#16 – The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross

August Leave a Comment

I’ve been blabbing on about Charlie’s excellent blog for a while now, both here and on Twitter, so it should come as no surprise that I’d eventually get around to reading some of his books. I figured I’d start with the Laundry series (named for the nickname of the super secret British bureaucracy/counter-espionage agency/counter-nameless-many-tentacled-horrors-from-beyond-spacetime agency that employs Bob Howard, the series’ protagonist) because the premise sounded interesting, and because like a lot of genre fiction, it’s bloody hard to find copies of his books that aren’t those horribly shitty, fall-apart-if-you-look-at-them mass market paperbacks, and the two Laundry books were the only ones I could get trade or hardcover copies of. So, the premise: mathematics and magic are, on some level, more or less the same thing. This actually makes a certain amount of sense the way Stross explains it. I’m going to quote about two and a half pages of… Continue Reading →

#15 – The Burning Land, by Bernard Cornwell

August Leave a Comment

Having somehow become hooked on certain kinds of historical adventure fiction (sea stories and Viking-era England, apparently), I spent several months scouring bookstores trying to snuffle out a used or remaindered or overstock (and therefore affordable to me) copy of Bernard Cornwell’s latest installment of his Saxon stories. My father had left the first four books with me, and they had captured the swash-buckling bits of my imagination. The Burning Land is nowhere near as good as those others. I don’t know if Cornwell’s writing fell off, or if I’m just getting too used to the tropes he’s using (that can happen, especially in a series; you don’t want to read the same thing over and over again, even when you sort of do), but I was disappointed in what I felt was an over-reliance on shorthand and established characterization. Sure, five books in readers should already be pretty familiar… Continue Reading →

#14 – Why Your World is About to Get A Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin

August 1 Comment

Part of the point of this book—the whole point, perhaps—is numbers, but I’m afraid I’m not going to get very deeply into that. There’s three reasons, generally speaking, why I don’t review very much non-fiction. The first is that it’s rare for me to find a subject that I’m interested in enough to read two or three hundred consecutive pages of facts about it. The second is that I’m used to the attention to language that goes along with literary fiction, and with a handful of exceptions, most of the non-fiction I’ve encountered is very poorly written, or worse, written by someone who gives the impression in the text that they could do better, but doubt their target audience could cope. Third, non-fiction generally collects a bunch of facts and tries to present an argument about what those facts might mean, and the idea behind reviewing them is that you… Continue Reading →

Thoughts on BookCamp Toronto 2010

August 3 Comments

This past Saturday a bunch of local and not-so-local book folks got together for BookCamp Toronto 2010, an “unconference,” which I think is a buzzword for conferences that have seminars rather than lectures or presentations. Most of the sessions were like that: lots of conversation around a particular topic with a moderator (or moderators) keeping things moving. I was a little rusty, but felt at home in almost no time at all. Most of my university courses followed that format, and I was very, very good at university (much better than at this whole grown-up, working-for-a-living thing—that’s why I was so gung-ho about becoming a professor—some people can work a party, some people can work a phone line or a sales floor: I can work a classroom). But in all seriousness, I hope that I was able to add something to the discussion for others. I attended the following sessions:… Continue Reading →

Do Books Need to be “Social”?

August Leave a Comment

Social media isn’t going away. Anyone arguing that isn’t paying attention or is just straight up not very bright. Everything is “going social”. Services like Facebook and Twitter, when coupled with the rise in popularity and greater affordability of mobile computing are making it easier for folks to stay connected to one another over long distances, and to feel like they have a relationship with their favourite brands, celebrities, media outlets, whatever. In some ways it’s a marketer’s wet dream. There’s this idea that social media, or the social web, or whatever you want to call it, is about making direct connections between people rather than, say, connections between dumb web pages and PDF documents and what have you. This dichotomy is true if you think of the Internet as being largely made up of automated, corporate-controlled, business-centred websites and tools. Accurate statistics have always been hard to come by,… Continue Reading →

Called It

August Leave a Comment

Do you remember last year when I complained about the absolutely dismal coverage of Richard Flanagan’s speech (among other things), because I thought the Australian and Canadian markets had some things in common and maybe, just maybe, the things Flanagan was worried about might have implications for us here in Canada, and that maybe we should talk about what setting that kind of a precedent meant? You know, before it became so urgent that we might panic and do something stupid. Do you remember that? I remember that. Well, I fucking told you so. It’s still not too late to have the (public, reasoned, analytical) conversation we should have had a year ago, but it’s coming down to the wire. Any of you boys and girls in the press want to actually step the fuck up this time?

Dear Facebook

August 3 Comments

re: recent changes to Facebook Connect/Open Graph I am concerned that I had to ‘opt out’ rather than ‘opt in’ to letting Facebook and my friends on Facebook release my private information to third parties not of my choosing. This is a disturbing trend, and it’s clearly not in keeping with the spirit (nor perhaps the letter) of your agreement with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Frankly, it feels like Beacon all over again, with OpenID grafted on top of it. I will continue to tighten my privacy settings and scale back my use of Facebook until such time as you have default settings and policies/practices that treat my privacy with respect, rather than making me feel like you’d sell my information to anyone and everyone, and just hope I won’t notice. best, August C. Bourré

Bam! Pow! Thung!

August Leave a Comment

So Ken Auletta wrote this thing in the New Yorker about ebooks. I’m feeling kind of schizophrenic about it: I want to talk about it, and I want very badly to not talk about it at all. I don’t know much about him, but in the Washington Post, Jack Shafer said, “I dare you to name a more plugged-in media and communications technology reporter than New Yorker staff writer Ken Auletta,” and I can’t decide if he’s being serious or not. A quick look at Auletta’s books tells us that, in long form at least, he’s not a media/tech writer at all, but rather a business writer who happens to write about the the business of media and technology, which is whole other fucking box of frogs, and is a nuance Shafer, as a reporter who specializes in calling out other reporters for lack of rigor (coughmonkeyfishingcough) probably should understand.… Continue Reading →

A Question

August 7 Comments

I’ve been running vestige.org for just a touch over a decade now, and one thing that I have always, always, always said, is that I didn’t want the site to be about making money. No advertising, no affiliate links, no donations or sponsored posts or any of that nonsense. What you do on your site is your business, but I didn’t want any of that here. Most of my current readership was not around back when I used to be vocal about this sort of thing, so it probably won’t matter to you folks, but I remember it quite clearly, and it matters to me. But. This site isn’t very expensive to maintain, if you define “not very expensive” in relation to some kind of objective measure, like the average income for a thirty-something, university-educated white male living in Toronto. The thing is, I don’t make the average income for… Continue Reading →

Doctorow’s Syndrome

August 1 Comment

The behaviour of those suffering from Doctorow’s Syndrome is characterized by the obsessive need to share information—regardless of the value of that information or the utility of sharing it—for the purpose of asserting their moral superiority. Though rarely contagious, frequent exposure to patients suffering from Doctorow’s Syndrome may result in a reaction known as The Hobbes Effect. Treatment consists of regular aural or written applications of the phrase, “shut the fuck up already, Cory.”