Finished Reading: The End Of The Alphabet

I contracted the flu/cold during the Christmas holiday and it lasted at least three weeks. And though I'm not a big fan of Christmas [consumerism] it felt ruined. I know what you are thinking but you are wrong. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Santa dissed me again. We've had beef since I was twelve so getting dissed was expected. What I didn't expect, was that his punk ass would try to assassinate me with the flu.

I'M STILL STANDING BITCH!

There will be next year and this time I'll be ready for his punk ass.

BTW, New Years sucked too.

I'm still kinda sick. I have this lingering cough and sometimes I go into these coughing fits that leave me breathless and light headed. My doctor just (Thursday) put me on some killer antibiotics (Avelox) and I need to go get a chest x-ray to see if I have pneumonia. Who knows, maybe Santa will have the last laugh yet.

So for the last three weeks I've been trying to catch up on the work that I didn't do while I was sick, and I've spent the last week and a half working 18+ hour days. The code I worked on was an addendum to an existing system in some places and a bug fix release in others. After four weeks of delays it went live on Friday. Yeah! But what I'm proudest of is during all the chaos I managed to read an entire novel, The End Of The Alphabet, by CS Richardson. How, you say? It's only 113 pages. That's right. He squeezed an entire novel into 113 pages and it took me three whole weeks to read it.

It's a love story, so if you are into that sort of thing, you may enjoy it. Be warned, it's not the, "dude crosses dessert and slays dragon", type of love story. It's simple, efficient, and satisfying. Given that it was a mere 113 pages, I was surprised I found it satisfying. Kudos Mr. Richardson.

My rating for this one is, sweet (sensitive meaning of the word).

2007 Recreational Reading Summary

As a younger man, recreational reading was a passion of mine. But once I started college I found I did less and less reading outside of the the curriculum. Things got worse once I started my professional life in earnest. Keeping up with IT requires volumes of technical material. The explosion of self published technical content in the form of blogs, white papers, and online documentation has reduced the number of books that I buy but has increased the amount of content that I read. Trying to assimilate all this technical content has led me to a very bad habit of scanning. I no longer enjoy reading because I'm not really reading. I'm scanning for information to solve a particular problem or trying to get to the root of how something is done. The last technical book that I can remember reading without scanning was, Mastering Regular Expressions, 1st Edition, by Jeffrey Friedl. That was years ago. So it was within this context that at the start of 2007 I decided I needed to return to recreational reading.

So far I've only managed to complete three non tech books; (1)Who Moved My Cheese; (2)Rich Dad Poor Dad; and (3)Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track. The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman. The first two where not on my official reading list. My brother handed them to me after he finished reading them because he wanted to hear what I thought. They aren't the types of books I would select for myself because they fall under the category of "self help". I'm not a fan of "self help" because they always tell the reader things the reader already knows. What's the fun in that? Nevertheless, I read them. They aren't bad books and if you don't already know what they have to teach they are worth checking out. They are small enough (especially, Who Moved My Cheese) that if you don't want to buy them you can read them in one or two sittings at your local library or bookstore.

I finished reading, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track. The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman, moments before starting this blog entry. I've been reading it since March but couldn't finish it because of work and all the technical content related to work. I finally finished it because I'm sick. I have a vicious cold that has had me bed ridden since yesterday. During patches of clarity I read. It is the first non fiction work I've read for recreational purposes in at least a decade. It has no traditional narrative. It is a collection of letters sent and received by a man named Richard P. Feynman. Feynman is a renowned Nobel Prize winning physicist who died in 1988. When I first started reading it I was creeped out because I felt like a third party reading this guy's personal mail. But by the end of the 3rd or 4th chapter I had settled into a first person point-of-view and was on occasion, surprised by the letters I wrote and received. This book is not an all around crowd pleaser. If you are the type of person who would be interested in the life of one of the giants in physics, it won't disappoint. Otherwise, your mileage may vary.

Finished Reading: Beautiful Code

Disclaimer**: I'm not a professional book reviewer so my rating system is succinct and should be taken with a ginormous grain of salt.

I recently finished reading, Beautiful Code, from Oreilly Publishing. It sucked! Avoid it if you can.