i think I want to read something...
which is odd for me. I am not a reader. I used to read all the time. I was a English major, in fact, and was going to read for a living (so I thought). But I got sidetracked by...stuff...and in the process lost my ability to sit down and read. Specifically, I lost my ability to concentrate while reading, so I would finish a chapter of some dense novel and reflect on what I had read, only to find that I had no clue. Comic book-sized things were all I could deal with --
Neil Gaiman and his ilk. Eventually I started creeping back into reading actual books, by another Neal --
Stephenson, this time. I actually started with
Cryptonomicon, the antithesis of a small book, then went back and read his others (and liked them all). I want to find the time to read
The Diamond Age again, as it's been a few years and I think I'd appreciate it even more, now.
So today I was getting my daily dose of
Boing Boing, and saw the article
"Why Microsoft should get out of DRM". I'm no Microsoft fan; any time I see a blog entry on a respectable site, on the topic of telling Microsoft what they shouldn't do, I'm all over it. Although I work in the computer/internet/techie stuff field, even
writing books that help beginners learn how to
program,
work with databases and use
CMS, I don't really follow specific people and their work. If I did, I'd probably already have known who
Cory Doctorow is. But fresh from reading Boing Boing, I know that Cory Doctorow is the guy who opened a talk on DRM, at Microsoft, with "Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!". Well, I was hooked from there (I'm easy).
After reading
the text of his talk, in which I laughed and went "aha!" at all the right times (and there are plenty), I went on to discover that this fine fella has a
new novel out, the theme of which is "Would you rather be smart or happy?" For many, many reasons, I am now determined to read it...and probably his other books as well.
