Ravenweb Blog

I read a lot of books, and sometimes even manage to comment about them here. More often that not, I enjoy most of the books I post about. This is probably because (admittedly) I look for books by authors I already know or that I have an inkling -- from word of mouth or reviews -- that I'll enjoy. Still, you never know when you're going to read a book that you really like or that makes others pale in comparison. The Chaneysville Incident is such a novel. I came to read The Chaneysville Incident after asking for suggestions for a big book for my long flights to and from Japan. One of my work colleagues suggested it, and though I'd never heard of it or author John Bradley, I decided to give it a try. I'm really glad I did. On the surface, the novel is a well-honed and affecting story of historian John Washington's attempt to discover what happened to thirteen runaway slaves in Chaneysville, Pennsylvania. The protagonist's efforts to reconstruct the past elevate ...

Bad Monkeys was my first introduction to Matt Ruff, and I was pleased. Ostensibly a thriller about a self-confessed member of The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons, Bad Monkeys is somewhere in between a parody of a thriller and an actual thriller. Ruff treads the line pretty well, and the result is a fun and weird concoction.

The McCain campaign is characterizing Palin as a leader on climate change, but with a record like hers, they no doubt meant that she's a leader on accelerating climate change and species extinction . After all, in this time of environmental uncertainty, who doesn't want a vice president who denies that climate change is man-made, disputes the findings of scientists, blocks moves to list animals as endangered species, opposes ballot initiatives to protect species from industry, and is beholden to big oil and development. Sources: Environmentalists can't corral Palin (Associated Press) Palin's "toxic" environmental policy would even make President Bush blush (Newkerala.com)

Travis Belrose, one of my best friends, has recently completed a historical novel set in Japan. The Samurai Poet follows Ishikawa Jozan, a man who turned away from the samurai to a contemplative life of poetry and calligraphy. Travis has uploaded the first chapter of the novel at Authonomy , a new community site for writers, readers and publishers, by HarperCollins. I've been in touch with Travis through all stages of this creation, from the early drafts to the final edits, and I can state emphatically that the book has truly been a labor of love, meticulously researched and well-crafted. Check out The Samurai Poet and Travis's author profile at Authonomy.com.

I started Little Brother thinking it was light young-adult SF about smart, net-savvy teenagers getting over and outwitting intrusive surveillance systems. Boy, did I underestimate this book! While on some level it is just that, it's also much more, and really is an important book for readers of all ages. Little Brother follows seventeen-year-old Marcus who -- along with some friends -- is apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security following a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. After being held for many days in a secret prison, Marcus is finally released, but to a vastly different America and San Francisco -- where personal freedoms have been revoked and the city has become a police state. Marcus deliberates and uses all of his technical skills to protest and try and reclaim a piece of the America in which he believes. 9/11 was obviously fresh in Doctorow's mind when he wrote Little Brother , and the questions the novel poses -- about freedoms, privacy, security,...

The Book of Lost Things tells of a 12-year-old English boy, David, who enters a portal to a dark fantasy world where classic fairy tales (Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White) have all been inverted into unsettling derivatives. As David makes his way through the strange world, he learns to confront his fears and reconsiders his opinions about the life and family he left behind. The novel is entertaining throughout and never feels derivative, even though the theme of traveling through a portal to another world is by no means original.

We're back from Japan. Still processing, but musings and pictures to follow.

So I'm traveling to Japan on Sunday and I'm looking for recommendations for a really long book for the flights. The kind of book that is fun and rewarding but might be intimidating to start due to its length. Basically, the kind of book you need to take a running start at. Can anyone offer any suggestions? Keep in mind that I'm looking for something that's fun and that will keep me riveted. I'm certainly not trying to fill in one of the many gaps in my reading of the classics (no Proust, thank you very much). The book also shouldn't be so huge in size that it doesn't pack well.

I recently attended a production of Wicked at Shea's Performing Arts Center (in Buffalo, NY), and can't remember ever enjoying a musical so much. Everything seemed to work -- the music, the cast, the high-end theatrics, and, of course, the story and its rich link to The Wizard of Oz source material. I was particularly impressed with Carmen Cusack, who plays Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West). After the show ended, I couldn't stop thinking about it and kept coming back to the feeling that this was so much better than the second Star Wars trilogy and a far superior retelling of a story from the point of view of one of its villains. Perhaps Wicked revealed just how much you can do when you really shift the point of view and tease out the possibilities. Or maybe Elphaba is just more fun than Darth Vader. And more green.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a fabulous novel that is at once a chronicle of an overweight nerd and his cursed Dominican family and a sublime nerdboy paean. The novel is richly narrated by multiple characters in English and Spanish, and the bloody history of the Dominican Republic provides the historic backdrop. What most distinguishes the book, though, are the many literary references, especially to Tolkien and comic books. High marks to Díaz. I look forward to reading more fiction from him.

I enjoy Lewis Black's riffs and rants a great deal (particularly on the The Daily Show), so I was excited when I neighbor dropped off one of his books, Nothing's Sacred . Having enjoyed written material from other stand-up comedians (George Carlin and Bill Maher), I was expecting funny variants of Lewis Black's comedic material. I was mistaken. Nothing's Sacred is instead a pretty underwhelming autobiography. While Black tried to intersperse some stand-up bits and emulate them in prose with vulgar language, sarcasm, and anger, the presentation that makes him funny when he's speaking was absent and the result was a big miss. Pass on this one but still tune to Lewis Black on Comedy Central.

I was pretty critical of the Scrubs finale , so I thought it only fair that I put up and describe the Scrubs series finale I hope to see next season, when the show finishes its run on ABC . Here are the major elements I think the finale has to capture: The finale has to bookend the pilot, "My First Day", when Dr. John Dorian (J.D.) clocked in for his first day at Sacred Heart Hospital. Fittingly, the final episode should be titled "My Last Day" and feature J.D. working his final shift. The daydream sequences should include riffs on finales from other shows, like M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, and Cheers. The finale should combine the show's signature broad comedy elements with at least one serious arc. Perhaps the final act on the show should be Bob Kelso (now retired) getting rushed in after a medical emergency and the Sacred Heart doctors scrambling to try and save his life. The soundtrack has to be strong and representative of the pop and indie montages the show has feat...

I was very saddened to learn today of the sudden passing of Tim Russert. In a media saturated age when it is sometimes difficult to discern the talking head journalists from political lobbyists, Tim Russert always seemed to rise above the fray, and ask the tough questions while maintaining professionalism. It seems an especially cruel twist of fate that Tim went this year, at this time, just before the ramp up to what will likely by a historic election. Besides mourning Tim Russert's loss as a political journalist, I'll also miss him as a fellow son of Buffalo, who always represented his hometown well and never missed an opportunity to cheer on the Bills or the Sabres.

Rhetorical Occasions collects twenty-four Bérubé essays and presents a good showcase of the author's wide range, spanning literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, academic life, politics, and even scholarly blog writing. This was the first Bérubé text I read, and I purposely spread out the essays and read them over a year, to allow the material to distill. Good stuff and definitely recommended, although readers with little interest in scholarly writing might want to steer toward some of Bérubé's archived blog writings instead.

If the Democratic victories in Congress and the Senate in November 2006 represented a new hope , then Obama's ascension as the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party no doubt indicates that the Jedi has indeed returned and is preparing to confront the Emperor.

I heard of Now, Discover Your Strengths from my wife, who read it for one of her MBA classes. I thought the conceit -- that a focus on enduring strengths is more important than eliminating weaknesses -- was interesting and seemed to match up against my experiences in various workplace roles. So even though I knew the book was wrapped around some product that the authors were pitching, I gave it a try. While I've not read a lot of the contemporary titles about effectively managing personnel, I felt from the start that what the authors were proposing was bold, different, and against the grain. Their model consists of the following core arguments culled from Gallup data: - All people have areas of talent. - The greatest room for growth for people is in an area of strength. From this premise, the authors argue that it makes more sense for individuals to build up their strengths and manage around their weaknesses than it does to focus on remedying shortcomings. Likewise, organizations ...

A couple of weeks ago -- on May 9, 2008, to be precise -- I had 427 visitors to my blog. This was unprecedented traffic and the highest single day visitor total I've had in all the years I've maintained a website. Of course, compared to some blogs, like Scalzi's The Whatever , this is a paltry number that he exceeds probably every hour. But in the context of my blog, it was a lot. At first, I was bewildered by the traffic. While I had published a short rant the night before about the disappointing Scrubs finale , it was a pretty thin post, without much to offer the interested visitor. And then I looked at Google Analytics and saw that nearly all the traffic I received on May 9 came from Google, via various keyword combinations of "scrubs" and "finale". Because I'd titled the May 8 post "Scrubs Finale?" and published right after I watched the episode, I got indexed and caught a lot of traffic from disgruntled Scrubs fans looking to vent ab...

Previously I discussed enabling expandable blog posts in Blogger through a template customization. While I liked the modification a great deal, I wanted to modify the output on clients with JavaScript disabled, where the tweak displays a link to the full post for every home page item. After some meddling with the original code from http://bloggermagz.blogspot.com/ , I adjusted the modification so that when JavaScript is disabled, the blog front page displays as it would without the tweak -- with complete posts and no links to full posts. This seemed like the best option with the Blogger environment and still provided full usability for JavaScript-disabled clients.

Update - Blogger had released functionality that does this. See You Might As Well Jump! from Blogger Buzz . Following an email exchange with Ranting Nerd , I decided to add expandable posts to this blog that allow a summary lead-in on the main page (instead of the whole post) and a link to the the rest of the post on a separate page. See the "Seinfeld" and "How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill" summaries and full-post links below to view this functionality. For anyone using Blogger, I'd recommend the Expandable Post template customization from http://bloggermagz.blogspot.com/ to setup this feature. This is the best approach I've come across and provides flexibility for adjusting the summary for only those posts you want to manipulate. The only caveat is that the tweak uses JavaScript, and will display a link to the full post for every home page item in browsers in which JavaScript is disabled. I'm thinking of adjusting the JavaScript...

Ten years ago, on May 14, 1998, the last episode of Seinfeld aired. Can you believe it's been that long already? In honor of the show on this date, I've dug up some old Seinfeld trivia questions that used to live in a survey on one of my old websites that (like Seinfeld itself) has since passed on. Enjoy. Seinfeld Questions ( scroll down for the answers) 1. What is George's middle name? [ ] Buck [ ] Louis [ ] Paco [ ] Stephenson 2. On which television show did Kramer appear? [ ] The Tonight Show [ ] The Bold and the Beautiful [ ] Cheers [ ] Murphy Brown 3. What is Elaine's favorite baseball team? [ ] The Mets [ ] The Orioles [ ] The Yankees [ ] The Mud Hens 4. Who won "the contest"? [ ] Elaine [ ] George [ ] Jerry [ ] Kramer 5. Is Joe DiMaggio a dunker? [ ] Yes [ ] No 6. What was the name of the Bizarro Kramer? [ ] Feldman [ ] Michael [ ] Ernie [ ] Ice 7. From what type of macaroni did Kramer make a miniature figurine of Jerry? [ ] Rigatoni [ ] Fusilli [ ] Zit...