Yep, another little theme shuffle here. I got tired of having slow scrolling on the old theme, though I loved it so.

I finished up Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself and have to say it's climbed to number two on my favorite Bryson books list, closely following In a Sunburned Country. After I wrote my previous review, the next few episodes in Stranger were simply sublime pieces of humor, some of Bryson's most humorous work. Serves me right for reviewing a partially-read book.

I followed that up with Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle which, as many Dick novels, has a somewhat cryptic ending. The novel is about the movements of the I Ching and its relationship to a novel that all of the major characters are reading. Man in the High Castle is an alternate history, but so is the novel that the characters are reading as they go about their various activities. Reading or interacting with this fictional book is a minor glue that holds together the characters, becoming more and more important as the novel proceeds. The conclusion has some fascinating psychological gyrations that I won't spill. Suffice it to say that this mental twist of an alternate history inside of an alternate history takes a spectacular dive off a cliff by the story's close. Additionally, there is a strong theme of cultural interaction as Eastern, European (German, actually), and American cultures collide and intermingle in the book. Dick stereotypes and humanizes these various cultures, commenting with deft strokes, and leaving no clear winner in the comparisons. As you can probably tell, I dug it muchly.

A friend's loaned me Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and its sequel. So far I like the setting, the characterizations, and how the plot's flowing, but I'm starting to see a religion vs. science theme that might get a bit irritable to me. Hopefully it's not drummed up too much.

I'm still reading through Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself and enjoying it very much, but the similar format of each entry is weighing slightly on that enjoyment. They're too short, unfortunately. While the content is still very good, Bryson's unable to go into enough depth on some topics in these three- to four-page essays to really cover them as effectively and hilariously as he does in his longer works. Maybe part of it is also that he didn't have much time to put each of these together before it needed to be published originally. Some bits are convulsively funny, absolutely classic must-reads for any middle-aged American, and the rest is good examples of short humorous prose, so I still highly recommend the book to any Bryson fans and also to anyone interested in the works of Dave Barry and Garrison Keilor, but it's probably number three on my favorite Bryson books list.

I so lied when I said content would pick up last post ... Just had a bunch of other stuff going on in meatspace, but I'm back. I think I'll just blorp out a mish-mash and let you poor folks slog through it rather than splitting into separate tech and "-lish" posts, so hold on tight.

Neil Gaiman recently made some headlines by releasing his masterwork American Gods for free. If you haven't read this book, I can't recommend it enough. Gaiman is unsurpassed at creating modern mythology that dips deeply into prior mythological work, and American Gods and the Sandman graphic novels are not only Gaiman's best, but the best literary works of the genre, and definitely among the best works of modern fictional storytelling. It's free now, so go git it!

I've begun reading Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself, a collection of short articles that Bryson wrote for a British readership after moving back to America. They are absolutely hilarious diatribes about various oddities of American life delivered with Bryson's brilliant blend of razor wit and deep reverence. This may be his best, narrowly beating out In a Sunburned Land as my top Bill Bryson book. Bryson's neck and neck right now with Dave Barry as my top literary humorist.

Moving on through the "-lish", here's an unbelievably cool tropes wiki. What's a trope? From the front page of TV Tropes, they are "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations." This means tropes are important to writers, critics, and anyone else interested in modern story-telling, including roleplaying gamers. It also means absolutely fascinating reading because the entries are just about everything but dry.

I found some gems of awfulness on the TV Tropes "So Bad It's Horrible" entry to share. Beware, these are toxic. First, The Eye of Argon, one of the most terrible fantasy epics ever. (This is "terrible" in the senses of both really bad and terribly violent at the same time) Next, widely regarded as the worst poem in English, I present the short horror of Theophilus Marzials's "A Tragedy".

Finally, in the roleplaying game category are two stinky examples of So Bad It's Horrible that I have to spotlight. The second is near and dear to my heart, as you'll see. Read this review of FATAL. FATAL was an RPG that I got maybe a page and a half into before I completely wiped my freely-obtained copy online somewhere. There's a link to the FATAL PDF at the top of the review if you're really desperate. I'd rather say I'm not linking to it than linking to it. Then there's the Wraeththu roleplaying game. As some of you may recall, I subjected myself to the first Wraeththu novel and started on the second before tossing the whole series out as utter rubbish, so this review of how terrible the RPG is strikes a sympathetic chord with me. The review's more oriented toward gameworld and setting analysis than system mechanics, and it's hi-lariously harsh. Shockingly, people are evidently paying money for the Wraeththu game.

I'm done with purely literary topics for this post. As a bridge to tech topics, here's an interesting article about "cultural" aspects of free operating system users (i.e. Linux). Especially interesting are items 5 and 6 in the list: "Free software users explore" and "Free software users expect to help themselves". In other words, free software users tend to be more confident and technically savvy with technological tools, something I find to be generally true. Linux nerds, ho!

Speaking of Linux, Anyone mounting FUSE filesystems under Linux should check this article out about setting up afuse, a FUSE filesystem automounter. I'm using FUSE to ssh into my iPod Touch, but I have a pair of scripts I run manually to do the mount and unmount of the FUSE filesystem that are working fine for me. Still, automation is good, right? So I might look into this on down the road.

Finally, I present InfoWorld's all-time top 25 flops list. I disagree heartily with some of these, such as iPod imitators, and wanted to link this up to air my strong ongoing opinion that money flows from sources to media makers to promote their products. I don't have any evidence to back this up on this particular article, but just from the iPod imitators entry I have to wonder how much InfoWorld and/or the author of this article benefits from Apple. My iRiver media player beats the shizzle out of my iPod Touch in one major area: media compatibility. I like Ogg Vorbis audio much more than MP3, so thanks to Apple's unwillingness to allow their media players to play this totally free compressed audio format, I'm highly inconvenienced. Dicks. There are workarounds, but why should I have to go there? Just open it up, Apple! Sorry, started ranting a little there. I also disagree with other entries in the list, such as the PS/2. The PS/2 wasn't popular with consumers, but it was an important interim step in the evolution of PC hardware that shouldn't just be discounted as an outright failure, for example. So this is thought-provoking on a couple levels for people who've been teching for a while.

Adam Boeglin, the excellent porter of various apps to the iRex iLiad, generated a new FBReader version a month or two ago. I plopped it excitedly onto my iLiad and found that I have almost no use for the new version unless I can get it to be the default reader for .txt files and I can access the options to change the font and alter text formatting for different files. This bums me out, because otherwise, it looks to be a nice update. Adam's now beating on a usable browser for the iLiad that looks hawt, but I'm browsing via my iPod Touch these days if I need a portable browser.

One more note about the iLiad and then this post's toast. I have read bunches of formats of ebooks on my iLiad and I have to say that the iLiad-formatted PDF offerings at Feedbooks are the finest. You download a book, move it to the iLiad, find it in the iLiad's hierarchy, pop it open, and stop thinking you're reading something in an electronic format. No resizing, fine legibility, and the flexibility of the iLiad's built-in PDF reader all combine into an excellent, seamless reading experience. Bravo, Feedbooks!

I have a lot of book reviewing for this post, thanks to the amount of time since my last one... Sorry about that. I'll follow up with a technical post a little later, but for now, I have to relate my experiences with some of the best literature I've read in years.

I've absorbed Neil Gaiman's masterful American Gods and liked it very, very much. Like Gaiman's "Sandman" graphic novels, American Gods masterfully blends modern "mythology" with classic mythology around the world, resulting in a view of the world and the things in it that seems plausible and yet fanciful at the same time. One of the things I liked most about this book is Gaiman's modernization of old gods and goddesses. Gaiman is probably the foremost author on the planet at that kind of thing, and since I'm a big sucker for that kind of stuff, that makes Gaiman one of my favorite storytellers. I also enjoyed the character progression and the pace of the thing. American Gods has a similar action speed to Tim Powers's novels (and it might be said that the two authors somewhat overlap in their generation of modern mythology), but not as breakneck-fast as, say, Dan Brown's works. We start with what seems like an ordinary person who is contacted by a strange man who knows too much, then as the story continues, the immense web of intrigue surrounding our hero slowly becomes apparent, ending in his making a choice that changes the world, or at least America. Sort of. You'll have to read the book to find out. By the way, Gaiman's Anansi Boys is a "spiritual" (heheh) sequel to Gods with a smaller scope. Boys is more humorous, but resonates with Gods as a tale of mythological evolution. I don't recommend reading one without the other closely following.

The Bluest Eye is another marvelously-written tale about a young black girl growing up with a highly damaged image of self-beauty. The author, Toni Morrison, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and her mastery of writing-craft shows eloquently in this book. As readers find out more about Pecola, the primary character, the shocking conclusion becomes inevitable, but even though I saw it coming, I still nearly wept. Eye treads ground somewhere near Flannery O'Connor's realm of dark American prose, but Morrison's novel takes its time drawing the reader in, resulting in a more devastating psychological blow than O'Connor's short stories. Much more cannot really be revealed about the novel's contents without damaging the experience for other readers. However, I will say that this is an outstanding piece of American semi-historical fiction, nearly on par with To Kill a Mockingbird for its importance in discussing American social issues, but Eye is much more focused on the more global topic of perception of personal beauty. The setting is America, but the major themes are applicable to just about any modern society. Any serious literature fan should dive into The Bluest Eye, but be warned that it may leave a permanent mark. Here's a link to more about the book.

I finished Me Talk Pretty One Day, too, and loved it. David Sedaris's blunt candor figures into the wonderful humor of the book as much as his cutting wit. His humor and style are not as positive as Bill Bryson's, and people who don't care for sarcasm should just say no to Sedaris, but for those who like to watch his brand of intelligence in action, this set of essay-like pieces about Sedaris's past is an impressive source of grins and wry chuckles.

One last epic fell to a voracious reading orgy while on my honeymoon cruise and the week after. Perhaps this one requires a separate post to describe, but I'll set down my thoughts about it here. I read all four parts of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. This monumental work is a chronicle of Severian's rise from torturer to pretty much in charge of humanity on the planet Urth. The story is set on an Earth of the far, far future, where the Sun is in decline, the Moon has been terraformed such that its reflected light is green, and a fairly structured society that incorporates ancient technology, mutation, and mythology into a cohesive whole. Time travel eventually figures into the plot, as do aliens, as may be expected, but the technology is presented as scientific but semi-magical concepts by the narrator... It's a bit hard to describe. Most importantly, it works to create one of the most immersive fantasy settings I've encountered.

Probably the best starting point for reading these is Neil Gaiman's "How to Read Gene Wolfe", and perhaps trying out one or more of the stories from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series before diving in. New Sun is dense stuff, and while it's complete in and of itself, some prep work may be required for casual readers to enjoy the ride. This is probably the reason that this Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement author hasn't been more widely recognized: his work isn't aimed at the average reader.

I thought that some of New Sun's prose was meandering crap for a while, but suddenly, like complex poetry, the whole snapped into my mental view. I discovered that the work is highly structured and that while the narrator is unreliable, Wolfe isn't: readers are given all of the information they need to determine what actually happens in every situation in the book. Everything hangs together to form a coherent whole. For example, the occasional "historical" divergences from a brown book that Severian, the protagonist and narrator, carries with him hold clues to understanding other parts of the story rather than just being frivolous meanderings. A set of seemingly unrelated stories from many different social classes and peoples toward the end of the last quarter of the novel adds important details to the canvas that Wolfe paints Severian's story onto. The question of who Severian's parents are, a topic touched on lightly but persistently, is answered obliquely but definitively by the end of the novel. I am still somewhat stunned by the scope, the complexity, the breadth, and the depth of The Book of the New Sun and will definitely be rereading it at least a couple more times to pick up more from it.

Lovers of grim epic fantasies who don't mind a bit of extra thinking will probably enjoy The Book of the New Sun. It's not for the faint of heart and doesn't have the same simple grandeur of The Lord of the Rings, but I found its huge, thorough scope, deep and complex themes, and towering majesty extremely enjoyable once I got used to it. I'm looking forward to future rereadings, something unusual for me.

As I said at the beginning of this massive missive, these books have comprised some of the best reading I've done in years. I'm almost at a loss as to what to follow up with, but fortunately there are sequels and other excellent works from other authors to read.

In the meantime, I'm zipping through Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing, a book that has taught me more about grammar in its first twenty pages than years of English. It's a great self-help book for authors and would-be authors from a copy editor's perspective.

Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods is, so far, the best Bryson book I've read. I haven't gotten through more than the first two chapters and am absolutely loving it. I was a Boy Scout way back, so I can identify with a lot of the preparation and mindset that goes into walking a long way. His hiking all the way up the Appalachian Trail is a mind-bogglingly gigantic trip compared to what I walked, though. So I have a bit of anticipation about what's coming up already. He's just met an old acquaintance who'll perhaps be accompanying him and THAT adds even more tension to the upcoming trek. Bryson's in fine form here, melding his love of travel, his keen eye for details, and his enormous writing talent into a great read.

Both of the new (to me) Sandman graphic novels have been utterly devoured. A Game of You is a classic piece of storytelling describing how powerful acting for others can be as opposed to an "I"-centric mentality. Fables & Reflections is a series of shorter stories with its ups and downs. Some fill in gaps in Dream's history, but others only involve Morpheus in a peripheral manner. The piece in this collection that really caught my mind is of the latter type, a tale in the tradition of the Arabian Nights and other Middle Eastern traditions called "Ramadan" with a shockingly ironic and poignant ending that left me with a long-lasting mixture of ponderables. I want more.

Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks has made me view Ubuntu with a bit more respect and has also gotten me to consider putting some of the open source tools mentioned in the book on my main system to use. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in seeing Ubuntu from a user's standpoint, even system admins who might be considering moving to Ubuntu desktops, but it's also a good general Linux user book due to its inclusion of information about various free tools and applications available for Linux.

I have a David Sedaris book called Me Talk Pretty One Day on the list. I'd gotten it as a gift for a friend of mine, but it turned out that he'd gotten it already, so I decided to run through it. I haven't been exposed to any Sedaris yet and am looking forward to encountering his wit.

So I tried Edgy Eft a few days back and found that it didn't want to install on my laptop. The live CD booted up ok on my main system, but it didn't want to deal with the laptop's hard drive well enough to install the OS. I looked more closely at the Ubuntu forums and found that Edgy is effectively a test release. Oh.

So I reinstalled Dapper Drake onto the laptop and have been following along through Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks. The level of the book is a little light for me, but I'm picking up all kinds of good information, such as what programs there are out there to do basic operations with the OS and how to customize emblems on folders in Nautilus. I didn't even know that "emblems" existed. Plus there's some basic command line information that's sticking better in my skull from reading this book than it has from just experiential usage. Very nice.

I think I've gotten to the stage where I'm just going to see what I can do with Dapper Drake on the laptop and if it can't be done, well, whatever. The lack of wireless access here at home does reduce the usefulness of the laptop tremendously around the house, though, so I might set up an XP dual boot setup. Not that I've been using the thing around the house much, though, for the last oh, year, but it bugs me. It rankles, like an itch I can't quite reach. So of course I'll have to fiddle with it some more later.

I read a couple reviews yesterday of Bigfoot's Killer NIC, which seems basically to be an intelligent network traffic buffering solution. I was interested in reading about performance, but then something caught my eye: The NIC can run Linux apps on its own processor and in its own memory. This is pretty interesting by itself, but without applications it wouldn't be terribly useful. Then I read that an iptables-based firewall is already available for the card, which perked my mental ears up right away. If a firewall could be stuffed into this card, I thought, then the need for a software firewall is reduced and system security would be increased, right? I think there is still a good case for a software firewall to watch for unauthorized outbound packets, but even reducing its inbound filtering frees up processing cycles. It has me a-thinkin'. I have questions like how 'bout logging traffic and configuring the firewall? Howzabout Linux compatibility for when I potentially stop running Windows? Wish I could try one of these cards out for a week to see how it runs because it's fairly expensive, especially when my main system's motherboard already has gigabit ethernet built in. More research will be going into this, yep, but knowing my impulses, I'll probably have one on its way to me fairly soon. I'll justify it as a late present from Santa. Yeah. And if it's not so hot, I'll let you all know I was insane for a short while.

In less techie news, I've started reading my next "real" book around the Linux one and have pushed Bryson's "Woods" back another step. The new one's called Characters and Viewpoint and is about exactly what it sounds like: a primer on these topics for authors. It's written by the esteemed Orson Scott Card and so far it's very good. In the first section he goes over how much more an author has to give to his audience than just pictures, for example. It's very good.

Bryson's next on my list, but in the meantime, I also got a few more books for Christmas that I want to experience first. One almost looks like a children's story and is called Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned From My Puppy. My fiancee has described this as "kind of a joke gift." It actually looks pretty good, though, containing advice about surviving the trials, tribulations, and triumphs that puppies and young humans bring to their caretakers. Right now my puppy's outside roaming around the 1/2 acre or so on her own, something that I wouldn't do with a human her age, even in dog years, but she seems to have enough natural savvy to work that out. Other comparisons and contrasts abound, but the basic idea, that taking care of a young animal can help ready a potential parent for the most difficult young creatures of all, is pretty sound. It's a beautifully illustrated short read, and after perusing a few pages, the content seems sound enough that while this might be intended for levity, it looks like I'll be bringing some of the book to bear in my life.

The other two books are Sandman graphic novels. Technically, they're not books, then, right? But Gaiman makes every Sandman story arc every bit as mentally chewy as the best short stories. These are my favorite comics: dark, but not too dark; sometimes savagely witty; frequently amazingly poignant; and downright beautiful. Yes, they must be ingested before I take another trip with Bill Bryson. Maybe I'll even devour both this morning.

But then, Diamond's quiet whine tells me that she's had enough roaming alone time for now. I think enough caffeine's slipped into my bloodstream for me to deal with her antics in a sane manner, so I'm off to play with my gangly, ill-mannered, silly, cute, and enthusiastic "youngest kid."

Oh, before I go, there are tons of "top" and "best" listings for 2006 coming out. Go check 'em out. I wonder if there are top English/reading listings besides bestseller lists? I'll have to hunt for those and see.

Have safe and happy New Years celebrations!

First the tech:

There's a TreePad Lite for Linux version. Shocking, I say, that I didn't look there sooner. So yeah, I guess I'm still fiddling with Ubuntu.

I've just upgraded my network to gigabit ethernet for the file server and my main system. Why? So the file access is faster for the OGG files on the file server. And to speed up the network in general, too. I have the cable modem hooked to a 10/100 firewall/router which is then connected to an 8-port gigabit switch. The various other pieces of the network now dangle off of that switch including my print server and the wireless router.

The toughest part in getting the gigabit stuff working was getting the new NIC (network interface card) working in the file server. The big problem was that the motherboard didn't seem to be correctly updating the type of card, so NAS-Lite 2 tried to load the wrong driver. I moved the NIC to a different slot and the motherboard said it had a CMOS checksum error, which was kind of nice because I was going to reset the CMOS to defaults anyway. To make a long story short (too late!), the NIC popped right up after that and I'm in business.

The results? So far music access seems almost as fast as it is with my USB 2 external hard drive, which means it's a mighty big speed increase in read rates. I'm stoked. NAS-Lite 2 gets yet another recommendation from me to any of you network nerds out there who need a quick, cheap file server. Printing is noticeably zippier, even though it's only a 100Mb connection, and it seems like the Internet access from my main system is a bit faster, too. The Internet connection's 10Mb at the cable modem, so maybe relieving some of the regular network traffic from my firewall/router has increased the amount of backplane bandwidth it has available for Internet packet routing.

My apologies to the non-technical in my audience. I'll make up for it now by bringin' on the English:

I finished up Bill Bryson's Made In America and absolutely loved it. The full title is "Made In America: an informal history of the English language in the United States" but should probably be something more like "Made In America: an informal history of the United States and its impact on the English language." It's much more about American history than about American English, yet Bryson intertwines the two so well, making this a trivia lover's dream. A not-so-quick excerpt:

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... [T]wo other linguistic novelties of the early 1900s need mentioning. The first is the hot dog. Memorably defined by H. L. Mencken as "a cartridge filled with the sweepings of abattoirs," the hot dog had been part of the American scene since the early 1800s, but hod gone under the name frankfurter or wienerwurst (literally "Vienna sausage," and corrupted to wienie as early as 1867). The modern name didn't arise until a popular cartoonist named T. A. "Tad" Dorgan drew a picture of a dachshund in an elongated bun in the early 1900s and the term caught on in a big way. It was also helped by the fact that Hot dog! as a cry of delight or approbation was also sweeping the nation as a catchphrase.

Dorgan was responsible for a slew of catchphrases, among them cat's pajamas, yes man, skiddoo, you said it, drugstore cowboy, and yes, we have no bananas....

---

It's a fun read, intricately researched and formidably worded. Light American history buffs and English linguists should definitely have a read. My next Bryson book will be A Walk in the Woods.

But first, I've started reading a book containing the stories Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I know the near-mythological stories of these creatures, but haven't managed to read their literary births. I think I'm going to enjoy them all very much as long as I can keep from critiquing a 19-year-old Mary Shelley's writing instead of just enjoying her creation.

One trivia note that might interest some of you: Stephen King mentions in the book's forward that Robert Louis Stephenson wrote about Dr. Jekyll's predicament in only three days. The tale so horrified his wife that he destroyed it, then rewrote it in another three days in the form he presented to the world. Less than a week of work to create one of the West's most enduring archetypes... Not bad at all.

G'night!

I finished up the Twain book and have begun Bill Bryson's Made In America. He mixes history, lists of odd things, and various anecdotes very well, making the seemingly dull topic of how American English evolved very interesting.

Bryson notes, for example, that the "ye" that we hear all the time as an attempt at being accurately medieval never actually sounded like "yee", but was a different way of spelling "the", as in the article. "Thee" was a form of address, of course, and somewhere along the decades, someone decided that what the original Saints would probably say as "har thee" (according to Bryson, they didn't call themselves Pilgrims but Saints, and they definitely didn't land at Plymouth Rock when there was a nice landing spot just a touch away), occasionally spelled "hear ye," should be pronounced as it was spelled. Voila, instant language history.

If you don't think "y" could be pronounced "th," consider the very commonly-known old usage of a modified letter "f" for the sound "s." Bryson also notes that the early Americans were among the first to utilize the newly-created letter "j" for its modern sound instead of using the letter "g" for such duties.

The mixture of classical American history and American linguistic history seems, as I mentioned, rather boring, but Bryson has a flair for bringing up tantalizing tales to tickle a reader's fancy while presenting even the more dry material with enough interesting juice to get through it without a sigh. The new letter "j", for example, is quite exciting when Bryson writes about it. I'm sure I'll read more about it in later chapters.

Made In America probably isn't a book for your average reader, but anyone interested in English, especially Americans, should give it a look. I'm enjoying it thoroughly. Language nerd!

I've almost finished with the Mark Twain short stories in the big ol' compilation book I'm reading. While his novels are very good, his shorter works are great. I especially enjoyed his chronicle of a trip to Niagara Falls and a discussion of how journalism in Tennessee differed from what he was used to. The man had the ability to generate out-loud laughter with a few paragraphs of irony, sarcasm, and highly detailed insight. Very fun stuff.

I don't know if I mentioned that I read When Gravity Fails a few weeks ago. I put the other two novels of his concerning the fictional cyberpunk Budayeen on my Amazon.com wishlist right after completing the book. This is the story of a supposed outsider who ends up being roped into the power structure he once hated, transforming into someone he detests, yet has to live with. The future Middle Eastern setting of the Budayeen with its personal surgical modifications, dark world outlook, and extensive Muslim influences, elevates this cliche-sounding tale into the realm of classics. It's a suspenseful thriller, but not in the same category as Dan Brown's works. This has much more characterization and a much darker cast of characters. It's become the classic example of a cyberpunk noir.

I've decided to dip back into Bill Bryson's works for my next two major reads, starting with Made In America, a jaunty history of the American version of the English language, and then diving into A Walk in the Woods, which covers a trip through the Appalachians. After that, I'll wend my way through The Thorn Birds, since my fiancee has it here.

I was wondering about RAID and NAS the other day and have come up with a medium-term solution. Check out NASLite. While I have a NASLite installation now sharing out 300 gigs of storage space to the network, I have the flexibility of going with a hardware RAID solution, such as a Promise card, later and still having NASLite be able to view and share out the array. Total cost so far: $30 for NASLite-2 CDD. I no longer have a live Linux installation to mess with. Really, though, that's not a big deal to me right now. I'll revisit Linux later, I think, after seeing how Vista takes off.

I finished the stories in Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find and loved most of them tremendously. Thanks to my English prof last semester for having us read a couple of O'Connor's stories, one of which is in this collection and still packs a wallop when I read it.

Next up is another travel book by Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island. This, my third Bryson book, is about that island where English folk live, and just twenty pages into it I've already laughed out loud a few times. It's another winner of an educational travel story that I highly recommend to anyone interested in traveling to England. His struggles with the language are rather poignant since I just finished reading Bryson's comparisons of English English and American English in The Mother Tongue. However, the story enclosed between the covers of Notes from a Small Island certainly stands on its own. Like most literature, though, the more connections a reader can draw from while enjoying the book, the richer the reading experience becomes.

Sadly, I'm already debating what to read next, although I really need to bury myself in setting up router to router VPN for the next few days instead of blasting through another book. Bryson is addictive, though, and lighter reading than O'Connor's dark stories.

"It got better..." I finished up Angels & Demons and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. The pace picked up, some decent philosophical debating occurred, and I was right about who was the über-baddy, but wrong about the inside person as a result. Very tricky, Mister Brown, very tricky indeed. Well done, Sir!

While the overall pacing was somewhat uneven, I felt happier with much of Angels & Demons than I was with The Da Vinci Code. I very much enjoyed the underlying theme of science vs. religion, since it's a core theme that I think mankind itself is wrestling with. Mother Nature is invoked frequently in the mass media, but so are the tenets of scientific theory. They just might meet somewhere, and this book postulates one possible such convergence and the various groups that are affected by it. The pacing at the end of Angels & Demons is excellent, something that I think the back cover calls "A real-time thriller." Like Brown's other novels, Angels & Demons occurs in a very small span of time. If his works are read quickly, the experience is like reading a long movie. In Angels & Demons, though, there are references to times and a countdown that I could almost set a clock by as I devoured the end of the book. Maybe I read at the same speed that Brown's target audience does, I don't know. It was almost unsettling, but made the book very difficult to put down during the last hundred or so pages. A lot of books have faux climaxes, and a reader can tell that there is more coming because of the number of pages remaining. Angels & Demons has one of these pseudo-endings, but then the events in the rest of the novel surpassed my expectations, grabbing me by the brain and not letting go until I had flipped the last page.

Two things did bother me with Angels & Demons. The first is the introduction of romance to the novel. Dan doesn't typically have the "l-word" show up in his works, preferring to have the action proceed without personal relationships as complications or plot drivers. It is handled fairly well here with emotional responses that seem a bit more contrived than necessary, but given that I'd already read The Da Vinci Code and knew what would happen to the relationship before starting this book, I guess I spoiled it for myself a bit. The pairing should have lasted longer between books, though, especially given the final scene in this story. However, the character pairing in The Da Vinci Code had to happen the way it did without another love interest in the way, so this is just a minor personal bother. The larger trouble that I have with Angels & Demons is the heavy-handedness that Brown uses to get some of the background information to the reader. I may have mentioned this previously, but the smooth manner of stage-setting in The Da Vinci Code is so much nicer to read through.

Overall, I have to say that Angels & Demons is one of Dan Brown's best. It's an excellent novel by a fine thrill-writer. He definitely do like his puzzles, he do, and we can look forward to more in his next tale, I'm sure. I may get it in hardback.

Having finished that roller coaster, I'm now reading Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue, which is a bit drier material than In a Sunburned Country, but definitely still interesting. I just went through a small section on Shakespeare that provided some more fascinating background to me about The Bard. Bryson's research and ability to piece together various sources into a whole historical tapestry of language is rather astounding. His obvious love of English and language as a whole show through just like his love of Australia permeates In a Sunburned Country. It's infectious, and I'm looking forward to reading Bryson's further ruminations on the most common language in the world.

Well, it's time for me to shift back to literature mode for a moment and talk about what I've been reading lately. It's not necessarily high literature, but it's words on pages of paper.

I finished up the chicken book, so I'm now somewhat competent about keeping chickens. Anyone interested in keeping chickens should check out Keep Chickens! and Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance as decent tomes on the subject. You can look those up on your own to find them, I'm sure. Why chicken books? Well, we are building a coop for six hens, so information was needed.

I've started the last Dan Brown novel that I own and have some pretty high expectations for it. The book's called Angels and Demons, aka The Previous Adventures of Robert Langdon (of The Da Vinci Code fame and by the way, says the cover, read Dan Brown's other stuff, too). So far, it's similar to Da Vinci Code in that there's a mystery that Langdon's tossed into, Brown's done a bit of research on his subject, and he writes a fun thriller yarn. It's entertainment reading, kind of my version of the classic cliche of women liking romance novels. Considering that some of my favorite reading has been effectively pulp adventures, this shouldn't be a surprise!

Finally, I've begun reading my first Bill Bryson book, In a Sunburned Land. This gentleman writes a hell of an entertaining book, and if his other travel books are even half as funny and informative as this one is, I have GOT to get them. Sunburned Land is a tale of Bryson's trip to and through the Land Down Under, a place that's been of interest to me even before my dad moved there. Bryson's command of the English language is sublime as he describes the wonderful strangenesses of the world's largest island. Check it out.