“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
[1997-07-13]
One of the first books based on a computer game, Alan Dean Foster’s The Dig is a futuristic fairy-tale that insults the reader’s intelligence.
How many times did you find yourself solving the same program design problem for the Nth time? The book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, by “the Gang of Four”, was the first book to address the issue of patterns in software design.
Carl Sagan is best known for his popularization of physics. Many, however, will remember him for his contribution for the war against ignorance. The Demon-Haunted World is part of that contribution.
Arthur C. Clarke is one of the Grand Masters of science fiction. his novel 2001 is one of the most famous works of SF ever published. The book already had two sequels, which makes 3001 the third.
Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-Prize winning opus,Gödel, Escher, Bach, is one of those rare works of non-fiction that are nonetheless works of art. The book never says what it really is about: it deals with a very wide variety of subjects, from Abstract mathematics to Zen. But deep inside, it is really a quest for understanding human intelligence.