Sunday, August 20, 2006

Undead and Unwed

I've just finished reading Undead and Unwed by MaryJanice Davidson (who has a blog) and published by Piatkus Books, the first in her Undead series. It was a good read and it is certainly an interesting departure from the other books in this genre I've read (though Betsy did remind me of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse).

I'm not sure if the next book will continue the theme (judging by the excerpt, I think not), but Betsy brought to mind David Eddings' description of his hero, Garion, as a "Sir Perceval":

Sir Perceval [...] is dumb — at least right at first... A dumb hero is the perfect hero, because he hasn't the faintest idea of what's going on, and in explaining things to him, the writer explains them to his reader.

In any case, I'll definitely have a look at the rest of Davidson's books.

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Friday, August 11, 2006

Megatokyo volume four

My copy of Megatokyo volume 4 (buy) finally came in and I bought it yesterday. It's good to see another Megatokyo book out and it's fantastic that it took so long to come in (having sold out, etc.).

The presentation is essentially the same as the first three volumes by Dark Horse. The only shortcoming I can see in the book is the binding — for some reason CMX couldn't manage to glue the pages level. It's no worse than the last book from Dark Horse and it is a fairly minor flaw, but it would have been nice if they'd put that little bit extra into the book's construction.

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Friday, August 04, 2006

Long time no blog

It's been quite a while since last I posted (here, or anywhere else), so I think it's about time for an update. Things are going adequately on the school front — it was a little touch and go, but I managed not to fail anything last semester — and I'm about to start a support job with a research project which will bring a welcome injection of funds (which have been rather tight lately).

On the "reading" front, I purchased my copy of Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages (companion and somewhat successor to TAPL) this morning. I've had a bit of a flick through it and it looks really, really interesting. Hopefully having spent almost $200 on the two books will provide an added incentive to not only start, but finish, reading them and hopefully even work through the problems.

I've been thinking about typography and book design lately which has suggested, amongst other things, that I see if it'd be possible to get my copy of ATTAPL rebound with some extra pages. It would be nice, for example, to insert the extended version of chapter 10 - the essence of ML type inference and to "fix" any errata with updated pages. I imagine, though I haven't bothered to investigate at all, that this'd be quite a difficult and expensive thing to do for a single copy, so it'll probably be a long while before I do it, if ever.

Before that though, I've been focussed on getting through Logic by Greg Restall. I'm almost half way through and while I'd have preferred a slightly difference syntax (I prefer as conjunction, rather than &), it's easy to read and is much more accessible than most other books I've seen with titles like "Logic."

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