At the time, when it was not known how the disease spread his big dilemma was whether to close down the playground, so the kids wouldn’t infect each other, or keep it open, so at least their energies would be well spent and they wouldn’t become delinquent or bored at home. He chooses one of these options, but I don’t want to spoil this part of the book for you. The reader can follow all the steps of the decision making process and appreciate the difficulty of the choice he needs to make. In the process we learn to like him, even though there was a growing sense of an incoming tragedy.

By the end of the book it becomes clear that his real nemesis was himself. The ability of forgiving himself was missing from the makeup of his personality due to a mixture of strict and living upbringing by his grandparents and due to his own personality. This is what really hurts him on the longer term and this is the nemesis he doesn’t manage to defeat.

Looking at the core issues our hero is struggling with faith. His fiance has an unshakable, simple, traditional belief in the divine, that he cannot comprehend and laughs at. His own anti-belief stance stance is just as unshakable and simple and it its own way traditional too. At one point in the novel (disc 2. segment #90 on the audibook format I listened to) the narrator says: “Now that he was no longer a child, he was capable of understanding of why things couldn’t be otherwise was because of God. If not for God, if not for the nature of God they would be otherwise.” This is the point in his youth where he lost his faith. Soon after he takes over the burdens of personal responsibility from God and that eventually cripples him  physically and more seriously, mentally.

I learned  much more about polio and its social consequences from the book. I also appreciated working through the main dilemmas, without me having to make such a decisions. I felt it was a good virtual training ground for accepting the possible future when I have to chose between two bad options, with inevitable negative consequences. In short, I enjoyed the moral and theological aspects more than the turn of events in this novel, but this latter aspects also helped me wanting to finish it fast and learned who the narrator was and what happened to Bucky in his later life. rest assured these questions do get answered.

Nemesis at Amazon.com

I enjoyed listening to the book, performed with passion by Christopher Evan Welch, but halfway through I realized that it was written for a much younger audience. I started to wish that I had realized this fact from the catalog, then possibly I wouldn’t have borrowed the book.

The hero isa shy, young teenager who was geographically challenged, i.e. he kept getting lost. He accidentally discovers alternate universes, and  finds good and bad forces in and between them as he slips through them. As the story progresses and he finds his inner hero and confidence he has to make a hard choice between the larger good and his own comfort zone. In short it has all the excitement of an action oriented book and the moral choices teenagers need to internalize.

As usual for Gaiman, it was a gothic, disturbing story. It was darker, than I would recommend for teens. But I also recognize that at this point of my life I am closer to being the father of a teenager than being  teenager myself. This means that the exhilirating feeling that I had when I was a teen and took (sometimes unnecessary) risks started to fade away or taken over my protective  instincts for my child’s (future) teen years. I wouldn’t want her to be facing the choices that Joey in the book had to face. Fortunately they mostly lived in an imagined world, that will not happen to my daughter, because they don’t exist. But I have to prepare her for other choices.

Back to the book. It was a page turner, with well built story, characters and a slight twist about who the bad guys were. It teaches about balancing knowing hard science and believing in magic (or imagination if you will) and most of all about the value of honor. For that reason I recommend it, as the cover says for ages 10 and up. If  you are over 15 though you may find the book a bit lacking in grown-up people.

InterWorld @ Amazon.com

This was the first book I read from Hillerman and I liked it. Apparently some of the characters and the setting appears in other books by him. It is part time mystery and part time mysticism. The mystery part is about solving a crime, which end sup being  a series of crimes. The mysticism part comes from the Navajo religion and its notion of shapeshifters, people who can you guessed it shift shapes.

What I most liked about the book was the way it depicted Navajo culture and way of being. It happened through the main character a, a just retired officer, who in himself is an interesting figure. I didn’t care much of the crime, particularly that theb solution to the mystery was easy to guess once the plot was outlined enough. But they way the people and their philosophies were depicted made me want to finish the book. I feel I learned something about Navajo attitude to life and nature and reading more about the author I am convinced it is accurate.

Barry Lyga: Goth Girl Rising

It is a sequel to “The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl” that I utterly enjoyed a few months ago. I had high hopes and they were met only halfway. In the first book Kyra–who is this books’ protagonist and was in supporting role in the first one–had an exciting mystique around her. Here that is unveiled and as often, the plain truth is less satisfying than the unknown that can turn into anything.

Reading this book I felt much more that I am not the target audience, than with the first one. That one made me remember the emotional state I often was in my teenhood. The sequel didn’t make me nostalgic at all.  I might have enjoyed it more if I had a recent breakup behind me and could identify with the characters in it. Without being even close to that state I didn’t muster up enough sympathy for the people in it. Nevertheless I am glad I read the book, because it contained some good insight about how other people deal with angst and tips how not to help them.

Isaac Asimov: The Caves of Steel

I have a growing ambivalence reading sci-fi books written a long time ago. This one, the first in Asimov’s robot series is from 1953. The fact that the future a a lot of sci-fi books are set in is already upon us, yet is so different than what the authors back then imagined is discomforting. Fortunately this book is set at a time that is still a bit ahead of us, although possible not much. It is on an unimaginable overpopulated Earth with 8 billion people. Currently we are already approaching 7, so this is not so unimaginable any more.

The crime story, figuring out who murdered a scientist, is engaging enough. But the real strength of the book is the musing about social relations and human prejudice against both robots/AI and against humans who have left Earth a long time ago. It shows the arbitrary nature of racism and that if you have enough contact with the “other” you will soon find what unites you as opposed to what separates you.

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I might sign up when they figure out how to do it without Google.

My mother warned me that the book is brutal at some places. It sure was and not just on the physical level. That part included forced prostitution, rape by investigators, beatings and killings. Similarly violent was–even if the harm to the people’s bodies was less direct–the coverage of forced evacuation from Estonia to Siberia or the aftermath of Chernobyl catastrophe a 1000 kilometers away. Underlying all these were the different, yet similar brutalities of regimes that swept over Estonia, where most of the book takes place.

It’s great novel, not just because the author’s writing style is stunning, but also because it has so many layers. You can read it as a mystery book, trying to figure out the connection between and the history of the protagonists. You can read it as an Estonian history book covering most of the 20th century. You can read it as a testament and witnessing of violence against women. (In this aspect it is similar to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.) It is also a comparison of the brutality of Nazi, Communist and Capitalist (aka Wild West). All of this is summarized in a few lines on page 300:

“If they are coming, they might as well all come–Mafia thugs, soldiers–Reds and Whites–Russian, Germans, Estonians–let them come. Aliide would survive. She always had.”

Then there is the ending. Part five of the book, the last 20 pages, are in the format of a series of “top secret” KGB/NKVD reports. They help to solve the mysteries, but also add unexpected turns to the story, that I didn’t see coming.This ending made the book cathartic. The brutality and inhumanity finally moved from the personal level to the state-organized one, showing the hidden yet very real criminality of the Stalinist system. After I put down the book, I felt I shouldn’t touch anything as it would become unclean. I felt utterly disgusted and a big block was pulling down inmy stomach. This may not sound as an endorsement, but it is. Any book that can have this kind of effect on you, without using low-level gore, is worth reading. It will teach you about yourself too, not just the subject matter.

I suppose I should say a few words about the plot and characters of the book, without revealing too much. It starts off like a David Lynch movie, except the homeowner found a sick girl in her yard and not a detached ear. Slowly we learn the girl’s story: lured from Vladivostok to Germany in the hope of making lots of money so she could go to med school, but then forced to prostitute herself, from which she managed to escape to the aforementioned garden in Estonia. The woman who found her lived all her life in that village. She has fallen in love with her sister’s German-sympathizing boyfriend during WWII. The sister and her daughter gets evacuated to Siberia, while she keeps hiding her brother-in-law even after she marries a card-carrying, true-believer Communist after the war. There is more to it, of course, but I already spoiled too much. Go read it for yourself.

I am looking forward to the author’s next book. It’s not out in English yet, but the Hungarian edition’s title translates to “Stalin’s cows.”

“This book focuses on the nontechnical user who is responsible for building, maintaining, and managing Drupal web sites. The book covers why you should consider using Drupal when building a new web site, what Drupal is, installing and configuring Drupal, creating and managing content, managing users, adding functionality to your web site through Drupal modules, and more advanced topics on using themes, panels, and views”

I have to admit I haven’t learned as much from it as true beginners might have. Nevertheless, because I have to return the book to the library now, let me quickly jot down some of the points that were either new for me (first 4) or I need to remember to do more learning:

1. Installing new modules now can happen via the UI at /admin/modules/install both from the URL or an uploaded tarball (page 85)
2. Upgrading modules also can be done via the UI at /admin/modules/update (page 90)
3. When adding a radio button field to a webpage you can define the values and options for it by a pipe in the “allowed values list” setting. (page 137) e.g.
   1|Yellow
   2|Green
   3|Blue
4. “Views” has caching which is great for long list of items. New additions may not appear right away though (page 158)
5. Page 169 has an example of a table view that allows updating several nodes at a time, aka grid update. This can be a great feature that I need to learn to implement. The details are not givin in the book though.
6. Chapter 12 (from page 175) is all about Panels. Based on the description it sounds manageable, but it probably can get hair when complexity grows. At least I have a basic understanding how it is supposed to work.
7. Chapter 14 (from page 215) is about administering Drupal sites, including how to create (and schedule) good backups. (An issue that became important at a client engagement just this week.)
8. Chapter 15 (from page 229) is an overview of “putting it all together” that includes a meticulously detailed methodology for a drupal project.
9. The most valuable part of the Appendix was the social networking section: Add to Any, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and modules for Facebook style statuses, user relationships, private messages, heartbeat (Facebook Wall).
10. Organic Groups are described on five pages starting on page 278.
11. Honorable mention: the last Appendix was about e-Commerce, with a basic Ubercart setup (from page

The book @ Amazon

Let me give you a quick rundown of the plot of the stories, followed by a few words of commentary

1. Tapka - The protagonist is 7 years old and he and his friends are taking care of their neighbors’ dog, Tapka. The neighbors are also fresh immigrants, and older couple with no children or other relatives in their new world, only their dog, whom the wife adores and the husband tolerates. Tapka gets into an accident under the boy’s care and ends up at the vet’s where his owner convinces the vote in her own to do an expensive operation for free.
   The way to get things done: sit down and don’t move until you get what you want. Not unlike the civil liberties movement’s sit-ins.
2. Roman Berman, Message Therapist – A few years later the boy’s father gets a certificate so he could open a small office to become a masseur. Getting the certificate was difficult, but getting and keeping customers are even more so, if you are not familiar with advertising and marketing.
   The opinion of the members of the book club was divided whether and how humiliating it was for the family to visit a more well-off and established family for dinner. Some of us tried to look at it from the other family’s perspective: inviting a poorer family for dinner is mitzvah. But we all agreed that showing off and treating them with less than full respect can be painful. Even if at the end they help to get clients for the father’s new business.
3. The Second Strongest Man –  The weightlifting team arrives from the old country to Toronto for a championship. The protagonist’s father was their coach and is happy to reconnect with his old protege and close friend.
   More than a hint of the old world crept in. The presence of the corrupt, but still frightening KGB officer accompanying the team still sent shivers down my spine.
4. An Animal to the Memory – The protagonist is keep getting bullied into fights at school. The last one happens to be at the (private Jewish) school’s Holocaust memorial exhibition. The principle, a Holocaust survivor, makes a painful memory for the boy so he would have stronger connection to and understanding of Judaism and its history.
   Making a Jewish kid shout “I am a Jew” in a room empty of people, but full with Holocaust pictures and related objects could have two outcomes: he will understand the assertion on a visceral level, he will turn against the person who makes him and his religion. The author kind of leaves it open which one happened. And as none of the other short stories mentioned school of the principal we can’t even know it for sure. My guess: both.
5. Natasha - The 16 year old protagonist gets introduced to his uncle’s new Russian wife’s 14 year old daughter. They play sexual games for a few months, until he refuses to run away with her.
   Natasha is a victim, who is essentially forced/lured/abused into prostitution. But this short episode made the protagonist distance himself from the circle of illegal activities, including drugs.
6. Choynski - The hero of the book is an adult by now, a journalist who is working on a  story about a long-forgotten Jewish boxer. While chasing the story in San Francisco, by interviewing an old and dying man, who knows about the boxer, his own grandmother is also dying back at home.
   The story includes the full translation of Psalm 180, making it the most religious piece of the book.
7. Minyan - The family works hard to get the man’s grandfather into a Jewish assisted living home. It helps that grandpa is religious and can make the minyan of the home, which only counts men in the necessary quorum of ten. The dynamics of the home is covered in details.
   I don’t recall reading about the topic of possible old age situational homosexuality anywhere else.
   As I learned, the Older Americans Act passed in 1965 in the USA, which provided subsidized housing for the elderly in the US. As there was a great demand for it the places were often allocated with the help of a lottery system.

Our book club agreed that Bezmozgis is a compassionate writer who manages to convey human frailty. He covered intimately how layers of identity and identity development were negotiated for the family members. Particularly how reasoning and motions vary in different stages of life

We also talked about whether the Western support of the Soviet/Russian Refusenik movement raised the expectations of the Jews stuck in the USSR. “Just come and everything will be alright and perfect.” One of our group members worked with the immigrants coming from there and elsewhere and told stories how some of them had a strong sense of entitlement and how disappointed they were when they found that their material quality of life didn’t necessarily increased immediately. Some of them even felt resentment for what they perceived as being deceived.

I also heard an enlightening story about the differences in value systems. When a grandparent of these immigrant families’ died soon after arrival they wanted to have the kind of tomb for her/him that they were used to back home: big stone with big picture on it. Meanwhile in the US, the tradition of the last decades moved to having a (much cheaper) small plaque on the ground. When the newly arrived family didn’t have the means to buy the kind of tombstone their value system dictated and asked for help the supporting agency was put in a difficult situation. Their money shouldn’t be wasted on something that their value system said was so far from being  essential. But some families said that they would turn their foodstamps into money to buy the tombstone. They would rather not eat than not honor the deceased relative. What would you have done?

Hardcover, paperback and Kindle version of the book at Amazon.com

When judging a tech textbook first and foremost I should assess what I have managed to learn from it. The answer in this case is a tremendous amount. Right now though, I don’t know how lasting my learning will be. That will depend on how much work I will be doing in Drupal and how much I retained in the first round of studying. As it was a library book, i.e. I have to give it back tomorrow, I tried to take as much note as I could. Nowadays I try to put every informational on the web, except confidential pieces, so you can find my notes on my blog here: chapter 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11.

I think that studying the book was very useful for me. I wasn’t a total novice in using Drupal 6, so I can’t say I learned everything I know from it. But I can say that my knowledge feels much more grounded now. And there was plenty of new information, tips, trick, modules for me in there. I enjoyed the clear style of the writing, the detailed explanations, the description of the processes and the screenshot that helped me along the way. My only regret was that halfway through the book the site accompanying the book went down and I still cannot reach it. I hope usingdrupal.com will come back, so I could reuse the code snippets from the book, without having to type them in.

The book had a lot of authors, most of them are members of the team at Lullabot. Let me spell out all of their names, that I  couldn’t do in the title of this post (hence the ellipsis there): Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, Jeff Robbins. Thanks to all them making for putting together an excellent resource. Too bad that by the time I was done with the book, that covers Drupal 6 , Drupal 7 came out and now I can start the process (almost) all over again.

* Here is the official descrption of what Drupal is: “a free software package that allows anyone to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.”

The book @ Amazon

1. Newo (Neo in the original) has several speech impediments
2. No occasion was missed to make a lewd reference or “enhance” simple objects and actions with sexual overtones. E.g. renaming Trinity to Titty was a softer one of these.
3. The text was pumped full with pop culture references as if name dropping would improve the quality. Whether I recognized them or not, they were just annoying.

Regarding this last point: earlier this week I was reading a debate online about whether, how, and to what extent should authors of novels include in their works references to contemporary culture. The classicist argument was that it would prevent ever making them timeless, so books that connect to current TV shows could never be great literature, because they would not be fully understood at different places or in the future. The counterargument was running around the line that authors’ responsibility is to reflect on the world they live in.

The whole debate was originating from the observation that the use of internet has rarely been featured in mainstream novels, despites millions of people spend hours a day with it. So why didn’t it show up n novels yet? I think because it would be a boring narrative: writing about sitting in front a screen doesn’t suggest engaging action.

On the other hand this book was chokeful of names of singers, actors, joints, brands… It did more harm than dating the book out of existence in 10 years. It made it irrelevant now. Don’t waste time on this one.

The book at Amazon.com

Curious Notions is a shop in the late 21st century, where people from our world are selling electronic gadgets in an alternative reality, where the Great War was one by the Germans and with the use of atomic bombs they concurred the USA as well. The proprietors of the shop have two mission: buy produce they can ship back to the home timeline and ensure that this reality doesn’t develop its own transposition chambers, the device that carries people and objects between realities. Things go well, until the authorities start taking too much notice of the curious things they sell, that is not known anywhere else in that world….

I haven’t been paying much attention in the past of the label “Young adult” literature. Looking at the long list of books that Turtledove wrote made me wonder why some is in that category and others are not. Reading this book made two requirement clear: the protagonists have to be teenagers themselves, so the reader can relate to them. Then the books should not have explicit scenes in it and apparently not even mild swearing. I noticed that every time Turtledove expressed somebody’s anger, he went around using expletives, made it clear that they were used by the characters. The lack of four letter words from the appropriate situations didn’t bother me, as I rarely use them myself. It was kind of part of establishing my identity as a teen, that unlike some people around me I consciously tried to eliminate using them. But it was funny in this book, how the author went at great length, to avoid them. Would have been simpler to include a few here and there.

The book’s plot is simple to follow and even predict, but that doesn’t take away the joy from the narrative. Turtledove made sure that the reader gets a horrifying picture of a totalitarian regime and a country under its rule. Let me give you an example: a German official telling to a really innocent Americna woman on page 47,

I will tell you how it seems to me. It seems like this. We have found no evidence,–ja, this is true. But does this mean you are not guilty? That I find very unlikely. So it must mean you are very clever. You think you have outwitted us. For the time being, you may even be right. We shall see, though, what further questioning of Herr Charles Woo will bring.

I enjoyed the simple fantasy of being transferred to a world, where Adolf Hitler never rose to power, despite the US and most of the world being under a German rule was still no fairy tale. Being safely separated from that world, by virtue of reading about it on a page, made me less anxious about whether our heroes in danger can get out. I don’t think I will spoil much by telling you that they did. This probably means that the third requirement for a YA novel is to have a happy end. There, you have one here now.

The book at Amazon.com