December 2007
Parallels Support Forum - Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon →
Tolstoy’s Transparent Sounds - Books - Review -... →
Tolstoy's Real Hero - The New York Review of Books →
James’s book 54: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy →
I’ve placed this in both the ‘Published 2007′ category as well as ‘Published pre-1900′. I’ve read three different translations of War and Peace before (Garnett, Maude and Edmonds) and none of them have been adequate. It’s testimony to the novel itself that it can survive poor translations in a way that other great novels can’t. Now, at last, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation has...
James’s book 53: Red Moon Rising by Matthew... →
I’m fascinated by the space race, and I’m even more fascinated by the Cold War. This book is about both, so I should be feeling a lot better about it than I am. Despite its interesting subject matter, it is hamstrung by some really poor writing - over-writing. Things (rockets, cities, people) pulsate, glower, loom and thrust; they are unleashed, hurled and crushed. One sentence will serve to...
wildcard inc. →
We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar →
JACK SPADE
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Does Continuous Integration Scale to Enterprise... →
Trial-and-error with a feedback cycle →
Hacking a GTD Moleskine at hyalineskies →
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Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to... →
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Typography desktop wallpapers. fonts on your... →
James’s book fifty two: The Collected Tales of... →
Oh, this is a wonderful, wonderful book. It’s split into two distinct parts - the first contains tales from the Ukraine (Gogol was not Russian, but Ukrainian), while the second is full of tales mainly set in Petersburg. Husband and wife translation team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky here give us, again, the definitive translation of a masterwork of Russian literature (Gogol may have been...
James’s book fifty one: The Artificial Silk Girl... →
The first quote on the (beautifully designed) dust cover of The Artificial Silk Girl goes like this: “[this book] reads like Bridget Jones’s Diary as rewritten by Berthold Brecht.” Further down, another quote says that it “[recalls] the greatest work of Alfred Döblin and Robert Musil [about] people on the edge of a destruction that they themselves cannot imagine.” But for heaven’s sake don’t them...
James’s book fifty: The Rain Before it Falls by... →
This is the first of Jonathan Coe’s books that I’ve read, and I understand that it’s a departure for him. In many ways, The Rain Before it Falls shares many of the features of a book I read early in the year and hated, Tomorrow by Graham Swift in terms of structure and a truth that will be revealed, but in that way alone.
Here, we have the reminiscences of a dying old woman, Rosamond, trying to...
James’s book forty nine: Exit Ghost by Philip Roth →
Exit Ghost is the last of Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman series. Here, he returns to New York City, in true Roth style, for an operation that he hopes will relieve his incontinence after an earlier prostate operation. In the course of his stay in the city, which he hasn’t set foot in for years, he unexpectedly also meets a married and much younger woman who he lusts after. He writes ever more...
James’s book forty eight: The Book of Laughter and... →
Kundera opens this novel with a superb joke. The Czech communist Clematis lends his hat to the party leader Gottwald. Clematis is later removed from history, and all photographs, and all that is left of him is his hat on Gottwald’s head. Kundera is one of the few writers who can simultaneously apply his great intellect, his melancholy and his smile. Never has a such a serious novel been so funny....
James’s book forty seven: The Carhullan Army by... →
I like Sarah Hall’s writing, even though it can sometimes feel a little oppressive, a little too mannered. Her Booker contender of a few years ago, The Electric Michelangelo, was one of the best books on the list that year. The Carhullan Army is a departure in many ways, although it is still set in the author’s native Cumbria. It’s a departure because it has an overtly political tone,...
*How* to view hidden files in Leopard / 10.5... →
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Hivelogic - The Narrative - Installing MySQL on... →
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LaCie - Hard Disk, Design by Neil Poulton -... →
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