Reviews and Comments

If half of this book is true Billie Holiday had an extraordinary life. I'm guessing William Dufty is the author, but her voice shines through this.

I couldn't stop reading this book. The sheer amount of trauma, anger and racism she faced is overwhelming but over that she never stops being insightful and funny. She could give as good a she got, had some serious troubles, and a real violent streak too.

I'm pretty tired of hangovers and ending up drinking more than the couple of drinks I meant to when heading out. This is a pretty convincing argument that you're not really getting anything out of alcohol.

I did stop before for about 10 years, I think it's time again.

I stopped on chapter 10 of 15. It feels like a blog post or two stretched to a book, repetitive and unfocused.

It started pretty well I thought. Explaining how children in his era of public schools are completely separated from their family and the rest of the country. They're then given no love or affection and effectively taught to build a protective wall of confidence, while being taught a very nationalistic view of English history. He says this then explains people like David Cameron and Boris Johnson who went to public schools at the same time as the author. They're incapable of admitting mistakes, must always show total confidence and have no understanding of what British life is actually like.

Always a risk to go back to heroic fantasy novels I read when I was a teenager. It's not exactly subtle, but I very much enjoyed it. It moves at a fast pace, has a large cast of quite interesting characters and has something more to say than "the heroic goodies beat the baddies".

Think I might go read the Drenai novels again at some point, I remember liking Legend and Waylander.

This months book club pick

I got this from the library. It's absolutely heartbreaking, that poor girl.

This month's book club pick.

Written by the maintainers of Helm, I needed some context about the templates feature.

A lovely book, easy to read and clear. There are some typos in the code examples but that was literally always the case back then. It was a part of how you learnt I think, forced you into figuring it out.

It ends with a full game in z80 assembly which gives you routines for everything. He even goes through how you can write and test each in turn which is a more structured approach than I expected.

I'm messing around with building something on the spectrum, but after that will probably move to the gb for its hardware sprites and more sensible video memory layout.

Pretty short but clear book on Erlang. The first half consists of things I'm familiar with already (immutability, pattern matching, recursion, higher order functions). It was the last half that I was more interested in, process oriented programming and OTP. I'll have to read a more in depth book to understand it thoroughly, but it's a very interesting approach.

Alan Kay said Erlang is closer to what he meant by object oriented than Java or C++:

computinged.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/moti-asks-objects-never-well-hardly-ever/#comment-3766

Apparently police are called bobbies because the Met was created by Sir Robert Peel.

I bought this in Japanese, I think it's going to take a while!