Catching up with my reading

Amazing what you can fit into a few days when the OU offices are shut & there's no marking to do....

Have finally read Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the punctuation best-seller. I liked that a lot & can quite understand why it became so popular. It treats dry topics such as semi-colons & misplaced apostrophes with the kind of fervent levity you would normally associate with newsgroups/blogs - in short, a web writer's voice addressing a bookish subject (in a book, of course....).

Then tonight I got halfway through David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined (his follow-up to The Cluetrain Manifesto). That's good fun too, on a much broader canvas. A philosophy teacher turned software marketer turned web theorist, he takes a bunch of Big Concepts (time, space, that sort of stuff) & looks at how the web gives them an alternate meaning.

My favourite chapter so far is Perfection, where he argues persuasively & humourously that the web's 'brokenness' is its strength: its flaws are precisely what make it human & therefore attractive, overcoming corporate glossiness, political correctness & all the other little strategies used in the 'real world' to cover up our deep embarassment at failing to achieve perfection. Weinberger says it all far better than my summary!