What I’m Reading 1

So, not much has been going on for me this week. I’m still practicing piano and working and everything, but it’s all been almost depressingly normal. One thing I have been doing a descent amount is reading, so I figured I would put up a list of the things I’m working my way through, since some of them are pretty interesting.

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling – I have to admit that I started reading this because of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Gaiman makes no secret of the fact that he got quite a bit of inspiration from this book, especially with the title being such an obvious reference. I’m most of the way through the first Jungle Book (there is a second), and I have to agree that it’s very well written, and very interesting. The poetry feels a bit sillier to me than Kipling intended, I think, but overall definately worth it. And it’s in the public domain, so if you have the time, there’s no reason not to read it.

Viriconium by M. John Harrison – The first M. John Harrison novel I read was Light, which was very odd, but all the characters had a great charm to them. Viriconium has a much different feel. While Light was about the characters, I feel like Viriconium is more about the world. There are pages and pages dedicated to flowering descriptions of desolate wastelands. The characters are somewhat interesting, but the way Harrison builds the world is what makes this worth reading. I’ll probably still be reading this for a while; it’s three novels together, and none of them are especially short.

Nova by Samuel R. Delany – I’ve really just started this book yesterday, so I don’t really have much to say about it, but I wanted to mention it since the way that I found out about Delany was through Coilhouse Magazine. Coilhouse is a magazine and blog that bills itself as a loveletter to alternative culture. The first issue contains an exerpt of Delany’s upcoming Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. The excerpt is probably one of the most touching pieces I’ve ever read. I wanted to read more, so I went off to the local used bookstore looking for Trouble on Triton, as it was also mentioned on Coilhouse. Unfortunately, they didn’t have it, but they did have Nova.

METAtropolis by various authors – METAtropolis is an audiobook collection of short stories by Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, and Karl Schroeder. It’s different than a lot of collections, in that the setting was created by all of the authors working together, and that each work is a coherent piece in that setting. So far, I really like this work. The setting is somewhat different than many near future settings in that it doesn’t have a dominant regime an a righteous rebellion, or a righteous government fighting evil terrorists. It mostly has people doing what people do, except with more technology and more history. I heard about this collection through the excellent Escape Pod quite a while ago, but I’m just getting around to it now, since I was busy listening to The Count of Monte Cristo.

Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Niederst Robbins – I started to program HTML right before the great standardization push began (back before HTML 4 reared its head), and the difference between them then, and the difference between HTML 4 and XHTML when those came out, was a matter of memorized commands rather than phillosophies. Since then, I’ve started reading A List Apart, and gotten on the train with web standards. I’ve also somehow happened to become a web developer, which is not something I expected to happen. Even so, although I’ve built up fairly good knowledge of all the little wiggly bits of web design, and I’ve worked to keep standards, my roots have always been shaky. It’s nice to sit down with a book that tells me not only how to do things (those are a dime a dozen, and I could learn that stuff from the internet anyway), but one that explains why it’s done like that. It’s really helped to bind together my abstract idea of web standards with the rather less pragmatic practice of writing HTML.

So those are the things that I’m reading, and how I found it. Hopefully this will be a help to someone else with similar interests. And hey, if I can pass just one more person on to the awesome Coilhouse Magazine, then this blog post was a success.