The last two novels I’ve read are Don Quixote and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Don Quixote has no plot. Event follows event but it all grows naturally out of character and conditions. The characters are immortal, independent of time and place. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is nothing but plot. It’s a good plot but none of the characters are interesting outside the confines of the story. They certainly have no sense of humor. Cervantes takes 900 pages to allow his two principal characters to reveal themselves through their words and actions. Larsson just blurts everything out: Erika was an organizer who could handle employees with warmth and trust but who at the same time wasn’t afraid of confrontation and could be very tough when necessary. She and Mikael often had differing views and could have healthy arguments, but they also had unwavering confidence in each other,… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Books
Customer Engagement
You want to actively elicit feedback from end users using short development cycles or by using prototypes and models during analysis. A good feedback cycle has the appearance of causing problems. It will cause emergent and latent requirements to surface. That means rework: the value of prototypes is that they push this rework back into analysis, where it has more value. And most important, good end user engagement changes end user expectations. It is only by participating in a feedback loop that’s grounded in reality that customers get the opportunity they need to reflect on what they’re asking for. If your customer changes their expectations in the process, you’ve both learned something. Embracing change doesn’t just mean reacting to it: it means providing the catalysts that accelerate it. — James O. Coplien and Gertrud Bjørnvig, Lean Architecture for Agile Software Development Read more →
Twitter: 2010-10-15
RT @Jesus_M_Christ: #unheardcelebbooks "I Did Not Sacrifice Myself so You could Get Fat and Watch Jersey Shore" By Jesus M Christ # Read more →
We All Keep Going
It just seems so amazing and wonderful and, well, a miracle, but I guess it’s just ordinary life, how we all keep going, isn’t it? — Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys Read more →
Enlightened Perseverance
Your own passion and dedication have to be bigger than other people’s attachment to the way things have been, their fear of change and losing control. — Gay Hendricks and Kate Ludeman, The Corporate Mystic Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
Anyone who REALLY likes one or more of the following: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Tom Clancy Golf The Big Lebowski Beer (bonus points if you call it “brew”) Las Vegas Boating KISS Skiing Frank Zappa (bonus points if you just say “Zappa”) Their own abs When Harry Met Sally… Mitch Albom Maya Angelou Read more →
Words
Our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. — Paul Auster, City of Glass Read more →
Short Books
My kid’s got a summer assignment for AP English — select and read two novels from a list of about 20. I’ve been telling him since June that I’d be glad to go over the list with him and recommend books that he might enjoy reading but he’s put it off so long now that I’m limited to recommending short books that he might enjoy reading, and that leaves us with Ethan Frome, Wide Sargasso Sea and All the Pretty Horses. He comes back from the bookstore with Frome and Sargasso, two books about men who marry crazy women. He ruled out All the Pretty Horses because it’s 300 pages long and “I read the first sentence and it had like six adjectives.” Read more →
Between Stimulus and Response
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning Read more →
My Idea of a Good Time
Raising intelligent, loving, sturdy children! Protecting some good woman! Dignity! Health! Love! Industry! Intelligence! Trust! Decency! High Spirits! Compassion! What the hell do I care about sensational sex? — Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint Read more →
Twitter: 2010-06-30
RT @DanNaturman: Fake Book Excerpt: "The Nanny Diaries" – "I understand. But you should still pay me for the time the kid was alive." # RT @thesulk: In the guy from Your So Vain's defense, that song is about him. # Read more →
Happy Father’s Day
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. — Mark Twain A wise son maketh a glad father. — Proverbs 10:1 Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later . . . that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called ‘Being a Father’ so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. —Tom… Read more →
Twitter: 2010-06-16
RT @penelopetrunk: All productivity books summarized in 11 words: 1 thing at a time. Most important thing 1st. Start now. (via lifehacker) # Read more →
Henderson the Rain King
“There is that poem about the nightingale singing that humankind cannot stand too much reality. But how much unreality can it stand? Do you follow? You understand me?” “Me unnastand, sah.” “I fired that question right back at the nightingale. So what if reality may be terrible? It’s better than what we’ve got.” “Kay, sah. Okay.” “All right, I let you out of it. It’s better than what I’ve got. But every man feels from his soul that he has got to carry his life to a certain depth. Well, I have got to go on because I haven’t reached that depth yet. You get it?” “Yes, sah.” — Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King Read more →
Hearty and Fleeting
Photo by melliemels Then, before the rain began, the old place appeared to be, not a lost way of life or one to be imitated, but a vision of life as hearty and fleeting as laughter . . . — John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle Read more →
Genius Takes a Walk
The Conceptualists would answer: It’s not permanence and materials, all that Winsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too. — Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word Read more →
The Erasers
The Erasers is a combination detective story and Greek tragedy, about a murder investigation in which the victim, unbeknownst to (almost) anyone, is not really dead. It’s also about multiple perceptions of the same events, all of them perfectly reasonable and all of them wrong. And it’s about the inevitablility of fate, which despite your best efforts can lead you to an unimaginable deed (cf. Oedipus). Highly recommended! Read more →
Books Etc.
Thanks to the annual Super Bowl Sunday Buy One Get One Free sale at Books Etc. in Laguna Hills, the works of Bellow, Borges, Bukowski, Brautigan, Cheever, Eco, Grace Paley, Dennis Potter, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe have found their way onto my bookshelf for a capital outlay of only 32 dollars American. Read more →
Pride and Prejudice
As my son comes downstairs for dinner, he says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune –” I finish it with him: “– must be in want of a wife.” “We spent 45 minutes in class today analyzing that one sentence,” he says. “It’s a very famous sentence,” I say. “The next sentence will probably go faster.” Read more →
Conversation with a Dog
ME: In the future it is neither necessary nor desirable for you to greet me every single time I walk in the door. Unless a minimum of two hours has passed, the previous greeting is still in effect. In other words, if I come IN the door, and you greet me, and then several minutes later I go OUT the door, only to return in a matter of seconds, you do NOT have to greet me again. LEWIS: Ha-ha. Good one. — Merrill Markoe, How to Be Hap-Hap-Happy Like Me Read more →