From the vault: Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers by Michael Crichton. First published in 1983, this is the famed writer/doctor’s early bird take on the computer revolution then getting underway in the United States.
All these years later, Crichton’s advice and observations make for some unintentionally funny reading. I wish you the good fortune of finding your own used copy for $1. Meantime, here’s a taste from the dust-jacket tease and some other goodies:
In Electronic Life, (Crichton) shares his knowledge and his love of computers. His message: Don’t be afraid of them, they’re only machines, they’re here to make your life easier, and, what’s more, they can be a lot of fun!
Choice chapter titles, with opening sentences:
Afraid of Computers - “Everybody is.”
Error Messages - “Beginners get a lot of error messages, inevitably accompanied by a sharp electronic beep.”
Power - “‘I have 40K of ROM!’ ‘I have 256 K of RAM!’ ‘I have a high-speed color printer!’ ’ I have a 16-bit CPU!’” … There’s only one response to this kind of bragging. Your big powerful machine is only as good as what you do with it - which is another matter entirely/”
Bonus: you’ll also learn what the following are:
floppy disks
computer skills
games
printers
Maps of Literary Classics
(via libraryland)
Would love to see John Irving’s Until I Find You on here.
Source: libraryland
Earlier this year, I missed the announcement that Canadian author/artist/fashion designer Douglas Coupland was picked to give this year’s Massey Lectures. I’ve been known to enjoy Coupland’s fictional yarns on occasion, and especially like his musings on Twitter (scroll back, there are some gems). He’s a man of quirky insight. He’s breaking with tradition and will be delivering his lecture in the form of a novel, Player One: What is to become of us?
Here is a snippet of conversation he had with Canadian literary monthly Quill and Quire about the upcoming “lectures”:
Q&Q: Why did you decide to write the lecture as a novel?
DC: A narrative seemed like the most efficient and accessible way of putting forth a large number of propositions about life in the year 2010. I’ve never done traditional lectures… I think that would have felt dutiful and homeworky.
Q&Q: What’s the novel about?
DC: It presents a wide array of modes to view the mind, the soul, the body, the future, eternity, technology, and media.
Q&Q: Where and when is it set?
DC: In a B-list Toronto airport hotel’s cocktail lounge in August of 2010.
I especially like that last bit. Can’t wait for this. Read the rest of the interview here.
Getting ready to dive into The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second book in the Millenium trilogy by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. I devoured the first novel in the series while on vacation and have been waiting until some free time popped up to start into the second.
I guess the novels could be filed under ‘crime’ or ‘mystery’, but I think that’s too narrow a reading, at least with regards to his first. In addition to spinning a gripping mystery set in backwater Sweden, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo presents a meaningful meditation on some of the ills facing contemporary Swedish society (primarily with regards to women’s rights, custody, etc.), all through the eyes of some of the most fully-fledged characters I’ve met on paper in some time.
Larsson, who died of a massive heart attack at the age of 50, was also a political activist and journalist who fought to expose fringe far-right groups in Sweden throughout his career. Such efforts made him the target of death threats. Apparently, he and his partner never married on account of a Swedish law that states that wed couples must publish their addresses publicly, something he wasn’t comfortable doing for security reasons. Sounds like the story line out of one of his novels.
