The Player of Games

Why am I always sad when one book adventure ends and another begins? The sadness must be a good indication of the quality of the book. This time I've finished Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games. Finally.

I started reading the book about a year ago. Or was it six months? I'm not sure, because it was not a great experience. The beginning was tedious and I found little inspiration to continue.

Lately, I've set a personal goal: finish all unfinished books. Upon finishing The Player of Games, my mind had changed about this book. It's not great, though, just good. Above average perhaps, and the following accounts for why.

The Player of Games is set in Banks' perfect sci-fi world of the Culture, where man and machine has equal social status, being gay is normal and money does not exist. Basically, everyone is happy and few questions anything.

Boring as it sounds, the Culture is rich with intricate board games and intricately bored gamers. The greatest game players, the queer protagonist of the book, Jernau Gurgeh, gets sent to an interesting empire called Azad and the planet Eä. The entire power structure of Azad is based on who is good at playing the game called Azad.

On the two year journey, Gurgeh learns Azad in and out, both game and empire. He thinks he is just there to play, but of course that's not so.

Ok, this book could be better. My breath was hardly taken away at the notion of conspiracy and corruption. The most interesting thin was actually that the Azad had 3 sexes (female, male and apex), whereof female and male were the inferior sexes.

What troubles me, is that Banks is so keen on displaying his foresight that homosexuality is normal in the future. The Azad despise of homosexuals and basically represents Earth anno 1988, when the book was written.

Many interesting points in the book, but the total did not impress me that much. After the first 100 pages it was never boring, however. Some of the technology mentioned in the book was interesting, but I'm no techno freak, so it got a bit far-fetched for my part.

The Kite Runner

Some while back I read "The Kite Runner"; one of those books exploding from the reading group thing going on abroad (yes, it's here in Norway, too. I just hate to admit it). My aunt's reading group had it's long recommending fingers around this book and there was just no way of not reading it.

I do not regret reading it.

Following are some of the comments sent to my aunt within minutes after finishing it:

First of all; this is a great book! It's one of those "one in a million" books that I personally need someone close to tip me off about in order to bother to read it. There is so much out there and a lot of it is actually crap or just not quite up my alley.

I despise books that have to have a lot of renowned papers/reviwers/authors dropping off their cliche comments about the book. I never buy a book because of them.

However, after finishing "The Kite Runner", I admit I actually read through them. The usual load of load of dung until I got to the one by Isabel Allende: "It is so powerful that for a long time everything I read after seemed bland". How fitting. I will tell you why too:

Reading the Kite Runner took me 1,5 days. I started on my bed, continued after dinner and then finished when travelling to Oslo the next day. Reading it was a break from a 11 000 page / 12 books fantasy series - The Wheel of Time.

Anyway, after reading 6 books of 900 pages each, I decided to take a break in order to read "The Kite Runner". The reading experience "mix" between The Wheel of Time and The Kite Runner reminds of watching several James Bond movies for a period of time and then suddenly watching "The House of Spirits". It's just gives you something totally different and watching James Bond afterwards seems.. bland.

I find no other way of explaining that reading experience. Everything else seemed bland for a while and I struggled to find something to read that provided meaning. It was all different shades of gray.

Read it. Please.

Paper or screen?

It's a known fact that a lot of people prefer the printed word as opposed to the monitor word. Especially when it comes to long articles and/or books.

Part of the reason for this is that in the past, technology hasn't offered the best of possibilities. Low screen resolutions, bad refresh rate and lousy monitors must take that blame.

Even so, I find myself printing out web articles that are of a certain size, despite me having a high screen resolution, nice refresh rate and a bona fide Dell monitor. I just prefer reading stuff on paper. Smaller text and blogs I can make do with, but the lengthy (and often juicy) stuff is better on paper.

There's something about holding it in your hand. When I was a programmer, I used to laugh at such people. Now I understand them.

Audio Books - Past, present or future?

This weekend I superficially tested an audio book while driving to a weekend stay in beautiful Hjelmeland, Norway. I have mixed feelings about this, though it should be mentioned that I had prejudices against audio books. I call myself The Reading Nerd, not The Listening Nerd.

The book was "The Secret Life og Bies" by Sue Monk Kidd and we didn't listen through it all. I would actually categorize it as a chick book, however I hate putting books in male/female categories.

Is listening to audio books the same as reading? Of course not. They leave out a lot of details (of varying importance) and you may have too much focus on the voice reading it aloud. In addition, you don't get the same exercise in reading, but that doesn't matter to everyone.

The upside is that you can simply lay back and enjoy. Big books are less hazzle and you can really close your eyes and let the bio imagery technology called fantasy run wild.

You have to have an audio player available, though. With a regular book you just need the book. The hazzle with big books for me is non-existent. I only buy the cheap pocket versions and they're rarely big.

I have also noticed that it's mostly women who recommend audio books. I wondered for a time why this was so. Then I discovered why; the people I know who read are mostly female.

It will be interesting to review my opinions in a year or two. Until then, I'm sticking to the real deal; paper books.

How Much Should Book Summaries Reveal?

The question on how much a book summary on the back of a book should reveal is an old one. On one hand, the author wished to sell the book to the potential buyer/reader. At the same time, both author and reader wish the reader to know as little as possible beforehand, to increase value.

I think books differ in how much they reveal. The X-factor being the popularity of author and/or book. With the editions of "The Lord of the Rings" that have been published the last 10 years, the summary merely uses big words on both author and trilogy. You can't do the same with Philip Neverheardof's "Journey to the other side".

This is too bad, I think. And that's a big dilemma. I really want to find new exciting litterature, but the title alone is not enough to whet my appetite. The only problem is, reading such a book takes me about half the book or more to get to the point where the summary stops with the spoilers.

I have a nice reading experience when I read a book that's been dearly recommended by a friend. This of course depends on me not reading the back summary. Sometimes that's hard, because knowing so little of the book, I need just alittle bit of inspiration.

It's the same with movies. Or maybe even worse, because I feel movie summaries go 3/4 into the movie. Only the end is unknown.

Off To The Non-Fiction World Of Usability

Ok, so I admit it. I also like non-fiction.

My profession being closely related to web usability, I often feel the need to study work stuff in my spare time. That would have been a big bummer if it hadn't been for the fact that I love what I work with.

I just got my employer to purchase the book "Prioritizing Web Usability" by a web usability guru called Jakob Nielsen (no, he's not nordic (red: ops, he is Danish I found out after publishing this article)) and some woman he works with called Hoa Loranger.

I have just started reading the book, so don't expect me to go into details on what I think about it, but it does look interesting.

Previously, I have read two good books on web usability and information architecture: Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" and Lou Rosenfeld & Peter Morville's "Information architecture for the WWW". Krug's was the best, because it's so easy to hand over to a developer and ask him/her to read it. They read through it fast, understand most of it and enjoyed it. The Information architecture is reserved for this with that special passion :-)

Fortuneately, most usability reading is totally free! There are a number of good usability blogs, but the best one is in Norwegian, I'm afraid. Here is a list of good usability blogs that I subscrive through via feeds:
* IAllEnkelhet - Norwegian company Netlife Research (Usability specialists) have made a good blog!
* Jensen Harris - Works on Microsoft Office 2007 and distributes points of views and tempting screens on the upcoming Office installment (I'm no MS Office guy be default).
* Signal vs Noise - Interesting blog from company 37 signals. I think.
* JustAddWater - Danish guys that are dedicated to usability. To me, they revolutionized the concept of developing web pages for which screen width.
* Accessify - Useful material for those concerned with accessibility

Should We Aspire To Abnormality?

At one point in my life, I was really fed up the common conformity of most books. There were rules on how to build the tension level in the book, how a story should be told etc. I was twenty and I though I had the answer to life, the universe and everything. Or was it the question? I hadn't read Hitchhiker's, so I didn't know.

I craved to read something out of the ordinary. Something new. Explore the why-for's and the whether-to's. Why was I the only one out here thinking like this? There had to be an explanation.

Time passed and I never really read that one mindblowing book that was out of the ordinary. I read some books with minor deviations, but they all had a folk commerciality about them. My interest in the abnormal and unexplored faded along with my urge to form my own religion.

Later, as in today, I _finally_ finished that bloody book I was looking for 7 years ago. That one out-of-the-ordinary book that didn't follow any written or unwritten rules. The book is called "Singularity sky", is written by Charless Stross and is quit simply a masterpiece of boredom.

Sci-fi fanatics will probably hate me for this, but I just didn't get the book at all. Too much tech stuff. Too much propulsion theory. And too little was pieced together in that pleasant way. Oh, sure, it looked promising enough; "In the far future, information demands to be free".

SPOILERS START: Let me spoil some of the fun for you haven't read it; some guys called the Festival moves in on an outlying planet called Rochard's world and throws phones from the air. The inhabitants of Rochard can get wishes granted if they give information to the Festival.

The New Republic intends to stop the festival by going backwards in time and reaching Rochard before the Festival ever got there. The Eschatron, super computer God that rules the universe, doesn't like people travelling in time and messing up the global synch, so he intervenes. SPOILERS END

Well. Reading this book was as inspiring as trying to catch a fish by looking at it. Luckily, I only spent 90 kroner on it (ca.13 dollar). Please don't read it.