Category: Books

  • Sitepoint books: raising money for Australian fire victims

    Via Heather: Sitepoint, the excellent web design publishing house based in Australia, have put their work and their hearts on the line for the victims of the Australian bush fires.  Please take advantage of this opportunity to help those affected while brushing up on your web skills too. http://5for1.aws.sitepoint.com/ “To support the victims of the…

  • What Jack Handey would say to the Martians

    I’m a huge fan of Jack Handey (bad Flash site alert), whose Deep Thoughts often reduce me to a giggling wreck. If you don’t find the following Deep Thoughts funny, there’s probably not much point in reading the rest of this post. One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going…

  • In my head, I’m Ian Rankin

    The rather sarcastic Stuff Journalists Like website (which, incidentally, would be an awful lot better if the writing was better) sometimes gets a little bit too close for comfort: Stuff journalists like: writing a book Buried under nearly every journalist’s notebooks, papers and clips is an idea for a book. …Unfortunately, a good percentage of…

  • George Saunders: The brain-dead megaphone

    “…the nightly news may soon consist entirely of tirades by men so angry that all they can do is sputter while punching themselves in the face, punctuated by videos of dogs blowing up after eating firecrackers, and dog-explosion experts rating the funniness of the videos…” I think I’m going to enjoy this book.

  • New Sony Reader e-book: better, still not perfect

    According to Mobile Tech Review, the new PRS-700 is better than the previous Reader: Sony has worked a near miracle with their touch screen and touch-centric user interface. The Reader is simply a joy to use in terms of ergonomics, control and navigation. This is by far the most natural way to manage, navigate and…

  • The lost years and last days of David Foster Wallace

    A superb (and very sad) bit of journalism from Rolling Stone. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published…

  • Three good things and one bad one

    Good: The new Christopher Brookmyre, James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin novels. Bad: The new Girls Aloud single.

  • Better e-book readers are coming

    Excellent news. We’re not quite at the point where I’d want to dump my daily paper for a digital Daily Me, but we’re getting closer. The iRex Reader 1000 offers a 10.2-inch diagonal E-Inkscreen, far larger than Kindle’s 6-inch screen or even iRex’s own 8.1-inch diagonal iLiad, its last e-book model. That stretched display is…

  • Why let an author’s death put an end to a series?

    Following on from the news that Eoin Colfer, best known for the Artemis Fowl books, will be writing the next book in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, I have my own announcement: I’ve been commissioned to write the sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Obviously I can’t say too much about it, but I can…

  • Babies don’t come with instruction manuals. But you can buy one

    You get a lot of advice when you’re about to become a parent, or when you’ve just become a parent. Most of it is well-intentioned, but it’s largely useless. Sometimes it’s contradictory – so one person says “you MUST do this!” while someone else says “you MUST NOT do this!”; sometimes it’s based on half-remembered…