Finished The Rule of Four, and still have not unpacked our stuff from the boxes… in fact, haven’t thought about them much at all, since they’re sitting at my brother’s place, still, out of sight, well out of mind.

So I don’t have my follow up books to go to, so I did a little digging around the library shelves at my parents’ house, and found this light little read.

Now just need to get time to actually read some of it, and we’ll be good to go.

Market Forces was a good read… good, not great. The hero, Chris Faulkner is similar to Takeshi Kovacs, but not quite, in that he’s definitely a flawed/human hero.

I had a little trouble of the premise you were just supposed to accept for a good portion of the book without explanation that, in the future, promotions will be determined by whether or not you can drive you adversary off the road, preferably killing them.

But, in the end, it was a good read for the train.

Michael Chabon did an excellent job selecting the stories for this collection, hardly a dud in the bunch. I still don’t understand how Cory Doctorow gets published, let alone in these kinds of things, but there you go. I guess he must be a brilliant writer, able to write in very childish styles to reflect his characters viewpoint or something. In every single thing he’s written.

But I probably shouldn’t dwell on that. And Cory’s story is readable enough, if you can get past the narrator’s style. Overall this is a great collection. Tom Perotta’s story starts it off strong, and I was able to pass the trip from Boston to Atlanta, Atlanta to San Jose with all of these and it wasn’t too painful. The one that surprised me, at first because I thought it was a bit weaker, and then because I really enjoyed it, was Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Cousins.”
Again, well worth reading.

Picked this up at Barnes & Noble the other day (half off! Woohoo!), with the idea that skipping through a few short stories would help me get that story off to Adam for Fenway Fiction II.

So far, not much progress on that front. I enjoyed the Tom Perotta and Dennis Lehane stories, though…

Repairman Jack is a pretty good character, as flawed tough guys are concerned. My father recommended F Paul Wilson to me, I think he’s read most of the Repairman Jack series, and I started off with All the Rage
He refers back to an incident in a previous book ( The Tomb ), but you get enough background, in both Rage and this one, Conspiracies, to get by without feeling like you really need to go back and read it.
A really good, quick read. Perfect plane reading.

Again, I’ve already said this book panders to an audience more familiar with Java than with WebObjects, but, from a marketing standpoint, and looking at the sizes of the two demographics, you can’t argue with a book skewed that way.

The examples at the end were informative from the standpoint of someone who’s done only WebObjects proper deployment, and not deployed any apps in a servlet container.

Worth reading.

An okay read… not particularly sparkling writing… and not writing that just gets out of the way and lets the story do the talking… it was an interesting story, told pretty well, but it could have been better.

Nick seems to hate his characters, and it’s making this one almost unreadable… maybe it’s a subtle ploy: a novel about suicide drives readers to leap off the nearest building…
I liked Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, About a Boy… but Nick’s got to go explore some new ground… or maybe he shouldn’t. His sharpest writing, when he seems interested in the book he’s writing, is when he falls back on his old favourites: music and lists. Personally, after High Fidelity and his “33 songs to listen to” or whatever that one was titled, I’m a bit sick of Hornby’s high opinion of his eclectic and… I don’t know what he thinks it is… the word ‘boss’ keeps leaping to mind. Anyway. Not enjoying it much, about halfway through, and my wife says it doesn’t get any better at the end (usually the one bit that lets him down, anyway).
UPDATE: She was right. I recommend sticking to Nick’s earlier stuff. This one has a great idea for the story, it’s a shame he hates every single character in the book, which, I suppose, could be a challenge to exceptionally compassionate people who want to try and like everyone… good luck with that, anyway. Nick, stick to 30-something English males for your characters… you’ve got those down. You just couldn’t pull off an older English breakfast show presenter, an older Irish woman caring for her vegetable son, a rowdy young minister’s daughter, and an American in London.

This is a pretty good, in-depth intro to WebObjects… you’ll want to either have worked with it a little bit, taken maybe the first WebObjects programming course, or are pretty familiar with a competing Java Web Application server.
In fact, it seems like the latter is the target audience for the early parts of the book. So far, a lot of the book is geared towards convincing Java programmers that they won’t have to throw away all their idiosyncrasies to use WebObjects. I kind of chafed at all this Java specific stuff, but, then, I’m not their target audience. I’m just reading through the book to see how good a job they’ve done (no, I haven’t had any offers to write a WO book, it’s not that kind of research), so it’s not like I’m expecting to learn any new tips and tricks. Their practical examples are pretty good, so far, and will help people wrap their head around EOF and friend.s