“I wonder... What's in a book while it's closed... Because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people I don't know yet and all kinds of adventure and deeds and battles... All those things are somehow shut up in a book. But it's already there, that's the funny thing. I just wish I knew how it could be.”
Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
“A wild dream and a far one -- but no wilder and no farther than some of the dreams of man.”
“That's the reason they're called lessons: because they lessen from day to day.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
“Think of a computer program. Somewhere, there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse? Where's the final “END IF”? Is any of this making sense?”
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Book In-Jokes
Here I try to maintain a list of book in-jokes: little jokes that most readers won't notice, hidden in otherwise serious books (for more about
what "in-jokes" are, see at the end of the list).
I'll need your help: if you find any such in-jokes, let me know. Please include the word “injoke” in the subject.
The books are listed in no particular order.
Book Reviews / Read LogBook Reviews: FictionScience-Fiction Book ReviewsNon-Fiction Book ReviewsComputer Science Book Reviews
[1999-03-18]
Fifty-five fictional city descriptions comprise Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a rare feat of writing that is almost more poetry than fiction.
Have you had enough arrows and bubbles in your documentation? If you’re trying to put some order into class diagrams, the modeling language UML, out to replace OMT and many other notations, is the current tool of choice. Together with Kendall Scott, Martin Fowler had written a great introduction to the language: UML Distilled: Applying the Standard Object Modeling Language.
Sholom Aleichem was sometimes called “the Jewish Mark Twain”. His excellent novel The Bloody Hoax, recently translated into English, is a comedy involving harsh criticism on the blood libels that were common at the time in Russia.
We’ve come a long way from From invisible inks and secret codes, but cryptography still plays a very important role in war — and secret love affairs. Bruce Schneier’s second edition of Applied Cryptography forms a great introduction and a handy refernce to the computer-based art of cryptography.
The future history of mankind is presented from a unique point of view in one of Clifford D. Simak’s best novels, City. A collection of short stories that follow one family over numerous generations, the book is most original and highly enjoyable.
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