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Recommended to me by a number of people recently. Loaned by Jascha. Very good. Somewhat annoying because Eco constantly uses languages that I don't read (French, Latin, German), but I found that most of the things in those languages were skippable, and it was pretty obvious when I needed to translate one to understand a plot point (yay Babelfish). Rips the world-conspiracy genre to shreds, and at the same time provides some insights into obsession and value.

This seemed like a Dave Duncan book, rather than a Bujold book. Strong characters, but the focus seemed more on the theological system than on the story. I kept thinking that it was a perfect framework for an Assassin's Guild game.

The deeply unsatisfying ending to this came up in a conversation, and I decided to reread it (again). The ending is still deeply unsatisfying. Just as it's starting to get really interesting, it's over. Still a great book, though.

Though I don't usually read business books, this one was fairly interesting. The thesis is that established, customer-focused companies are essentially helpless when confronted with a cheap, less-effective alternative. Because the interests of their customers force them to allocate resources towards maintaining and improving their current products, they can't muster the organizational will do develop and market lower-end products that don't meet their customers' needs. Christiansen points out a number of examples where these lower-end products repeatedly developed into larger markets and eventually displaced their higher-end competitors. The book was much longer than it needed to be, visiting and revisiting the same material many times, so I ended up skimming most of it.

Reasonably fun, surreal take on college life. Clearly an early work. Stephenson doesn't really make the multiple plot threads coherent until the end, and many of the characters are unsatisfying.

(Reread.) Not much to say. Great book.

An amazingly beautiful book that covers floral arabesques, calligraphic designs, geometric tilings, and muqarnas with hundreds of pages of gorgeous color photographs. Focuses on the design elements of tilings, with descriptions of how various patterns are derived and how to lay out new works.

(Reread.) I reread this to compare Gaiman's depiction of Faerie to Dunsany's depiction of Elfland. Gaiman's prose is very little like Dunsany's. It's much more matter of fact than Dunsany's lilt, and rightly so, as the realm he's describing is much less otherworldly than Elfland. There are plenty of nods to Dunsany though. I was amused to see a pair of foxes running alongside the unicorn in one of the paintings (unmentioned in the text). Gaimain's story is much more involved than Dunsany's. Where Dunsany spends long, flowing paragraphs setting a tone, Gaiman can rely on the beautiful illustrations by Vess. This frees up the text to present a much more intricate plot, with many more threads.

(Reread.) Dunsany's writing is amazing. Lyrical and evocative. It takes me a while to get into it each time I read one of his longer works — time to adjust the rhythm of my reading to match the prose. But it's worth it. Scenes like the forging of Alveric's sword and the arrival of the visitors in Erl sing with beauty.

The papers and presentations from the ACM's conferences on the History of Programming Languages. The first was interesting mostly for the historical descriptions of how the languages were created. The second was fascinating because the philosophies behind the languages were so different. The chapters on Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth and C++ were particularly interesting. I now have a hankering to play around with each of them (I never thought I'd want to learn C++, but Bjarne Stroustrup's explanations of why the language features work the way they do makes me want to give it a try). The Lisp chapter reminded me what I loved about coding in Lisp: a mix of programming elegance and humor that I haven't found elsewhere.

The papers and presentations from the ACM's conferences on the History of Programming Languages. The first was interesting mostly for the historical descriptions of how the languages were created. The second was fascinating because the philosophies behind the languages were so different. The chapters on Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth and C++ were particularly interesting. I now have a hankering to play around with each of them (I never thought I'd want to learn C++, but Bjarne Stroustrup's explanations of why the language features work the way they do makes me want to give it a try). The Lisp chapter reminded me what I loved about coding in Lisp: a mix of programming elegance and humor that I haven't found elsewhere.

(Reread.) Revisiting this was rewarding. Probably my second-favorite Culture novel. I think I picked up on a lot more of the intricacies this time around. The plot is convoluted enough that motivations are hard to understand on the first go-round.

Having rediscovered Alexander's Prydain Chronicles (and the joys of witty children's books), I picked up this triple volume. They're very similar to the Prydain Chronicles and each other. The main character, a young man, flounders around looking for his purpose in life, encountering characters along the way who impart lessons to him. Though each has a different, amusing set of adventures and a different mytho-historical setting (Homeric Greece, Classical China, and the India of the Panchatantra, respectively), I don't think any of these three stack up to the Prydain books. But they're pleasant.

Great book. Fast-paced and fun. A time-traveling researcher visits the Victorian era looking for information about a mysterious object, and gets swept up in a tangle of mistaken attractions and humorous adventures. Highly recommended.