Books Read in 2006

I have roughly 7,000 photos in my library, growing at about 2,000 photos each year, and it's getting increasingly hard to keep organized. This is the first photography book that I've read that has made me immediately change my behavior. I'm not rushing out to buy Photoshop CS2, so I can't use Adobe Bridge as suggested by the author, but the techniques Krogh suggests can be easily adapted to other software (Photoshop Elements or the Adobe Lightroom beta, for example). The "ratings pyramid" he espouses is a great idea — obvious in retrospect — and I'm starting to implement it today.

This was better than I expected, given the mediocre reviews it gets in comparison to the previous books in this series. I'm bummed to be caught up and now have to wait for Mr. Martin to publish the next in the sequence.

I recently joined a book club, and this was the first pick. It made for interesting discussion, but I didn't care that much for the book itself. It was very interesting to read about an Afghani protagonist, and to learn about life in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but the writing is uneven, and there are a couple of really annoying scenes, including a "deathbed conversion" to Islam, and a fist-fight to the death.

This is widely regarded as the strongest book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, but I think the first three have been uniformly good. This is great epic fantasy.

This is a terrific pop science take on music and its affect on the human brain. It's very well written, and it's wholly consistent with everything I've studied on the subject. I didn't learn all that much, but it was a welcome refreshing read.

More of the usual advice.

Can you tell that I finished ten books before going back and writing down my thoughts? I honestly don't remember much of this one.

This book inspired me to start running for the first time in my life, and I spent a terrific 2.5 months training before getting sidelined by tendonitis. I'm looking forward to getting some new shoes and starting up again in the spring.

A terrific follow-on to A Game of Thrones.

This is a kind of fun meditation on photographic inspiration. The techniques presented are pretty ordinary, but some of the photos are quite nice.

There was nothing new here for me, and the photos were completely uninspiring.

I probably need to read this again.

This is another self-contained Tim Powers novel, and it's good. It centers on a device created by Einstein that is a powerful tool and a weapon more horrible than the atomic bomb. It deals reasonably well with time travel and some of its narrative difficulties. If the previous two sentences don't scare you off, you'll probably like it.

This is a very good photography book for its intended audience: snapshot photographers. There's no technical jargon, it's very readable, and it contains very usable advice. For more advanced photographers, it's still worthwhile as a reminder of many simple things you can do to take better, more meaningful photos.

I'm not usually a fan of "knights and dragons" fantasy, but George R.R. Martin transcends the genre with this first volume in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Although I was frustrated with the language at first (too many realms, visages, destriers, etc.), I soon became absorbed in the large cast of complex, flawed, and interesting characters. Martin's fantasy world is very realistic in the sense that without proper medical care, even a minor wound can be fatal — and he's not afraid to kill a major sympathetic character if the story demands it. After 200 pages or so, I was so absorbed that I didn't want to put it down.

There are several more books available in this series (and at least one or two that remain to be published). I'm very interested in revisiting this fictional world, and if the other books are half as good as this one, I'll eventually read them all.

I liked this better than Singularity Sky.

None of these techniques were new to me, but they are powerful tools for analysis, and the presentation was adequate.

This, one of Powers's earliest novels, is a swashbuckling tale of pirates and voodoo. I like his novels that are set in modern times more, but this was enjoyable.

I discovered Philip Eby's blog Dirt Simple a couple of months ago, and his approach to mindfulness, mind hacks and getting things done resonated well with me. So when he collected his best posts and published them as a book, I happily ponied up his asking price and bought one. I'm glad that I did.

Eby's writing probably won't resonate with a wide audience, but for a reader with a programming background, it's one of the most approachable and useful books on introspection that I've found. Throughout, Eby uses computer programs and computing machinery as metaphors for the mind and the brain. They are good metaphors, and the conclusions he reaches by following their implications are interesting and non-obvious.

At present, You, Version 2.0 is available only directly from the author .

This is a nice complement to Langer's Mindfulness, in that where Langer's book describes research supporting a theory of mindfulness, Gunaratana's is wholly practical &mdash it teaches how to live mindfully. This is the best guide to meditation practice I've read to date.

I'm not a big fan of speculative fiction short stories, but Tim Powers is always worth reading.

I remember that my Dad read several books from this series when he was a department head at his school, and as my worklife skews more toward management, I figured I'd see if they have anything to offer me. Although Blanchard and Johnson's parable of the "One Minute Manager" is well articulated and simple, it's not obvious to me that its specifics are a good fit for my situation. This one bears some more thinking.

I've been coming at the topic of mindfulness from several angles over the past two years or so, from meditation as a stress-reduction technique, from "mind like water" in David Allen's Getting Things Done, and from a general desire to get more out of life by living in the moment.

This book approaches mindfulness from yet another perspective — the psychology of graceful aging and its implications for living well.

Langer is a psychologist who has done research on "mindlessness" in the elderly and in the workplace, and she credibly describes the horrors of living on autopilot. There is much to be said for questioning our assumptions and our mindless habits and looking for ways to live in the moment. Langer's book provides a background for why this is so.

This started out promising but was bogged down by some very mundane writing, and the whole thing fell to pieces at the end when the author basically says "this is just the start of a series, so I'm not going to bother having a real conclusion". That approach is fine, but if you're going to do that, you damn well better say so on the book jacket. I feel robbed — the author wasted my time.

Jack Kornfield is a highly regarded teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, and his teaching, books, and recordings have been instrumental in bringing that tradition to the West. I don't think this book is structured very well, but it's worthwhile. There's interesting introductory material and a great overview at the end, both of which are terrific for a reader who is just starting to learn about vipassana (insight) meditation and the Buddhist tradition, but in the middle there are some very long sections that are really only useful to someone who is already some distance down the path.

I don't know if this is Kornfield's best book to introduce these topics, but I haven't found anything to suggest that his other books are a better place to start.

If you asked me which one book an intermediate amateur photographer should read, I would probably suggest this one. It's very clear, and it suggests lots of non-obvious but useful techniques. I may have to buy a copy for my bookshelf.

I'm usually a fan of O'Reilly books, but this one isn't very good. There's way too much focus (no pun intended) on commercial plug-ins for photoshop, not enough on actual techniques, and the example photographs aren't all that good.

I really liked Understanding Exposure and Learning to See Creatively and had high hopes for this, but it is Peterson's weakest book. It may be somewhat useful as a first photography book for a beginner, but there's not much here for even the slightly advanced beginner.

I'm very bad at talking to people in large groups, such as at parties, and I figured I'd see if there was any good advice to be had in this book. Mostly the answer is no, but on the plus side, I'm becoming increasingly aware of my shyness and just being aware of it in the moment is helpful.

Rod loaned this to me. I'm the first to admit that kids can be annoying, especially other people's kids, and I was fully prepared to laugh at myself while reading this. However, the book just isn't that funny. There aren't any non-obvious observations, and the author seems to be going for a Dave-Barry-esque voice without much success.

I enjoyed this, but I wasn't blown away. The threads involving the two main characters were interesting, but I could have lived without a lot of the mayhem surrounding the supporting cast.

This volume unites both of the original Winnie the Pooh collections, along with a bunch of Milne's poetry and terrific non-Disney illustrations by Ernest Shepard. Kevin and I quickly read through nearly all of it, but stopped two chapters shy of the end because Kevin didn't want to read the ending. After a couple of months, I finally persuaded him, which was nice because the ending is quite touching.

The first Pooh collection is a bit awkward to read aloud, at least for this American reader, but the language is very fun. The second collection gets easier and also introduces the ever-popular Tigger. These are terrific stories, and it's fun to revisit them as an adult, especially after having read The Tao of Pooh in college.

I've seen mind maps presented as the output of brainstorm sessions, and I was never that impressed with the technique, but one of the sessions at ETech made me reconsider. Mind mapping can be very useful for getting the creative juices to flow, and it's more powerful when used by an individual than when used by a group. However, the end result is highly personal, and truly meaningful only to the person who created the mind map.

That said, Tony Buzan's book isn't very good. It's poorly written in the sense that the authors tell you what they're going to say, say it, and then tell you what they've said, in every single five-page chapter. It's unbelievably repetitive. Also, Buzan is very quick to take credit for inventing a technique that's been around forever, and that rubs me the wrong way. Mind mapping isn't nearly as great as Buzan tries to make out, but in spite of that, it's a useful tool.

Kevin's interest in chapter books has flagged, and we struggled to finish this one. That's more a comment on Kevin's attention span than on the quality of the book, which is quite good for its target audience.

I picked up Fledgling from the library shortly after hearing about Butler's untimely death. I've never read any of her other novels, but I heard good things about this one last Fall, and it's been on my list of books to check out since then.

Fledgling is a reimagining of the vampire mythos, told from the perspective of a young, amnesiac vampire. The opening 100 pages are wonderfully engaging, as Butler shows us the world through her protagonist's eyes. After this terrific start, the pace bogs down a bit, and the racism themes become a little too obvious, but overall, it's pretty well constructed. It would have been more thought-provoking if things weren't so black and white, but it's enjoyable nonetheless.

The Search is a cross between a business book and an attempt at cultural anthropology. Battelle examines the short, recent history of the search industry, naturally focusing on Google. He knows (or at least has interviewed) many of the key players, and he covers the history well. Battelle is very colloquial in his presentation, and as a result, the book is accessible to a general audience.

Although he acknowledges that search — as a problem — is only about 5% solved, Battelle doesn't really touch at all upon what the remaining 95% comprises. I'm interested in how search can be applied to images, audio, and video without the need for intermediate human tagging, and it would have been nice to touch on some of the work being done in those areas.

Ray Kurzweil comes across to many people as a raving lunatic. In this book he claims many things, not least of which are that many people alive today will be able to live as long as they choose to, and that in less than thirty years, $1000 will buy more computational power than that of all of the human brains on Earth combined.

Although on the surface these ideas seem like science fiction, Kurzweil does a very good job at supporting his claims with strong arguments. In an all-too-brief nutshell, it all boils down to exponential (and faster-than-exponential) growth in processor speed and memory size, and in our ability to reverse engineer our bodies and brains. The titular "singularity" is a side-effect of the "faster-than" part of the exponential growth, which theoretically predicts that it will reach an infinite rate of change at some time within the next few decades.

I don't believe many of Kurzweil's specific predictions about which technologies will accomplish particular things on particular timescales, but I definitely do agree that the world is changing at an ever-increasing pace, and that most people drastically underestimate the effect of future improvements in technology (to us, the little bit of the exponential curve we see looks linear).

This is truly awe-inspiring stuff, and itmakes me thrilled to be alive to see it happening. (It does depress me a bit, however, that I've steered my career away from making this stuff happen.)

As a side note, I was quite surprised that Kurzweil makes no mention whatsoever of Jeff Hawkins' work (see On Intelligence) on reverse-engineering the neocortex. I don't know if this is an oversight or a swipe.

In marked contrast to Peterson's wonderful Learning to See Creatively, Smith's Designing a Photograph embodies much of what I dislike about photography books. Smith's photos are entirely uninspiring (I liked less than one in twenty), and he prattles on and on in art-school jargon that may have relevance to someone, but not me.

I very much enjoyed Bryan Peterson's teaching style, in which he juxtaposes a typical snapshot and a good composition of the same subject. In the text, he explains the thinking process or technique that led him from the former to the latter. It's terrific to see dozens of examples of how a simple change of viewpoint or camera setting can make a huge difference in the quality of the resulting photograph. Of the many photography books I've read in the last couple of years, this is the most inspiring, and it's both extremely approachable and immediately applicable.

This ultra-brief folio of essays began as a series of interstitial monologues that Vonnegut recorded to help WNYC public radio raise money. It's an amusing collage of imagined interviews with dead people conducted while Vonnegut undergoes near-death experiences at the hands of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Vonnegut hasn't had anything much new to say in his writing in more than twenty years, but I still greatly enjoy his work. Among his more recent writing, I recommend A Man Without a Country above this one.

I've been a Vonnegut fan for about twenty years. I finished reading all of his novels in 1999, and now I've finished reading all of his other books (with the exception of Nothing is Lost Save Honor, which is unavailable except for more than $500). I wish there were more.

This collection, a followup to Vonnegut's earlier autobiographical pastiche Palm Sunday, is a mess. There's no coherence to it at all, and though I always enjoy his brutally honest style and sardonic wit, I found little to savor here. For Vonnegut autobiography, check out Palm Sunday.

This was recommended by my friend Chris. It's a thriller centered on a hacker who is temporarily released from prison to help the police stop another hacker who has gone on a killing spree. Chris is a seasoned programmer, and he liked the way that Deaver used appropriate jargon and technologies to describe the hackers' speech and actions.

Unfortunately, I disliked this book quite a lot. Deaver does use a lot of terms that are appropriate, and he often uses them appropriately. Some bits of hacking history are sprinkled thoughout, and they mostly corresponded with my limited knowledge of phreaking, etc. However, there are a bunch of errors that made me stop short — for example, misspelling "steganography" (twice) and writing 2600 megahertz when it should have been 2600 hertz.

Little technical mistakes are not a big problem, however. I was more frustrated with Deaver's prose. Many times in the novel, he begins sentences with "All hackers...". That's just bad writing. Nearly all of the characters are cartoonish, and the dialogue in general is corny. On the plus side, it's a very quick read.

In Anansi Boys, Gaiman revisits a world somewhat like the one he created in American Gods. It's a present day where gods walk among men, largely forgotten, living lives as immortals, except when they decide to die for a bit.

Gaiman seems to be trying very hard to be funny, though not quite in the slapstick manner of Good Omens. It's still a very British style of humor, and as an American reader, I see the jokes, understand them, and think "that's mildly amusing," but there's nothing here that's laugh-out-loud funny. It's neither serious nor humorous, and it doesn't quite work.

I keep hearing such great things about Gaiman, but I've yet to be dazzled by him. I feel like I ought to be squarely in his demographic, so it makes me wonder if he's been coasting since Sandman.

Woken Furies is the first of Richard Morgan's novels since Altered Carbon that fully lives up to that debut. In it, Morgan further fleshes out his flawed protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, by delving into life on Kovacs's homeworld. It expands on the Quellist doctrine only hinted at in the previous books, and fully satisfies any Morgan fan's expectation of continuous action, violence, double-crosses, and plot twists. It's a terrific addition to Richard Morgan's rapidly expanding body of work.

My four-year-old son is starting to have an attention span that allows me to read longer books to him in installments. I typically read to him for about thirty minutes each night just before I tuck him into bed. Over the last month or two we've read nearly all of the two original Winnie the Pooh books, but Charlotte's Web is the first chapter book we've finished.

It was a mixed success. Kevin didn't care much for Wilbur, but he couldn't wait to hear about the spider web. After the rather dark climax, we had a long discussion about death — a topic we probably could have put off for a bit.

Charlotte's Web is very good on several levels. It's written exactly as you'd expect from the coauthor of The Elements of Style — there's not a word out of place. It's exceedingly easy to read aloud, much moreso than Winnie the Pooh. The story has a terrific arc, the pacing is good, and it deals with important issues — friendship and death. The illustrations are also quite good, and they were paced well enough to keep my son engaged. Charlotte's Web is a classic for good reason.

My brother has asked me to be his best man for his wedding later this year, and I'm honored and excited to do it. My parents thoughtfully gave me this slim book at Christmas. It has a few useful pointers, but unfortunately it's full of stereotyped "guy" talk that gets to be incredibly annoying. If you are looking for advice on a best man's responsibilities, my advice is to ask someone who's done the job.

Every now and then, I find it useful to read another photography book. Even though by now I've been exposed (no pun intended) to nearly all of the techniques many times, reading a new book on the subject nearly always reinvigorates my photography, suggesting some slightly different twist on the subject. Peterson's book is full of decent images and good, albeit basic, advice. I picked up a few tips on metering difficult scenes like sunsets, and I've renewed my interest in my camera, so this was a worthwhile read.