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 I had some reservations when I heard that a posthumous collection of unpublished stories and essays was being released, since if these pieces were worthy of his canon, Vonnegut probably would have published them on his own.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.

Neil Gaiman's fiction is a bit hit-or-miss for me. Sometimes he blows me away (e.g., American Gods), and other times (e.g., Anansi Boys), he's not that interesting. I saw the movie Stardust a few months before reading this book, and I liked the movie quite a lot. Happily, the book lives up to the movie, and Stardust is in the running for my favorite young-adult fantasy novel. And there are enough differences between the book and the movie to make it worthwhile to seek out both. Good stuff.

Most people know Hugh Laurie as the anti-hero on the television show House, M.D., but he's much better known in England as a comedic actor. For some reason, it seems like a ridiculous number of British comedians are Oxford- or Cambridge-educated, and they write as well as they act.

Anyhow, Laurie's The Gun Seller is a witty spy novel. I enjoyed it but found that the very British delivery sometimes got in my way. Good stuff, but I was glad when it was over.

The properties that sometimes emerge from large collections of very simple objects can be mind-blowing and fascinating. I was first introduced to them by Hofstadter's "Prelude, Ant Fugue" in Godel, Escher, Bach and I've often viewed Minsky's Society of Mind in the same way.

Johnson does a great job of making emergent behavior approachable to a popular science reader. He touches on the structure of cities, the "intelligence" of an ant colony, and more. This is well-written and interesting material.