Reading

I've been trying to salvage some of my commute time recently: I spend far too long every day on trains and buses.  I've read five books in the last month or so:

1. Can Man Live without God? by Ravi Zacharias
2. The End of Reason by Ravi Zacharias
3. The Dust of Death by Os Guinness
4. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Baumeister and Tierney
5. More Guns, Less Crime by John R. Lott, Jr.

I'm afraid I'm still only about 20% of the way through Calvin's Institutes. I'm not procrastinating on finishing it, I've just been more interested in other books recently.

The times, they are a-changin'

Life has been somewhat tempestuous for the last six or seven weeks. The details are boring and unnecessary, but the upshot of it all is that I've been sort of cloistered away in a haze of uncommunicative business.

One interesting feature of the last six or seven weeks is that my [new] employer wants me to have a disclaimer on any blogs to make it clear that my opinions don't reflect theirs. Of course they don't! But it's a simple enough request, and not unreasonable. So I've added a disclaimer block to the bottom of the page.

In other news, I've been reading a lot recently. I finally read Emma. I've watched several movie adaptations and listened to it as an audiobook; but it's only been in the last month that I read it. It is a delightful book. I find I like about half of Jane Austen's books. Persuasion is on the short-list of my favorite novels, but I couldn't make it past the fourth page of Northanger Abbey. It was simply too annoying.

Now that I think about it, that's why I never read Hunger Games. It's not that I haven't tried to read it, it's just I hadn't made it to the third page when I realized I completely hated it. Which says something, because I hated Wuthering Heights too, but I actually finished it.

At any rate, what I love about Jane Austen is how she can make me love, hate, despise, pity, or admire a character with just a few bold strokes. She leaves me despising Sir Walter, while at the same time patiently tolerating Mr. Woodhouse. It's not that her stories are terribly interesting: it's the characters who live in them. To be blunt, Jane Austen writes some pretty boring stories about people I find very interesting.

Since my acknowledgement of reading Jane Austen likely will cost me any claims to being a Real Man, I might was well go the distance and say I've been reading Georgette Heyer again too. Like Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer wrote some really boring stories. In fact, I wouldn't even call her characters interesting, but they are so terribly witty. One doesn't read Georgette Heyer for the story, nor even for the characters. One reads Georgette Heyer for the dialogue.

Back to it

Working in higher ed has a lot of frustrations and aggravations that just come with the territory, but there are some definite perks. One is that my place of work basically shuts down for a little over a week every Christmas. That didn't prevent me getting called a couple times when the campus was "closed", but I still ended up with more than a week off.

It was a nice break: I made some beer, played the guitar and mandolin, cooked, read a little, and watched some movies.

I've been reading The Coming Prince by Sir Robert Anderson: it's well worth the effort.

I might try and actually finish more books this year: it seems I'm about 75% done a dozen books at any given time, and most just end up back on my bookshelf without my actually crossing the finish line.

Every year, my sister Shan sends me something cool for Christmas. Shan's what I might call a very gifted giver. She has a knack for finding that perfect thing you didn't know you wanted. She made my Bodum Cozy, she gave me the CD of Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales," and she gave me her own copy of The Grand Sophy. This year she gave me a copy of the BBC's adaptation of North and South.

Yesterday one of the kids was sick and I wasn't feeling the best, so we popped the new DVDs into the player, expecting to watch one of the four episodes. We watched them all in one sitting. Shan describes the story as "Pride and Prejudice for grown-ups." Is it my favourite 19th Century book adaptation? I don't know... I'll need to watch it a couple more times. It's definitely in the running.

I think I prefer it to BBC's famous and brilliant Pride and Prejudice adaptation, solely on the grounds that it is visually more pleasing. The P&P miniseries was really very well done, but the DVDs are awful: they're washed out and colourless. (I hear the Blu-ray version really is much better.) But I'm very fond of the 2009 version of Emma. I don't know if the melancholy brilliance of N&S can possibly overcome the much more cheerful--- but not totally insipid--- E.

Here's a question, if it's not insipid, does that mean it's "sipid"?

Finally, my neighbour bought me the Lord of the Rings, Extended Edition on Blu-ray last summer. We had said we'd watch them together, and we're still not finished. It's hard finding times when we're both free. We've made it through The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. We were supposed to watch The Return of the King on New Year's Eve, but we got pre-empted.

This is a time when the "new and improved" really is. I watched the same sequences both on the older DVD version and the Blu-ray version, and I can actually see the difference. For example, the threads in Frodo's cloak are plainly visible.

Tomorrow it's back to work. Back to Perl and Java and Unix and Lisp and Spring and Hibernate and email and Oracle and GWT. I'm not really depressed by the thought, but it's been nice to get away from it for a while.

A piece of Dorothy's mind

Well, I finished Unpopular Opinions by Dorothy L Sayers on my ride home this evening. I highly recommend this book as an eclectic and extremely well-written view into a very interesting woman's mind.

Dorothy Sayers was a contemporary and friend to C. S. Lewis. She's celebrated as a feminist author, was a successful writer of detective novels, and was clearly seen as something of an interesting speaker: many of her "essays" are actually transcriptions of speeches she made.

She uses the word "obstreperous" in a sentence, and argues for plain English. I'm delighted!

The book is broken into three sections:

1. Theological


2. Political


3. Critical

The Critical section is actually interesting, in a strange way. It largely consists of applying "Higher Criticism" to the Sherlock Holmes stories. She works on timelines and chronologies; on determining Holmes' university, college, and major; and on establishing the details of Watson's personal life. I still can't decide if I enjoyed that section.

I definitely enjoyed Political the best. These were largely WWII-era speeches, and are certainly patriotic in extolling the virtues of the English. In fact, her essay "They Tried to be Good" is perhaps the best of the book. She argues that Hitler came to power not because England was incapable of stopping him, but because they'd fallen into political correctness (not that it was called by such an appalling euphemism back then) that kept them from calling a spade a spade: that made it a crime to be English and to have an empire. As someone who works in higher education, I found her analysis and subsequent morals and warnings apropos, almost frightening in their clarity and perspicuity.

In the political essays were also two or three feminist articles that would be hailed as misogynist these days. Funny how standards change. Like Ayn Rand, she warned against allowing the individual to be reduced to a representative of a group. Sadly, the collectivists have won, and individual dignity is now generally regarded with contempt. We have earned the consequences that shall certainly come on us...

But the most compelling essays were her Theological, which are clearly written from a conservative Anglican (perhaps even Tractarian) viewpoint. I shan't even attempt to sum them up: they are worth the time and effort of getting this book. They are humourous, thoughtful, and terribly important.

My favourites in this section are "Christian Morality" and "A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus".

I'd never read Sayers before, although I'm a huge fan Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis---names almost always mentioned with hers. It was a wonderful read: I really feel like I've discovered a great mind.

Books!

So I just got a shipment of books from Amazon. I love books, and since I'm self-employed, I budget for several work-related books a year. It's a legitimate tax deduction, a genuine need for a programmer, and it's a fun way to spend some "business" budget. Everyone wins.

I'll end up writing a review of each of these eventually, but I thought I'd just share the titles:

• The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer (both by by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen), and The Reasoned Schemer (by Daniel P. Friedman, William E. Byrd, and Oleg Kiselyov). I've been wanting to buy the "Schemer" books for quite some time: they're probably the strangest and best books on programming available. They're an introduction to software programming in Scheme (a Lisp dialect) written almost entirely as Socratic dialogues. I bought A Little Java, A Few Patterns by Felleisen and Friedman last year, which is an attempt to do something similar with Java. These books are brilliant. I can hardly wait to get going on them. We don't use Scheme at work, but the whole point of these books is not the learn a language, but to learn how to think about programming. That's definitely worth the investment of time and effort.



• Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong. Erlang is not a new language, but has been getting press and buzz in the last couple years. It's all about massive concurrency and distributed systems: it was developed by Ericsson to program telecom switches. I don't use Erlang in day-to-day work, but I wanted to get into some of the Erlang philosophy on concurrency, so I bought the book. Interestingly, Erlang seems to force you into doing what you're supposed to do in concurrent Java. I'm not expert on Java concurrency, but I'm above-average, concurrency being an interest of mine. Maybe I'll figure out a way to start using Erlang at work, but even if I can't, getting a glimpse at how Erlang does it is really helping me see how I ought to use Java in the context of concurrency.



• Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs by Mark Jason Dominus. Wow. My Perl is good (even "very good" or "fluent"), but this is a whole new level. Admittedly, I've figured out a lot of his tricks on my own, but this is an incredible book describing how to use functional programming techniques in Perl. It's almost like "How to use Perl like it's Lisp." This is an amazing book. I've been wanting to buy this for several months, and it was worth the wait. I do use Perl day-to-day, and my Perl is really very good. But this book will really help me ratchet up the level of my daily Perl grind.



• Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow by Seth Ladd, Darren Davison, Steven Devijver, and Colin Yates. I use Spring daily, and we've been slipping some Spring MVC in here and there at work. This book is supposedly the best on the subject, and I've been wanting to pick it up.



• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts. I end up with a lot of refactoring assignments at work, I finally decided to buy the definitive book on the subject. This is one I intend to read cover-to-cover.

So I have a lot of fun reading to do.


By the way, if you like books and you haven't tried it, you might want to check out LibraryThing. It's a great online application to track and maintain a virtual catalogue of all your books. I love it.

In one sitting...

Well, I bought Deathly Hallows today, then I came home and read it.

It was surprisingly good. In fact, I was astonished how well she managed to tie up the loose ends more observant Potter fans had noticed. I knew she was good, but not that good.


In other news, we've managed to lose our camera. Isn't that crazy? We have a decent DSLR, and we can't find it for anything.

Good evening, friends, and welcome!

My ten-year-old read Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. In three days. Four years ago. And she understood it: I had a little tete-a-tete with her when she was done, and asked her some basic comprehension questions: "Who was Aragorn?", "How did Denethor die?", "Where did they meet a balrog?" "Who was the brown wizard?" questions like that. She got them all right. We won't let her watch the movies, but she's read the books.

And like me, she liked Tom Bombadil the best. I can never forgive Peter Jackson for completely ignoring the most interesting character in the whole story.

Last year, she wanted to read A Christmas Carol by Dickens. I gave her permission to read my Charles Dickens "omnibus": a single volume containing four or five of Dickens' novels. She seemed to be taking quite a while to read A Christmas Carol, so I asked her how she liked it. She liked it a lot; but she liked Hard Times better, and Great Expectations was good too, although A Tale of Two Cities was too depressing, so she didn't finish it.

She occasionally refers to Ames and me as the "A. P. s"

The hardest thing with having a bona fide reader in the house is, finding age-appropriate material. She loves the Redwall books by Brian Jacques, but he's not writing them fast enough. So now I scour used-books-stores, looking for the wonderful novels I read as a kid. I found a used copy of The Mad Scientists' Club, which was a wonderful find. We also found The Egypt Game, and a bunch of sundries I read as a kid. And I obtained a complete set of The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper in a single volume a few years back. My ten-year-old's put quite a dent in that too.

But the real treasure was this:


That, friends, is a partial set of Children's Classic Library. We had a set when I was a kid: I think they were a gift from Uncle Mel. At any rate, I've been slowly piecing together a whole set from various used-book sources.


My favourite volumes as a kid were: Arabian Nights, King Arthur, and Robin Hood. I don't know how many times I read "The Genie and the Merchant", or "The Man with Two Hinds". I loved that book. In fact, I read it through the other night, and it was everything I remembered.

Gift idea for clumsy: a complete, "adult" (i.e. not a kids') edition of 1001 Nights (Arabian Nights). Just a helpful hint there...

A lot of people are shocked to learn we don't have T. V. Sure, we can watch DVDs on the computer if we need to: and it's a decent system. Or at least, it's convenient enough to use, and inconvenient enough to not become a habit. But people always ask "What do your kids do?". Well, reading is high on the list.

And you know what? They seem to like it that way.

For my own part, I've tried to gather good kids' books from before we had any kids, or before I ever met my wife. It's nice to be able to walk into a library and have an idea what books and authors my kids will like. Frankly, it's nice to know I got at least one thing right...

Books!

There's nothing quite as exciting as receiving a package in the mail. Well, almost nothing.

But today I had a triple-whammy exciting day:

1. A huge package arrived for me in the mail


2. The packages was from Dover Bible Fund (Books!)


3. The timing was perfect, because I just finished finishing my new bookcase!

So here's the package:


Looks a little dinged up? Yeah, it was. I assume that's the fault of USPS, rather than DBF.

And here it is unpacked:


What are those books? I'm glad you asked. I got the complete set of F. E. Raven (20 vols. plus an Index plus Letters of F. E. Raven, a couple volumes by J. B. Stoney, a couple booklets by M. W. Biggs, three copies of Closing Ministry of J. Pellatt, Vols. 1 & 2 and something called The Scroll of Time. Sounds Dispensationalist!

And, of course, I got all the books on my new bookcase:


That's pretty mad book storage density! That's actually a whole lot of books to fit in 29 1/2" wide bookcase. Actually, that bookcase turned out pretty well. Thanks for the help, Dad!