1. 25 May 2008

    Distraction

    Bruce Sterling

    193 days ago

    Fits in nice with the last two books I’ve read, although this doesn’t touch San Francisco. First book I’ve read by Sterling, and he really fits in with Stephenson. Not that Sterling should be measured against Stephenson, but there’s a special, pure, unadulterated, joyful absurdity to everything I’ve read of Stephenson1 that I don’t feel in Distraction.

    I’m an impulse reader2, as you might have guessed from the above. I’ll get wind of a book—most often when I’m already at the computer3—then find it either on amazon.com or worldcat.org from whence I get a link straight to the Minneapolis Public Library’s record of the book and whether or not they have it. From there I click to have the item shipped to the library branch 7 blocks from my house, wait for it to show up on their hold shelves, zip over on my bike, walk into the library, return any finished books, grab my books marked with a convenient sticker featuring my name4, walk them back towards the doors where there are some neat new automatic checkout machines, spend a minute or so futzing with laser barcode scanners and the codes on the books and my library card, throw the books into my bag, and I’m out the door. It’s an awfully good system.

    1 All of them but Interface and Cobweb—jumpcut to me browsing worldcat.org and checking both of these out from the library. Long overdue.

    2 I picked this novel up off a post from Cory Doctorow.

    3 If I’m not on the internet when I get a notion to scrounge around for a book, I’ll oftentimes forget about it. Unfortunate. I’ve probably missed out on a lot of books this way, and it’s one of the chief reasons I wish that I’d walk around with paper and pen (or even a notebook!) more often. But I hate having things in my pockets. I always carry a pen, and sometimes I can manage a piece of 8.5“x11” folded in fourths slipped into my back pocket, but never habitually.

    4 Actually, the first 3 letters of my last name plus my other two initials followed by the first few digits of my birthday—who’d want the library to unwittingly out their salacious reading habits to their distant acquaintances! But in case you’re ever at the Washburn branch, look to the left of the third shelf from the bottom (I think) for OLSKA0111, that’s my tag.

    And sorry for the obscene use of footnotes, I’ve wanted for an awful long time now to correct the way the <sup> elements messed up my line–height—throwing four of ‘em into two paragraphs made the post ugly enough for me to fix it. Give the buggers line-height: 0px;. Now textpattern just needs the linkback feature that Gruber worked into his footnotes. Because footnotes are a pain in the ass.

  2. Also somewhat recently

      |