Book 16: The Reason for God (Keller)

Average. The unbeliever has nothing to fear from this.

Book 15 - The Girl Who Played With Fire (Larsson)

Another very good thriller.

Book 14 - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson)

Very good thriller.

Book 13 - Things Fall Apart (Achebe)

Really good story about Nigerians.

Book 12 - Mao II (Dilillo)

Meh. Kind of boring.

Book 11 - A Game of Thrones (Martin)

Very good epic fantasy. A little lower than Bakker.

Book 10 - Guitar (Brookes)

Pretty good history of guitars and some modern boutique guitar-building. Brookes is more interested in guitars than music.

2010 - 9 - The City and the City (Mieville)

Excellent. Police thriller wrapped in weird fantasy.

2010 - 8 - Infidel (Ali)

Good stuff

2010 - 7 - Permanance (Schroeder)

Pretty good SF. Similar universe and ideas to Watts' Blindsight (consciousness rare, though not a disadvantage), but sunny and cheery instead of bleak and hopeless.

2010 - 6 - Zoe's Tale (Scalzi)

Very good SF

2010 - 5 - Blindsight (Watts)

Excellent. Philosphically like Scott Bakker, but grimmer.

2010 - 4 - Postwar (Judt)

Excellent. Beyond my competence to comment.

2010 - 3 - Jesus for President (Claiborne, Hay)

Very good. The only acceptable Christianity.

2010 - 2 - The Great Emergence (Tickle)

Awful. Historically ignorant, philosophically incoherent, sociologically fanciful.

2010 - 1 - 2666 (Bolano)

Excellent. Huge and weird.

Book 50: A Brief History of Time (Hawking)

Interesting stuff.

Book 49: Pushing Ice (Reynolds)

OK SF. Some cool ideas, but protagonists were annoying power-loving heirarchs.

Book 48: Half a Crown (Walton)

Very good conclusion to the series.

Book 47: The Prefect (Reynolds)

Very good standard SF. No singularity: no real AI.

Book 46: Swiftly (Roberts)

Pretty good. Weird sex made it icky.

Book 45: The Warrior Who Carried Life (Ryman)

Wow, really strange and cool.

Book 44: Titans of Chaos (Wright)

Meh. In love with the system.

Book 43: Salt (Roberts)

Very cool SF. Anarchists and fascists.

Book 42: Peer Gynt (Ibsen)

Weird modern-ish play.

Book 41: Yellow Blue Tibia (Roberts)

Fantastic science fiction.

Book 40: Fugitives of Chaos (Wright)

Good fantasy. In the struggle of art v. ideology, art wins, but ideology pokes its nose in occasionally.

Book 39: Humpty Dumpty (Knight)

Weird. Well-written but very confusing, as probably intended.

Book 38: Twenty-Piece Shuffle (Paul)

Wealth and poverty.

Book 37: The Enchantress of Florence (Rushdie)

Very good fantasy. Potato witches, indeed.

Book 36: Orphans of Chaos (Wright)

Pretty good fantasy.

Book 35: Infoquake (Edelman)

Lame SF. The future as seen through the lens of a 90s web-marketer.

Book 34: Undomestic Goddess (Kinsella)

Fluffy.

Book 33: Matter (Banks)

Very good SF.

Book 32: Kidnapped (Stevenson)

Classic adventure in Scottish hielands

Book 31: Raymond and Hannah (Marche)

Kinda boring literary stuff.

Book 30: Soon I Will Be Invincible (Grossman)

Very good, semi-literary superhero stuff. Fun.

Book 29: Making Money (Pratchett)

Good discworld.

Book 28: The Last Colony (Scalzi)

Also good, funny, semi-military SF

Book 27: The Android's Dream (Scalzi)

Good, funny, semi-military SF

Book 26: Year of Wonders (Brooks)

Pretty good plague novel.

Book 25: The Mists of Everness (Wright)

Pretty good. Marred by silly, naive politics.

Book 24: The Last Guardian of Everness (Wright)

Excellent. Alternatively terrifying and goofy.

Book 23: The Light Fantastic (Pratchett)

Pretty good Discworld novel.

Book 22: The Armageddon Rag (Martin)

Lame and boring. Maybe his fantasy stuff's better?

Book 21: Carpe Jugulum (Pratchett)

Funny and true.

Book 20: The Judging Eye (Bakker)

A little slow to start, but then excellent.

Book 19: Neuropath (Bakker)

Freaky.

Book 18: Gomorrah (Saviano)

Excellent non-fiction on organized crime in Naples. Truly wretched.

Book 17: The Thousandfold Thought (Bakker)

Awesome.

Book 16: The Warrior-Prophet (Bakker)

Excellent epic fantasy.

Book 15: God in a Cup (Weissman)

Fawning and trivial look at third wave "coffee guys" (Intelligentsia, Counter Culture, Stumptown)

Book 14: The Darkness That Comes Before (Bakker)

Very good fantasy: bleak but gripping

Book 13: Inspiration and Incarnation (Enns)

Good discussion of NT use of OT (not grammatico-historical by a long shot)

Book 12: Sunshine Sketches (Lewis)

Good somewhat humourous stories about rural Ontario.

Book 11: An Evil Guest (Wolfe)

Good. Lots of action, Lovecraft ending, baffling shout-out to Cory Doctorow. I think there's more to this book than I got, maybe because I've heard people say there's always lots to Wolfe.

Book 10: The Golden Transcendence (Wright)

Excellent finish to the trilogy. High-quality far-future SF.

Book 9: The Worldly Philosphers (Heilbroner)

Interesting overview of economics.

Book 8: The Shack (Young)

Poorly written, low-quality theodicy. Protagonist does not have his wits about him, for which I blame the author.

Book 7: The Light Ages (MacLeod)

Average fantasy. Victorian era + Magic + Revolution should have been awesome, like Susanna Clarke meets China Mieville, but it was kind of flat.

Book 6: Dream (Selby)

Very good. Introductory comments by Aronofsky are just wrong, but author's preface is interesting ("Living the dream" v "Living the life")

Book 5: Hamlet (Shakespeare)

Canonicity puts it beyond categorization.

Book 4: The Phoenix Exultant (Wright)

Excellent sequel to The Golden Age. Hero's a bit more sympathetic now. And a couple of funny parts.

Book 3: The Golden Age (Wright)

Excellent far-future post-Singularity SF. Good stuff on remaining human (or not). And a kind of cool lost-memory detective story. Cliffhanger ending.

Book 2: Pirate Freedom (Wolfe)

Very good historical novel. Doesn't seem as weird and layered as usual for Wolfe, but maybe it's just going over my head.

Book 1: The Birth House (McKay)

OK historical novel.

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?

Key Changes

The band with the offensive name goes through a lot of key changes. This is just an extreme version of what rock does already. Where does the E-flat in F7 come from when you're playing in C? It sounds to me like they're going into the dominant more (playing the flat-five to imply a major second).