Currently Reading

I’ve been reading mostly fiction recently. I’d kinda stopped reading anything non-technical for far too long; there was always some new techie book to read, but there always will be… I used to read masses of fiction, mostly SF and fantasy stuff; but recently I’d only read fiction when on holiday, and then only as a backup to the techie stuff I had with me… That changed, on holiday, when I read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. I loved it, bought the other three that he’d done and read those back to back. Angels and Demons was, IMHO, almost as good, Digital Fortress sucked (in the way that books that are about things that you have an understanding of, but that don’t do the subject justice suck), Deception Point was OK but by that point I was starting to see the formula too much and the books were less interesting. I enjoyed Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman, though the “I’m getting old, I’m losing it, I don’t even load all of the MSDN disks anymore” thing hit close to home ;) I enjoyed Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson and To Ride Hell’s Chasm by Janny Wurts, but then I’ve been a long time fan of hers. The latest book was The Magicians’ Guild (Black Magician Trilogy) by Trudi Canavan, which was pretty good fantasy; good enough for me to buy the second in the series…

Stepping back to reality, if this techie world in which I live can be called reality, I’m reading Hacking the XBOX: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, which is an interesting looking book about hardware hacking, full of hints and tips on soldering and stuff ;) I’ve got several hardcore C++ books on order and I’m currently trying to work out which books I should take on The Trip, but more on that later.