Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 21:28:37 +0000 From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <19980613212837.A17939@doriath.org> In-Reply-To: <199806121619.JAA08857@usr02.primenet.com>; from Terry Lambert on Fri, Jun 12, 1998 at 04:19:35PM %2B0000 References: <199806121443.HAA09471@mailgate.cadence.com> <199806121619.JAA08857@usr02.primenet.com>
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You, Terry Lambert, were spotted writing this on Fri, Jun 12, 1998 at 04:19:35PM +0000: > Some people watch television; I read. A lot. At one point in time, I > actually ran out of science fiction books to read at my local Carnegie > Free Library (the Weber County Library at the time), and had to start > on the history and biography sections. Thankfully, more science fiction > arrived before I ran out of biographies. For scale, I personally own > around 3500 books which I have read, and very few of them overlap with > what was in the library at the time. > > I think people should read more; if you're going to be antisocial, do > it with a book instead of a television. 8-). I definitely agree, but I do wonder at the choice of SciFi as the main reading material (perhaps it isn't in your case, but it is in case of most of reading programmers and hackers I know). It always struck me as something weird that so many otherwise very intelligent people, who are able to create amazingly clever and beautiful algorithms/programs/OSes, spend so much of their time reading essentially trashy literature, not much different in its average quality from detective stories or paperback romance novels. They can explain to you subtle details of VM architecture, or tell you the plots of all William Gibson novels, but ask them about Flaubert or T.S.Eliott or Cortasar or Chaucer or Pushkin or Italo Calvino and you mostly get blank looks in return. Ah, SciFi. There are so few really good authors and books in it, books that could really be considered real literature. Besides, many of those remain much less known than better-selling trash. This is especially true, I would say, in the US, in which readers usually pay little or no attention to non-American authors. For example, America has, by and large, missed the genius of Stanislaw Lem, who is perhaps the greatest SciFi author currently alive, certainly in the Top 5, if you ask me. Regards, Anatoly. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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