not-inverted manga I've read and I was surprised at how quickly I adapted to reading right-to-left. Neato.

Iain M. Banks' scifi novels are all* set far in the future when the dominant human society is the Culture, a post-scarcity near-utopia. As a utopia, the Culture is somewhat boring, because nothing dramatic really ever happens there. So most of his novels are set in the ranks of Contact (and its secretive sibling "Special Circumstances") the branch of the Culture that interfaces with other species and isolated planets where humans live under less enlightened governments.

Inversions is set on such a human planet where they no longer have knowledge of the stars and things are just making the first tentative steps out of a feudal system, and is told from the perspective of natives who no notion that Contact might be working among them. In fact, other than a few touches that might be puzzling to someone who hadn't read any of Banks' other books, this might well a stand-alone fantasy or ahistorical novel. In any case, it's a pair of lightly intertwined stories -- one of a bodyguard to a ruler in one nation and the other of a doctor to a king in another.

Both stories cover a lot of ground -- there's court intrigue and the clash of nations and romance and unrequited love and torture and despair and, perhaps, redemption. Heady stuff. A great read.

FuzzyCo grade: A

* or mostly, at least. I haven't read them all, so I'm not sure.

Yeah, I read pop culture sensation novels 10 years after they're popular -- that's just how I roll.

Actually, let's digress about the tricky notion of picking what book to read next. My main reading time these days is the 45-minutes each way I'm on the train going to and from work. (On average, that's 100 pages a day.) So a book has to be messenger bag friendly, doubly so if I'm carting my laptop around. I've got, for example, a copy of 1491 I'm itching to sink my teeth into. But it's a 450 page hardcover. No way I'm lugging that thing around. Bridget Jones's Diary, on the other hand, is a 260 page trade paperback (and further, printed on pretty thin paper, it seems). Bingo! Though, I did feel a bit funny reading BJD on the train, and not because it's girly or ten years out of vogue or anything. It's just that from a distance, the cover might seem to be some other sort of book, if you know what I mean.

Veering back towards the track, I'll mention that I started giving my reviews a 'grade' (ala, I suppose, Christgau via Entertainment Weekly) and BJD is decidedly hard to pin down. There's some good stuff in there. For example, I really got into the obsessive chronically of numbers of drinks drunk, cigarettes smoked, calories eaten, etc at the start of each day's diary entry, and especially the subtle variations thereon. And there are some funny set pieces (though some clunkers too -- much of Bridget's life is a little too sitcom-y for me). And the plot's pretty good, except that there we run into the rub that it's not really Helen Fielding's, is it? (And that's a point -- is it 'cheeky' or 'self-aware' of an author ripping off Jane Austin to reference both Clueless and Pride and Prejudice itself?)

Ultimately, I think the reliance on that plot might be the book's real Achilles' heel. Because... (and I'm about to drop a spoiler here, but surely you've seen the movie. Or seen Clueless. Or read Pride and Prejudice. Or seen Pride and Prejudice. Or, perhaps, seen Pride an Prejudice.) ... I think "now she's with the right man, even though she's hardly even spoken to him, so everything will be fine" worked better in 1813 than 1996.

FuzzyCo grade: B-

I'm glad I read The Time Machine before The Time Ships, because it heightened my appreciation for what Stephen Baxter has achieved in the latter book -- writing an marvelous novel that manages to be both a faithful sequel to a hundred-year-old book and an epic journey through millions of years and several very different human (and post-human) civilizations. FuzzyCo grade: A.

I picked up The Time Ships at a used bookstore last week to read on the plane, but discovered in the first few pages that it was a sequel, of sorts, to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. And I realized that while I certainly knew the story of Wells' novel, I wasn't sure if I had ever read it.

So I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg and read it on my laptop. Given the current debate over whether a computer screen is a suitable replacement for books, it was an interesting experiment. I opened up the text into BBedit, enlarged the text to a comfortable 14 points, and read away. For a short novel (at 32,600 words, The Time Machine would just be just shy of qualifying for NaNoWriMo) it was a fine reading experience. Of course, it's a lot harder to hold a MacBook Pro in one hand on the El.

And also, given my frustrations with the last few "classics" I've read, I was happy to discover that The Time Machine is a pretty good read.

Part of the reason I was so hard on Cascade Point, I've realized, was that it's in my least favorite segment of speculative fiction -- the future as a simple mapping of the past* -- the starship version of a tramp steamer is even called a "tramp starmer", which really rings hollow to my ears. And it had a side helping of "the technical problem with your imaginary technology" ala the technobabble problem of the week on Star Trek: TNG. Boo, I say.

These problems are highlighted by the nature of Cascade Point's companion novella in this Tor Double -- Greg Bear's Hardfought. Hardfought is truly speculative fiction -- a look at a battle between a completely alien race and a humanity so far removed from us that they are on their way to becoming alien as well. There're plenty of universal questions pondered -- the nature and limits of war and what it means to be human -- but there's also some pretty far out stuff. I mean, there are flashbacks in this story to the year 29,000! In 85 pages, Cascade Point felt like a stretched out short story. Clocking in at 92 pages, Hardfought feels like a vast novel whizzing by. FuzzyCo grade: A.

* Which, of course, can be done well -- Firefly's future as old west, for example. But I still don't like it in general.

Not the best sf novel I've read in a long time. (I'm just being snarky -- it won a Hugo. And I guess Timothy Zahn writes good Star Wars novels.) FuzzyCo grade: B-.

Update: More thoughts on Cascade Point in my Hardfought review (they're two halves of a Tor Double).

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge is the best sf novel I've read in a long time. Make that, the best novel I've read in a long time. It's action packed (there are two major plot twists in the first 16 pages!), full of spot-on future speculation, and full of distinctive characters. My only complaint is that there are a few loose threads left at the end. Vinge is said to be considering a sequel. I can't wait. FuzzyCo grade: A+.

The first book of Ben Mezrich's that I've read, Bringing Down the House, was about a group of MIT students who used a group blackjack technique to make a lot of money until casinos began to figure out their system and brought heat down on them. This new book, Busting Vegas, is about a group of MIT students who used a group blackjack technique to make a lot of money until casinos began to figure out their system and brought heat down on them. Seriously. A chapter in I had to double-check to make sure I wasn't just reading the same book over again. And perhaps because he knows that he's repeating himself somewhat, Mezrich is trying way too hard here. It's a dramatic story, but the prose is overblown and Mezrich tries to make even walking through a trendy Boston neighborhood seem psychologically intriguing.

And the dialogue... At one point Mezrich notes that interview subjects often meet him in noisy places to defeat the recording devices they presume he's carrying and notes that he's "not that kind of writer." Well, he might want to start, because the reconstructed dialog he puts in people's mouths is stilted and unrealistic. (I would quote you some, but I gave the book away minutes after I finished.)

FuzzyCo grade: C.

Clash of Star-Kings by Avram Davidson

Both the title and back cover blurb of this slim novel rather overstate the excitement contained within ("they came from the Evil Stars!"). Which is not to say it was a disappointment, but rather than a grand adventure it's a short, tense tale of a small Mexican village where things are not as they seem (ala The Wicker Man) and the few scifi elements mentioned (a brief mention of a "star ship") could easily be discarded to leave this a disturbing fantasy. FuzzyCo grade: B+

Man, if you wanna have even your nerd friends call you a geek, carry around a Star Trek novel for a couple of days. My excuse for reading The Final Reflection is that it's by the late John M. Ford. Ford didn't publish that many books, but they're all worth reading. Yes, even the two Star Trek novels he wrote.

This novel is set well before the original Star Trek series (it features a cameo by Dr. McCoy literally in diapers) and is entirely from the point of view of Klingons. Ford was one of the first to take a stock 'unknowable enemy' and posit that they might be doing what they do for reasons that make sense to them. The whole 'honor-obsessed' Klingons of the Next Generation shows and beyond -- that all comes from Ford originally.

It's also a novel about playing games, which is just odd, since the last sci-fi novel I read was about that, too.

It's also just a really good novel about a young man (well, Klingon) making his way in an Empire, and a universe, that has little sympathy for anything new, or different, or weak.

FuzzyCo grade: A.

There's more than a whiff of space opera around Iain M. Bank's The Player of Games -- an alien empire determines their rulers by means of a complex game and so The Culture sends one of their greatest game players to investigate. But it's also an intensely personal journey of one man and a biting indictment of all empires. And it's an adventure. And it was about fifty times better than I was expecting. FuzzyCo grade: A.

1633 is a sequel to, of all things, 1632 -- a sci-fi novel wherein an entire modern West Virginia town is transported back to 1632 Germany, right in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The first book was rather adventure-filled as the Americans attempted first to survive and then to bring something of democracy to 17th century Europe. This second book in the now-sprawling series is much more talky. The already complicated politics of the time are rendered even more complex by history books stolen from the Americans. The English king, for example, has Oliver Cromwell arrested before he's actually done anything, because the history books say he will lead a rebellion in the future. Characters spend pages and pages on info-dumps and speculation on the motives and plans of other factions. Really, I don't think I should like this book at all, and yet I kept reading and reading. FuzzyCo grade: B-.

I can't really complain about Vengeance in Vicksburg, because I knew what I was getting into when I bought the darn thing at the Jackson Airport. V in V is number five in a series of "Mississippi Mysteries" by Phil Hardwick, each an alliteratively titled mystery set in a different town in Mississippi. Hardwick is, according to the back cover, an "award-winning real estate columnist" and indeed the descriptions of the locales are best thing about the book. The mystery, and even the action sequences, are kind of boring.

While we were in Vicksburg this past weekend it happened that one of the Second City touring companies was performing in town. I called one of our friends in the company to see if we could meet up after their show and he said, "while I've got you on the phone, could you tell me the name of a local small town and a local tourist attraction -- we have a place in the show where we throw those in and it always gets a laugh, just saying the names of local things." This book is that same principle, only for 112 pages.

Set in a future where people can make multiple, temporary copies of themselves, Kiln People by David Brin is meant to be a sort of noir-meets-scifi novel. But I found it to be something of a slog. It just didn't seem very (and I use this word advisedly) real. Only the fact that I've enjoyed many other Brin novels got me through the first 300 pages, and by then I'd made such an investment in the dang thing, I had to push on to the end.

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

I'm a huge fan of Pratchett's Discworld books, but I have to say that this is not the best of the bunch. Maybe it's that the main character, Going Postal's Moist von Lipwig, is a thoroughly reformed scallywag. In Postal we all knew that he was going to realize that he had a heart of gold and do the right thing, but it was fun watching him discover it. And the plot is clever enough, but maybe just a bit too clever, with too many of its gears exposed. It's not bad -- I LLOLed* a few times -- but I've read better from Pratchett.

* It's well documented that LOL, originally "Laugh(ed) Out Loud", has become completely devalued. So I'm introducing LLOL -- Literally** Laughed Out Loud.
** Of course, since literally is also already devalued from its original meaning, I may be fighting a losing battle here.

The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard

The Hot Kid exists at the intersection of Westerns (it's set in Oklahoma), gangster stories (it's the 30s), and true-crime fiction (in a touch of meta, one of the characters writes for those sorts of magazines). And it's unmistakably Elmore Leonard. Yes, please.

Marathon - The Ultimate Training Guide by Hal Higdon

This is kind of the book when it comes to Marathon information, and it is indeed a smorgasbord of advice, tips, anecdotes, and inspirational stories. I'm glad I wasn't relying solely on this book for my marathon plan, but it's a great resource.

Well, there's that, then. I was impressed right off the bat with audacity of the flap blurb -- in lieu of any plot summary or such it simply read "We now present the seventh and final installment in the epic tale of Harry Potter." In other words, "look, if you don't know who Harry Potter is at this point, we don't need your business -- just go crawl back into whatever cave you're living in."

I found it somewhat darker and heavier* than the first six, but it's been a build to that I suppose. Now I'm off to read all the sites I was avoiding for the sake of spoilers.

* Including, of course, literally.

Seriously. I'm on like page 280 of 6000 and I keep almost catching glimpses of discussions on the internet. I knew that if I was going to read this last book with any sense of surprise, I'd have to read it quick before the plot was just out there in the zeitgeist. Soon, I'll bet you, people will be using events from the book as examples in pop culture, just because so many people have read it that it'll be a cultural touchstone. (Or maybe I'm over-estimating the influence of a bunch of 12-year-olds and nerds.)

Oddly, because of the circumstances, it's hard to think of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as anything except a prelude to the final book, which I'm about to start. I suppose it'd be different if I had to wait a year for the next one instead of five minutes.

I read the first four Harry Potter books and then bought the fifth (i.e. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) while I was in Scotland in 2004. I promptly never read it. But now that the last book is out, I figured I'd better finish up the series quick before all the shocking revelations were just out there in the zeitgeist. As Penny Arcade and Threadless* have noted, there's a statue of limitations on spoilers.

So, you know, pretty good for the cliched kind of wizardy young adult lit that it is. And hey, I did like sweetkealoha and found out which House I'm in:

* In fact, I just noticed that there's a sixth-book spoiler on that shirt.

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

Said Ravenclaw, "We'll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron's affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine's editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

When we saw 500 Clown Frankenstein last month, the Clowns used the text of the novel in a rather physical fashion. It made me realize that I had never read the original novel. So thanks to Dover Thrift Editions I soon had a copy for $2 (if you can stand to read on a PDA or computer screen, the novel is available for free from Project Gutenberg).

There are, as you might expect, a ton of differences between the original story and the Universal Studios movies that are most people's source for the Frankenstein story. And of course, it's the product of a different era. But I have to say that Victor Frankenstein's passivity and whininess drove me crazy.

I was impressed by one authorial trick -- the novel is narrated by a British explorer who is writing letters to his sister relating the stories that Victor Frankenstein is telling him (think about the layers of meta there for a second) and Frankenstein never actually says how he built a person. Since it turned out to be such a mistake, he doesn't want anyone else to try, he says. But it's a delightful bit of hand-waving that prevents Mary Shelley from having to explain how it actually would work. (Unlike the movies, there doesn't seem to be any electricity or dead bodies involved, though. He just builds a man from scratch. Interestingly, after he's already built a working man he needs to go consult some English scientists when he's trying to build a woman -- evidently lady parts are different.)

I'm signed up for the Chicago Marathon and I'm training by myself using the Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer.

This is a book that comes out of a class at the University of Northern Iowa that is a joint class between a psychology professor and a phys. ed. professor -- the phys. ed. professor brings the training you need to complete a marathon and the psychology professor brings a lot of self-helpy stuff about the mental preparation you need to get through the training process and then the race itself. I'd make fun of the self-helpy stuff, except that it seems to be helping already. And the book is aimed squarely at the non-runner and getting you to complete a marathon. Not do it with a great time or lose a lot of weight or any other side goals -- simply complete a marathon. Since that's what I'm trying to do, it seems like the perfect training program for me.

You can follow along with my Marathon progress on my main blog, if you like.

Your Movie Sucks is a sequel of sorts to Roger Ebert's earlier I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie -- both collections of his reviews of movies he enjoyed the least. The earlier book covered a few decades of reviews and so it had the stringent requirement of one star or less; the new book covers just the 21st century and so, I assume to pad out the book a bit, includes 1.5 star movies. It does mean that some of the reviews are less vitriolic and more Ebert basically saying, "eh."

But when Ebert is on a tear, ripping into a terrible movie, it's quite a sight to behold. The book opens with an extended introduction detailing a few reviews that resulted in public exchanges with the director or stars, like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (from which review comes the title of the book) and Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny.

It should be noted that these books are, like so much these days, effectively free online -- just go to the Advanced Search on Ebert's site, set the "Star rating To" field to one or one-and-a-half stars, and click Submit. But it's harder to take your computer into the bathroom, which just might be the natural home for this sort of book. Of course, you might also want to use it as a sort of affirmational -- read one of these reviews right before you leave the house and there will be a certain spring in your step. No matter what you do or don't do during the day, at least you didn't make a terrible movie.

Soon I Will Be Invincible is Austin Grossman's debut novel and it's rather good. It's a superhero adventure told in alternating chapters by an experienced evil genius (he's in prison for the twelveth time when the book starts) and a new cyborg hero. The action of the story is straight out of a silver age comic book (the villian says things outloud like "Who dares?" and "In the coming era I will rule the world, as is my right.") but the inner lives of the two narrators are complex and authentic.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Heaven - Season One by Mur Lafferty was recommended by Boing Boing and I listened to it as an audiobook over the course of a couple runs and bike rides to work. By chapter 8 I was not very interested, but I kept going just to finish the narrative. Which, as you might expect from a book subtitled "Season One", ended on something of a cliffhanger, so I wasn't even satisfied there.

FuzzyCo rating: eh.

Now that I've started running, I'm trying out listening to audiobooks. The first one I listened to is Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker, released as free audiobook by Subterranean Press.

The book is in Baker's "Company" series, about time-traveling immortal cyborgs, but this one is a stand-alone comedic adventure, set in 1930s Hollywood. It was delightfully read by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke

There's code here and there on FuzzyCo that goes back to 1994 or so, when I built my first webpage by hand and hosted it on my personal account on schenectady.ecn.purdue.edu (try typing that five times fast). And HTML 1.1 served me just fine for the next 10 years. Right around the time that I would have probably needed to really dive in and modernize things around here, I moved much of the site over to MovableType, which took care of enough that I could put it off for a little bit longer. But there are things I want to do with FuzzyCo that are going to require that I get up to, say, 2003 web design standards. So I'm slowly getting up to speed on the current state of web design.

This book is not a beginner's how-to level book to CSS, and so I didn't understand half of how I would actually implement the examples given. But I really glad I read it first, because it gave me a lot of great ideas about how to approach the workflow of redesigning my site(s), rather than just diving in and replicating my old tables structure with a bunch of divs and calling it a day.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

What a great new children's novel this is (grades 5-9, says the publisher). It's a grand adventure story of four extraordinary children brought together by the mysterious Mr. Benedict to save the world from impending doom. Each of the children has different strengths -- Reynie is a hardworking puzzle solver, Kate is strong and acrobatic, Sticky remembers everything he reads, and Constance Contraire is... contrary. But mixed in are some fairly serious explorations of the notion of family, of how far you can go fighting evil without compromising your ideals, of bravery.

A great review by Jessie at What We're Reading Now.

(Disclosureville: Trenton Lee Stewart is my co-worker Kenner's brother-in-law Trent.)

The Atrocity Archives by Charlie Stross

Charlie Stross mixes Cold War spy fiction with "nameless horrors" stories ala HP Lovecraft, with a healthy dose of Douglas Adams' Bureaucracy and modern computer geekiness mixed in, for an engaging read with a surprisingly sympathetic main character.

In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Revised 2nd Edition) by Walter Murch

This book was recommended in an aside in the DV Rebel's Guide and since editing is the area of film-making (other than, say, scoring) I'm most insecure about, I thought it'd be worth a read.

The first part of the book is a long essay, adapted from a 1988 lecture, on the nature and philosophy of editing. The second half is a discussion of the difference between analog and digital editing -- Murch knows this terrority well, having won the first editing Oscar for a digitally edited film.

The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap by Stu Maschwitz

We've made some action movies before, but FuzzyCo has recently decided to film an action movie that takes longer than 24 hours to make -- we'll see if the quality goes up in any proportion to time spent. Reading this book was step 1 in the new process.

Don't Go Where I Can't Follow is a spare and affecting work from Chicago comic book writer and artist Anders Nilsen. It's snapshots of his relationship with his girlfriend Cheryl Weaver, culminating in her sudden illness and death in the winter of 2005. By no means an exhaustive memoir of their life together, instead we get illustrative moments -- postcards they sent each other, a letter to his sister detailing a comically disastrous camping trip, a short list of Anders' faults as a fiancee. And almost before it's begun, the book is over -- returning from France, Cheryl is diagnosed with cancer and then treatments fail and then she dies. To the reader, it's devastating.

Cancer is something of a hot-button topic around our house these days, but I don't think that's a requirement to appreciate this book -- as Anders says in his afterword, "it's just love and loss. And everyone, for better or worse, can relate to that."

"The new graphic memoir, "Don't Go Where I Can't Follow," breaks a great many rules of form, concluding with what might be the most devastating 16 panels of artwork in Anders Nilsen's career." [LA Times]

"It's very difficult to deal with Don't Go Where I Can't Follow from any sort of objective or critical viewpoint: simply put, it's the best graphic novel to be released this year." [Tucker Stone]

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen

I think the two things that mark this as a Hiaasen book for younger readers is that the cast isn't quite as huge as usual, there's no sex, and the ending is much more unambiguously happy.

Penny Arcade Volume 3: The Warsun Prophecies by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik

Penny Arcade is a webcomic with lots of video game in-jokes, strong language, and juvenile humor. I love it. This book is a collection of every strip that appeared on the site in 2002. Let me emphasize that those strips are still online -- you can read them for free. But I like having them around in dead tree format. I sometimes laughed re-reading a strip that I had read a few minutes before. There's something about PA that (often) plugs straight into the humor receptors in my brain.

The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld

I read a lot of Westerfeld last year, enough that I think I'm pretty much out of books until he writes more. Fortunately, he's prolific. The Last Days is a sequel to Peeps, set in the same world, but focused on a different group of kids, who are more concerned about getting their band together than the looming apocalypse.

A fast, fun read.