Monday, July 18, 2005

Time for books

Lots to add from my two weeks "vacation"

School books.

SB 7. The Anarchist in the Library - Siva Vaidhyanathan. The two themes of the book? Copyrights are being abused by the owners and anarchy is not necessarily bad. My book for leading the group discussion. Luckily I went first, so I didn't look too bad by comparison.

SB 8. Free Culture - Lawrence Lessig. More about copyrights and the government and greedy people. But it came as a free pdf, so at least he sticks to his principles. BTW, this guy was also the founder of Creative Commons, which I need to look into more.

SB 9. Digital Copyright - Jessica Litman. Can you guess what this one was about?

SB 10. The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information - Bernardo A. Huberman. There are hidden patterns in the Web and physics can predict them. Somehow the whole 99 pages seemed like common sense to me. Which means I probably missed the point.

Regular books.

42. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - JK Rowling. A prelude to #6 which is staring at me but has not yet been started. School ends on July 29(ish), I may have to wait until then. Oh, who am I kidding. As soon as I finish my book club book, it's the next thing I'll open.

43. Mirror Mirror - Gregory Maquire. Another of the fairy tale retellings. This on was Snow White, the dwarfs were rocks and the Borgias showed up but it still managed to make sense. Good book. Makes Lost that much more disappointing, Maquire is 3 for 4 but that one was so bad it may need to be weighted more.

44. The Rule of Four - Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. A pretty good book, especially for one bought in an airport. It reminded me of Foucault's Pendulum with a bit of DaVinci Code thrown in for good measure. Kind of book-nerd thriller.

2 comments:

Susan said...

It's all about the fun books, isn't it?

LadyLinoleum said...

Totally agree with you about Lost. Boy did that one suck...I loved Wicked too. LOVED it. Oh well, I am going to try Mirror, Mirror.