Books I've Read This Week

xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe of the extremely popular web comic xkcd. Now xkcd is for nerds and geeks but it's sarcastic humour does help to bridge the gap to norms. The question is why would you want to buy this collection if you can read it all on the web for free? That's a good question, in fact the other asks the very same question early on in the book. The best answer I can give is that Munroe adds a bunch of his own annotations to the comics and there is a puzzle imbedded in the book itself. Since the original publication the puzzle has been solved but this is a great way to do value add to a web comic collection.

Naruto, Vol. 47 continues the fight between Naruto and Pain. We learn a bunch of information about Naruto's father and the nine tailed fox contained within Naruto.

Level Up by Gene Leun Yang in essence a book about growing up. The protagonist, Dennis Ouyang, is a young man who just wants to play video games. Unfortunately, his father is pushing him towards being a doctor. This is actually a pretty damn good book but I'm always a sucker for books featuring a father/son dynamic. Plus, it features 80's video games!

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is one of the best debut novel and best novels I've read in a long time. It's 2044 and the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. Most folks spend their time a fully immersive on-line game the creator of which has since passed on. Upon his death a contest is launched of which the winner will get control of the company that runs the game and become a billionaire. The really great thing about this contest is it is centered around the creators favourite things which include 1980's pop culture and video games. As a child of the 80's the references in this book really resonated with me. Besides that it is an excellently written sci-fi novel that I can't recommend highly enough.

See you next Friday.