David Jack Wange Olrik

This weeks pick is a book – you know those analog¹ thingies that doesn’t require batteries. My pick is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and this is quite possibly the best science fiction novel I have ever read.

Snow Crash is set in the early 21st century where we follow Hiro Protagonist and a young girl nicknamed Y.T.² through an epic tale that mixes together Sumerian culture, virtual reality, religion, love, computer viruses and sword fighting.

The main theme of the book is a computer virus called Snow Crash that begins to infect humans. To explain how this transition from machine to flesh is possible Neal Stephenson uses the somewhat controversial³ concept of Julian Jaynes Bicameral Mind Theory.

The attention to detail in this book is phenomenal as is the writing – I guarantee that if you first pick up Snow Crash, you won’t be able to put it down again before you have read the last page – and then you’ll wish there were more chapters to be read.

1. If you prefer digital you can get it from Audible.com or from iTunes [↩]
2. Short for Yours Truly [↩]
3. I find the theories described in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind very believable – i.e. it just makes sense [↩]

Tomorrow is May 25th, also known as Towel Day amongst friends. This is the day where we celebrate the life and works of my favorite author of all time Douglas Adams¹. Douglas is the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a most excellent book about another book that is equally excellent.

A towel, it² says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

So, do as the book says: “Don’t forget your towel!”

1. Douglas is the reason for my weird obsession with the number 42 [↩]
2. “It” being the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [↩]

A few days ago I tweeted about the latest news from the Pragmatic Programmers. This morning I received the official newsletter in my inbox with all the details.

All of the Pragmatic Programmers eBooks are now available in the ePub and mobi formats as well as PDF. And whats even more cool, is that if you have previously purchased any PDF eBook from the Pragmatic Programmers, you can now download it in any of the new formats – or both!

This means you can now bring your entire Pragmatic collection on your iPhone or Kindle.

To get your collection on your iPhone, install Stanza and use Mobile Safari to download the books directly ¹ on the iPhone.

Oh, did I mention the the books are DRM-free?

1. The Stanza desktop companion fubars the formatting [↩]

I know this cute girl, who thinks she might be mainstream , actually I live with her, and I would definitely say no.

Recently she picked up The Da vinci Code , and she haven’t been able to put it down until she finished it yesterday evening. Every free moment, every time of the day she just had to read a couple of pages…

I remember seeing a BBC TV documentary on Discovery channel a couple of years ago, before the book came out. I then found it an interesting story – but I totally dismissed the book when it came out, thinking its just a copy with some lame murders thrown in for the fun of it.

Hmm… guess I have to read it too – It must be good, and now she has made me too curious not to read it. Hope it doesn’t make me mainstream too… but at least I’ll know what all the fuss is about.