A new, non-series mystery from the author of the delightful tales of Mary Russell, a Jewish teenager in Victorian England who befriends her neighbor, the retired Mr. Sherlock Holmes (The Beekeper's Apprentice). Folly is darker, and to my mind less completely successful. King (like Arthur Conan Doyle) thrives on her minor characters, and Folly necessarily isolates its aging hero, Rae Newborne, on an uninhabited island named (for her ancestor) Newborne's Folly. Nonetheless, a very worthwhile book and (I hear) a strong contender for major awards.

never (permalink)

A Readercon purchase, this anthology collects later work of noted Cyberpunk writers and a few post-cyberpunk notables.

Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man” is an intriguing first cut at the central plot of The Windup Girl. Where The Windup Girl’s Jaidee finds himself in the midst of a procedural thriller, here we have a Run To Freedom, the backstory of Neuromancer or “The New Rose Hotel.” It’s well done, though the tone is exactly like The Windup Girl and Ship Breakers.

Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth” is solid Doctorow, describing a disaster that leaves pudgy, unkempt internet maintenance people in charge of everything. Di Filippo’s “What’s Up Tiger Lilly?” is close in spirit: a mega-rich inventor who is otherwise callow and feckless is forced by circumstances to get out and do things. Both try to replace the heroic punks of early cyberpunk with credible techies, and both ultimately condescend to the unfortunate characters whose failing is that they know stuff and upon whom the writer must therefore inflict suitable torments. Elizabeth Bear’s enigmatic “Two Dreams On Trains” explores the street artist’s dilemma: you can be famous, everyone knows your work, but they’ll haul you off to jail nonetheless. It’s a fine story, but Banksy lived it already: do we need spaceships?

June 4, 2013 (permalink)

This novel made a great, and greatly under appreciated, movie, and I wanted to see whether the book is equally good.

It is.

The performances do a remarkable job of capturing Chabon’s voice, and the screenplay stays quite close to the novel, especially in the crucial opening chapters. The differences between novel and film are often subtle — changing a black jacket to white, adding an extra female character, cutting a transitional episode.

June 4, 2013 (permalink)

The best of Dorothy Sayers’ mysteries and among the best mysteries of all time.

The Oxford of Gaudy Night is a wonderful wish-fulfillment fantasy where all smart people have read one’s books, have discussed them with their friends, and have intelligent questions about them at their fingertips.

May 23, 2013 (permalink)

The proof of this lively guide to restaurants and food shops of Paris will lie in my upcoming trip, I suppose, but this is a pleasant and amusing little read, well above the usual guidebook fare. The book is replete with tasty sidebars about language, customs, habits, and these are its particular strength.

Dusoulier’s weblog, Chocolate & Zucchini, captured my attention early on with a simple anecdote. Clotilde was having the neighbors to dinner, and she had a particularly nice wine. What should she cook? This was a revelation: no one had ever suggested to me that you could choose the wine first and build a meal around it, while every cookbook and wine seller talked all the time about pairing wine with particular foods. At restaurants, you always found out what people were ordering and then tried to pick a sensible wine; you never said, “Let’s have this interesting Bordeaux” first, leaving people to choose what they’d like to eat with that wine. Knowing how Clotildle was thinking about this opened up all sorts of possibilities.

There’s some of that in this book, but perhaps not quite enough. Perhaps age and celebrity and a baby have made her more private. Perhaps it’s a desire to put the restauranteurs and storekeepers in the foreground. She was never a confessional blogger, but there’s not enough Clotilde here for her fans.

And we could even more of the book’s plentiful sidebars. Those macarons in the lovely bakeries: can you buy just one or two? Or does one buy a dozen? How does a hotel-bound visitor sample viennoisserie? OK: it’s (say) 1530 and you’re standing outside a famous bakery; is it OK to buy a single roll? Should one buy a baguette and tear off chunks to eat as you stroll down the street, or is that obnoxious?

---

As it turned out, we chased down two restaurant recommendations from Edible Adventures, and one bakery, and all were (of course) excellent. But this is Paris and there’s lots of good food, and plenty of people to tell you about it. What can we learn from these three?

Les Papilles is a wine store in the 5e arrondissement that serves dinner. I tried to get reservations for May 1, struck out, but we did find space for a small crew at the big communal table in the basement the next day. It’s a fixed menu: you choose your wine from the store shelves but that’s it. The dinner was outstanding: a delightful celery soup, a lamb stew, some tasty cheese, and a panna cotta. We had some nifty Bandol. It was terrific, but you wouldn’t know about a place like this if Clotilde didn’t tell you, and give you permission. (I’m still a bit unclear whether it would be bad manners for an anglophone couple to sit at a communal table, but I suppose it’s ok for a larger party.)

Interestingly, the staff at Les Papilles didn’t know about the book or about Clotilde.

L’Entredgue is a neighborhood place in a neighborhood that is not terribly folkloric but that happens to be close to the Palais des Congrès where Web Science was held. Clotilde had given a wonderful presentation at Web Science the day before and a friend had ordered the book overnight on Amazon and reserved a table at this handy place. Again, it’s not very big and it’s not very conspicuous, but the cooking is very, very good. I had some foie gras, some delicious pork, and a tarte tatin.

In the mornings, we’d been taking our morning coffee and a croissant in the nearby Place Maubert, and they were very nice indeed. Even the conference croissants were terrific. But Clotilde speaks highly of Eric Kayser’s boulangerie down the street, so one day we grabbed two of his pain au chocolate. Wow! These are at once more tender and more flaky than I thought possible. We immediately bought a second pair to eat by the Seine. Astonishingly good. Again, it’s not so much the tip as the permission, the suggestion that you should stop and try this even if you don’t have to.

May 6, 2013 (permalink)

Paris. 1938. An American movie actor sails over in the I’le de France, lent to Paramount by Jack Warner. He’s not entirely comfortable with this. Soon, German emigres and diplomats make him even more uncomfortable. Lovely sense of place and time and noir.

April 30, 2013 (permalink)

In Little Brother, Marcus Yallow’s high school world got blown apart when someone blew up the Bay Bridge. The panic was bad but the government response was worse, as the government used terrorism as an excuse to impose martial law. That crisis was resolved, thanks to Marcus’s clever hacking, but the Lesser Depression has gotten worse and worse and the government is still eager to use the Internet (and a healthy dose of torture) to control a docile populace. This sets the stage for Homeland.

Doctorow’s entry in Clute’s commendable Science Fiction Encyclopedia is, I think, exactly right: Doctorow is a thinker who uses fiction to explain an argument that mixes technology and politics. This has not been a formula for success lately, though of course it once worked well enough for Hugo and Zola and Shaw, for Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. But it seems to me that Victor Hugo is the closest match to Doctorow’s aspiration; these are books of ideas first, with some dramatic tension to leaven the dough.

There’s plenty of leavening, and also plenty of info dumps. We learn a lot about police tactics, 3D printers, Burning Man etiquette. We learn how Occupy does public speaking without a microphone and how to manage a political site.

One thing we don’t learn much about is Marcus’s callow, feckless parents. Mom and Dad are useless. The parents of Marcus’s remaining school friends are no better; though his girlfriend’s parents are cool about his spending the night now and then, none of them does much about the government surveillance, harassment, and torture of their kids, and none of them takes much interest in finding a job for themselves or their grown children. Marcus does make a point of cooking nice family dinners to restore a sense of normality to the house, but his parents simply make appreciative noises. These kids grow up early. So does Katniss Everdeen, to be sure, but Katniss knows it’s wrong and it makes her sad and angry and she thinks about it all the time. To Marcus, absent parents are just the new normal.

Canadian-born Doctorow now lives in England, and his campaign subplot makes more sense for the UK than it does for the US. The story is set in a near-future that is even more recognizable than the terrorism-battered San Francisco of Little Brother. Our hero, Marcus Yallow, is now webmaster for a charismatic politician running an independent campaign for the US Senate.

This candidate is clearly a progressive, but deplores the Democrats’ support for drones and detention and bankers. The Republicans are “just as bad.” This is arrant nonsense. First, the Republicans aren’t merely just as bad; they’re just as bad on these issues and they’re insane on many others, Doctorow forces his would-be Senator into false equivalence of the worst sort. The candidate worries about being forced by party discipline to vote against his conscience, but everyone knows that the Democrats have no party discipline. The candidate is running for the Senate: how does he propose to work in the senate? Of course he’s going to caucus with the Democrats.

When was the last time a Democratic senator was really hurt badly for going off the reservation? Remember: this is the party that held Hubert Humphrey and Theodore Bilbo together. Someday someone will pull off the trick that Lincoln did in 1860 and replace one of the current parties with a new one, but that’s not going to happen in a California senate race and, if it were to happen in the near future, the obvious candidate to play the role of the Whig Party is the GOP. This independent candidacy could make sense in Parliament; in the US, it’s a silly fantasy, and it feeds the right-wing propaganda that always blames the Democrats for Republican intransigence.

Doctorow will keynote Web Science 13 this Thursday May 2, in Paris.

April 28, 2013 (permalink)

David McCullough recounts the adventures of a century of Americans in Paris. In the 1820’s, Americans came for the world’s best medical training ands the world’s best art training. At the century’s end, they came for the fashion and for the food, for glittering nights, and for the world’s best art training. In between, McCullough reconstructs the fascinating, forgotten story of the American Ambassador who determined that it was his duty to remain at his post through the siege of 1870 and the Commune and whose rediscovered diary provides vivid insights into a time whose brief turbulence seemed likely to continue forever.

April 27, 2013 (permalink)

Two distinct groups of people are interested in the aesthetics of computer programs. On the one hand, we have people who create software; those with taste and judgment will naturally hold aesthetic opinions and prefer the beautiful to the ugly. Opposed to these artisans, we sometimes meet a group of theoretically-inclined critics or "codewerkers" who compose things that look like poems but that ridicule the benighted corporate fools who make or use real software.

In Speaking Code: coding as aesthetic and political expression, Geoff Cox and Alex McLean are writing for the latter. The program code of which they speak is almost always either a hypothetical category too broad to be analyzed or a clever stunt ginned up in a dozen lines of perl. These toys are sometimes clever, but they have little to do with actual programs, and their creation has little to do with the construction of actual code. It is as if the authors set out to write about painting but, finding actual painters dead and actual paintings opaque, decide instead to analyze instead the movie actors who portrayed some painters. The actor’s version of Jackson Pollock might look like a painting, and it might be made from paint, but it’s not Pollock.

The book is filled with tiny little programs. Some of them run. Some of them simply look like programs and are meant to be read. The first example is written in an esoteric language called Befunge, and the general level of scholarship in this volume is reflected in the first footnote.

As an esoteric language, Befunge also breaks with the conventions of downward direction of interpretation through two-dimensional syntax [1].

[1] For more on the Befunge programming language, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge.

Parts of this book are scrupulously sourced – for example, Cox makes some very nice distinctions between Lacan and Hannah Arendt – but the creator of the programming language that is the subject of the opening argument doesn’t deserve citation, presumably because the kind of mechanic or drudge who would actually write a compiler is obviously insufficiently human to deserve one. Elsewhere, Cox urges resistance to Javascript because "it is proprietary, indeed owned by Google." This point might be interesting, were it true. His footnote leads to a wiki page at LibrePlanet which links, in turn, to an essay by Richard Stallman; apparently, Cox misunderstood Stallman’s opposition to Gmail (a Google Web service) to mean that Google owns the underlying language. Stallman’s polemics against software property are briefly mentioned elsewhere in the book, but his actual art — the beautiful and immensely influential EMACS editor — is not.

It’s not just Stallman. You won’t find Kernighan here, or Ritchie. Bill Atkinsons’s not around, nor Bricklin, and there’s no joy for Bill Joy. You won’t find Sutherland’s Sketchpad, or Smalltalk, or The Demo. Knuth appears only for a cameo on literate programming. Ward Cunningham’s wiki was beautiful code (though modern incarnations are covered with ugly encrustations). Charles H. Moore’s FORTH was gorgeous. So was John McCarthy’s LISP. And there’s no hint of the work programmers do with Iverson’s APL and Wall’s Perl to express complex ideas in a tiny, tiny compass, a game as intricate as a villanelle and as delicate as haiku.

In fact, Reading Code seldom looks at any code that does something, code that might dirty its hands with actual work. Instead, we have things that look like programs and make pithy declarations about capital and labor. Every beginning student, learning that a variable name is simply a label and that the machine does not know or care what the label means, spends a day or two playing silly games.

for (teacher = every + fracking + grownup) { frack = you; }

There’s a lot of that here. And there’s some mild cleverness, like referring to a program that recursively deletes your Facebook friends as a form of (social) suicide. But none of it is really code, and a lot of it isn't quite as clever as it thinks.

The problem we face in thinking about code aesthetics is twofold. First, code is big, and the printed page is small. When we write about novels or epic poetry or a Collected Work, we assume that the reader is generally familiar with the work, that we are exchanging insights about familiar things. It’s not clear that MIT Press expected the audience for this volume to be able to read code, but there is no hint in the book that the authors expect readers to have any shared experience of it.

Second, code works. It does stuff. Its hands are dirty. This seems to unnerve the code aesthetes as much as machine aesthetics unnerved so many people in the 19th century. How could stone and steel be anything but ugly? Viollet-le-Duc had an answer, and Ruskin had another, and then Louis Sullivan told us that the tall office building "must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line." Architectural beauty does not depend on ornament any more than delicious food depends on folding napkins into pheasants; to understand, we must simply have sympathy for things, their inherent tendencies and their purposes, their fabric and their fate.

What Cox and McLean overlook, alas, is that software aesthetics are in the midst of a profound revolution. For years, aesthetic discussion was polarized between two camps: those who advocated provability or at least mathematical rigor, and those who prized clarity. The mathematicians (also called “neats”) prized concise languages and intriguing formalism: LISP and Scheme, APL and Prolog. Their opponents (“scruffies”) prized structural clarity and expressiveness: Algol and ADA, C/C++ and Unix Tools, Java and Javadoc, Smalltalk. Neats wrote lovely little things; scruffies wrote exciting big things. That’s changed in the last five years in the wake of Design Patterns and Refactoring, Agile, and the tiny methods style. Today, scruffies still write large, but those programs are made up of lots of tiny bits, bits that look like the work of the neats. And the neats, too, can suddenly find a place for their work in the middle of a Web of small, loosely joined pieces. Spuybroek sees this in The Sympathy of Things, but there’s really not the slightest hint of it here.

Cox and McLean fancy themselves members of a radical left that abjures corporate control and detests "neoliberalism". In practice, they've gone all the way back to Versailles, dressing up as working folk and holding working-folk tools and cherishing clever little jokes that display their leisure-class status and superiority to work.

April 23, 2013 (permalink)

Alison Bechdel’s childhood was difficult. All of them are. This long, profound, and beautifully-drawn comic explores the author’s relationship with her mother, and also with her several psychiatrists, three girlfriends, and Virginia Woolf. On the way, she engages the work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott with depth and sensitivity.

My father was an analyst. Almost anything about psychoanalytic theory will send me running for the exits, but somehow I found this work thoughtful and engaging and – for once – more focused on ideas than on theoretical fireworks. It’s also a relief that, through all the emotional discussions with mother and shrink, Alison’s sexuality is always taken as a fact, not something to be explained much less fixed. The book is technically masterful, especially when pulling two or three separate arguments across a series of panels without muddling them and without being bogged down in more allegory than the medium can bear.

April 18, 2013 (permalink)

A reliable way to define the protagonist’s beloved is to give him or her no inner life. Adrienne Booker is beautiful and brilliant and loves to sing Mozart and Bach, the Beatles, and she makes loves to Jim Praley. This surprises and delights Jim, who has no idea what’s going on but who is not hard to please. A would-be poet without access to his own inner life, Jim makes a wonderful partner to Adrienne. They are young and attractive and the world is all before them. Of course, the world is mostly Tulsa.

April 17, 2013 (permalink)

A love-letter from a 20-something comic-book writer to her mother, couched as a book about cooking, eating, and coming-of-age. Knisely has a knack for expressive character drawing and a clever way with anecdote. Chapters are punctuated with two-page spreads that describe a recipe; these are neatly done and the recipes look reasonable; though she still believes the McGee-debunked myth that washed mushrooms get soggy, anyone who suggests serving a big bowl of sautéed mushrooms for dinner is fine in my book.

The most original chapter in this pean to tasty food is an intelligent piece on bad meals and on cooking for people who don’t really like to eat – two real problems that we seldom hear discussed.

The subject here – the confluence of food, family, and memory – could easily have collapsed into mere sentiment. What keeps Relish fresh is Knisely’s lively drawing, particularly her knack for sympathetic portraits of herself at various ages and her skill at drawing not the food, but the way people react to it.

April 12, 2013 (permalink)

Don D’Ammassa explained at Readercon’s The Year In Books that he found John Connolly in a grocery store. Visiting friends in a remote part of rural New England, D’Ammassa ran out of books. This is not hard to imagine, as he reads one or two novels a day, but booklessness is not something he is willing to contemplate for more than an hour or so. And so it was off to the grocery store to find the least-bad book in town. (Had his hosts nothing in the house? ) And there he found John Connolly.

In The Gates, we meet a young British lad named Samuel Johnson. He has a dachshund named Boswell. He has a distracted mother, an absent father, and unpleasant neighbors named Abernathy. Unfortunately, these unpleasant neighbors have taken to dabbling in satanic rituals. More unfortunately still, one of their rituals, assisted by the CERN supercollider, accidentally manages to open a portal to Hell.

No one will believe Samuel’s warnings, and demons turn out to come in surprising varieties, including one who discovers that he really enjoys driving a Porsche very fast. The book inhabits Terry Pratchett territory, which is not a bad place to be.

April 7, 2013 (permalink)

Lotty and Mr. Contreras and the rest of the crew join V. I. Warshawski once more in this energetic and angry mystery at the sleazy intersection of fancy law firms, politics, and right wing broadcasting. We’re not that far from the mean streets of wartime Vilnius, and nowadays we’re never that far from the mean streets of modern Kiev, and both cast a long shadow over Warshawski’s South Side. It all starts in a disused Chicago cemetery when a bunch of schoolgirls stage an initiation and one sees a vampire. The book is superbly plotted and the writing has its moments, but something terrible has happened to Paretsky’s ear for routine dialog, especially when kids are in the room.

April 3, 2013 (permalink)

The very capable analysts at the estimable Baseball Prospectus attempt a sabermetric analysis of the 2004 Boston Red Sox. Rejecting the cute but silly belief that the Red Sox had been cursed by fate, the authors examine some reasons the Red Sox had historically failed and explore the moves that made them champions in 2004.

This enjoyable and well-edited collection of articles breaks less new ground and reveals fewer new insights than I'd expected. Lots of questions remain unanswered.

We understand, I think, why the Yankees and the Red Sox differ, so elucidating this doesn't really add much to our appreciation of the game. But how do the current Red Sox differ in philosophy and execution from the A's? Are the Red Sox simply the Athletics with an adequate budgets? Where do the Indians fit in the picture?

My impression is that Theo was building the team toward a pennant in 2005, or perhaps toward a pennant in the 2004-2006 window. Is this true -- or consistent with the team's actions?

Back in the day, Bill James would find more interesting things to say about minor figures on bad teams than BP discovers in a rich and colorful championship. Nevertheless, a fine, intelligent, and serious look at the construction of a winning team.

March 26, 2013 (permalink)

Lots of books about the practice of programming are written for raw beginners, for people who don’t know what they’re doing, who need their hand held gently, and often for people who don’t want to be studying this topic. They spend a lot of time coaxing and cajoling and telling little jokes to keep the kids from getting scared.

A second strand of recent books about programming, starting from Fowler’s Refactoring and Beck’s Test-Driven Development By Example, aren’t written for beginners but, like the children’s stories, they move in tiny steps and chiefly address topics that seem fairly simple. I read Refactoring from start to finish and, the whole time, I was convinced that the next chapter was going to get interesting. I finished it, shrugged, and a couple of weeks later I began to realize, “Hey! That was sort of interesting!” This predilection for great care in taking tiny steps is partly the result of the modernist preference for tiny-methods style, partly a matter of temperament, and (I suspect) partly the result of careers spent consulting for software managers who don’t really know what they’re doing but who hold the checkbook.

xUnit Test Patterns fits solidly in this tradition. It’s exhaustive and fairly exhausting, laying down the law for unit testing and showing in detail exactly how each step can be taken without fear of fouling everything up. Much of what’s covered here is probably already part of the working vocabulary of any programmer with enough experience to read the book, but because Meszaros gives names to stuff you already do, he makes it easier to talk about those things and to justify them.

I took away three things.

Everyone knows that unit tests really need to be fast. Meszaros puts a number on it: 100ms per test is not fast. Meszaros spends pages showing why 100ms is not fast. It’s overkill, presumably aimed at giving you lots of information to vanquish your pointy-haired boss, but it’s good to know.

Second, shared fixtures are a pain. I knew that. I’d developed a test style that returned fixtures to their proper state after I used them. Meszaros argues that it’s better just to make fresh fixtures if you can manage that, and this seems to me a big win.

Finally, there’s a fine paper on Humble Object by Mike Feathers that I’d missed. It’s a good reference to have.

So yes, it’s made a concrete difference in Tinderbox Six. I’m not sure this needed to be a book, and there’s another book about refactoring practice that’s trying to bust out of this one. But it’s certainly worth having and browsing this book, and you could do worse than to spend a few evenings working through it in detail.

March 24, 2013 (permalink)

I saw this on Nate Matias’s bookshelf when I was stowing conference supplies in his office at MIT. Nobody tells me about good books in my field, so I take note of what people seem to be reading. Finally, I found some time.

It’s a good book. Debugging is a skill; half the questions I see at StackOverflow could have been resolved fairly quickly if the writers had better debugging skills. Butcher walks through the basics with patience and tact, showing inexperienced programmers how to find bugs and pointing out some kinds of problems that are tricky to find.

This is a book for the inexperienced, and it stops when things are getting interesting. Yes, asynchronous and multithreaded code is hard to debug. We knew that! And yes, doctor, we know that if it hurts when we do that, it might be a good idea to avoid doing that. Sometimes we can’t avoid it. Sometimes, the bugs appear when we’re already hip deep in the Big Muddy. Sometimes, the Big Fool says, “Management decided to architect it this way. Fix the damn bug.”

There are two kinds of tricky bugs. The first is the masquerade party: something is going wrong, it’s clear what the problem is, but that can’t happen. I had one of these publishing this post. A newly-rewritten method, ConstantTextSize, was crashing because when it called CreateAttributedString because, whatever it was getting from CreateAttributedString wasn’t an AttributedString. That’s nice, but it turns out that CreateAttributedString only returns AttributedStrings. I spent a lot of time proving that it could only create an attributed string. And then proving that the object it was complaining about was, in fact, an attributed string. So, why the crash? Because the text encoding was fouled up and we were looking beyond the end of the string, and an attributed string made up of garbage is not an attributed string as far as the system is concerned, no sir! So, we marched out of that river and now, when you use a whole slew of mathematical symbols in a post, Tinderbox won’t holler at you the way it hollered at me.

Masquerade parties take time but they’re kind of fun. The other tricky bug is the Epic Storm, and it’s no fun at all. Debug It! book avoids bogging down in war stories, but in a way that also falsifies the experience of debugging. I really hated Ellen Ullman’s The Bug, but it did get one thing right: an epic bug is a terrible thing. Everyone is screaming and shouting and generally emoting all over the place. Survival depends on finding the thing. Somehow, whatever is wrong keeps going wrong. You think it’s fixed, you pop the corks, you ship. And then it happens again. And again.

Over the years, we’ve had some awful epic bugs. They had names. Storyspace Ate My Links was the worst, but the Tinderbox unit tests have plenty of methods named for the great customers who filed the reports. I think we’ve only had two category five epic bugs in the last few years, though; test-driven development has helped, and perhaps experience and whisky have helped keep things calmer than in the old days. (One is fixed, the other is still open but we think it lies deep in the Carbon libraries where no program went before, and where no program is ever going to go again.)

One of the great contributions of Martin Fowler’s Refactoring was that it gave a name to one of the best approaches to addressing an intractable bug. If you can’t find the problem, and localization strategies can’t quite pin it down, you can just refactor the hell out of the neighborhood. This may or may not fix the bug, but at least it improves the code. Before refactoring, bug hunts left tracks all over the program in the form of hooks and temporaries and diagnostic writes. Nowadays, bug hunts leave mown lawns and cleaner design.

March 23, 2013 (permalink)

Derek Powazek hosts {fray}, the famously beautiful personal storytelling site. Each Fray story ends with a direct question, such as "Who have you almost forgiven?" Readers respond with their own stories, often hauntingly frank and disarmingly candid. The main Fray stories appeal through their polish and care, while the impact of the reader stories stems from their authenticity, their sharp edges and raw candor. At its best, it's a lively mix.

In Design for Community, Powazek explores how designers can use discussion groups, email lists, and weblogs to nurture cohesive communities of dozens or hundreds of readers and writers. Some communities are larger -- slashdot, for example, is huge though hardly cohesive -- and some very large groups (amazon users, for example) have aspects of communities, but Powazek's experience suggests that, once you grow beyond a a few thousand participants, electronic communities tend to explode or collapse.

A large part of the book records interviews with community leaders -- people like Slashdot creator Rob Malda, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, Burns and Parr from jGuru. The interviews give a picture of the human side of community maintenance, the day-to-day role of hosts and moderators. Knowing how to survive a flame war without being emotionally drained, and how to nurse a community through a flame war without seeing it collapsing in ashes, is valuable. Had this book been written four years earlier, we might still have TechnoCulture.

Powazek is a designer, not a decorator, and he understands that usability can be the enemy of utility, that making something harder can sometimes make it better. He's not very interested in ethnography, and so looks more at capabilities than at usage patterns; I wish we knew more about how communities typically work, to supplement the book's success stories and anecdotes.

Design for Communities had the bad luck to appear just after then end of the dot-com era. Had he written this book three years earlier, Powazek would have sold a lot of copies to managers, investors, and frequent flyers. This useful book will be light and pleasant reading for its core audience, though right now the people who are dedicated enough to read the book would probably welcome more detail, while the suits who would be scared off by the details have moved on.

March 22, 2013 (permalink)

Few writers can match Hillierman's sense of place. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police joins his retired ex-boss, the legendary Joe Leaphorn, to solve a puzzling shooting, vaguely connected to legends of a lost mine. Hillerman is, I think, at his best when he stays with the Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni, far from the cities and towns and the belagana, so this isn't Hillerman's best. But it's always nice to hear from Leaphorn and Chee.

March 7, 2013 (permalink)

A wryly over-the-top mystery set in the midst of a power struggle in a 1990s Women’s College in Cambridge. Our hero, the Bursar, brings an old friend into the school to lend a hand with the political infighting; when the Mistress is murdered, things get badly out of hand. After a reverse in a faculty meeting, suffered at the hands of the women’s studies/queer studies faction, the Bursar exclaims “Time and again we were warned of the Dykes!” A good time is had by all.

The incredibly ghastly cover doesn’t matter in the $2.99 Kindle edition.

February 4, 2013 (permalink)