tag archive: books

When the zombies take over — or when the One Percent leave in their spaceships and take all the jobs they created, leaving our infrastructure in ruins — it won’t be easy lugging paper books around, but at least we’ll have the option.

Zombies mostly ignore books. Many of them will survive, and in a pinch, a hefty hardcover makes a good weapon. Can you imagine trying to bash a zombie’s head in with a dainty little Kindle reader?

I like having books on my desk. I just picked one up and flipped through it. Ah… such a pleasant sensation, the flipping of the pages. I inhaled deeply from its pages, and hugged the book, and kissed it. Oh, paper books, you’ve been such good companions. I love you so much. I’ll miss you when you’re gone.

I’m liking the book and disliking myself for buying it as an ebook. I had my reservations about ebooks before experimenting with them, and those concerns are just as strong now after trying a few. This one in particular created some mental distress for me.

I grew up reading and loving books. This meant the traditional form of paper books, but I don’t think I’m overly attached to that — I read very few paper books these days. Most of my reading is on the web. I’m already digital in my textual consumption.

I wanted to title this post, “Look! Puppies!,” but as I looked for a photo to go with it, I ran across this one from 1999. This is Morgan the Boxer and Sprite the Tabby.

We “lost” Morgan in 2006 to cancer, suddenly and so, so heartbreakingly. We loved that dog so much. And… hey! That brings me to the book I’m reading: The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein.

I’m deep into Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, and now Steve Jobs is deep into my brain.

All this stuff about design. About amazing things.

He was so demanding in his tastes that he had a hard time furnishing his home. I think about my home and the things I have, and I wonder what Steve would think. Do I own a single thing that he would have deemed worthy? And what about me? Am I just another “bozo”? Would he have judged everything I own and do to be “shit”?

I just got Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus from the library. Full of goodies, as expected.

Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to the people who’ve grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of its value is tied to its scarcity. For years after the price of long-distance phone calls collapsed in the United States, my …

I’m reading H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In the early going, it appears to have aged well. For a 111-year-old book, it still reads like good science fiction to me.

Not long after The Time Traveler’s arrival in the year 802,701 A.D.:

‘I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

‘Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time …

While in Paris we play the Nashville Club, a seedy velveteen music hall in St. Germain, and are staying for a few nights in a flophouse behind the Gare St. Lazare. The entrance of our hotel is in a narrow and fetid alleyway off the main boulevard. In early evening it is flanked by the garish lights of a sex shop and dimly lit secondhand bookstore. The alley is a pitch for about twenty women leaning in doorways, chain-smoking. In their shiny open raincoats, short skirts, cheap boots, and high-heeled shoes they watch the street with hooded eyes, like spies in a B movie. Some are young and pretty, and some are older, and some of them are very old, with facial expressions ranging from sullen to wry. Most of the commerce is centered on the slightly older women, as …

One indication of the quality of this book is that I read the entire thing. And not only that, I finished it in about a week. It was engrossing enough that I kept wanting to pick it up to find out what happens next. It helped having a trip in there where I had time away from a computer to invest in some “long form” reading, but still.

Say Everything is a book about blogging: “How blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters.” I’ve been reading (and writing!) blogs for many years and was familiar with some parts of the story. I’ve read some of the people profiled in the book, and I had my own opinions on the significance of the form, but I …

I was excited yesterday to hear about a new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. (Also mentioned in a Creative Commons blog post.)

I wasn’t familiar with James Boyle and his work, which is disturbing, because it seems like I should already have been a fan of such a free culture luminary. He has lots of good things to say on the topic. (I’ve since tried to remedy my negligence by adding him to my “Free Links.”)

The book is available for free online under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike License. After downloading it and reading through part of the first chapter, I ordered the paper copy from Amazon.

I fully expect it to reinforce my beliefs and give me …