Category: books
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A.D. Nuttall (2003) answers: The word, I think, connotes a quality of completeness: at the lowest level, complete literacy (never a colon where a comma should be); complete, though not redundant documentation; complete accuracy even with reference to matters not…
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Parts of this post were first written in March this year (9th March and 11th March). Revised on 17th November, 2010. Recently, I read Melanie Benjamin‘s Alice I Have Been (2009), which is a fictional account of the life of…
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This post was originally posted on 18th July, 2009. – Today we went shopping in the upmarket neighbourhood of Chelsea. Our first stop was the famous John Sandoe Bookstore. The store, which sells new books, is absolutely packed, much more…
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This post was originally written on 18th April, 2009. Today, the webmaster told me a story from Greg Egan‘s Axiomatic. The story, “The Hundred Light-Year Diary”, is about a future invention that allows people to send messages to themselves from…
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Written by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, this post was originally published on 5 April 2010. . In his Acknowledgements, Neil Gaiman cites Kipling’s The Jungle Book as an influence of his The Graveyard Book (note the similarity between Kipling’s and Gaiman’s…
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Nicholas Ostler has a new book out: The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010). In it, he argues that English, today’s global lingua franca, will die out, following the pattern of former great languages Sanskrit and Latin. He…
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This post was originally written on 24th March, 2010. This morning, when reading Leonard Wolf’s The Essential Dracula, I learnt a bit more about the universal typing system (the subject of ‘typing’ is brought up as you may know, Mina…
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