March
16,
2004
I mostly read David Foster Wallace’s Girl With Curious
Hair
, a collection of his short stories, and I mostly liked
it.
The “mostly”s there are because I bogged down hard in the
book-capping novella and uttered the Three Deadly Words — “Idon’t
careabout thesepeople” — whereupon I quite happily put it down. But
up until that point, I’d been vaguely enjoying it, in a loose and
aimless sort of way.
(Aside: Why do short story collections always end with a damn
novella? I mean, just at the point in your reading when you’re
thinking, “Well, this is all very nice, but I think I’ve nearly had
enough of this author’s stories,” they dump this whompin’ huge nearly
novel-length thing on you. Getting bogged down in the final novella
is a common experience in my collection/anthology reading life.)
Anyway, the big problem with the book is that it’s mainstream
fiction. It’s maybe leaning up against the SF fence a bit, but it
can’t even be described as straddling the genre border — it’s got both
feet planted firmly on the mainstream side. This isn’t an inherent
problem, mind; I’m told many people read non-genre fiction
exclusively, even. But it fucked with my head, and I couldn’t
get away from the disturbing feeling that there wasn’t much
there there.
It makes me feel like the worst sort of know-nothing advocate of
hard SF to complain that these were just stories about some
unimportant, pathetic people, so I won’t do that. But I will
say that it felt like there was something missing, which I can’t quite
pinpoint. Maybe it’s just the moment of surprise that the best SF
provides, when the world-building hints finally coalesce and you
understand what’s going on; maybe it’s the uncertainty of open
possibility that you get when you don’t know what the ground rules are
for the story’s universe until you’re well into it; maybe it’s
actually that I just want some damn robots and spaceships (though I
tend to doubt it). Or hell, maybe I’m misdiagnosing things entirely,
and the stories are lacking in some way that’d make them feel
curiously empty even to exclusive readers of mainstream fiction.
But as empty and pointless stories go, these are good. Wallace has
a deft hand with style — and not just one style, either. The stories
in this collection are vastly dissimilar stylistically, ranging from
the footnoted style that’s his trademark to a superb dialect-heavy
story that was my favorite of the lot (and, coincidentally(?), the
most SFnal) to fairly traditional narration. Enormous fun for a
while, but ultimately unfulfilling.
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March
15,
2004
In Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’s The Pragmatic
Programmer
, the authors attempt to distill years of experience
into a slim (but highly-priced) book. Instead of presenting a huge
over-arching methodology or a single grand idea, they just have lots
of little (usually 2-5 page) tips about ways of working and thinking
that produce better results.
The bite-size nuggety nature of the book is a big strength — lots
of good ideas aren’t book-length, and hence don’t get written up for
posterity — but it’s also a weakness. Some of the info-nuggets are
dreadfully obvious, some of them are highly controversial, and some of
them are too complex to be crammed into the space allotted for them.
The book is an uneasy amalgamation of common sense notions, really
good ideas, dubious ideas, and the occasional vague idea.
But that’s fine. You don’t expect every bit of a book to be great.
The real problem I had with this book is that it was all
over-familiar. Use version control, master your editor, do automated
unit tests with xUnit, have an automatable build process, don’t
believe users’ stated requirements: I know these things, and I’ve read
scores of articles and Web pages over the years telling me exactly the
same thing that Hunt and Thomas are telling me, so do I really need to
pay them this exorbitant sum to tell it to me again? Not really.
On the other hand, if you haven’t heard these things and are a
working developer... well, first of all, you need to read around a bit
more; but you could do worse than to start your reading with The
Pragmatic Programmer. There’ll be very little new for experienced
developers, but lots of interesting tidbits for new ones.
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March
12,
2004
The title of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything
is
audacious; the subtitle, “Simple Recipes for Great Food” is ludicrous.
We’re supposed to believe that we can just buy one big ol’ cookbook
that will tell us everything we need to know to cook, and that the
cooking will be easy yet produce great results? Riiiight.
Still, I’m a sucker for audacity, and “easy yet delicious” strike
me as desiderata to strive for; plus, the book jacket and Amazon
reviews were glowing — so, I figured I’d give it a whirl. Now, last time I
reviewed a cookbook, I did so after reading straight through it
and making a single recipe out of it. While that was fine for that
tutorial-style book, it didn’t seem appropriate for a cookbook that
purports (as How to Cook Everything does) to be useful for
everyday cooking. A more extended evaluation seemed in order before I
wrote anything up.
So, every night for the last month or so, we’ve cooked dinner from
a recipe (or two) out of the book. From that sentence alone, you
might guess that either I’m an incredibly dedicated book reviewer, or
that Bittman’s book fulfills its audacious claims. As it happens, I’m
not, and it does.
This book was revolutionary and life changing for me, nearly as
much so as
The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need
. I’ve
been a life-long eater of pre-prepared, processed, frozen or boxed
foods, but Bittman has converted me to eating meals made from actual
ingredients and fresh foods. Because, and here’s the amazing thing,
the recipes in the book are almost all easily made and have (so far)
been universally excellent. As Bittman notes in the foreword, why
bother making Kraft macaroni and cheese when you can make
sage-parmesan pasta with no more time or effort?
I actually feel like I’ve been betrayed by society. All my life,
I’ve learned that cooking can either be easy or good, but not both.
Cookbooks have fallen into one of two categories: 1) Ones with food
that looks great in the full-color glossy pictures, but requires
ingredients you can’t buy and hours of elaborate preparation you have
no time for; or 2) Midwestern cooking, featuring lots of ground beef
and cream of mushroom soup, where “salt and pepper” are considered
exotic spices. Since neither of those extremes are very appealing on a daily basis, pre-made food looks like a great middle ground — not as good as the fancy food, but better than the easy food, and easier than them both.
What Bittman so successfully demonstrates with his recipes is that
you can take simple, straightforward ingredients, use a few basic
techniques, and turn them into great tasting meals. Why did nobody
tell me this before? What conspiracy has prevented this knowledge
from coming into wide circulation? I can’t help but suspect that the
huge agribusiness industry has played a role in this; much like Nike
and Levi-Strauss have helped society’s other great lie, that casual
clothes are more comfortable than dressier ones.
At any rate, Bittman gives you the basic techniques you’ll want to
learn, a huge pile of excellent recipes, lucid writing, and enough
information that you’re not engaging in cargo-cult, brainless
recipe-following. The upshot here is that you can go from being
unable to cook anything more complicated than frozen pizza, to being a
person who casually makes real food from raw ingredients on a daily
basis under the tutelage of this book. And once you do, you’re going
to be pissed that the purveyors of branded food pulled the wool over
your eyes for so long, because this stuff is good. If you have
a kitchen, buy this book today.
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