Letters Remain

Category: books

  • Being Creative with gapingvoid

    You may know gapingvoid from Hugh MacLeod’s “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards“. Now he’s telling us How To Be Creative. So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years: You are responsible for your own experience. Everybody…

  • Writing a Novel – The Snowflake Method

    I’ve started writing a novel. I don’t have ideas of grandeur or dreams of retiring from novel royalties; I write because I enjoy doing so and because I find it therapeutic. Still, it’s nice to produce legible prose and to do so requires at least a bit of forethought.That’s where The Snowflake Method comes into…

  • Book Lists

    I’ve been updating my reading list lately and my Amazon wish lists are growing exponentially (even with significant culling). These book lists are great: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, AI researcher (writer of The FAQ on the Meaning of Life) Ryan Holiday, writer Kevin Kelly, Wired’s Editor at Large and board member of The Long Now Foundation…

  • 100 Best Fiction and Non-Fiction of the 20th Century – The Modern Library

    In 1998 The Modern Library (of Random House) started a poll to find the best 100 fiction and non-fiction books of the 20th century (do you think they realised that there were still two years of the century left?). There are five lists: 100 Best Novels The Reader’s List (Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand) The…

  • Books That Will Induce a Mindf**k

    Trying to keep this site family-friendly (bring the kids… I’ll play with them) I thought a couple of asterisks would come in handy for my most recent find: The den of iniquity that is Everything2 (I waste spend way too much time there) has a pearl of wisdom in Pseudomancer’s Books That Will Induce a…

  • CIA Guide to Optimised Thinking

    Complex situations are – by their very nature – difficult to understand. Compound this with the fact that in any given situation we’re all going to have cognitive biases that make us view situations differently and inaccurately, and you’re going to have a bit of a mess when it comes to thinking about and analysing…

  • The World Without Us

    What would happen if humans disappeared from the face of the planet right now? What would happen to our infrastructure, the wild animals… our legacy? This is the topic Alan Weisman tackles in his speculative non-fiction book, The World Without Us (which I’m considering adding to my reading list purely out of curiosity). The Wikipedia…

  • Jonathan Franzen on Shanghai

    The novelist Jonathan Franzen is skilled at describing the rich and colourful dreams we have about our futures, whilst still managing to portray the bleak reality of life for society at large (I loved The Corrections). Shanghai seems like a great place for this style to really shine, as a recent audio story in The…

  • Books That Make You Dumb

    BooksThatMakeYouDumb is a little ‘statistical’ graph on how average SAT scores correlate with what books people read. Accepting it’s unscientificness Virgil (the creator) lists the most notable things about the data: Harry Potter is the most popular book. The Bible is the second most popular book. At least among college students, Harry Potter is, like…

  • 100 Best Last Lines

    The 100 best last lines from novels, as chosen by the American Book Review Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how…