Reviews and Comments

What a strange book. Many questions posed, few answered. Conversations that you have to follow on your own. Punctuation optional. If you don't like how thick McCarthy's writing can get, you definitely do not want to read this one. I found that I could only handle a chapter (or less) at a time because I had to think so hard and pay attention to what was going on. I re-read many lines to try to understand them. Re-read entire passages to figure out who was actually speaking.

I've read a number of other McCarthy books, so I knew what I was getting into, vocabulary wise. I think as you get used to his style it gets easier to read, though.

A lot of philosophical ideas presented in the conversations between the main character and his cast of "friends." Western's role in the story felt more like a sponge for pain than an actual part of the plot. He seems to move along without much driving him, outside of avoiding something or someone or somewhere. There isn't much there there, when it comes to him. The real interesting characters are those around him. If you want a hero, he is not that. If you want a vessel for yourself, then you're on to something.

There were times that I felt like McCarthy was speaking directly to the reader. Times where he seems to apologize that the story isn't what we expect. Maybe even times where he talks down to us. Does Cormac McCarthy secretly hold a doctorate in mathematics or physics? He clearly has an idea who shot Kennedy.

Would I say this was as good as The Road? No. Suttree? Maybe. Better than Child of God, IMHO. A book I could see myself coming back to in 10 years and finding new things to learn. I enjoyed the challenge, which I always do with McCarthy's books.

I've had this book recommended to me personally as well on several lists of "cybersecurity books everyone should read" so I finally got around to reading it.

The story, while slightly repetitive, unfolds in a first person, linear style. I found the book easy to read, and while the cybersecurity ideas presented seems commonplace today, I think they were probably groundbreaking when the book came out.

I found it fascinating that Cliff's use of a logbook, external monitoring systems, a pager, a very early form of a "canary token," and a few other technical ideas are still in use today. (OK, maybe not the pager exactly but lots of IT people get text alerts on their phones!)

His inability to get any help from the 3 Letter Federal Agencies was not surprising. It took 9/11 to fix some of those communication problems (but not all from what I understand).

Anyways, this is a fascinating look at how one person laid the path for the future of cybersecurity incident response. While the technical details probably aren't relevant in this day and age (1200 baud modems, anyone?) this book should be required reading for anyone that has a personal or professional interest in cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity is my job, so I came into this book with some amount of knowledge of the subject, but I still found it a fascinating read.

At first, I was slightly annoyed that Shapiro was making up new words (downcode, upcode, metacode) to describe things we already have word for in the industry, but as I read the book I started to see why he's using these words.

Shapiro does a great job of using the ideas of downcode (what you might consider regular computer code), upcode (generally the ethics or rules that the computer user has), and metacode (the rules that exist "above" the user, such as laws). By defining these three ideas, Shapiro makes the case that cybersecurity is not a technology problem at all, but rather a human problem.

This idea is something that I've tried to instill in others at my day job, but it is something that is hard for people to understand, even those that work in the IT/cybersecurity industry. Many technical people think you can solve all problems via technical means. This is what Shaprio calls "solutionism" near the end of this book (if I remember correctly, the word "solutionism" is actually coined by someone else).

I found myself comparing this book to another one I read recently, A City on Mars by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith. Both of these books take what is ostensibly a "technical problem" and then start to apply the human element to it, with the end result being about the same. Technology cannot and will not solve all of our problems. We really have to do it in the messy human world.

I've not read anything else by Ted Chiang, and after getting this I noticed he also wrote the story that Arrival was based on (which I have seen and enjoyed) so I was looking forward to this.

The stories collected here all share a common humanity, while they are still kind of sci-fi based (and one isn't even written from the point of view of a human).

These stories definately made me think, but especially The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (I am a sucker for time travel stories, and this one works better than a lot of them because of the way the premise is set up), The Lifecycle of Software Objects (the story notes at the end really shed some light on the author's intent with this one), The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (a wonderful exploration of memory and how it effects us), and Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (a bit of a con-man story with some sci-fi trappings - really interesting premise).

I will definitely need to check out his other collection and go from there!