In praise of used books
I have spoken on you of how I used to frequent a store nearby, in Mountain View (“Book Buyers“), and how they relocated away a few years ago (more recently, they shut down that location, and sold of i…
Books
76 posts
On catastrophe
From the blurb of a book by John David Ebert Disasters, both natural and man-made, are on the rise. Indeed, a catastrophe of one sort or another seems always to be unfolding somewhere on the planet.…
Unix blues
From the foreword to "The Unix Haters Handbook" by Donald Norman, author of previous works like "The Trouble with Unix: The User Interface is Horrid", and "The Design of Every…
Eulogy for a bookstore
I moved to Mountain View in 2010. At that time, there were plenty of bookstores within a 10 mile radius: 1. Borders in Mountain View 2. Borders in Palo Alto 3. Barnes and Noble in San Jose 4. Bo…
Against The Day
I just finished reading this, after several years. I had picked this up in 2015 after reading Crying of Lot 49, V and Gravity's Rainbow in the two years before. But then there was a gap of sever…
A simple reader for books
The apps on my phone bear the marks of many years of use, of arrangement, of addition and deletion. Among these are various e-book apps, and I have one of “each”, in a single group: Google Play Books…
Reading, fast and slow
TIL that Art Garfunkel (of Simon and Garfunkel fame) has a pretty cool book list. And ... scrolling down, it's updated as recently as 2020! Slowly and steadily, he's covered a lot, and a lot…
Explaining the Hobbit
Found this little diagram I'd drawn on my daughter's "drawing tablet" from around May 2021 when we were reading The Hobbit.…
A bunch of DFW stuff
* Selections from DFW's personal library * An unedited interview with David Foster Wallace * an older interview (1989 ?!) with DFW * another (less) old interview from 1998: * The most recent…
Book store browsing
Saw these in the Amazon Books store we stumbled into for half an hour today. "The Dawn of everything" is the most interesting of this bunch, it seems like a legit re-imagining of pre-histor…
On a Soundtrack coincidence and some books
I happens to be listening to the Braveheart soundtrack recently, a few days ago, and I can say I haven't heard it anywhere else, in the last two decades. Today while we were in Lahaina, near the…
Farmer's Almanac
I don't know why I do it, exactly, but I started this five years ago and it's just "something I do" now. I buy the Farmer's Almanac for the year. It has zero practical necessit…