A Modest Construct
It's all bullshit and it's bad for you
Now Reading news
I have providing some light maintenance development for Rob’s Now Reading plugin; since Wordpress 2.7 wholly changed its interface, the plugin need some tweaking to make it work.
Up to this point, I’ve been hosting it locally, mostly picking at it whenever time allows.
I just updated it the other day to add a new feature (editable ASIN) and hopefully fix a recurring bug (CDATA error when searching).
In any case, I hope to make a push in the near future to clean it up and submit it the official Wordpress plugin site so that its user can benefit from auto-update, etc. etc. My own much-atrophied skills as a PHP developer aside (I deal mostly with Java at work), I think that it will ultimately benefit everybody, assuming I can make it so that the updates don’t override custom templates (perhaps giving preference to Now Reading template files in the theme folder?).
Stay tuned.
Death From the Skies!
Death From the Skies by Philip Plait, Ph.D.- Publisher: Viking Adult
- Year: 2008
- Pages: 336
- See the rest of this year’s listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №24
Call me a sucker, but I can’t seem to stay away from popular science books. When they’re good, they’re excellent (Outliers; the often-cited A Short History of Nearly Everything); when they’re bad, they can run the gamut from underwhelming (Physics of the Impossible) to “pretty damn bad” (Electric Universe).
I’m pleased to note, before getting to any discussion of substance, than Plait’s Death From the Skies! falls firmly in the former category.
Into the Wild
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer- Publisher: Anchor
- Year: 1996/2007
- Pages: 207
- See the rest of this year’s listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №23
I’ve come to appreciate Jon Krakauer more and more as a writer since I was a young pup, when I refused to read Into Thin Air mostly because I was told to. Though in fact my English professor at the time introduced us1 to Krakauer by way of an article about (or an excerpt from—I can’t remember which) Into the Wild, Krakauer’s first book, and a sort of primer on the very idea of wanderlust, or the necessity of itchy people to do silly things for ultimately unfathomable reasons.
- I say introduced because he seemed to intuit that few people, the overachievers excluded, had actually bothered to read the book over the summer[↩]
Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance
Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers- Publisher: McGraw-Hill
- Year: 1985/1987
- Pages: 457
- See the rest of this year’s listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №22
Though it’s been over two years since I was first introduced to Richard Powers (via Galatea 2.2), this is regrettably only the second book of his that I’ve read. Powers’ books are not the sort of fluff you can just pick up any time you want, after all. Reading them—and I think this is the hallmark of great books—is a work of care and devotion. Otherwise, you might as well be reading Twilight1.
Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance is Power’s first novel (published way back in 1985, when I was born), but you’d never notice: it contains the same distinct Powerisms and the same quality of craft that mark every other book by him since.
- Which, if I may use Stephen Fry’s phrase, ranks with The Da Vinci Code as “arse gravy of the worst kind”[↩]
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith- Publisher: Quirk Books
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 320
- See the rest of this year’s listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №21
First, a preamble. If you’ve been hiding in a cave with your eyes closed and cotton in your ears, you might not be aware that zombies are in. Though at one point nothing more than one entry in a pantheon of ghouls (which also included mummies and vampires), they have quickly worked their way into popular culture. Nowhere is this more apparent than the internet, where they have become a meme along with such colorful characters as pirates, ninjas, pirates vs. ninjas, lolcats, raptors, &c..
Zombies in particular have proved fodder for both cursory reference and more substantial fare: be it books such as World War Z or Breathers, films such as 28 Days Later, or video games such as Resident Evil1 or Left4Dead, zombies have begun to infiltrate our niche media.
- Note that I list Resident Evil as a game and not the perhaps better-known films. This is on purpose.[↩]
Buyology
Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom- Publisher: Broadway
- Year: 2009
- Pages: 256
- See the rest of this year’s listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №20
Were you to take seriously Paco Underhill’s forward to Buyology, or the publisher’s jacket press, you’d likely be under the impression that Martin Lindstrom is the second cousin of Jesus in the marketing world. Actually, I can’t dispute or verify that: relatively well-published, Lindstrom very well may be a branding guru among those in the know.
I picked up Buyology because I’m in that kind of mode from my MBA classes, and the premise of the book (buying decisions are largely unconscious) intrigued me. Except for Lindstrom’s penchant for repetition and the “This is going to blow your mind!” hype1, I thought it was actually a good book.
- I deplore this technique, which is almost never merited. See Freakonomics and Outliers for examples[↩]
