Musing about books and covers and “judging” and reading

I read a lot of books. For decades I used to average ten books a week, but nowadays it’s probably closer to two or three. Nevertheless, I read a lot. And I’ve been reading a lot for over forty years.

When it comes to choosing what I read, I have a variety of techniques:

1. Past-predicts-future: This is by far my most common technique. When I read someone for the first time, and I really like the book, the author goes into my unmemorised unwritten “look-out-for” list. Then, whenever I go to a bookshop and browse around, that author’s name is stuck in my head as I traverse the aisles, and if I see something new by that author, I pick it up. Both aisle-traversal as well as pick-newer are themselves techniques which I describe later. Past-predicts-future is an unordered list of authors I like whom I then look out for when wandering past any collection of books.

2. Aisle-traversal: Whenever I go to a physical bookshop (and here I mean a real bookshop, not a newsagent masquerading as one), I have a simple plan. I go through new releases, shop recommendations, signed books. Then, if time permits, I wander across to mystery/thriller/crime/detection. Once that’s done, if I still have time, I shuffle past the literature section. And then it’s science/nature/mathematics/physics. Which tends to lead me towards computing, and then I settle for a while in business/management. If I still have time on my hands, I get to biographies, then poetry, then art and history, finally humour. Aisle-traversal is an ordered list that defines my journey within a physical bookshop, very sensitive to the time I have available.

3. Pick-newer, pick-older and its variants. Quite often, the first book I read by an author is somewhere in the middle of that person’s oeuvre. If I like that book, then I move into the past-predicts-future technique, but only picking newer books, chronological-forward. If I like the second book as well, then, depending on how much I like the two books, I go into different overdrives. The commonest overdrive is pick-older-from-the-start: I start reading everything that author has written, in chronological order. Sometimes that develops into get-whole-collection-signed-first-edition. Occasionally I don’t wait, I try and acquire the complete works signed straight after book two. This technique is really about extending the reach of an author already on my to-read list.

4. Trusted-friend: The first three techniques are all about authors who are already on my to-read list. So how does someone or something enter the list in the first place? Here I have four subcategories. The first is written reviews: I am a big fan of Kirkus Reviews: a starred Kirkus review is pretty much an order for me to go out and buy the book. I also read both New York Review of Books as well as London Review of Books, and occasionally the Times Literary Supplement as well. The Economist and the Financial Times are probably the only other “reviews” that make this cut. The second subcategory is the human trusted friend, someone I know whose reading taste I respect. I have a small number of such friends; there is a variant to this subcategory, where the friend is an author. In third place is the social web, the chatter from twitter and facebook and the blogosphere. And finally there’s the Amazon recommendation. These are my primary techniques of introducing someone new into the mix.

5. Pre-publication reviews: There are some publishers I trust enough to go looking into what they’ve come out with. I’m always relaxed about buying Dover for maths and physics and logic and number theory; I like the kind of stuff that Nicholas Brealey puts out, so I look out for the imprint; similarly I have time for O’Reilly and Penguin and Pearson for technology and management, for No Exit Press and Mysterious Press and Hard Case Crime. My sister’s a publisher, so sometimes I find out about authors from her. You get my drift. Sometimes I inject fresh blood into my reading stream as a result of the publisher’s reputation. It’s really an upstream review, when you think about it. A commissioning editor is a bit like a reviewer, only pre-publication.

6. Things-that-go-bump-into-me: This is the serendipity technique, the random element. How I discover authors I’ve never heard of, authors who don’t come recommended. Three subtypes. First, because I am known to read, I get given books as presents for all kinds of things and in all sorts of ways. Second, because I am at an airport or similar, in a hurry, with a long trip ahead, and I haven’t had the time to load up with fiction. [I have the Bible and a bunch of business/management articles always to hand]. In such cases I look at the endorsements on the cover and back of the book. Occasionally there’s a third route, a variant of the endorsement. I check out the reviews inside the book, but this is rare for two reasons: they’re not there, or I haven’t the time.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I’ve just finished reading Daniel Suarez’s Daemon. A book I bought really as an airport read, one of those “exclusive airport only editions”, bought because I’d already picked something else up and I was looking for a “2 for £20” companion.

The front cover looked vaguely infotech, so I started browsing. The tagline “Michael Crichton for the Information Age” didn’t do much for me. The back cover did have some endorsements: someone from Google, someone from the White House, someone from Time Magazine. Not quite Yawn. But close.

So I flipped to the back of the book. Two sections of interest there. One, “Further Reading”. A list of books that included Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab, Carl Zimmer’s Parasite Rex, Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Kevin Phillips’ Wealth and Democracy, the McClure/Scambray/Kurtz Hacking Exposed and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. Oh-kaay. Mr Suarez had my attention now. Anyone who recommends books like that for further reading was someone I was interested in reading.

Then I flipped back a little. Acknowledgments. The people the author wanted to thank. And there I found Stewart Brand, Don Donzal, Craig Newmark, John Robb, along with the authors of the Further Reading list.

I was hooked.

I finished the book last night.

It was excellent. Well written, consistent, different, exciting. [Thank you Daniel Suarez. I shall be looking out for more from you.]

You know something? All this made me think. Maybe it’s time for authors to put the names of their influences and mentors on some easily accessible part of their books. A bit like a blogroll, it’s one way of figuring out what the author’s about. I think this will become more important as things like the Kindle take off worldwide.

Views? Has this been helpful? Should I continue to share stuff like this. Comments welcome.

Outlook: Cloudy: Floating up into the cybersphere

Just finished watching/reading David Gelernter being interviewed by John Markoff and Clay Shirky. Spellbinding.

You can find the entire interview here in Edge. Thank you everyone at Edge.

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Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to run across a good deal of Gelernter’s works; Mirror Worlds was probably my favourite, though Muse in the Machine sometimes ran it pretty close.

If you want a quick taste of the way he thinks, take a look at the manifesto he wrote nearly a decade ago. How he visualised clouds and lifestreaming, in the same way as he visualised the Web and java a decade earlier.

I’m not going to say any more, I don’t want to spoil things for you. Just read it. While I go off and dig up my battered copy of Mirror Worlds to read again.

Slow down, you move too fast

…you got to make the morning last
just kicking down the cobblestones
looking for fun and feelin’ groovy
Hello lamppost,
What cha knowing?
I’ve come to watch your flowers growing.
Ain’t cha got no rhymes for me?
Doot-in’ doo-doo,
Feelin’ groovy.
Got no deeds to do,
No promises to keep.
I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you,
All is groovy.

Simon and Garfunkel, The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)

Don’t you just love that song? All fresh and bubbly and oh so sixties.

But that’s not what this post is about. Instead, I wanted to use the first line of the song to talk about Capo. What a wonderful idea.

Take a song. Slow it down. Change pitch if you want. I haven’t done much with it as yet, I only have a trial version, but for sure I’m going to get the real thing. Capo is doing with music what Ribbit is doing with voice. All possible because we live in a digital age.

My thanks to Chris Messina for the heads-up.

[Disclosure: While I have nothing whatsoever to do with Capo, I am for sure involved with Ribbit.]

Cutting the mustard

I love food. I love eating it, cooking it, preparing it, buying the ingredients. I love watching people cook. I love researching food culture and habit and folklore and history.

Yes, I love food. I love everything about food.

One of my all-time favourite dishes is made from ilish maach (a particular type of fish popular in Bengal), where the fish is cooked in mustard oil, with liberal use of mustard seed and chillies. When cooked properly, it looks something like this:

[My thanks to Indranil Sen and Jayashree Roy for the photo and for their wonderful recipe, which can be found here in Palki.]

I didn’t just come across this recipe randomly, I spent some time looking around the web for the right one: I was particularly interested in demonstrating a sense of the rich gravy that dominates my memory of the dish. And along the way I came across this article: The Mustard Oil Conspiracy. I’d read a good deal of Vandana Shiva’s work before, in particular those tracts and booklets related to the join between food and patents, but I hadn’t come across this one before. Unbelievable.

And you know something? More and more, I’m realising the truth of what people like Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and John Perry Barlow and Larry Lessig have been saying all along. Today’s battles about IPR aren’t about commerce, they’re about culture. There’s nothing more cultural than food.

Recent events suggest things are going from bad to worse now; the optimist in me thinks it’s “the darkest hour before the dawn”.

What next? I guess we should wait patiently for people to be arrested for selling kitchen equipment. On the basis that the equipment was used to cook food using “illegally” obtained recipes. Or something as ridiculous as that.

Yes, things will get ridiculous if we let them. Or sublime, as in the case of ilish maach. Our choice.

Losing control of the device

I’ve been fascinated by the space where communications meets computing for quite some time now, ever since the early 1980s. When I started working for Burroughs Corporation in 1981, I hadn’t really seen a “proper” computer before; my experience of computers was limited to playing hours and hours of the text-based Star Trek on a wealthy friend’s Commodore Pet between 1977 and 1980.

The first real computing experience I had was in working on Burroughs mainframes (specifically the B1000 series and B6000 series) via dumb TD830 80×24 terminals; for me, computers and networks therefore went together right from the get-go. Having been brought up on a traditional journalist diet rich with Smith-Corona and Remington standards and portables, it seemed magical to me that I could type things using a simple “language” (a text management system based on something similar to SGML) into a keyboard on the 1st floor of a building, and documents would come out on gigantic printers on the 9th floor of the same building.

I became used to the concept of a network, of being able to move data around, of being able to attach and detach devices and to address them, to direct stuff to them, to receive stuff on them. I became used to being able to run software on boxes on one floor and to view what was happening on another floor. But the network was limited to the building I was in, the protocols were proprietary, and the devices were dumb and locked down.

A few years later, my astonishment grew. I found out that I could run software in one building and demonstrate it in another using a display unit, a modem and a phone line: I was introduced to dial-up (and, incidentally,  to a world where 4800 baud was normal and 9600 baud was super-fast). The “network” was now more than just one building, the buildings could be miles apart, but everything else remained the same. Proprietary architectures, proprietary devices, proprietary protocols.

Incidentally, it was around then that someone recommended the Steven King film to me, but the video was not easy to find. It is now. And I would recommend that any of you that wants to know a little bit about computers and communications watches the film, Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing, which was made in 1972.

Then a few things started happening all at the same time. First, the PC came along. [At Burroughs, we had networked multitasking colour PCs in 1983-84, from Convergent Corp, running something called CTOS; we marketed them as B20s and B25s, running our own variant BTOS). The advent of the PC meant that there was now considerable intelligence within the device, even if memory was limited and fixed storage almost nonexistent. We were beginning to lose control of the device, which was no longer a dumb slave to the mainframe. But it was only a beginning: the only PC was the IBM PC, and the only operating system was MS-DOS.

Two other things happened, both possibly due to regulatory pressure. First,  IBM seemed to be allowing people to build “IBM Compatible” PCs; the AT bus became the ISA bus, and clones started appearing everywhere. Around the same time, “open systems” began to make their mark, apparently driven by the availability of SVID from AT&T; organisations like X/Open, with their XPG and later POSIX specifications, really started to drive the open systems world forward.

It was around the same time that I started getting interested in “the internet”, I was a fairly late starter. In fact I didn’t even have an e-mail account until that year, nor did I belong to any internet groups or bulletin boards until then. In fact, it wasn’t until much later, 1994 in fact, that I had regular access to the internet, as the Web was emerging. And it took till 1997 before I had regular internet access at home.

So in a relatively short space of time, maybe a decade, I watched dumb proprietary “tied” devices connected to proprietary architectures transform painfully into intelligent open distributed devices that connected to open architectures and operating systems. The computer industry were beginning to lose control of the device.

To my way of thinking, the same thing had already happened to the telecommunications side of the industry, albeit more slowly. First it was “any colour you like, as long as it’s black” Bakelite phones you could only rent from the telco. Then the telco gave you coloured phones, but you still had to rent them. You were “subscribers”, not customers. After a while they started letting you buy the phone, but only from them. It took a long time before you could buy your edge device from anywhere, anytime.

Computers and telecommunications. Two industries with a history of monopoly participants, both losing control of their “device”. The first time around, it wasn’t too painful for either industry. Control of the hardware was soon replaced by control of the software — in the case of IT, this meant locked-down desktops, centralised “builds” for the desktop, complete emasculation of the technology while flying the flag of security and confidentiality. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not.

That was then.

Today, in a converged world where digital natives have entered the workplace, device lockdowns are no longer sustainable. The objective — that of keeping enterprises secure from unauthorised access and keeping confidential information confidential — need not change, it is perfectly rational.

What has to change is the way the objective is being met. The historical way of doing this is pretty asinine when you think about it. I’m going to loan you a Ferrari and then take the wheels off and immobilise the steering wheel and block access to the tank. Because that way you won’t steal the car or hit something or cause any damage.

So now new ways are needed. New ways that begin with services that are delivered on a device-independent basis. Services that work out the hardware and software specifications of the device at the point of delivery, and adjust everything accordingly.

This time around, the converged industry has really lost control of the device. And the customer has gained that control, in the name of choice and preference and style and affordability. And even freedom.

That’s why I’m still excited about the promise of networked IT. Because we’ve lost control of the device. Any fool can make money in a bull market. I’m excited that I’m with a bunch of guys who are going to make money despite the market.