Archive for April, 2006

One Good Story, That One

Sunday, April 30th, 2006

by Thomas King
ISBN: 0006485251
King doesn’t tell one good story in this book — he tells ten of them. Each story is different, yet they all share a certain quality that I can’t quite name, but I want to describe as “heard.” Reading the book (silently) to myself, I felt like I was being told a [...]

Emotional Design

Sunday, April 30th, 2006

Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
by Donald Norman
ISBN: 0465051367
Thanks to Norman’s book, it is possible to settle the Mac vs Windows issue once and for all: Macs really do work better.
Now, Norman doesn’t actually say Macs are better, but his first chapter is called “Attractive Things Work Better” so there you go. In a [...]

Weight

Sunday, April 2nd, 2006

The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
by Jeanette Winterson
ISBN: 1841957186
I suppose authors don’t often get the chance to (explicitly) do cover versions. But that is what Weight — one in a trio of books in Canongate’s new mythology series — is. The project appealed to Winterson because, as she explains in the introduction, “I like to [...]