Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

This short book contains the first few chapters of Auguste Comte’s work, translated by Frederick Ferre. It gives a very brief and compact introduction to the ideas but nevertheless remains rather hard going.

Comte believes that all sciences can be broken down into individual classifications. Each can then be split into the theoretical and the practical, the latter of which can be disgraced. You can then use them as building blocks. What I mean by this is that you start with physics. If you want to study astronomy, you can, but only after you have learned physics. Similarly, if you want to study chemistry, you must first study physics and astronomy.

He also talks about “social physics”, now known as sociology. He puts this at the top of the pile, thus making it the most difficult science to study because you need to have a grounding in almost everything else in order to effectively study it.

Between the Bridge and the River is a novel by Craig Ferguson. Ferguson is an American, but was born in Scotland, and hosts “The Late Late Show” which as you might guess, comes on after “The Late Show”.

The plot is complicated. It follows lots of different characters winding in and out of each other lives. Religious themes are explored extensively throughout the story, generally in quite a satirical light.

Ferguson does that thing that Douglas Adams someones did in taking a meaningless extra from the back of a scene and going into extraordinary detail about their life. If anything, he takes it to a new extreme.

His writing blends a number of different styles. The sex scenes for example are very blunt and matter-of-fact to the point where they could be at home in an Irvine Welsh novel. Whereas at other times we move in and out of the surreal that James Joyce would be proud.

It is a book that I think you really have to commit to to avoid getting half way through and thinking “what is this nonsense?” It all comes together at the end though and forms some kind of coherent story.

I’ve read Douglas Crockford’s book on JavaScript several time before, but it is always goof to have a refresher. It’s super-helpful and so short that you can easily get through it in a day if you try. I think the appendices are actually bigger than the text.

Auguste Comte and Positivism is a book by John Stuart Mill and best of all, was available free from the Kindle store. You can also get it from Project Gutenburg. The Kindle edition was not great because I suspect it was in an odd format – I could not select and lookup words for example.

The book itself is a sort of review of Comte’s work. I am sure there is a scholarly term for it.

I found it hard going. Mill writes without breaks for sub-headings. The book is divided into two parts and those are the only distractions from a constant stream of text. The first part looks at Positivism and the second part looks at Comte’s Religion of Humanity.

I found the second part easier to follow, perhaps because I had no background in what positivism was, or that I was just more interested in this part and so found it easier to concentrate.

Comte clearly has some views that are very silly today. Suppression of science and women for example are pretty much the worst things you can belief in. Underlying that seems to be Comte’s severe OCD. He needs to category and systematise everything. I am looking forward to reading more about his work though.

Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing tells the story of James Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon and myCFO. More accurately, it tells the tell of James Clark trying to programme his boat Hyperion, while in his spare time becoming a billionaire.

It is a strange story. Clark is almost certainly something special having made a huge amount of money with all this companies. He saw the future again and again. And he capitalised on this without actually making proper businesses.

Silicon Graphics was a business success. However, Netscape never was and was ultimately flogged to AOL (for shares) while Healtheon is a company I had not even heard of and had to look up on Wikipedia. There there is a short article to be found about how it merged with WebMD.

Clark’s skill seems to be creating an idea and giving it a spectacular IPO without ever really building a business. And he is very, very good at it.

I am a big fan of Steinbeck. While Of Mice and Men was enjoyable, it was The Grapes of Wrath that truly sold me on his writing. I do not consider myself that well read, but if you said you had you were and had concluded Grapes of Wrath was the best novel ever, I would find that totally believable. His graphic deception and insisting of emotion and hopelessness has been surpassed by no other book I had read.

It was for this reason that I picked up East of Eden.

Given the success of his earlier work, it seemed odd to discover that Steinbeck believed that everyone has one great novel in them – and that East of Eden was his.

I am glad nobody really asked me what it was about in my first few weeks reading it. The truth is I had no clue. It wasn’t about something notable like the Great Depression. It was just about life. Life in Salinas Valley, particularly the life of two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks.

Is it Steinbeck’s finest work? That I am not sure. However, I did enjoy reading it just as much as any of his other work.

Normally I am a big fan of Sam Vimes and the City Watch. I did not enjoy Thud! as much as I did some of the other novels though, due in part to finding it a bit harder to follow than most storylines.

It did produce a fantastic quote though.

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self

And it is not like a novel with The Watch, trolls, dwarves and Death can ever really not be enjoyable.

Watership Down is the tale of a group of rabbits who leave their borrow and set off, eventually making a new one on the so-named down.

Obviously it is a metaphor for the struggle between the left and right wing in modern politics. However, this is sometimes quite cleverly hidden. For example the author Richard Adams attempts to disguise this by saying in his introduction “this is just a story I made up for my daughters and has no more meaning than that.”

For month after month I have long awaited the arrival of a Discworld novel entirely devoted to the postal system. So much so that I assumed I had built it up so much in my mind that it could only disappoint. But it did not!

Moist von Lipwig is a cool character. More importantly however there was an indepth discussion of the clacks and how it works. Technical details, that’s what I like to see. There was not much laugh out loud humour until nearer the end, but enjoyable the whole way through.

What is all this nonsense about chapters though?

Good novel. I really enjoyed the sections on Levin’s farm management. There was also some stuff with someone called Anna, shagging around, which was less interesting, but she did provide an important message that you should always follow your heart. You know, until the train scene.

I finished it inside a week. This replaces finishing War and Peace as the greatest achievement of my life.