I wrote a piece of software to ingest an XML file of all my Pinboard links (easily available from the Pinboard API by anyone – you just need to know your username and password). That software then generates a web page for each book, which is passed into the incredible PrinceXML to create a book. Prince handles all the indexing, page numbering, contents-creation, and header-creation.

As prompted, my top ten novels, unordered, with brief tasting notes. Not all of them are novels… but these aren’t just my top ten books, in the most generic sense, either. Maybe I should say “top ten stories that somehow do what a novel does.”

Kim, Rudyard Kipling. Lyra Belacqua has a brother.
Wind, Sand & Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince was once on this list, but WS&S is the unadulterated substance.
The Last Novel, David Markson. I’ve re-read this more than any other book in the world.
Light, M. John Harrison. Off the charts in terms of vision and prose alike. Science fiction without linguistic compromise.
A Distant Neighborhood, Jiro Taniguchi. No words for this; I keep wanting to write “melancholy” but it’s wrong. It’s everything you want from a story about going home.
The Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander. Included for sentimental value… and because they live up to the sentiment again every time I re-read them.
Postwar, Tony Judt. I can’t even believe a book like this is possible.
My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell. As with the Prydain books: nostalgia earned and re-earned.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, unknown, but translated by Simon Armitage. Read this and only this translation; read it out loud; read it to friends or family.
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck. Lyra Belacqua has a country.

(I tried to write this list like a haiku—one swift stroke, top to bottom, no revision. I’m sure that, upon reflection, there will be other books I want to include here. But hmm, aren’t the really important books the ones that don’t require reflection to summon up?—the ones that are simply… there?)

 

I’ve been thinking about pages, print and scrolling for a while, mainly because I’m a designer and it’s part of my job, but also because I quite fancy getting an e-reader of some kind. I’m thinking about one particular aspect of the technology: the page metaphor.

One of primary use cases I am testing out on the iPad is reading and annotating PDFs. If I could replace 20 inches of paper in my bag with an iPad, that would be awesome. Obviously I need to be able to annotate, extract annotations, etc. Major pluses would be easy downloading from Web of Science searches, and integration with Endnote.

A Small Matter of Programming asks why it has been so difficult for end users to command programming power and explores the problems of end user-driven application development that must be solved to afford end users greater computational power.

Highest quality computer books all of which are available for free download.