Amazon link I mentioned in this post how I picked up Me++ at the Whitney Museum, and started reading it. Some interesting ideas here. I found out later from Jofish that Mitchell is the current head of the Media Lab at MIT, which explains a lot about the book. There’s nothing particularly innovative about his […]
Category: reviews
Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith
Amazon link While we were driving up to Cornell, Jofish recommended this book. I’d read another of Smith’s books, Spares, borrowed from the library, but it made absolutely no impact on me, and I didn’t remember a single detail. But, in the mornings, while waiting for others to wake up, I picked up Only Forward […]
Finite and Infinite Games, by James Carse
Amazon link After seeing James Carse speak, I was eager to read his book, which I finally got around to doing on this vacation. It’s a deceptively simple book, with lots of short, simple sentences. But there’s a lot of thought packed into those sentences. I covered his overall gist in that previous post, where […]
Emotional Design, by Donald Norman
Amazon link I go back and forth on my feelings about Donald Norman. I think that his observation of The Design of Everyday Things was a really important insight in understanding how omnipresent the role of design is. I liked his idea of information appliances in The Invisible Computer. But I’ve always been left a […]
Wonderfalls
As I mentioned in my post on Firefly, I also got the DVD set of Wonderfalls in the same Amazon order. And I’ve watched that whole series now as well. My original review actually stands up pretty well even after watching the rest of the unaired episodes, in terms of describing the overall feel of […]
Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
Amazon link Picked this up in my big library trip of a couple weeks ago. Again, recommended by a friend. Plus, I’ve been curious about Palahniuk since seeing Fight Club. I really like his stylized writing in a lot of ways, and it’s easy to see the resemblance to the style of Fight Club. I […]
King Rat, by China Mieville
Amazon link I remembered China Mieville’s name from Aneel’s book page, so when I stopped by the library, I looked him up, and this was the one book by him that they had. It’s somewhat in the same vein as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, describing a London with more dimensions than most of us ever get […]
Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
Amazon link I stopped by the library a few days ago and picked up a bunch of books that I was vaguely interested in, but not enough to toss into one of my Amazon orders. Mostly quick reads, so you’ll see several book reviews over the next couple weeks as I slam through them. This […]
Firefly
[ed. note: As a complete break from the cognitive science type philosophy that has filled this space recently, we bring you a rant about television] I finally got the DVD set of Firefly last week, and have now watched the whole series. For those of you who don’t know, Firefly was a show created by […]
Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
Amazon link I’ve been talking about Gladwell for almost a month now, so it was high time I actually read Blink. The “thin-sliced” summary? It’s interesting, but shallow. By now, if you’ve read any of the interviews, or heard him speak on the radio, you probably know the premise of the book – that we […]
