The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is an historical-fantasy detective novel set in Southern Europe in the Middle Ages. I’ve just started it, I’m a little way in, and here are my initial impressions.

The book I am reading is an English translation of the Italian. It is presented as a fictionalization of a set of notes the author took from a rare, archaic French manuscript before it was stolen from him, which itself was a translation-slash-contemporization of an earlier Latin manuscript, written in a before-its-time dialect, that is extremely obscure, its non-fraudulent existence attested by direct citations found, again, in second-language translations of rare books found in open markets in exotic parts.

This is all clearly put to the lie immediately as Eco makes it obvious his main character and the book’s protagonist are an earlier Watson and Holmes, perhaps with shades of Chesterton’s Father Brown — or perhaps not.

Brother William’s first set of observations deduce the whereabouts of a horse he had never seen and the structure of part of the monastery by “reading the book of nature”. The signs left on the landscape by the animal’s passing and the structure’s existence. Further on the book describes parts of the abbey implied by its architecture, but which are not visible, and the opening leaves of the novel contain what I think is a mislabeled map of the abbey. Several paragraphs, so far, have been dedicated to the numerology and astrology of the design of the architecture — why a balcony has seven sides and faces West, for example.

Umberto Eco, it should be noted, is a Semiotician. His work involves a good philosophical understanding of symbolic thought — having a dense structure of pointers to things that aren’t there is an intensely interesting way for him to start a book: exactly how much can we “know” simply by parsing logical structures? Is that “real” knowledge? Etc.

“All the same,” I said, “when you read the prints in the snow and the evidence of the branches, you did not yet know Brunellus. In a certain sense those prints spoke of all horses, or at least all horses of that breed. Musn’t we say, then, that the book of nature speaks to us only of essences, as many distinguished theologians teach?”

“Not entirely, dear Adso,” my master replied. “True, that kind of print expressed to me, if you like, the idea of ‘horse,’ the verbum mentis, and would have expressed the same to me wherever I might have found it. But the print in that place and at that hour of the day told me that at least one of all possible horses had passed that way. So I found myself halfway between the perception of the concept ‘horse’ and the knowledge of an individual horse. [...] And so the ideas, which I was using earlier to imagine a horse I had not yet seen, were pure signs, as the hoofprints in the snow were signs of the idea of ‘horse’; and signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.”

Plus, the main character eats cannabis — instead of Holmes’ preferred cocaine — which is how I assume he comes to understand all the crazy connectivity he sees.

As a computer science undergrad, one of my (and my girlfriends’!) favourite books was Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. The book is about a group of Microsoft programmers who leave Microsoft to found a start-up company, before the dot-com bubble. Besides the characters’ career arcs, a large part of the book is about [SPOILER!] Daniel and Karla gradually getting together. Ultimately, Microserfs is a romance set in a very realistic Silicon Valley.

Coupland effectively rewrote Microserfs as JPod, changing the setting to Electronic Arts in Vancouver. Except JPod skips over the few months where [SPOILER!] Ethan and Kaitlin start dating. In his rewrite, Coupland removed the aspect of Microserfs that I liked best: JPod is a boring piece of crap (that made for an even worse TV show).

The only two films about programming that I can recall are Hackers and Antitrust. Both films have male protagonists supported by technically-competant love interests: Hackers was Angelina Jolie’s first major role her best haircut ever and I don’t remember much about Antitrust, but Wikipedia assures me that the girls kicked ass*.

I finally got around to seeing The Social Network, which got a lot of attention when it came out for its “angry nerd misogyny”. Writer Aaron Sorkin flip-flopped on whether it was a pure Hollywood fantasy, sexed-up to sell tickets, or if he was accurately reflecting the mysogyny of the tech industry. I think The Social Network was an amazing script, making a fast-paced film out of typing and depositions, but maybe I would have liked the film more with some romance?

* Although Rachael Leigh Cook’s career-best hair was in Josie and the Pussycats.

There aren’t enough “Books” tag-entries!

I just finished The 50th Law by Robert Greene and 50 Cent. It’s a well-done sequel to The 48 Laws of Power in that it doesn’t require reading the previous edition, but the work has more dimensionality if you have.

I’ll break The 50th Law into two guiding principles (call them laws 49 and 50) that round out the previous 48 to an even half-century:

49. Constantly change and improve. Comfort and security are dangerous illusions because they kill the desire for, and fun found in, adventure.
50. Death is the source of beauty — the sublime. Existential stoicism is a better response to this than nihilism: everyone dies, you might as well spend your time being awesome.

The book is heavily illustrated with examples from the criminal underworld and entertainment business in which 50 Cent matured and eventually rose to power. These illuminations are intercut with example personalities from business, politics, history, war, science, and the arts.

Yes, a shameless self promoter writing a book about why you should be a shameless self promoter deserves some incredulity. That said, the book advises arguing with every book you read, all meta-styles. I also wonder to what extent the criminality detailed in the book is fictionalized — how many scams can, or will, a dedicated hustler actually admit to?

Those caveats in mind it’s a great read (or listen — I audiobook’d it — Fiddy reads bits).

TIME’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 is my new fiction to-read list.

I will not be posting next week because I’m in seclusion. I’m taking the following books with me, which I may or may not get around to reading:

• The Next Enlightenment: Integrating East and West in a New Vision of Human Evolution by Walter Truett Anderson
• The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg
• Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann
• The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett
• The Ethnic Food Lover’s Companion: A Sourcebook for Understanding the Cuisines of the World by Eve Zibart

My music player is loaded with BBC’s The Sound of 2009:

• The Big Pink
• Walking on a Dream by Empire of the Sun
• Lungs by Florence and The Machine
• Complete Me by Frankmusik
• A Kid Named Cudi by Kid Cudi
• La Roux
• The Fame by Lady Gaga
• Hands by Little Boots
• Manners by Passion Pit
• Conditions by The Temper Trap
• Traveling Like the Light by VV Brown
• To Lose My Life by White Lies

I started this post while eavesdropping on the bus while a student describes “this great book he read”…I look it up and it hasn’t been published yet. Clearly he has read, or is at least familiar with, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

It turns out that the title of this book is misleading: it only has space to argue that if you talk about a book you haven’t read, you are saying the same things as someone who has. It doesn’t give positive recommendations for how to talk about books and doesn’t say how not reading a book puts you in a better position to talk about it. The argument is as follows:

While reading a book, you’re forgetting most of the detail

By the end of a book, you’ve already forgotten a lot about the beginning. Every day after that you forget more. At what point do you become equivalent to someone who hasn’t read it?

You can tell as much by skimming a book as by reading it

Very rarely do we read books with the rigor of a scholar. There must be a point of diminishing returns in reading, who’s to say it’s not at skimming speed?

What matters about a book is not it’s contents but it’s context in society and intellectual frameworks

Summed up by the joke “you know you’re a grad student when…you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text” – and who are grad students if not experts at reading?

A lot of reviewers believe that this book is satire, but I think they underestimate the realism of a French literary professor. The last point goes along with contemporary literary theory by saying post-structural analysis is better than other ways of understanding a text.

If you’re reading this, chances are you think I would make a good professional writer. I’m attracted to the concept, but when I look at the future that strikes me as a career of suicide. I believe that the amount of money people spend on the written word will decrease every year and writers will have to be constantly moving to find revenue.

Right now, novels appear to be the safest market – the market isn’t large, but most consumers pay for them. Non-fiction books have to compete with Wikipedia and the rest of the web, while people have less and less time to get deep into a topic. Besides, many non-fiction books seem to either be collections of magazine articles (eg: Malcolm Gladwell), or single magazine articles stretched to book-length with the addition of anecdotes (eg: Urban Tribes).

Jakob Nielsen believes that eBook readers will invert that as the Kindle is very usable for linear, engrossing content but unusable for most non-fiction. He also believes that non-fiction still has a market: The ability to inspire deep thinking is why non-fiction books still have value compared with websites, which are better for quick hits and controversial writing.

But Clay Shirky (an Internet fanboy whose ideas must be taken with a grain of salt) argues convincingly that all the writers are going to go broke before we invent a new way to pay them:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it.