My bulletproof, patented Book System®.

…Being an exposition of an organisation.
I keep three books on the go at any one time. The partition of my reading into three reflects the organisation of my life: the first book is fiction: it is read as a leisure activity and enjoyed in such hours as are designated as such. The second is technical reading; recent books to have occupied this honourable chair are SICP, Feynman’s Lectures on Computation, and Fowler’s Refactoring. This element of the triumvirate is primarily a reflection of my occupation, being as I am a programmer things computational. The third, and final, trivium of the literary partitional trivia is toilet reading. As do so many others I enjoy a good trip’te’de’jacks, and waiting for me there is a book to occupy my mind during my stay. Typically this is non-fiction, but a prime requirement is that it be relaxed in subject concomittant with the relaxing nature of its commodal abode. An example to illuminate perhaps: at the moment my toilet reading is “The Making of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’”. Now I’ll be the first to admit this whole partition is far from regimental, there’s often a fourth book floating around which tends to alterate between fiction and non-fiction. At the moment the position is held by “The Trial” by Kafka. Following on from the past post I figured I’d close with a stacktrace of my current reading:

Leisure

• Started Sophie’s Choice
• Started Bonfire of the Vanities
• Finished Bonfire of the Vanities
• Started East of Eden
• Started American Psycho
• Finished American Psycho
• Started Brave New World
• Started Ham on Rye

Technical

• Started SICP
• Started Refactoring
• Ended Refactoring
• Started Feynman Lectures on Computation
• Ended Feynman Lectures on Computation

Commodal

• Started The Making of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’

Bric-a-Brac

• Started The Trial

Also a big thank you to my darling girlfriend who gave me the most amazing present of two books on Friday.

You’re the Best

Last Weekend, and the Events and Happenings Contained Therein

…being a short ode to books, couches, and trees.To mark the occasion of my family purchasing its first ever reclining leather armchair I spent last weekend enjoying said chair along with some textual company. I’ve been somewhat between books the last while. I read Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” a few weeks ago, and then started “East of Eden” immediately afterwards. But I had gotten into my head that it might be nice to write up a little of my impression of the books I’ve been reading and hopefully link these impressions together a bit. So I started to thinking through “Bonfire of the Vanities” and sorting it all out in my head when I realised it might be helpful to take on something similar with which to connect and contrast it. With this in mind I pushed “East of Eden” onto my ‘to read’ stack and started “American Psycho” by Brett Easton Ellis. Now I’d heard a lot about this book (but never seen the film), and had read “Lunar Park” by Ellis which namedrops “American Psycho” a bit (and its protagonist Messr. Bateman a lot). I have a terrible habit of taking a mad urge to read one book in the middle of another (to illustrate this “East of Eden” was in turn an interruption of “Sophie’s Choice”!); for the most part I can context switch pretty well though so it’s not normally a problem. So context switch I did and lashed into “American Psycho” which I finished pretty quickly, and I do think it helped in setting “Bonfire of the Vanities” in context (and I am working on a proper piece linking and looking at both). So having now finished “American Psycho” I had the chance to resume “East of Eden”. But instead I found myself in a charity shop waiting for the lads yesterday and ended up buying “Brave New World” (which I’ve managed to miss up to now) and have started that instead. But I will get back to “East of Eden”, and hopefully will post a piece on it and “The Grapes of Wrath” which I read and loved a few years back. Once “East of Eden” is done I’m planning to finish “Sophie’s Choice” and move on to something different from there. It occurs to me that apart from a couch I haven’t really mentioned anything about last weekend at all. To quickly sum up in index form:

• Books — Holistic Experience of, Good.
• Couch — Placement of Arse Within, Sensation of, Found to be, Great.
• Trees — Orientation of, Horizontal, Due to, Interaction with, Saw, Wielded by, Me.
• Evidence — Of the Preceding, Photographic, to be Found on, Flickr.

Join me next time when I discuss my bulletproof, patented Book System®.