John Miedema

The debate over technology and books has reached new heights this year. Amazon just announced that e-books have overtaken hardback sales. At the same time, there has been an intensification of debate about the effects of online reading on our brains. At the center of this debate is Nicholas Carr’s, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
Do your kids still do memory work at school? Have you wondered if memorization matters much now that we can access information online anytime? Carr clearly shows that it does. …

Title notwithstanding, Introduction to Emptiness is a weighty book. In just over a hundred pages, Guy Newland provides a coherent description of the Buddhist concept of emptiness. According to Buddhists, the cause of suffering in life is rooted is our illusion of the permanence of things, especially our idea that we possess an essential self. Through meditation we come to see that there is no permanent core in self or any other thing; ultimately, they are empty. Emptiness may sound undesirable, but this insight is key to achieving peace and …

I quit coffee yesterday. A mighty headache ensued but it passed. Today is much better. I started taking the practical advice in the book I’ve been reading, How to Quit without Feeling S**t (their asterisks) by Holford, Miller and Braly. I’m drinking herb and green tea. Green tea has caffeine but the effects are different. I’m taking Vitamin C and plenty of water for the headaches. I’m getting Omega-3 fats from flax. I could be doing more but I’m a tough guy.
Why quit coffee? I don’t consider it terrible for …

Once upon a time I lived back-to-the-land. Just a few years. When the kids were still young, my family and I made the classic move to the country. Old farmhouse, barn, septic bed, dug well, big skies. In the garden, I heard the call of the land. It said, John, you buffoon, the land doesn’t talk. It caught me by surprise how much I loved it out there. I learned the essential back-to-the-land skills: gardening, home-brewing, canning, small-engine repair. I grew fond of simple, old-fashioned tools: the hand shovel for …

An unusual novel. If there is a spoiler in this brief review I am not sure it matters because it is not the plot but the setting and delivery that make this novel work. One, in Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead, the crossover to the afterlife is fantastical and deeply personal, but the afterlife itself is pretty much like this world. People still have their bodies, eat and work and love and sleep, but things are just a little better, enough to make it preferable to this world. …

Robert Darnton was the Director of the Harvard University Library during two important events, the Google Book Search project and the university’s open access movement. In The Case for Books, Darnton provides a perspective on the interplay of private and public interests in libraries.
Google Books involves the digitization of public domain and out-of-print books to form the world’s largest digital library. This project entails scanning the works of research libraries, and Harvard was an initial partner. Darton approves of making books more accessible through digitization, but he is concerned that …

When the Dalai Lama visited Canada in 2007 a Catholic asked if he should convert to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama replied that the man should use Buddhism to become a better Catholic. A humble answer, it seemed, but it was also a clever one. Buddhists do not wish to compete with other religions. How rare, I thought. It took some time to sink in, but the Dalai Lama’s reply also positioned Buddhism as a meta-religion, a perspective from which to understand and enhance other religions. Clever. Each new insight I …

The history and future of libraries is a story of fire. Many have heard of the burning of the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt. It may have been burned by Arab invaders or started by Julius Ceasar to forestall an invasion. In Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles observes that book burnings are not always fatal to knowledge. The burnings inspire the writing of other books. Also, while many books are lost over time to natural decay, scrolls blackened by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 are …

As a reader, bone and sinew, I cannot review The Book on Fire by Keith Miller, this pure, uncut fix of bibliophilia. To review a book is to claim some distance from it, but having entered this story I have yet to find my way out. I am not looking. Call these words a tribute instead, borrowing liberally from its phrases, written while the spell still lingers.
“Do you love to read?” asks Balthazar, the story’s narrator. Each sentence, almost each word is an indulgence of description, a tale of all …

Information Ecologies is the antidote to polarized thinking and propaganda about technology. Nardi and O’Day reject both the rhetoric of inevitability about technology, as well as mindless resistance to it. They take a larger view, observing that questions and concerns about technology have a long history. The key lesson is that a technology may make sense in one context, and not in another.
The authors compare metaphors of technology. When we look at technology as a tool, we evaluate it by its affordances, its capacity to control things. The metaphor of …

Prepare to shiver at Richards’ dark portrayal of the intellectual. In The Lost Highway, Alex Chapman is an irritable and ungrateful young man, but he has a measure of intelligence. He uses this small gift to cope with bullies. It takes him to priest school, but he is insincere and eventually derides it, preferring atheism and finding his home in a liberal university. Here, right and wrong are substituted for approval and disapproval. It is a place where someone like Alex can wind up teaching ethics. The politics of the …

They hook you early, the pushers, even in pre-school. Maybe some of us have a greater weakness for it than others. It is a fierce addiction, reading, and from there it is a slippery slope to writing. Howard Engel was hooked young. Blame his parents; they read in the house. Soon he was picking his own library books and writing puppet shows. He could not be found without a two or more books on hand. As an adult, he wrote for radio then published a dozen detective novels. He was …

People come to programming with many different, sometimes overlapping motivations. Some like the mathematical dimension, the beauty of elegant algorithms. Many like the satisfaction of solving a problem. Others think it good money with career prospects. In Hackers & Painters, Graham frames a view on those who like the hands-on art of programming, the same ones drawn to writing, painting and other arts. Programming may seem a pale cousin of the arts, compared to writing or painting, but there is an art to it. Graham calls these sorts hackers, for …

My job has recently required me to travel and the quiet times at night are a good time to explore something I’ve been curious about, Buddhism. I visited a Shambhala Meditation Centre for an introductory session and picked up a recommended book, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chögyam Trungpa.
What is Shambhala? What is this warrior thing all about? (I could not help but think of Klingons.) Trungpa was a Buddhist teacher closely associated with the Dalai Lama. He was a scholar who researched the legendary kingdom …

Imagine Calvin without Hobbes. Hobbes has gone somewhere … died maybe … I don’t know. His folks too. Place him on a farm, feeding chickens for his chores. Uncle Ken is a good man, but he doesn’t really understand. Tales From the Farm is not about Calvin, but young Lester is about the same age. His imagination is equally fantastic, but missing the necessary props his situation is heart-rending and irresistible. Stark sketches and dialogue tell the story of the deep holes in Lester’s life, and the discoveries that help …