Book 31: What is the What (Eggers)

Excellent "autobiography" of a Sudanese Lost Boy.

Book 30: The Song of the Silent Snow (Selby)

Good short story collection.

Book 29: The Book of Joby (Ferrari)

Very good fantasy/adventure. First third is spectacular.

Book 28: The Elementary Particles (Houellebecq)

Excellent modern fiction. Too much graphic sex, but some excellent philosophy.

Book 27: Ha'penny (Walton)

Very good Farthing sequel. A couple of characters are the same, heroine is of the same type as Farthing's.

Book 26: Irresistible Revolution (Claiborne)

Very good activist Christian stuff. "Do small things with great love."

Book 25: Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis)

Surprisingly good. With Lewis you rarely escape the feeling of being preached to, and he seems to be fighting a battle with some old ideas for which Weston's a stand-in (check Wikipedia), but on the whole it was fairly cool.

Book 24: Boone (Hansen)

Wow. Just terrible. Annoying, pathetic people. Maybe that was the point?

Book 23: The Monsters of St. Helena (Hansen)

Pretty good story about Napoleon in exile. Not as weird as Hansen's other stuff, and not as interesting either.

Book 22: Perlman's Ordeal (Hansen)

Good story about a hypno-therapist in early-20c London. Gets kind of weird.

Book 21: A History of Violence (Wagner)

Good graphic novel. Can now see why Cronenberg did the movie.

Book 20: Surprised by Hope (Wright)

Very good semi-popular theology on the end.

Book 19: Mr B. Gone (Barker)

OK horror. Most books bring you in by putting the protagonist in jeopardy. This one tries to put you in jeopardy, but it's not convincing. Angel/demon negotiations were pretty cool.

Book 18: Little Brother (Doctorow)

Spectacular. Every North American should read it.

Book 17: Mothers and Other Monsters (McHugh)

Short stories. Competent, but not for me.

Book 16: Watch Your Back (Westlake)

Decent Dortmunder novel. Don't know who that support group at the end were, though!

Book 15: Ficciones (Borges)

Excellent short stories. Philosophical, academic, fantastic.

Book 14: Disunited States of America (Turtledove)

Pretty good. Alternate-worlds adventure. Kind of juvenile.

Book 13: Aristoi (Williams)

Very irritating. Annoying protagonist and poorly-fleshed-out world. The fork thing was cool, though.

Book 12: The Ghost Brigades (Scalzi)

Sequel to Old Man's War, in same 'world'. Also good.

Book 11: Butcher Bird (Kadrey)

Grotesque fantasy: piercings, drugs, and Dante. Free download from Tor.

Book 10: Old Man's War (Scalzi)

Good space adventure. Some cool ideas, and an engaging protagonist. Free download from Tor.

Book 9: The Devil in a Forest (Wolfe)

Medieval Wolfe. What is his obsession with boxes of sand? Short Sun books have it too! Seriously, good book. I wouldn't have gotten the twist had he not discussed it at the end. Keep track of everyone's weapons!

Book 8: Slave Nation (Blumrosen)

American revolutionaries endorse slavery to ensure success of their revolution.

Book 7: The Golden Ocean (O'Brian)

Nautical story in mid-18th century. All the great things from the Aubrey/Maturin series, condensed. Very very good.

Book 6: Free Culture (Lessig)

Media want to ban all free media.

Book 5: The Circus of Dr. Lao (Finney)

Little story about a beat-up transcendence in a small town.

Book 4: Blood Meridian (McCarthy)

Good. Relentlessly violent western. Unsuccessful stabs at philosophy. Imprisoned: leave your people and you may die.

Book 3: House of Leaves

Very meta. Wallace-esque post-modern footnote-filled horror story.

Book 2: The Ladies of Grace Adiue (Clarke)

Very good. Fairy stories in the vein of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, with mostly happy endings. And a pig.

Book 1: Run (Patchett)

Excellent. I love every one of these characters.

2008 Reading List

I plan to keep track of the books I read in 2008 (like I did in 2006). My goal is, again, to read fifty books this year.

Scheme: Through the List Once

The simplest way to compute the average of the numbers in a list is:

• compute the sum of the numbers in the list
• compute the length of the list
• divide the sum by the length, giving the average

So if we have sum and len defined as

(define (sum l) (foldl 0 + l))
(define (len l) (foldl 0 (lambda (x y) (+ 1 y)) l))

then we can compute the average as:

(define (two-pass-average l)
  (cond 
    ((null? l) 0)
    (else (/ (sum l) (len l)))
  )
)

This solution is correct, but it walks the list twice (once to compute the sum and once to compute the length). If we add a couple of accumulators and a facade function, we can compute the average with one list pass, like this:

(define (one-pass-average len-acc sum-acc l)
  (cond
    ((and (null? l) (= 0 len-acc)) 0)
    ((null? l) (/ sum-acc len-acc))
    (else (one-pass-average (+ 1 len-acc) (+ (car l) sum-acc) (cdr l)))
  )
)
(define (average l) (one-pass-average 0 0 l))

The drawback to the one-pass method is that we've lost the nice definition of sum and len in terms of foldl. I wonder if we can restore it?