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 Book Review: Good Omens |
Posted by
Hemos
on Saturday May 16, @11:11AMQuite possibly, Good Omens or, as the subtitle reads The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, is the funniest book I have ever read. The creation of the funniest British men since the spawning of Cleese and Palin, Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett both make you laugh even that you forget to breath. But then again, how else should the world end? I tell you true, the Horsemen will come on Harleys... Click belong to read the full review.
Both of these guys have long histories in the creative fields: Neil Gaiman has written other books, but is best known for his creation of one of the best comic book series ever written (er) The Sandman. The creative genius he evidences in that series is in full force in this as well.
Terry Prachett, the creator of the "Discworld" novels, writes in much the same vein. His ability to tell extremely dry jokes is often used in Egyptian mummification rituals.
So, the plot of the book is something along these lines: The End of the World
is coming, but it is almost nothing like what you imagined it to be. Beyond that,
it is almost impossible to quantify the story. But I think this text alone should convince you to buy the book:
"God does not play dice with the universe: he plays an ineffable game of his own devising,
which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in
an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes,
with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."
You must buy this over at Amazon.
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In 1991, future coverstar Linus Torvalds released a little kernel which has ended up working in synchrony with GNU utilities and
various other
software projects to live happily on millions of computers worldwide. Read about the beginnings of the Linux kernel peppered with
anecdotes about growing up Finnish, straight from the horse's mouth, with Linus's book Just For Fun,
coauthored by David Diamond. This makes a lighthearted companion piece to the slighly-more-serious effort from
Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic. On the (wacky, speculative) Science Fiction front, you may enjoy Hemos' reviews of Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time. And for your more serious moments, we've run reviews lately of the sobering Hack Attacks Revealed and the very informative Digital Copyright by noted authority in the field Jessica Litman. There's also the hard-to-categorize work from Ian Stewart called Flatterland, a modern update to the classic Flatland.
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