I’m very much into large document layout techniques right now. Every book I pick up I look first not to the content but to the way the designer has placed the page numbers.

Absolutely brilliant. I haven’t enjoyed a book this much in ages. It’s just straight-out, full-on, character-oriented world-building at its best. The writing is direct, uncomplicated, and yet scattered with breathtakingly lovely metaphors. Supernatural elements are present, but they don’t overwhelm the narrative. The overarching moral theme, to me, was that doing the right thing often can cause more pain and harm — in the short term — than going along with the game.

Plus: dragons. And direwolves.

There are three more books in this series, not including the newest one, set to appear in September of this year. I suspect I will be caught up by then and waiting impatiently for my hardcover edition to be delivered.

I am deeply disappointed with O’Reilly. It is with them that I place the most blame for the personal misfortune I have suffered from paying $29.95 for this book. Their line of books has been consistently timely and exhaustive of the major technology topics of the day. When I discovered this title in their catalog, I was excited by the possibility of finding a solid work on some of the emerging ontological challenges and characteristics of the modern Web. But that is not what this text is, and for the reasons listed below, I don’t believe they should ever have allowed this book to be published.

My chief complaint is Morville’s inability to do more than leap around a subject, quoting other sources aggressively but shedding no original light of his own. This is combined with the unfortunate editorial choice of using the same symbols for both footnotes and bibliographic entries. It seemed that he did a poor job of citing all his sources; if he cited them as often as required, the pages would bristle with numbers, because the text is such a hodgepodge of other people’s words and ideas.

The entire book reads like the first few pages of a scope document, or a sales pitch, wild with glib, facile, sophomoric rhetoric, lacking any substance, intended to excite and to provoke, but providing nothing to back up the emotional language. And some of it is downright incomprehensible: “Our future will be at least as messy as our present. But we will muddle through as usual, satisficing under conditions of bounded rationality. And if we are lucky, and if we make good decisions about how to intertwingle our lives with technology, perhaps we too can reclaim a fragment of asylum.” (p.97)

When the work is original, it often disintegrates into a series of terse and mostly unhelpful definition lists. I kept asking myself: where is the value add? The text is profusely illustrated in a high-color format unusual for an O’Reilly book, but the images consist of low-resolution screen grabs which are largely unnecessary for an understanding of the material under discussion. This whiff of “shovelware” is unsurprising, given Morville’s research methodology: “For most of my research, I found what I needed from where I sit, via the free Web, online databases, and my personal bookshelf.” (p.172)

The only concrete recommendations concerning increasing findability that I could glean are to stay away from bitmapped (i.e. graphic, not live) text in websites and replace “pushy” marketing messages with more verbose link descriptions. Perhaps the text would have been more focused if the author was able to define his professional identity more clearly. In each chapter he seemed to wear a different hat: designer, librarian, information architect, findability engineer. For him, “words are messy little critters” (p.15) but for the money I paid for this book and the time I invested in reading it, I would have hoped for an author with a little more control over the English language.

In a positive light, there are a few interesting anecdotes, mostly personal, and an explanation of the term “folksonomy” and the popularity and power of sites like Flicker and Delicious that those unfamiliar with the rise of user-contributed keywords as means of organizing large amounts of dynamic information will find helpful. And he makes the excellent point that web developers should pay attention to how their site is being found, and that viewing the discipline of search engine optimization as somehow sleazy or secondary is an excuse to ignore questions of context and to shirk one’s responsibility to the user.

But as a whole, I cannot recommend this book, and am in fact going out of my way to warn other people about its content. Morville is a bright guy and he certainly has his mind in some interesting places. But I would have been better off reading his website. The material in “Ambient Findability” has all the buzzword-dense charm of the web but it exhibits its often frustrating lack of deep scholarship and originality. I hope O’Reilly exercises more caution in its selections for future titles of a more general nature.

My first McSweeney’s, which I’ve admired for a while for its typography and graphic design. This issue is devoted to comics. Delightful, although one wishes that comics artists were a wee bit less fanatically introspective and told more stories, instead of dwelling in meta-levels endlessly questioning the validity of their craft.

Read in three sessions; found to be a glorious novel about zoology and theology, delivering 100% on all the riches suggested by such a heady combination. It manages to simultaneously affirm the outlook of both the atheist and the theist. Plus you get to spend time with tigers! Meercats! Sentient Seaweed!

Three rather incoherent lectures given by Feynman at the University of Washington in the late 1960’s. Not really worth it, but the high esteem with which Tufte spoke of him made me trudge through it till the end. One good point: we expect our politicians to have answers to everything ahead of time and we end up electing rhetoricians instead of people who may not know the answers but know how to go about finding them.

A real switching of gears, this is a book about how the failures of the current model of software development and how these failures can be addressed by taking the task of design away from programmers and giving it to user interaction specialists. We must learn to build blueprints for our applications before they get built, which should go beyond feature lists and functional requirements and describe how the software will interact with people.

A short essay full of wonderful insights, such as the assertion that as the “lights of health go down” strange and virgin countries of the soul are revealed, empty places where we all must go alone. To Woolf, the body is not a tidy, compliant piece of glass through which the mind gazes but a clouded, ever-changing lens. Perhaps the point which resonated with me the most is the statement that it is impossible to be truly sympathetic for more than the briefest moment in response to the pain of others, otherwise the human race would be completely overwhelmed and civilization would grind to a halt.

Mildly amusing and somewhat sleepy series of essays about different topics related to Art. At its best it achieved the enthralling pull of a good Fine Arts 101 lecture. At worst, an incoherent thesis unsuccessfully grasped at least led to interesting information about the specifics of a particular artist or time period. Debating about whether to read his “History of Reading.” Probably will, as when he is good, his prose has a Borges-ian density and luminosity which transforms the mundane into the extraordinary.

Novel about a young autistic man experiencing upheaval in his family life. Along the way he talks about math and logic and human behavior, from the compelling perspective of someone with an exotic form of intelligence, an intelligence which is abnormally expansive in its logical scope but limited in its ability to process emotions.

A series of conversations between Sheldrake, a religious scientist and Fox, a scientific theist. Single greatest moment was Sheldrake’s offering that perhaps angels are the morphogenetic intelligence fields of the stars.

This is a re-read, spurred by a reference on Lost, and by the discovery of copious margin notes in my edition of it from twenty years ago. Mind-expanding, but as I draw near the end, the balance is shifting less toward self-made cosmology and more toward full-blown mental illness.