Books

I just finished reading (well, two days ago) Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. It's a sort of cautionary tale of biotech gone wrong, about playing god, revenge, jealousy, personal pain in a complicated world, and so on. It's a really good book and there's lots to think about, the responsibility of an engineer for what they produce, for one thing.

This was only the second Atwood book I've ever read, the first being A Handmaids Tale, which was for a undergrad English class. I'll probably read a few of her others now. I tried to read Orwell's 1984 after I read The Handmaids Tale, as they deal with similar themes, but I never quite got through it, or started on it really. Too much oppressive society all at once is bad. Atwood hasn't had the pop culture impact as Orwell, but I guess he had a few years on her.

I started reading it, because I need yet another distraction from studying for my upcoming midterms. They have these cars that run on methane, which some call fartmobiles. The protagonist throws a brick on one from a great height, and it explodes, and out comes the slang for methanol in this world: assoline.

Well, I thought it was funny. Humph.

Also, crypto-Tourette's: generating random input to help seed a new key!

Cory Doctorow, author of Down and out in the magic kingdom and Eastern standard tribe, gave an interesting talk at an O'Reilly conference recently about ebooks. Mostly he talks about how ebooks are different from paper books and so on, and why he's released his work under creative commons licenses. Down and out was recently relicensed such that anyone can create derivative works of it, such as plays, fan fictions, and so on.

Anyway, I'm not doing it justice, but if you are interested in intellectual property and how/why/if it should be protected, then it's worth reading.

On a side note, I downloaded both Down and out and EST, and put them on Chinook (our new laptop). As Cory Points out, downloads of ebooks tend to be more like people browsing books in a book store, except without the risk of catching something nasty. It remains to be seen if I will actually get around to reading them.

Finished it last night at about 4:00 am. I guess that would be this morning. Whatever. It was a very good book. I liked it. That is all.

Aside from his slightly annoying habit of refering to everything in Paris as "famous" in the first few chapters, and my initial bewilderment at what was made up and what was real, this book is turning out to be really good. But if Gabe over at Penny Arcade says it's good, then it's good right?

He does a good job of writing a page turning. I just read over a 100 pages, just because the chapter would end with a little cliff hanger, and you just have to keep going so that you can find out what happens.

But oh well, time for bed.