The Code of the Woosters (P. G. Wodehouse)

A perfectly crazy story, perhaps the best of the "Jeeves" books.

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Quotes:

‘We are as little children, frightened of the dark, and Jeeves is the wise nurse who takes us by the hand and—’ ‘Switches the light on?’ ‘Precisely.

Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts.

We do not, he said, fear those whom we despise. The thing to do, therefore, is to cultivate a lofty contempt for those who will be listening to one.’

But mere thews and sinews do not qualify a man to pinch policemen’s helmets. You need finesse. [...] But at least impress upon him that it is essential, when pinching policemen’s helmets, to give a forward shove before applying the upwards lift. Otherwise, the subject’s chin catches in the strap.

‘You mean he scatters these data—these extraordinarily dangerous data—these data that might spell ruin if they fell into the wrong hands—broadcast to whoever asks for them?’ ‘Only to members, sir.’

Didn’t you tell me once that the Code of the Woosters was “Never let a pal down”?’

‘You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘One or the other. Not both.’ ‘Precisely, sir.’

Hamlet (William Shakespeare)

I wanted to re-read Hamlet after i listened to an episode of This American Life where they chronicle staging the play with a group of high-security prison inmates. Amazing stuff. The play was everything i remembered too and more. The play is the thing.

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Quotes:

To be, or not to be,--that is the question

your chaste treasure open To his unmaster'd importunity

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

This above all,--to thine own self be true

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Murder most foul

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten (Hamlet)

Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't. (Polonius)

To be, or not to be,--that is the question:-- Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?--To die,--to sleep,-- No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to,--'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die,--to sleep;-- To sleep! perchance to dream:--ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,-- The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn No traveller returns,--puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?

The lady protests too much, methinks.

'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. (Hamlet teaching how to play the recorder)

Hoist with his own petard

Break not your sleeps for that:--you must not think That we are made of stuff so flat and dull That we can let our beard be shook with danger, And think it pastime. (Claudius)

Alas, poor Yorick!--I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy

Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all

Hamlet, thou art slain; No medicine in the world can do thee good; In thee there is not half an hour of life

the play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king

Matilda (Roald Dahl)

I'm finally reading the Roald Dahl books with my daughter Laura. We started with Matilda because Laura reminds me of Matilda and my wife Henrieta reminds me of Miss Honey. I can only hope i'm a better parent than Mr Wormwood.

No matter how old you are, Roald Dahl is essential. We're going to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory next.

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Quotes:

I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable... (Matilda)

"I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books."

Let The Great World Spin (Colum McCann)

Wonderful book. The beautiful language reminds me of Frank McCourt. The intricate stories of at least a dozen interesting people, each one told in their own voice, compose a New York symphony.

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Quotes:

CORRIGAN TOLD ME once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.

Even the worst of what men did to one another didn’t dampen Corrigan’s beliefs. He might have been naïve, but he didn’t care; he said he’d rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water—it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce A. Tate

Buy from The Pragmatic Programmer and you can get paper or several non-DRMd e-versions, including Kindle/Mobi, ePub and PDF.

An introduction to Ruby, Prolog, IO, Erlang, Haskel, Clojure (a dialect of Lisp) and Scala, with emphasis on learning different ways to express programming concepts and having fun while doing it. I have always believed that a broad knowledge of programming language with a working knowledge of at least a handful of them will make a better programmer. This book is in the same mindset. If you read everything and follow the assignments, you will know enough to write toy programs in each of the languages, a good foundation to build on.

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Quotes:

Ruby is a great language for getting a viable product to market quickly. Second, the scalability of Ruby is limited in some ways.

In Io, everything is a message that returns another receiver. There are no keywords and only a handful of characters that behave like keywords.

Static typing is a natural fit for functional programming languages, but Java-style static typing for object-oriented systems is a deal with the devil.

The Erlang mantra is “Let it crash.”

Concurrency hurts, not because it is inherently difficult but because we’ve been using the wrong programming model!

Scala does not define precedence on operators. It defines precedence on methods.

The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs (Patricia B. McConnell)

I have read several "dog books", but this is the one that has helped. The author is a true dogologist, and has a strong understanding of humans too. She strives to make us more aware of what we do with our dogs and why.

I can't say enough good things about this book. If you like dogs, you will love this book. In all my years of relating with dogs, all the books, tv programs, doggy classes, etc, all the good and bad advice i've gotten, this is the first book that has really helped me understand our four-legged friends and has given me a glimpse of how they perceive us too.

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Quotes:

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are no brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. Henry Beston -- The Outermost House

It's important not to let others demean your love for your dog.