Funk Babblings

I don't take much time for reading anymore, but I do occasionally like to read a bit before going to sleep. At some point I decided to read Dangerous Visions, the famous 1967 collection of short stories edited by Harlan Ellison.

I got mired somewhere in the middle of the longest story in the book (also Ellison's favorite), and I'm stubborn about not skipping ahead. (I think I'm being reminded that I'm not into mixing science fiction with politics, though.) Throwing in a novella early in a short story collection just isn't fair. :-)


Then a couple months ago I was at a library book sale, and picked up a couple of biographical books that seemed like the kind of thing every geek should (or would want to) read: Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, and iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak.


I started with the Turing book. Only problem was that that book started by describing where in the British class system Turing's ancestors came from, starting somewhere in the 1600s and going on down the generations with what everybody did for a living. Even when we finally got to Turing's life, the writing about his childhood was not much more compelling. Good for sleep, but not for wanting to continue reading.


Then I tried the Wozniak book, which at least starts with his parents (and having little knowledge of his father's job) rather than his distant ancestry. It's written as an autobiography, but with a credited ghostco-writer, and the more I read the more I imagined tortured interview sessions where his collaborator struggled to get coherent stories out of him. At one point early on, Wozniak mentions his philosophy that all technological development is a good thing, a common idea among geeks and techies, but one that I long ago rejected as naive.

I finally had to throw the book down when I got frustrated with his (their?) simplistic short sentences. It was like reading the writing of a ten-year-old sometimes (possibly related to writing about his childhood?), or a bad imitation of Hemingway. And, ironically, quite the opposite of the Turing book.


Maybe it's time to try tackling Dangerous Visions again....