Front Cover

The other day I finished a proof copy of a book called The Return Man by V.M.Zigo. It is due to be published in March and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

It is a book set in a future where a mystery virus has created zombies, but the outbreak has been containe, albeit to a very large area. Basically the entire Western half of the USA has been evacuated leaving it populated only by the undead while the survivors cram in the the Eastern safe states.

One man hid from the evacuation teams and stayed behind to look for his wife with the intention of laying her to rest if she has been infected. In the meantime he takes commissions from people in the safe states to find their loved ones and ‘retturn’ them to a peaceful death.

It is an interesting twist on the whole zombie situation, making a change from the usual flight to safety. My only reservation was that it sounded like a good outline for a film and I couldn’t see how you could really capture the whole spirit of the films on paper, but it turns out you can and this bloke has done it!

The zombies are very much in the Romero tradition of shuffling slow zombies, which is the way I like them.

All the usual elements are there but with some extra depth and background. The hero is not a typical survivalist, but a surgeon who has had to teach himself how to survive in that environment and how to hunt. Thanks to satellite connections he is able to communicate with a relative out East who hooks him up with clients and provides a link to what is happening outside. The descriptions of how society has reacted and coped is not overdone but is enough to make you think seriously about how the world would adapt – not well, with the far right taking control of the remaining states.

Doctor Marco gets persuaded to take on a mission to find a specific corpse in California and on the quest he hooks up with a Chinese soldier sent from outside and here is another twist as the soldier’s Chinese cultural attitudes towards the dead make him more ready to kill live people than to re-kill corpses.

All of this means that there is a proper story arc with an objective more complex than just trying to avoid being over-run, and it is written in a decent, direct style without being trashy, and there are some spectacular set pieces in it. To go into too much detail would constitute major spoilers, but I will say that there is a sequence on a stalled train and a another where the hero wants to break into a prison crammed full of thousands of ex-con zombies who have been trapped there in order to find one specific ex-person.

All through the book, while enjoying it immensely, I could not stop myself wishing there was a film of it too so I was quite pleased to see that a company has already taken out an option on the film rights. Even so, I’m glad to have read the book because it contain a lot that a film would understandably miss out.

Best of all, the book comes to proper resolution that is satisfying enough while still leaving lots of scope for a sequel, which I will be first in the queue for when it comes out.

One of the many little pleasures of Vine is that I get to read things I would not normally have the chance to. There is no way I would fork out over £20 on a text book in a field I am neither studying nor working in, so getting these does broaden my horizons a little.

I don’t get carried away though. Also on offer was a Beekeeping for Dummies book. I don’t think I need to broaden my horizons quite that much, although seeing it on the list did make me wonder just how much of a market there is for such a book. Just how many budding beekeepers are out there?

But I digress… here is what I thought about the book:

It may be that, not being a designer or a design student, I am missing the point, but I found this book to be a bit light on hard information at the expense of filler.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a beautiful book to hold with some gorgeous pictures in it, and it is extremely well presented as you might expect from Smashing Books, but it was too lacking in substance for me. For example, of its 402 pages, 32 are taken up with the index, contents and pages that are either blank or chapter title pages. On top of that another 274 pages are just image galleries: mostly screenshots of websites or photos taken from Flickr. That only leaves 99 pages of text – and many of those pages only have a paragraph or two on pages that are otherwise blank or full of pictures.

Most of the book tells you that you need to look at things for inspiration and then gives you lots of examples of things without giving much of a clue about how to do that practically. Along the way at times the book treads a fine line between getting inspired and copying other people’s work. In fact it more or less tells you to copy from enough different places so that you avoid obvious IP infringement.

Suddenly at chapters 6 and 7 the book does what I spent the best part of 350 pages wanting it to do – giving two practical demonstrations of how to use inspiration from other websites or from more abstract sources. Up to that point I was thinking that it was all a bit ‘emperor’s new clothes’.

And yet…

I guess that if you are in the design field and the book gives you just one idea that makes a project work or gets you a commission then it is all worth it at twice the price. Just because it didn’t do what I wanted doesn’t mean that it won’t work for somebody else.

I realise this is all subjective but personally I would have welcomed a lot more chapters like 6 and 7 because I already have a source of thousands of images. Its called the internet. Having said that, the clue is in the title. It is a book of ideas and not step-by-step instructions so it actually does what it says.

Where I would quibble with the title is that it is not clear that this is a book squarely aimed at people designing websites. While somebody designing, say, fabrics, might get an idea or two it is not really aimed at them and anybody designing things other than websites would be better off with something else.

I do wonder if I am being a little unkind though. I have an architectural source book that is very similar, being little more than lots of pictures to show different aspects and styles which I find fascinating even if it is of no practical use to me. I just think that somebody who designs websites will, by definition, have access to the internet and a whole world of different pictures already.

What it reminded me of was one of those Tony Buzan memory-improving books I read ages ago. It was a 200-page hardback book. At page 33 I was thinking that it was interesting and possibly useful and then I turned the page and discovered that the book was effectively over: pages 34 to 200 were just lists of things to remember using the techniques in pages 1 to 33. Basically it was a pamphlet that had been stretched to fill a whole book.

In the same way this idea book could have contained all its information in 50 pages. But who buys 50-page books? Or 33-page books? Do we as consumers think that anything that short can’t be worthwhile and so the only way we can be persuaded to buy it is with loads of filler?

A more recent example would be Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, another pamphlet pumped up to book size, in his case by labouring the point. If anything I think that the book’s main big idea was given far less impact by being restated umpteen different ways, something a few of these popular science bokos are guilty of, especially those in the behavioural economics field.

This is a very accessible book aimed more at the casual reader rather than an academic book. What it reminds me of most is the television programme QI as it is stuffed full of the sort of things ‘everybody knows’ that turn out not to be the case like Mussolini making the trains run on time, James Watt inventing the steam engine or the defeat of the Spanish Armada being a heroic victory.

Each chapter is very short, perhaps a little too short, and the selection of ‘facts’ to debunk is a bit idiosyncratic, with some being quite vague, and some being a little obscure – I have a feeling that few people have a fixed opinion of Philippe Petain one way or the other. For all that it is still very readable, and with enough surprises to justify its title.

For me, the biggest surprises were in some of the chapters about American history, like the hostility towards democracy amongst the Founding Fathers of the US. It seems that although democracy was a result of the revolution it wasn’t the objective but more of an accidental outcome. The chapter on Abraham Lincoln was the real eye-opener though.

I had known that Lincoln was against slavery, and that the civil war effectively ended it, so it was a bit of a shock to see quotes from Lincoln like:

I am not, nor ever have been in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifiying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.

Amazing that they voted Obama in only 150 years after that!

The den last October

This time last year we were living out of boxes, getting ready to move house. It doesn’t feel like a whole year (well 51 weeks today) since we moved here.

Today I spent a very large part of the day moving my desk about 2 metres. It took so long because I had to take a couple of shelves down and put them up in a slightly different place, but that involved taking all the books off them and then putting them back afterwards. I am beginning to think that maybe I should thin out the library a bit, but that is easier said than done.

Although I have accepted the principle that I have too many books, I find it hard to pick any particular ones that I really don’t need or want.So far I can only identify a few that I should ditch (but in most cases won’t):

• Some teach-yourself accountancy books
• Some out-of-date technical books (a 1998 book about the internet – lots about Usenet and Gopher for example)
• Do I really need a +10 year old paper encyclopedia?
• Likewise, can I really justify at least 6 normal dictionaries + thesauruses + dictionaries of slang and several books about English usage, including two editions of Fowler’s when I always look everything up online?
• Manuals for software I don’t use any more
• Books I have electronic copies of or can get electronic copies of for free from Project Gutenberg
• Ian Rush’s autobiography
• Out-of-date maps and guide books of places I probably won’t go back to – plus lots of phrase books for those countries.
• The 1997 edition of Halliwell’s Film & Video Guide and a similar vintage Time Out film book.

I have books that I have never read and never intend to read but bought because the title amused me and it was only 20p or something similar in a remainder bookshop – my favourite has to be The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkein and the archetypes of Middle-Earth.

Somebody started an informal book exchange at work, where some shelves in the break areas are filled with mostly genre fiction. Perhaps I should sneak some in there? I could start with the complete works of Oscar Wilde, since I have all of them electronically.

The den now. I'm wondering if it wasn't tider when everything was in boxes.

Anyway, that was my day. The desk is now flush against the wall in the corner instead of sticking out halfway along the wall. It makes the room look bigger now, with room for a nice comfy chair, maybe one that folds out as a guest bed, or a very small pool table, or a multi-gym.

Or a drum kit

One thing though: is it normal for a book to change title for the paperback version? Perhaps there is a sibling working in the book trade who can answer that…

I am not a designer. I have dabbled with knocking up logos for personal projects, but I know I will never do it as a business. As such, this book is probably not really aimed at me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway.

Don’t read this expecting to be told how to come up with ideas though. Although the author describes a bit about how and where he personally finds inspiration that is not the sort of thing that can be taught: you either have some sort of creative spark or you dont. What this book does do is encourage that creative spark and provide practical information on how to apply it. There is no point being able to create beautiful and effective logos if you can’t persuade anybody to employ you to do that.

The sort of practicalities covered are what types of software to use (and why), what types of file format to use to provide the finished article, how to behave with clients, how to make sure you get paid, and so on. That makes it sound a bit boring, but this sound practical advice is in bite-sized chunks and interspersed with practical advice on techniques to use in the actual design like using vectors, aspects of typefaces or choices of colour schemes.

In the course of the book you are told the basics of writing a design brief and contract, how to avoid getting ripped off and what to include in your deliverables, including a section on writing guidelines for the use of the finished logo. Throughout the book the emphasis is on professionalism. It looks like a really good starting point for anybody starting off as a freelance designer.

You can tell while reading this that every paragraph has come from experience and is not just theory. I’m sure that every chapter could be expanded into an entire book in itself and the author recognises this, providing references to books or online resources that would expand on any topic you felt you wanted to explore more. Possibly the most important thing the book does is to make you aware that those topics are important enough that you would feel the need to learn more about some very specific things.

Of course there are lots of pretty pictures, and examples of designs not just from the author but from other companies and designers. As you would expect and hope from a book about design it is well laid out and attractive to look at in itself, but the content is also well-organised providing a logical structured approach to the process of design. Ironically the badly-designed bits (very useful examples of what not to do) are some of most interesting.

I’m sure this will be invaluable to sombebody in this field, but even for an outside it is fascinating and should be required reading for people who commission designers’ work!

Book cover

I recently read a book called I’m Feeling Lucky: the Confessions of Google Employee 59 by Douglas Edwards. No point explaining what it is about, the title sums it up quite nicely, but for what it is worth it is the erstwhile brand manager of Google telling the story of his five or so years in the company.

By a coincidence I finished reading it just before Google Plus suddenly appeared. One reason why I didn’t get round to writing the review on Amazon was that I was busy playing with Google Plus, but having just read about the behind-the-scenes decisions and debates around earlier product launches I looked at the new product launch in a different way. I couldn’t help looking at all the aspects of it and wondering what discussions and arguments might have gone into them.

Here is what I wrote about it on Amazon:

This is probably as close as we are going to get to the inside story of Google, for a good few years anyway. Douglas Edwards joined the company in 1999 just as it was starting to expand and was one of the first employees who was not an engineer. He recounts some of his experiences of the six years he spent there from his perspective in a clear way, making it interesting even for those who can’t remember the days when search meant using Alta Vista or Lycos on Netscape.

This will not be the whole story for several reasons. Firstly, there is the element of loyalty to previous colleagues and a company that still had a family atmosphere when the author joined it (at that time every new employee was still interviewd by either Sergey Brin or Larry Page). There is also the practical fact that employees from that long ago probably still have a significant shareholding and won’t want to say anything damaging or give way secrets, but on top of that it is still just one person’s point of view and maybe there are old office politics scores to settle.

Having said that, I get the feeling that the account is as honest as it can be, given those caveats. It is a shame that it is written by somebody out of the loop of the technical aspects, though that is a blessing as well in that it keeps the book readable because it doesn’t get bogged down in technical detail. Still, I sometimes found myself wanting to know just a little more, but on balance I think that the author’s status as a non-engineer makes him a bit more like the majority of us, viewing events through eyes more like ours than an engineers’ would be.

I do think that a result of all that is that Edwards downplays his own contribution and role somewhat. Towards the end, in his tales of contract negotiations with AOL he seemed to be blowing his own trumpet a bit, but otherwise I suspect a bit of false modesty. Google is a demanding employer that rewards success and probably doesn’t tolerate failure or carry passengers, especially not when it was a smaller company and waiting for its IPO. He would not have managed to stay there for six years without being more impressive than he comes across in the book. It is a bit like Nick Mason’s story of Pink Floyd where he hardly mentions his own drumming.

The other problem about the book is unavoidable – it only goes up to 2005 when Edwards left the company. By the end I was left wanting the book to go on and cover all those products that came along afterwards: Google Earth, Maps, Street View, Buzz, Wave, the instant search preview thing, the privacy controversies, Google Apps, Chrome, Android, the Chrome OS and now Google Plus. I am hoping that somebody will write the follow up.

One of the highlights was a frank (up to a point) discussion of the economics of working for a small start-up and the rewards if it becomes successful. It falls short of actually saying how much an early employee made from their share options when the company went public, but otherwise gives those of us who have always worked in stable, normal jobs a bit of an insight into that culture.

It might seem like I have just pointed out a load of bad things about the book, but they are just comparitive shortcomings – comparing this book to the perfect Google story which will probably never be written for all sorts of practical reasons. As it is this is a good read that is much more suitable to the general reading public than a standard story of a business. It has human interest, a history of a company in its infancy, as well as some background on an industry.

If you wait for the ideal Google book you will wait a very, very long time. This is more than good enough for now, and a lot better than you would expect.

A couple of things stick in my mind about this book. One is the job interview with Sergey Brin and I still can’t help wondering how I would cope with it. Brin basically said he was giving five minutes preparation and then he wanted a presentation explaining how to do something that he (Sergey) doesn’t already know. Talk about high pressure.

What is remarkable is reading about how close to failure the company came several times when it took on new contracts and had to scale everything up at extremely short notice and realising how easily things could have gone the other way at a couple of key moments – and then wondering what the online landscape would look like if Google had not won those early search wars. Would somebody else have come up with Android? Or Street View?

It is a good read: a business book for people not terribly interested in business and a computer book accesible to non-experts but which will probably interest computer experts and business geeks alike.

After the end of the story there is a glossary, followed by some thanks/acknowledgements, and right at the end an index. ¹Â  I scanned through the glossary and dutifully read the acknowledgements turned the page and found…   just the words “to come” followed by 15 blank pages.

Brilliant!

I can understand that a proof might not have the index included and can understand why.  I just thought it was a fantastically ironic to have a blank index in a book about Google which, at its heart, is one gigantic index.

This is not a complaint by the way.  You have to expect proof copies to contain small glitches or a missing index or illustrations and things like that.  As I was saying to Skuds’ Sister just yesterday, the thing I like best about getting books though Amazon’s Vine programme is not that they are free but they are often pre-publication proof copies.  The free bit is nice of course, but it is the getting something in advance of publication that I really enjoy.

Being a bookseller the Sis understands that of course and is surely aware that when she has given me proof copies of Iain Banks or Robert Rankin books I am immensely chuffed.

1. For any younger readers… just think of all this stuff as the paper equivalent of DVD extras

I think that was backed up by blind taste tests too, but this new test has rather different results, leading to a conclusion that maybe people don’t prefer Heinz, they just think they do, and original suspicions that Heinz’s success owes more to the bottle and label than to the contents are looking likely again.

I’m not really a fan of the ketchup myself.  I use it to smother the taste of things I’m even less keen on like the whites of fried eggs or sausages.  I certainly wouldn’t put it on a roast dinner like somebody at my table in the canteen at work did yesterday.  It also works well to liven up a re-heated bolognese.

Back to the taste test though.  The winner was Sainsbury’s own brand, which only slightly surprises me.  Quite a few years ago I found a ketchup that I did really, really like.  It was less vinegary and more tomato-y than most and I used to sometimes use it in cooking – it was Sainsbury’s own brand Italian ketchup.  Bloody brilliant, so of course they stopped making it.

I still look on the shelves in case it magically re-appears.

For some reason I have read very few English translations of foreign books.  Of the thousands of books I have read only a handful have been translations.  I have not read Tolstoy or Proust and would not be surprised if I had read less than a dozen ‘foreign’ books: a couple of Voltaires, a Camus and a Sartre, Borges, Nietzsche, Kafka short stories, Machiavelli, and three (!) Ismail Kadares.  Only if Plato, Aeschylus, Aesop and the like count do I reach a dozen, unless I am forgetting some.

I only mention it because, having just finished a book translated from Spanish I am about to start on a book translated from Chinese.  What are the chances of that eh?   A nice example of statistical clustering if nothing else.

So what am I missing out on?   What jewels of the world’s literature have I been depriving myself of?  Any recommendations welcome – bearing in mind that I never could quite get into Marquez.