96 dB

When I decided to reimplement 96db.com to run under Django, I read Castro's HTML, XHTML & CSS Visual Quickstart Guide, and it fulfilled the "visual quick start" portion of its title—it got me up and running quickly with reasonable results. However, after several frustrated hours spent tweaking style parameters, I still had trouble getting the layout and presentation I wanted for my site.

In Don't Make Me Think, Krug strongly recommends Eric Meyer's writing on CSS, so after finishing that, I sought out CSS: The Definitive Guide on Amazon. I'm glad I did.

Meyer's book is perfect for programmers. It describes the models that underly CSS thoroughly, along with the algorithms that browsers use for layout. Much more so than Castro's book, it leaves me confident that I know what's going on.

While I was reading, I tweaked a few bits of my site's CSS, and I got a lot closer to my original intent. If you really want to understand CSS, this seems to be the book to get.

This is a short and sweet introduction to usability, targeted specifically at web design, but generally applicable to broad areas of interface design. I picked it up because it seems to be commonly cited as a classic of the field. It's a well-designed, straightforward book that hammers home the point that there's nothing complicated about usability and user interface design—it really is just refined common sense.

Krug's three laws of usability are well-taken, but the most useful parts for me were the chapters on informal usability testing and accessibility. For the latter, there appear to be some good references for further reading. This is a very quick read, and there isn't a lot of depth, but it seems like a decent overview.

I was very sad when Kurt Vonnegut died last year (so it goes). He has been a hero to me for more than twenty years (since high school, when I discovered his novels). I had some reservations when I heard that a posthumous collection of unpublished stories and essays was being released, since if these pieces were worthy of his canon, Vonnegut probably would have published them on his own.

My fears were realized when I read this collection, but I'm still glad that I had the opportunity to read these pieces. A lot of Vonnegut's best writing drew heavily—though often tangentially—on his experience as a POW in Dresden, Germany during World War II. This collection contains several short stories that are explicit reflections on that experience, and the overall effect is almost a holographic recreation of those events. It's a bit of a mess creatively, but it hammers home just how much that experience shaped Vonnegut's world view.

Goodbye, Kurt. I miss you a lot.

I was skeptical when my book club chose Prodigal Summer because my previous exposure to Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible) didn't end well—indeed, I couldn't finish it at all. Happily, I fared much better with this one.

The themes of Prodigal Summer strongly echo those of Richard Powers's best work. Like Powers did in The Gold-Bug Variations, Kingsolver entwines multiple story lines with unifying threads taken from biological science. Here the unifying threads include a lone coyote den, the extinct American chestnut, and pheromones.

The novel has three human story lines that circle around each other and eventually interconnect. All take place in a rural county in Appalachia. There's Deanna, a fiercely independent park ranger, Nannie and Garnett, an aging pair of neighbors, and Lusa, a newly-married transplant caught up in family politics.

What strikes me about this novel is that all of the characters are compelling, and each of the three story lines is worthwhile on its own. Kingsolver's women are all strong and independent, but her men are a little disappointing in their ignorant stubbornness. Her dialogue and her powers of description are strong.

This is the most enjoyable book my book club has chosen to date. Recommended.

Every night, Lisa or I read a bedtime story to Kevin. Left to his own devices, he usually wants to read a Goosebumps book or something with even less redeeming value. I have been trying off and on to introduce him to some of the classic children's chapter books, so when it's my turn to read, we usually read a few chapters from a longer book. Since Charlotte's Web was such a success, I thought we might try another of E.B. White's novels.

For the most part, Stuart Little held Kevin's attention, but it wasn't nearly as enjoyable as Charlotte. Where the language and subject matter of Charlotte's Web is almost timeless and the sentences simply roll off the tongue, Stuart Little feels very dated and awkward, both in language and content. Charlotte has a beautiful story arc that starts on page one and doesn't fully pay off until the end. Stuart winds all over the place and leaves the reader hanging at the end.

A little over a year ago, my book club read The Kite Runner as its first selection. I didn't care for it that much, and I certainly didn't want to endure Hosseini's amateurish writing again, but I was overruled and the book club picked A Thousand Splendid Suns.

I was pleasantly surprised. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a much more compelling book than its precursor. The characters are more nuanced, the story has a better-structured arc, and the descriptions are richer. I think Hosseini may actually be a good writer and The Kite Runner simply suffered from being exploded from a short story into a full-length novel.

Pastoralia is a collection of disturbing, thought-provoking speculative-fiction short stories. Saunders had been recommended several times over the past few years, and I'm glad I finally checked him out. I'll probably go back and read his first collection, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, at some point.

The Accidental Time Machine is a time-travel novel that mostly manages to avoid the paradoxes of time travel (it does a good job until the very end). It's breezily written and fast-paced, and I enjoyed it somewhat (especially the parts set at M.I.T. in the future), but it's a minor work at best.