Weekly Reading 3.20.12

03 Apr 2012

This was supposed to be posted on the 20th of last month, but due to operator error, it wasn’t. Oops.

Books

Last Week: The Statues That Walked, Ship Breaker, The Quantum Thief, The Third Reich, and One Way Forward. Of these five, my favorites were definitely The Statues That Walked, which made a rather persuasive argument that rather than polluting themselves to death/killing each other, the people of Easter Island were both peaceful and remarkably good stewards of the environment, and One Way Forward, which was one of the most hope-inducing political book that I’ve read in a long time.

This Week: Ragamuffin, Fever Crumb, and Dark Life. All of them were good, but nothing really bit me.

Articles

• E-Books, Paperbacks, and Authors - A future of publishing.
• Can A Local Currency Improve Resilience - It looks like the short answer is yes.
• Alternative Currencies In Greece - More on alternative currencies, this time from Tobias Buckell.
• Drones That Operate For Years On Their Own -
• Why High Gas Prices Are Here To Stay - The title may say it all, but worth a read. Then again, I check oil-price.net every morning because it seems to be the best single indicator of what will happen in our society, so I may be a bit biased on this front.
• A Writing Experiment - Basically, using Apple’s Siri to capture dialogue and a keyboard to capture the rest of the story. I’m not sure how well this will work out, as real speech makes terrible dialogue. Of course, I am still planning on writing a story that involves a group of people sending frantic status updates via text message, which I plan to frantically type into my phone to capture some of the autocorrect hilarity.
• Locke Lamora Read-Along Bonus #4: YOU SUCK, LYNCH - Lynch provides some fascinating insight into what it means to not go back and fix the things that you wrote years ago, when you lacked the skills you currently possess.
• Using copyright to keep kids from reading - I realize that there is another side to this, but really? Way to shoot yourself in both feet, publishing industry.
• E-Books’ Uncertain Future at Local Libraries - I realize that this is a tough time for publishers, but I fail to see the rationale of not selling to libraries at all.