Booking Ahead

[stoutfellow]

I hadn't bought any books in several months, so yesterday I put in an order at Amazon. The haul:

Dead-tree: Vyvyan Evans, The Language Myth (a response to Chomskyan orthodoxy in linguistics); Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human (subtitled "The Role of Failure in Successful Design"); Edward Tufte's classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; and on the fiction side Jim Butcher's Skin Game and Bill Willingham's Arabian Nights (and Days), the next volume in the Fables series.

Electronic: Walter Jon Williams, The Sundering (sequel to The Praxis) and John Lumpkin, The Desert of Stars (sequel to Through Struggle the Stars)

I also picked up a couple of greatest-hits albums, by Billy Joe Royal (mainly for "Down in the Boondocks") and the Seekers (mainly for "I'll Never Find Another You").

Delivery of the non-electric items is scheduled for the end of this week.

Comments

[stoutfellow]

That thought had occurred to me, yes.

I find Petroski fascinating. This is the third of his books that I've bought (after The Evolution of Useful Things and The Pencil), and I also enjoy his regular column in American Scientist.

Wikipedia tells me his next-most-recent book is To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, presumably a sequel of sorts to the one I just bought.

[mmegaera]

Ah. I thought I recognized the name. I got about halfway into The Evolution of Useful Things before I had to return it to the library. One of these days I'll check it out again and finish it.