Microserfs

Earlier this week, Bill Gates announced his intention to leave his job at Microsoft to devote his time to philanthropy.
The news reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. Bill Gates is an important but unseen character. The book is about a group of low-level programmers who leave Microsoft to start their own software company. Daniel, one of the programmers, narrates the book through his diary entries. He and his friends are trying to balance their obsessive work with a desire to have fulfilling personal lives. But they're all driven to be part of the excitement of pioneering a one-point-oh piece of software, and that takes up a lot of time.
Here's how the novel begins:

Friday

This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out.

Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system - and he just wailed on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven - not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to wail on is confusing. We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill's so smart.

Bill is wise.
Bill is kind.
Bill is benevolent.
Bill, Be My Friend...Please!

Actually, nobody on our floor has ever been flamed by Bill personally. The episode was tinged with glamour and we were somewhat jealous. I tried to tell Michael this, but he was crushed.

Read the rest of the excerpt published in Wired magazine here.

The Observations

I reviewed The Observations by Jane Harris for the newspaper where I work. It begins:

The charming voice of Irish maid Bessy Buckley brightens this contemporary take on the intrigues of scheming servants, arrogant masters and nosy townspeople orbiting the gloomy Scottish estate of Castle Haivers. Bessy gets her position there after unwittingly revealing to her soon-to-be mistress, Arabella Reid, that she can read and write.

Read the entire review here.

Happy Bloomsday!

Today is Bloomsday! Remember last year when I blogged about Bloomsday? No? Well read that entry here.
I'm happy to report that my Ulysses book group, whittled down to a lean, mean, group of three, finished about 70 percent of the book. We drove an hour south today to have lunch with the James Joyce Society of Sarasota.
We ate, then watched actors read a scene from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then there was a scene that imagined Joyce having a conversation with one of his contemporaries. Then there was a trivia quiz.
It was fairly modest affair, J. said it was smaller than it had been in years past. But we still had a lot of fun and enjoyed our lit-geeky selves.
We are going to finish Ulysses then try to read Proust. I'll have to research to see if there is a date associated with Proust for us to celebrate. Somehow I doubt it.
And on a final note, The New Yorker this week published an article about the great lengths James Joyce's grandson has gone to to protect his copyright. Read it here, quick, before it disappears into their archive. The grandson seems a bit intense, but in a way that strikes me as very Irish, at least as it's portrayed in Ulysses. Read the article and decide for yourself.

Special Libraries Association in Baltimore

I got back this week from the Special Libraries Association annual conference in Baltimore. I got to hang out with lots of other news librarians. One of the keynote speakers was Gwen Ifill of Washington Week.
I blogged about my experience for the News Division blog, check it out here.
It's important to note that special librarians includes just about any librarian who does not work at a public library, a school or a university. I think it would be more appropriate to call us specialized librarians, but that's not the traditional term. At the conference, I met all kinds of different librarians, including law librarians, corporate librarians, freelance researchers, scientific librarians, etc. It's a very diverse group.

Favorite books, Men vs. Women

A friend who knows I'm fascinated by book lists sent me this item. A British study separated the genders and then asked for their favorite books. Women's No. 1 book is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Men's No. 1 book is Albert Camus's The Outsider, or as we know it in the U.S., The Stranger.
Making both Top 20 lists are Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, Gabriel Garcia 's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
I tend to think that men and women have more similarities than differences, but I still find this list kind of fun. The article characterizes the differences as men preferring angst, women preferring passion.
I'm also thrilled and amused to see that Nick Hornby's wonderful novel High Fidelity cracked the men's list at No. 15, coming in right ahead of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Read the whole list here.
Thanks to Ryan F. for the tip!

Christ Among the Partisans

On vacation last week, I read a slim little book called "What Jesus Meant" by Catholic intellectual Garry Wills. It's a highly analytical but plain-spoken reading of the New Testament's Gospels. Wills's intention is to recover the Jesus who is a radical, frightening preacher and to show that he is beyond political parties or agenda. The book is intellectually hefty but quite short. (I just love those attributes!)
Wills wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in April that highlights a lot of his book's ideas:

He was never that thing that all politicians wish to be esteemed — respectable. At various times in the Gospels, Jesus is called a devil, the devil's agent, irreligious, unclean, a mocker of Jewish law, a drunkard, a glutton, a promoter of immorality.

The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats

.
Read the whole op-ed here:

Next book group pick

I selected Kafka on the Shore for my book group's next pick. And my Ulysses book group is winding up this week with discussion of the Penelope chapter, just in time for Bloomsday on June 16. I plan to blog more on my summer reading shortly!