Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

01 Jul 2002, 9:16 a.m.

Recently I've actually finished two books. I didn't like…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Recently I've actually finished two books. I didn't like Jon Stewart's anthology Naked Pictures of Famous People as much as I'd hoped, although a few of the pieces were worthwhile. I especially liked "The Devil and William Gates".

This morning, I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. Very good. I like how Dick's plots just charge ahead whether I'm ready or not, and how his characters think and feel, but not so much as to slow down said plot. There's a passage in the beginning-middle of the book, explaining the concept of "kipple" (entropy, roughly), that I might excerpt here because I love how Dick wrote it.

Last week of school. I'm not looking forward to it. Too much reading to catch up on, too hot, too hectic. And at the end of it: a plane trip. I wish I were more excited than hassle-anticipating about that.

From my wall, the faces of Dmitry Sklyarov and Anna Akhmatova and Jon Johansen and Yuri Gagarin regard me with different expressions: tired resignation, almost-smiling understanding, hip young disinterest, and enigmatic sorrow, respectively. I assume that Gagarin's sad because his helmet is the entire world, according to the conceit of the poster.