One of my all time favourite novels is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and last week I stumbled (thanks to Boing Boing) across a 1956 radio play, narrated by Huxley himself. It is just an hour long, and a very nice production, so there is really no reason not to listen to it.

This dystopian vision of the future still rings true, especially since we seem to be moving towards it faster than Huxley originally envisioned: When the book was published in 1932, he set his story six hundred years in the future. Twenty-five years later in introducing the radio play, he revised this to two hundred years. I wonder what he'd have to say now that another fifty years have passed.

India operates at its own pace and I spent many hours on this trip in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. To help pass the time, Martin handed me the novel he was reading, said he was about a third through, would buy himself another copy later and wandered off to the book store. And indeed, it helped pass the time and I finished the book by the time I reached immigration in Mumbai nine hours later.

I usually do not pass judgement on books as I do not feel qualified to comment on literature, but I am sure that if Martin had read on a little further, he would not feel inclined to spend another 95 rupiah.

One night is bookended by the author recounting a night train ride in which a beautiful girl offers to tell him a story about six people in a call centre receiving a phone call from God, but only if he promises to turn the episode into his next book. After the story is finished she also provides an alternative version of how that call might really have happened. That construction reminded me a lot of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, where it is immensely more effective.

The first third of the book introduces the main characters, who in the second third are each faced with very predictable calamities, go on to have their conversation with God to remind them about what is important in life, and finally bring about a happy end that is too infantile even for a novel targeted at young adults, with whom it has apparently struck a chord anyway, as the book made Bhagat the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India's history and has inspired a major Bollywood picture.

On the plus side, I learned a nice MS Word hack.

This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell.

The (very short) story is called Lyra and the Birds and takes place after the events in His Dark Materials. On its own (and even against the backdrop of the trilogy) this new episode seems rather incomplete, like an opening chapter to a forthcoming novel.

The several other things are a fold-out map of Lyra's version of Oxford, a postcard, a cruise ship pamphlet and excerpts from travel guides. There are also small illustrations throughout the book.

This collection of the first four novels (out of five, plus an additional collection of short stories) of the Earthsea cycle recounts four episodes in the life of the Archmage Sparrowhawk (which is not his true name) as he travels about the many islands of this fantasy world.

I found Le Guin's writing refreshingly different from most other fantasy novels, and on many different levels. First of all it is very taut: Whereas sprawling works like The Wheel of Time expand thousands of pages to introduce dozens of characters that drive many simultaneous plotlines and often engage each-other on battlefields involving huge armies, these four books are a combined seven hundred pages, and there are only a handful of characters and a single narrative thread. As far as geography is concerned, instead of a band of heroes traversing a continent on horseback, we are presented with an archipelago and little sailboats. Unlike your average mighty wizard, Sparrowhawk spends about half of the time sick, injured, helpless, sleeping, unconscious and/or dying. And even though all four books chronicle crucial events in his life, he is the main protagonist only in the first one. Finally, there is definitely a female sensibility at work here, especially in the fourth book, which interestingly enough was written decades after the others (1968, 1971, 1972, 1990), but takes place immediately after the third book, whereas the first trilogy was written in closer succession but is decades apart storywise.

Studio Ghibli's Hayao Miyazaki had for many years wanted to create a movie based on Earthsea, but Le Guin refused until finally approving the project after the great international success of Spirited Away. Miyazaki was then busy with Howl's Moving Castle. however, and his son Goro instead took over to direct his first film, Tales from Earthsea, which received a mixed reaction.

They lay in the dark, guarding. There was no way of measuring the passage of time, nor any inclination to measure it. There was a time when they had not been here, and there would be a time, presumably, when they would, once more, not be here. They would be somewhere else. This time in between was immaterial.
But some had shattered and some, the younger ones, had gone silent.
The weight was increasing.
Something must be done.
One of them raised his mind in song.

One year into the job, con-man-turned-Postmaster-General Moist von Lipwig has managed to turn Ankh-Morpork's postal service into a highly efficient business. The ruling tyrant is impressed and asks Moist to take over operations at the Royal Mint and Royal Bank. Moist's plans to aggressively expand the bank's clientele from just the rich families to the general public, and to replace the gold standard by introducing paper money is met with opposition from his employees and his shareholders.

As far as comedic fantasy goes, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series with its thirty-seven novels (so far) must be the foremost one. According to Wikipedia, it has made Pratchett the UK's bets-selling author of the 1990s (he has since been overtaken by J.K.Rowling). As such, it is somewhat surprising that I have not read any of them until now. Fortunately for me, the individual books are only loosely related to each other, so that there is no particular reading order, and I could enjoy Making Money (the thirty-sixth Discworld novel and second of the Moist von Lipwig cycle) without any background knowledge about characters or setting.

It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.
Each morning they came around, three brisk and serious men with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes, accompanied by brisk and serious Nurse Duckett, one of the ward nurses who didn't like Yossarian. They read the chart at the foot of the bed and asked impatiently about the pain. They seemed irritated when he told them it was exactly the same.
"Still no movement?" the full colonel demanded.
The doctors exchanged a look when he shook his head.
"Give him another pill."

This classic novel of wartime madness goes through three very different stages, and each of them holds up very well.

It starts out as a comedy, filled with clever wordplay, puns and hyperbole similar in style to, say, Douglas Adams. Two particularly amusing patterns that Heller constantly employs are funny non-sequitur lines of reasoning that fly straight into the face of convention or common sense, and conversation threads that abruptly jump around in time, location and participants, which makes for nice momentary confusion.

After a while, it develops into social satire, commenting on the madness of the military machine and war itself. That part probably gained Catch-22 its status as a subversive counter-culture classic in the sixties, but it is still relevant today.

Towards the end of the book, humour makes way for tragedy as the horrors of war are suddenly shown in grim detail: Many characters that have been previously established as comic relief are killed, and the plight of the Italian civilians also becomes apparent in a depiction of Rome that has completely changed in tone from previous chapters.

Am letzten Tag, bevor er zur Bundeswehr mußte, war Frank Lehmann in keiner guten Stimmung. Es war der 30. Juni, ein Montag, und er hatte nichts zu tun, es gab nicht einmal irgendwelche Scheinaktivitäten, in die er sich hätte stürzen können, um seine Gedanken von der unausweichlichen Tatsache abzulenken, daß er sich am nächsten Tag in der Niedersachsen-Kaserne in Dörverden/Barme einzufinden hatte, um dort seinen Dienst als Soldat zu beginnen. Das schöne Wetter machte die Sache nicht besser, im Gegenteil, hätte es wenigstens geregnet, dann hätte er vielleicht zu Hause in seinem Zimmer bleiben können, wäre mit einem Buch und einer Tasse Tee auf seinem Bett liegengeblieben und hätte den Tag vergammelt, aber das ging bei schönem Wetter nicht.

The second of the 2008 Christmas books. The 2001 Herr Lehmann was a very successful German novel with a 2003 movie adaptation, both of which I had never heard about (an audio version of it has just received the 2009 Audiobook Award for Best Fiction). As the blurb on the sleeve has it, it might be interesting to tell something about Herr Lehmann's youth as well, and Neue Vahr Süd, named after the Bremen suburb in which it is set, is the resulting prequel.

Bremen, 1980: As the result of the general conscription, Herr Lehmann, still called Frankie because he is only twenty, reluctantly joins the army, moves out of his parents' apartment, moves in with three almost-friends, and spends a great deal thinking about all this in much detail. In fact, this book is a stream of Frank's consciousness, showing us how he reacts to (or rather over-thinks and then fails to do anything about) a string of events that are at the same time ordinary, recognisable and mundane, but also grotesque, comical, and tragic.

I do not know if any of this is autobiographical, but the depiction of life in the eighties, in Bremen, as a punk, as an organised left-wing youth in the fading days of the movement, and as a Bundeswehr recruit is certainly authentic enough (although I can really only vouch for the latter) to provide for a lot of humour.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.

'Daniel, you mustn't tell anyone what you're about to see today,' my father warned. 'Not even your friend Tomás. No one.'

'Not even Mummy?'

My father sighed, hiding behind the sad smile that followed him like a shadow all through his life.

'Of course you can tell her,' he answered, heavyhearted. 'We keep no secrets from her. You can tell her everything.'

My uncle gives me a book for Christmas every year, and since I missed it in 2007, there were two this time, the first of which being The Shadow of the Wind, or rather Der Schatten des Windes, as I read it in its German translation.

Daniel, a ten-year old boy who has lost his mother in the Spanish Civil War, accompanies his father to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he finds a gripping novel called The Shadow of the Wind by a certain Julián Carax. As it turns out, other books by Carax are hard to come by, as someone seems to be actively destroying copies, and the fate of the author himself is shrouded in mystery. A few years later, Daniel tries to find out more about Carax, thereby stirring up a lot of trouble, even putting his life (and those near him) at risk. At the same time, Daniel's life starts to take on an unsettling similarity to the tragedy that befell Carax.

Zafón's 2001 book has become an international bestseller, there is now talk of expanding the story into a four-part series (a prequel is already out), and you can get a Carax-themed tourist guide to Barcelona, too. It also put me in the mood to finally watch Pan's Labyrinth.

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

The best thing - in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing - about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

After his release from prison, Shadow meets a strange man, who calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and whom he eventually agrees to work for. As it turns out, Wednesday is not just a strange man, but an ancient European god, who has been carried over to America by the Vikings. Like all immigrant Gods, he has found America to be a bad place: After a generation or two, the number of faithful dwindles and the immortals' power and glory rapidly fades away. Wednesday is currently on a crusade to round up other ancient deities and lead them into a war against the modern American idols, such as the Internet, Mass Media, the Car, or the Credit Card.

The book alternates between three modes: We get to follow Shadow in how he deals with a chain of supernatural events while travelling across the United States, we get to follow him behind the scenes in a series of dream sequences (that part did not really work for me), and we get to see a number of vignettes where Gods struggle with their place in modern life. Gaiman obviously did a lot of research into mythological characters, but he also shows a lot of restraint in using these references in that he does not hit you over the head with explicit explanations or introductions. Instead, the reader is encouraged to gather the background information by himself.

Erasmus (the book is written in first person) is a young fraa at the Decenarian math of Saunt Edhar, whose task (in addition to studying alongside his fellow fraas and suurs, of course), includes winding the big clock in the Mynster every day during the aut of Provener. All of the avout are in preparation for the annual Apert, when the doors of Saunt Edhar will open to the Saecular world for ten days. This year will be a Decenarian Apert, and Fraa Erasmus eagerly looks forward to reconnect with his family, his first chance in the decade since he was collected.

While Stephenson starts out like his take on Harry Potter, you later get pieces more in the spirit of Jack London (a trek across the North Pole), Larry Niven (orbital adventures) and Dan Simmons (philosophising about other universes). The book sports a detailed glossary, a chronology of the four millennia leading up the story's opening, and a supplement of three mathematical exercises. An album of music inspired by the book is available on CD separately.

France, 1815: Young sailor Edmond Dantes returns home to Marseille, about to marry his fiancee Mercedes and be promoted to ship's captain. Unfortunately, three jealous friends conspire to get him arrested as a Bonapartist and he becomes a secret political prisoner instead. On the prison island he begins a friendship with another inmate, an Italian priest and scholar, who over the course of the following years provides Edmond with a comprehensive education and also information about a great treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo.

Edmond finally escapes and uses his new-found fabulous fortunes, combined with endless patience and merciless determination, as well as thorough knowledge of the world, its peoples, and its languages, to put into motion an elaborate plan for revenge. Using a number of fake identities, most notably as the Count of Monte Cristo, he seeks out the trust of his unsuspecting enemies and arranges their downfall.

The novel is available in its entirety from Project Gutenberg, and thanks to Youtube, many television and movie adaptations are readily viewable online, too (at least in parts), so that it is easy to take a look and see what got translated to the screen and how. From what I have seen I can recommend the French 1998 miniseries with Gerard Depardieu and Ornella Muti (which seems to introduce an additional major character), and the Japanese anime Gankutsuou (which presents the tale as a space opera)

Stanley Yelnats, whose name reads the same backwards and forwards, is cursed by his family's history of bad luck, which started when his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather did not actually steal a pig, but broke a promise to a one-legged Gypsy. And so it does not come as too big a surprise when he is convicted of a crime he did not commit and sent to a juvenile detention centre in the desert, where he has to dig a hole every day, five feet deep and five feet across. This is supposed to be just a character building exercise, but the Warden takes a strange interest in what the boys dig up.

What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1-13. Joker = 14. I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers. I also added an explanatory note before or after each story, depending on which seemed the more fitting position. Next collection: selected by Tarot.

A collection of fourteen short stories (ranging from about twenty to about eighty pages) about undergoing an autopsy while still alive, meeting The Man in the Black Suit, a travelling salesman contemplating suicide, gangsters in the Thirties, escape from a torture chamber, vampires in the West, occult symbols that can kill, a theory of pets, a scary painting that keeps changing, a crazy restaurant waiter and his big knife, the feeling you can only say what it is in French, a haunted hotel room, hitchhiking with the undead, and a lucky quarter.

Alan has just sold his shop and purchased a house that he plans to write his story in. He spends the rest of his time helping Kurt with his project to set up a free neighbourhood Wi-Fi network. Adam's peace is destroyed by visits from his younger brothers Eric, Fred, and George, who are a set of Russian nesting dolls (Alvin comes closest to human in his family: his father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine, the other brothers Ben, Charlie, and Dean are a psychic, an island and undead). As children, they have jointly murdered Daniel, who was intolerable in the first place and is now really angry, apparently planning to revenge himself by killing his brothers.

Sometimes billed as science-fiction, I would rather call Someone a fantasy or a horror novel. I really liked the part about Albert's family (and hope to see a future short story based in that world). The real-world subplot about the Wi-Fi network felt out of place, however. I see the need for showing how he interacts with humans, but it just felt like a lecture. It would have been more interesting to for example follow Aaron's house remodelling efforts, or maybe have him open another shop.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

One of the best-known horror short stories, The Call of Cthulhu is presented in documentary style, as a series of notes found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston. Mr. Thurston himself has been pulled into the mystery by stumbling upon notes left behind by his late grand-uncle, who in turn had been piecing together reports about outlandish rituals and outbreaks of mania, as they happened around the world, while still strangely connected to each other.

Marcus is a high school student in San Francisco. He is smart and tech-savvy enough to outwit his school's surveillance systems (keystroke loggers on the classroom laptops, RFID on library books, gait recognition cameras), so that he can chat and surf during classes and leave the school grounds unnoticed. Then terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the Department of Homeland Security takes over control of the city, implementing all kinds of security measures. Marcus' attitude towards authority, combined with his technical skills, do not go over well with the DHS and they give him a hard time, which motivates him to put his energy to sabotaging the war on terror, trying to show the insanity and futility of that campaign, while putting him and his friends at a much greater personal risk than he could ever have imagined.

Needless to say, this is a very political book, trying to raise awareness about how Western democracies are quickly turning into police states. It is also spiked with interesting technology pieces, all of which seem much more science than fiction, most of which are probably already in place. In fact, reading it alongside with real news articles is more than a bit scary.

Gibson and Sterling collaborate to create an alternate nineteenth century, where Babbage's Analytical Engine has actually been built and the Information Revolution coincides with (and propels) the Industrial Revolution. Power in Victorian England has been seized by the Industrial Radical Party, with hereditary lords and Luddites alike being pushed to the sidelines.

The book is a mostly atmospheric piece with several vignettes (translation: it is a bit in want of a coherent story), that detail episodes in the lives of Londoners at the time: A prostitute who gets caught up in political spheres, a palaeontologist who stumbles upon a stack of Engine cards and into a violent riot, and a diplomat/spy who is plagued by visions of an all-seeing Eye.

In spite of the shift from cyberpunk to steampunk, the genre's typical topics are all to be found: The subculture of the tech-savvy clackers that know how to program the steam-powered Engines (using punch-cards), the dystopian view of the ever-watchful, data-gathering surveillance state, the mysterious and dangerous artefact that serves to drive the story (in this case a stack of cards created by the Queen of Engines, Ada Lovelace), even the fascination with Japan (which here has just opened itself to the world and is about to have its own Industrial Revolution).

An O'Reilly book without the popular animal cover design that collects essays where leading programmers explain how they think and present examples of elegant solutions to hard problems.

Author	Subject	Programming Language
Brian Kernighan	A regular expression matcher	C
Karl Fogel	An internal data structure of Subversion	C
Jon Bentley	Quicksort	C
Tim Bray	Web server log file analysis	Ruby
Elliotte Rusty Harold	XML verification	Java
Michael Feathers	The FIT Framework for Integrated Test	Java
Alberto Savoia	JUnit	Java
Charles Petzold	On-the-fly code generation	C, C#, CLR Intermediate Language
Douglas Crockford	Top-down-operator-precedence parsers	JavaScript
Henry S. Warren, Jr.	Counting the number of set bits in a word	C and circuit diagrams
Ashish Gulhati	Secure web-based email	Perl
Lincoln Stein	Data visualisation for bioinformatics	Perl
Jim Kent	A genome analyser web application	C
Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek	Libraries to solve linear equations	MATLAB, Fortran
Adam Kolawa	The CERN mathematical library	Fortran
Greg Kroah-Hartman	Linux kernel drivers	C
Diomidis Spinellis	Layers of indirection in the FreeBSD filesystem drivers	C
Andrew Kuchling	Python's dictionary data structure	C, Python
Travis E. Oliphant	Multidimensional array iterators	C, Python
Ronald Mak	A highly reliable information portal for the NASA Mars Rover Mission	Java
Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat	Enterprise Resource Planning	Python
Bryan Cantrill	Thread synchronisation and prioritisation in Solaris	C
Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat	Map-Reduce	C++
Simon Peyton Jones	Software Transactional Memory	Haskell
R. Kent Dybvig	Macro expansions	Scheme
William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt	A networked logging service	C++
Andrew Patzer	REST (as opposed to SOAP) for integrating business partners	Java
Andreas Zeller	Systematic debugging	Python
Yukihiro Matsumoto	Brevity and human-readability	Ruby
Arun Mehta	A one-button user interface for Professor Hawking	Visual Basic
T.V. Raman	Emacspeak (auditory output from Emacs)	Emacs Lisp
Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald	The Seven Pillars of Pretty Code	C
Brian Hayes	Computational Geometry	Lisp

I quite enjoyed the Golden Compass movie and immediately ordered this boxed set of Lyra's adventures (the Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, and the Amber Spyglass) from Amazon. It is being marketed as a Young Adult book, probably as a result of the main characters all being teenagers, but it certainly tackles more serious topics than, say, Harry Potter, and there are also a number of rather shocking plot developments.

When the Catholic League called for a boycott of the Golden Compass movie, they said it was less about the picture, but more about keeping children away from the books. And indeed, Pullman is quite aggressive in his attack on the concept of organised religion, to the point where one has to wonder if he is actively trying to offend.

Hardcore fans of the novels also disparaged the movie for watering down the controversial content to make it more commercially viable. I do not think that this actually happened, and the religious themes are not all that prominent until the later volumes anyway, but the movie does deviate from the source material in other ways, most notably in that it cuts off the ending (an anti-Happy-Ending if there ever was one) and reverses the order of the two main events before that. Apparently Pullman approved of these changes, though.

HarperCollins has released another free MP3 recording of Neil Gaiman reading one of his stories, which he does very, very well. A letter-form story set in Cthulhu-Victorian London (and narrated in wonderful Victorian English), A Study in Emerald follows the protagonist, who shares lodging in Baker Street with the city's foremost consulting detective, as he assists his friend in the case of a murdered German noble.