Out of the way

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KLM Oslo-Amsterdam-Madrid

• Must the War Spread - D.N.Pritt (a Penguin Special from 1940)
• Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (it reminds me of work)
• His Illeal Self - Peter Carey (it reminds me of bliss)

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So I have a few more books I read

Why Weren't We Told, Henry Reynolds. Good history and historiography.
World Without Us, Alan Weisman. Interesting ecological speculation.
Cloudstreet, Tim Winton. Australian magic realism, that I enjoyed.
Beneath the Dardanelles, Vecihi and Hatice Hürmüz Başarin. Slapped up pastiche of the history of the AE2, not terrible but not very original.

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John Reed's classic piece of journalism, describing the "October" revolution of the Bolsheviks as it unfolded...

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New year, more book reviews...

Stasiland is by Anna Funder, published by Granta in 2003. An investigation into the Stasi, the East German secret service during the days of the DDR.

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I am back... I spent ten days Marañando (just like a vaacation except for 40 hours spent to attend a meeting in the middle), and ten days in South Africa on a University tour.

(Which means I have been to more than one country in Africa. At last. See my updated visited countries map ... there is a bit of space to fill in still).

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It has been a while since I wrote, and a while since I wrote about books. I recently read a few that I enjoyed...

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So far this year has been about reading books. But for the second time in a year I received a package recently that had a book in it where I had written something. This one was "Knitting the Semantic Web" - a collection of papers edited by Jane Greenberg and Miel^H^H^H^H^ Eva Méndez, and Eva and I wrote one of them called "Library Cards for the 21st century".

It's a nice book - reasonable size for carrying around, hardback for hitting things, white and orange on the spine for simple recognition (and upsetting Moose's sense of æsthetics). You should all rush out and buy it - I am sure your bookshop has been stacking up advance copies in anticipation... (if you really want to buy it, drop me a message - I have some order forms).

The basic idea of our paper is that unlike normal XML, which is pretty much what library catalogues were since they started getting on computers, RDF gives you the ability to scribble more useful stuff on them or add a second or fifth card under a different category in the same way you could with an actual card catalogue. (When I started my university studies we atually had one of those - duplicated at different parts of the library. Sometimes cards from the 19th century are better than the computer records of the 21st). And the added bonus is being able to search it all electronicaly still, rather than fighting over the "PROM - PROT" box with the big guy with a bad reputation who doesn't much like you ...

Since my FileVault enryption failed and swallowed all my data, and sine it was non-critical, the book is probably the only copy I have handy of the paper, actually. Anyway, it is nice to see my name in a book even if it is only on the inside. And it was a fun artile to write - it was something I had been thinking for a while.

...but the journey continues.

I flew to Australia yesterday, and I finished my 52nd and 53rd books.

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It's been a while. I started reading a bunch of books that are going slowly, but in the middle I read some more...

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I was once likened to Genghis Khan. According to the book of that name, by John Man, this was definitely a great compliment. Part biography of the man who made an empire bigger than anyone had before him, and part historiographical journalism, I greatly enjoyed it, and learned some stuff about Mongolia as well as about Genghis Khan. (Sorry Mielina, this is where I got your cards for Kaja's game).

Book 42 was my third (and least complex) book in Norwegian. "Heksene" by Roald Dahl, is written for kids - kids under 10. Illustrated by Quentin Blake, it is about witches. Although it purports to be autobiographical, I am a little suspicious that it is not the entire truth...

Now I am re-reading a book about books. Although I only read it in english before. I am not about a quarter of the way through "Il Nome della Rosa", by Umberto Eco. And some easier books alongside, since I got to Jim's and found a pile of easy reading (I have had the Eco book for years, but never dared to try reading it before. I only backed myself into the corner by running out of books at a moment I was packing in a hurry).