Tag: Reading

Goals past and present

I pretty much failed at 2013’s goal of tasting and grading 50 beers. I did pretty good at the front part of that goal, mind you, but it’s the second half of the process that proved difficult. I did a reasonably good job of exploring the world of Trappist abbey ales and found an IPA that I can tolerate [1]. I tried an oaked beer (bleh), a sour beer (double bleh), and a chili beer (could have been better). I found an awesome session beer in Stone’s Levitation [2]. I never found a roggenbier to try—it’s all Rye-P-A here in the states. I brewed a few beers and tasted the heck out of those too.

Again…just lacking documentation.

Looking forward, perhaps the commitment to try and document fifty beers was a little much for one year. This year I’m pledging to follow through on 25 beers. They don’t need to be new ones. They don’t need to be commercial beers. I just need to drink and document them. I’m going to do this using BeerAdvocate [3] and you can track me there.

To take up the slack I’m also pledging to read 25 books in 2014. You can track my progress on Goodreads [4] which seems to be a place where people I know who read books hang out. It just isn’t any fun unless someone is tracking all the data I’m generating. 😉

Notes:

  1. http://lagunitas.com/beers/ipa/#
  2. http://www.stonebrewing.com/levitation/
  3. http://beeradvocate.com/community/members/nixquips.773588/
  4. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/27242031-nick-hansen

The new phonebooks are here!

To say I’ve enjoyed the Wool1 saga by Hugh Howey is an understatement. It’s probably the best long-arc dystopian fiction I’ve ever read. For a kid coming of age in Reagan’s America, I had nightmares of how living in fallout shelters might work. The numbers of generations needed to outlive the half life of nuclear fallout was incomprehensible. At some point the math just doesn’t hold and everything has to collapse.

In the Wool saga, Howey puts a story and framework around these childhood fears and lets his characters play out in this world. It is gripping stuff and I devoured everything published. I came to the party relatively late so having most of the series already available was great. Waiting for these last few books to drop have been interminable.

Dust2 is the very last book in the series and it was made available this last weekend. If you’re short of reading material, like dystopian fiction, and have a little coin to throw around, you could do a lot worse than pick these up.

I should also add, Hugh Howey is a model for self publishing. It doesn’t work for everyone, but he managed to turnkey Amazon direct-to-Kindle printing into a multi-six-figure payout.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wool_%28series%29
2 http://www.amazon.com/Dust-Silo-Saga-ebook/dp/B00CYNGPTG

Self-referentially awesome

So I’m reading Reamde because I happened by the CBPL and against all odds they had it on the shelf. The benefits of being one of the few cyberthriller readers in the metro area that didn’t pre-order on Amazon or just torrent the thing I guess.

Anyway, there is a part where the main character is talking about the splash screen of the MMORPG his company is making money off of and Stephenson throws out some gratuitous smack. I don’t have the book in front of me but he basically says that the splash screen is a ripoff of Google Earth but that he (the character) didn’t feel bad about ripping it off. This was because Google Earth was a ripoff of an idea in some sci-fi novel someone wrote.

The joke being, Neal Stephenson described an internet application simply called “Earth” that was a real-time, 3-D, user interface for accessing any knowable data about the planet. For values of ‘knowable’ that are equivalent to the information in the Library of Congress, which in Snow Crash had evolved into a for-pay information access clearinghouse.

Now some people who would be better suited to make this claim than I say that Neal Stephenson is kind of an ass…or at least ballsy in a socially uncomfortable way. I’d love the chance for him to prove me wrong though. Word-for-word, one of my most favorite authors, Stephenson has some serious capacity for digesting information and trends and turning them into gripping narratives.

I really only wish that he didn’t ultimately make everything in to an end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it conflict about 2/3rd the way through every novel. Smaller problems can be at least as gripping as planetary revolution. So, Neal, in the event you stop by, consider yourself advised. Also, if you want to share beers, the porch is always open.