After a steady diet of E. M. Forster and Jane Austen in the latter half of 2005, I felt like I had been plunged into a rich broth of the English language when I began reading Return of the Native. Very vivid writing, with no word left unturned.

Unfortunately, the stories in both Return of the Native and The Woodlanders didn't seem to measure up to my fond, perhaps now hazy, memories of Hardy's other tragedies: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Project Gutenberg eBooks:

• Return of the Native
• The Woodlanders

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Blood Ship

An essay's worth of material stretched out to fill a book—in my humble opinion, at least. Newcomers to the subject may find the book useful, but I recommend skipping directly to Ehrman's powerful Lost Christianities.

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Prisoner of Zenda

...

More humorous adventures of Daphne's brother!

"Soldier, mountebank, and rhymester too!" said Jonah. "And yet we breathe the same air."

"I admit it's strange," said [Berry]. "But it was foretold by my predecessor. I think you'll find the prophecy in Henry the Fifth. 'And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best, Neighboured by fruit of baser quality.' My game, I think. What?"

Project Gutenberg eBook: Berry and Co.

"Being a Tale of the Colonies from the Manuscript of One Geoffry Carlyle, Seaman, Narrating Certain Strange Adventures Which Befell Him Aboard the Pirate Craft NAMUR".

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Wolves of the Sea

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Mansfield Park

...

Illustrated on-line book.

Project Gutenberg eBook: Four Weeks in the Trenches

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The White Waterfall

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Wharf by the Docks (pub. 1896)

Yet another "beautiful woman tries to rise above the ordinariness of life through adultery with tragic results" plot. The story is interesting enough, but the real pleasure of reading the book actually comes from how it was written. The many multi-phrased sentences give the words almost a poetic cadence.

Project Gutenberg eBook: Madame Bovary

"A Story of Adventure in Central Africa"

Project Gutenberg eBook: In Search of the Okapi

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Vicar of Wakefield

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Stella Fregelius

...

John Buchan eBooks are available at Gutenberg Australia (public domain in Australia).

...

See also:

• Niklaus Wirth (ETH home page)
• Niklaus Wirth (Wikipedia)
• "New Book: The School of Niklaus Wirth" thread in 2000 on the comp.compilers USENET newsgroup.
• Table of Contents

In the 1830's, Richard Dana, a student at Harvard University, was taken ill. To regain his health, he went to sea for two years. His ship sailed out of Boston, rounded Cape Horn, traded up and down the California coast, and eventually returned home via the Cape. The book is a straightforward account, without embellishment, of the life of a sailor and is, perhaps, for this reason such a brilliant piece of literature and definitely worth reading.

Being an early description of California, the book (and the author) enjoyed a resurgence in popularity 20 some years later following the California Gold Rush and the resulting expansion of California's population.

Project Gutenberg eBook: Two Years Before the Mast

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe -- Volume 3

When I began writing a program in Scheme for work, I pulled out my never-opened, hard-cover copy of the venerable first edition of SICP, purchased quite some years ago. Since I was already familiar with Scheme, more or less, I picked sections here and there to read, whatever was relevant to solving the current problem-of-the-day at work. The book is fascinating, well-written, pedagogical, and has foot-notes at the bottom of the page. I don't know how well the book fares as a sophomore introduction to computing, but it is a pleasure to read. I would perhaps rank SICP right up there with Bertrand Meyers' Object-Oriented Software Construction (first edition) as necessary (and useful and enjoyable) reading for software developers.

Also see:

• SICP Web Site - is the companion web site for the book. The site has the full text of the book on-line, the source code from the book, and other useful links.
• MIT OpenCourseWare: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - is a listing of MIT's free open courseware (OCW) in the EE and CS department; scroll down for a link to the current year's SICP course (6.001) and materials.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - is a free on-line course (6.001) developed jointly by MIT and Microsoft.

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: King Solomon's Mines

A mystery and a spy story from the creator of "The Thinking Machine". The spy story, Elusive Isabel, is better once you get into it, although the premise is a little far-fetched.

Project Gutenberg eBooks:

• The Diamond Master
• Elusive Isabel

...

The book is available as a free eBook in various formats: The Conservative Nanny State

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Colossus (pub. 1893)

...

Project Gutenberg eBooks:

• The Great Impersonation
• Peter Ruff and the Double Four

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Metamorphosis

...

Project Gutenberg eBooks:

• The Prodigal Judge
• The Just and the Unjust

There are so many new computer books I would like to read, but they are so expensive. I bought Parallel Logic Programming a decade ago for a few dollars via a book seller's close-out sale—thank goodness, because the book now sells for $80! The book, written at the height of Japan's Fifth-Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project, is probably aimed at a graduate-level audience. I've only read the first several chapters and glanced through the remaining chapters. Akikazu Takeuchi (more recently president of Sony's Platform Software Development Center) begins with quick introductions to the theory behind logic programming, its expression in Prolog, and concurrent logic programming. Interestingly, the later chapters cover parallel (pun intended!) subjects in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: streams, object-oriented programming, etc.

Takeuchi writes well and held my interest, but I would have been lost without some prior knowledge (however limited) of Prolog. I think I better work through my old copy of Michael Covington et al's Prolog Programming in Depth before attempting to tackle the more advanced chapters in Parallel Logic Programming.

Also see:

• Logic Programming and Concurrency: a Personal Perspective" - by Kazunori Ueda.
• Ehud Shapiro's Papers - links to a PDF of his "The Family of Concurrent Logic Programming Languages", published in ACM Computing Surveys.

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Lady of the Barge and Others

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Washington Square

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Wings of the Morning

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Tutt and Mr. Tutt

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Children of the Whirlwind

...

In this Mystery*File blog post from July 22, 2008, "A Review by Mary Reed: MELVIN L. SEVERY - The Darrow Enigma.", Victor Berch provides some biographical information about Melvin Linwood Severy.

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Darrow Enigma

An impulse buy from the bargain bin at a computer store, IIOP Complete turned out to be an interesting book, although a little dated. IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol) is the TCP/IP "instantiation" of CORBA's abstract General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP). Having implemented my own version of IIOP (CORBA-Lite) based on the CORBA specification, I was already intimately familiar with the details of IIOP.

The authors begin with an historical overview of various approaches to distributed computing: shared database access, message-oriented middleware (MOM), transaction process (TP) monitors, remote procedure calls (RPC), and, finally, distributed object middleware (DOM) such as CORBA and DCOM. The authors then recount the development of GIOP/IIOP from its ONC XDR and DCE NDR roots. Following a few chapters on the nitty-gritty of IIOP (including an interesting look at IOR discovery in 3 commercial CORBA products), the authors finish out the book with discussions of IIOP's future evolution and its use in Java and on the web.

And then came SOAP ...

Aprè le Deluge, Cosmo Versal!

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Second Deluge

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Purple Cloud

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Friday, the Thirteenth

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Cruise of the Jasper B.

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Doctor Claudius: A True Story

Fiction from the 1930's becomes fact in the 2000's?

[Doremus Jessump] was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.
...
"More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever."

Sinclair Lewis eBooks are available at Project Gutenberg Australia (public domain in Australia).

I like Jim Wallis's monthly columns in Sojourners Magazine, but I only made it about halfway through this book. I don't think the Left doesn't get it and, given the Right's track record, I get a little tired of the "reach across the aisle, let's all be friends" admonitions to the Left.

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Pit Prop Syndicate

...

Free eBook: Eastern Standard Tribe

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Midnight Passenger

I picked this up at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland. Each chapter takes a brief look at one (or several) women who served as keepers at various lighthouses in the continental United States. The chapters are brief and leave you wanting to learn more; regrettably, most of the women labored in relative obscurity.

One impression I came away from the book with is that the husbands and/or fathers of these women had limited life expectancies (six months to a couple of years) after being stationed at the lighthouses. This is, of course, backwards logic on my part. Practically the only way for a woman to become a lighthouse keeper was to be appointed as a replacement for her late husband or father.

When speaking of lighthouses on the Pacific coast, the authors note that the west coast has few natural harbors, a fact which I didn't know but had wondered about when reading Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. Dana's ship landed at various "ports" along the California coast. Whenever a storm appeared imminent, the captain and crew would raise the anchor and put the ship well out to sea to ride out the storm. Sometimes it would take days after a storm was over to get back to their anchorage.

Also see the publisher's page and the United States Coast Guard's biography of Ida Lewis, one of the keepers profiled in the book.

Some light fare—and short, each of them. The first is a horror story that leaves you hanging—not bad. The second is a King Kong-like adventure story—don't bother. Glenmutchkin Railway, published in 1845, was my favorite—a humorous story about two averse-to-work, down-on-their-luck gentlemen who run an investment scam to build the never-to-be-built Glenmutchkin Railway in Scotland! "Now, by your leave, let's have a Welsh rabbit and another tumbler to drink success and prosperity to the Glenmutchkin Railway."

All three eBooks can be found at Project Gutenberg Australia (public domain in Australia).

...

Herbert Adams eBooks are available at Project Gutenberg Australia (public domain in Australia).

...

R. Austin Freeman eBooks are available at Project Gutenberg Australia (public domain in Australia).

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Ayesha: The Return of She

...

Melville Davisson Post eBooks are available at Project Gutenberg Australia (public domain in Australia).

...

Herbert Adams eBooks are available at Project Gutenberg Australia (public domain in Australia).

More Tutt and Mr. Tutt cases!

Project Gutenberg eBook: By Advice of Counsel

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Captain of the Kansas

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Burglar and the Blizzard: A Christmas Story

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Riddle of the Frozen Flame

In 1905, a university professor discovers the "Blind Spot", the portal between our world and the "occult" world. This was an interesting story at first until it descended into "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"-like descriptions of the other side. What was considered to be the occult world turned out to be one of possibly many infinite universes, co-resident with ours in the empty interiors of atoms. A couple of references to relativity suggest some influences from the increasing public awareness of Einstein's early work.

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Blind Spot

A grand adventure—or should I say adventures—at sea, set in the very early 1800's on a ship out of Salem and bound for the Far East. But why oh why do the good men repeatedly let the evilest of the bad men, Kipping, get away only to return and cause even more trouble in subsequent encounters?

Project Gutenberg eBook: The Mutineers

...

Project Gutenberg eBook: Old Saint Paul's: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire

Writing nearly 10 years after I read this book, I remember two main points:

• Consumption (tuberculosis) was viewed as a somewhat fashionable disease, a sign of an artistic and intellectual nature. (It was probably viewed that way by artists who contracted it; the greater "unwashed masses" who also were afflicted with the disease had no such pretensions.) Of course, tuberculosis eventually succumbed to medicine and fell out of fashion. (It is still a problem in communities underserved with health care.) To a certain extent, depression has some of that cachet attributed to consumption by earlier generations, but Dr. Kramer thinks that depression will eventually go the way of tuberculosis and be cured with medicine.

• More important, but briefer: the opposite of depression is not happiness, but resilience.