This book, Hinton’s first for adult readers, has some serious flaws–but
I have to admit that it’s an interesting ride and kept me turning pages.
It’s a novel of rebellion and redemption; it’s also the most peculiar
vampire tale I’ve yet seen.

Although I usually avoid spoilers in my reviews, I find that I can’t
write about this book without going into significant detail.
If you have fond memories of The Outsiders and you’re inclined
to pick up a copy of Hawkes Harbor on the strength of them,
you should probably just go do so and skip the rest of this review.
That was my motivation for reading the book, and on the whole I’m glad I
took the time.

The rest of you can continue reading.

Continue reading →

One of the first civilizations my daughter and I are learning about while
homeschooling world history is Ancient Egypt. It’s an interesting culture,
there are lots of cool artifacts and monuments left by them to study and
it’s useful for teaching how to study a civilization in terms of government,
social issues, geography, the role of religion and mythology, etc. We came
to the conclusion that the Egyptians were a very visually-oriented people,
extremely pragmatic in their thinking and not inward-directed or concerned
about abstract concepts or philosophical questions. They developed extensive
canal irrigation and water control systems, indoor plumbing, built the
pyramids and carried on extensive trade, all with a clumsy writing system
that left most people illiterate and, compared to the Greeks, an
unsophisticated system of mathematics.

As an educational tool, historical fiction is useful for making the reality
of the times come alive in human terms. Temples that we see as fascinating
archeological artifacts were real places with sights and smells and sounds
that are hard to imagine unless you are given a story to place them in. So
we are reading some fiction as a way to make the history come alive for my
daughter.

Mara is the first of these novels. It’s set in the reign of Queen
Hatshepsut, the only female pharaoh in Egyptian history. Mara is a slave
girl, bought by one of the Queen’s advisors to use as a spy in the inner
chambers of Thutmose III, the Queen’s heir. Thutmose has been affianced to a
Syrian princess who speaks only Babylonian and since Mara has been owned by
a scribe she is fluent in that language. Her role is to translate for the
princess when she speaks with Thutmose and report back to the Queen’s
advisor on anything amiss that she may hear. The conflict comes when she
inadvertently falls in love with a young lord loyal to Thutmose who is involved in
a plot to depose the Queen and put Thutmose in his rightful place on the
throne. Her personal loyalties lie with Thutmose, but her owner will kill her if
she betrays the Queen.

It’s a good story, well told. The general background history is believable
though I went back and read a bit on the reign of the Hatshepsut and
Thutmose III and had to point out to my daughter repeatedly where the
history ended and the fiction began. McGraw played a bit fast and loose with
reality to build the tension in the story, which is ok for fiction as long
as the reader understands the difference. It did serve to bring an ancient
culture to life, particularly in the daily life of the temples and the
common people.

As anyone who has ever produced a large document knows, writing it is
just the beginning. In our last installment, I listed
some of the things left to do before I can offer bound copies of Through
Darkest Zymurgia! for sale on-line. I’ve got much of that work done
now; in particular, I’ve chosen the font and the page style, set the
pagesize to 5″ by 8″, and got the frontmatter of the book almost
completely ready to go. (You can download a preview
of the front of the book in (what else) PDF format if you’re
interested.)

But there was one big step which I had forgotten–or suppressed, I’m not
sure. And that big step is policing line-breaks or, in a word,
hyphenation.

The soul of TeX is its justification algorithm. TeX is extraordinarily
good at producing high-quality fully justified output that looks as though
it were typeset by hand by a skilled typesetter. Unfortunately, that
beautiful output comes with a cost–by TeX’s standards, not all text is
capable of being beautifully typeset. This usually results in what TeX
calls an “overful hbox”–that is, a line that it simply can’t break
without introducing “too much” whitespace into the paragraph. In such
cases TeX reports the error and allows the line to run a little long and
stick out into the margin. If desired, it will also mark the error with
a big black box, so that it will be easier to find visually.

There are several ways to solve the “overful hbox” problem. TeX is good
at hyphenation, but of course it doesn’t know anything about made up
words and names, nor is it aware of all of the possible word-breaks even
in standard English. Often it’s possible to solve the problem by
inserting an explicit hyphen here or there.

In more serious cases the appropriate words in the errant paragraph
simply do not admit of hyphenation. You can’t hyphenate the word “good”,
for example. In such cases, you can tell TeX to be “sloppy” about
formatting the paragraph; this allows it to add more interword space than
it would ordinarily do, and usually solves the problem.

Sloppy formatting has its own perils, however–once in a while it results
in the dreaded “underful hbox” error. This means that TeX has had to add
too much whitespace between one or more words, and that its poetic soul
has rebelled. One can ignore “underful hbox” errors, as TeX inserts the
space anyway, but the annoying thing is that TeX is usually right. Too
much whitespace sticks out like a sore thumb. In this case, you
generally have to modify the text in some way. Sometimes you can split
the paragraph in two; other times, you actually have to change the
wording slightly.

There’s an additional problem associated with hyphenation, which is that
people’s names shouldn’t be hyphenated if it can possibly be avoided. It’s
possible to specify that a word is not to be hyphenated, but all too often
so specifying leads to all of the problems listed above.

TeX has no idea whether a word is a person’s name or not; and sometimes
even when hyphenation can’t be avoided it will hyphenate names in the
wrong place. Consider the narrator of Zymurgia, Professor Leon
Thintwhistle. The good professor’s last name is prounounced
“Thint-whistle”, yet TeX decided that it could hyphenate it
“Thin-twhistle”. It’s possible to educate TeX about such matters, but it
requires looking through the finished PDF file for hyphenation problems.

All of this, I may say, is slow going. I’ve now spent two or three hours
at it, and I’ve made it through chapter 10 (of 41).

It’s not all bad, though. I’m taking the opportunity to added drop caps
at the beginning of each chapter, and as I read through the output
looking for bad line-breaks I’m finding a number of other small errors.

In the next installment–I’m not sure yet. We’ll see.

When I was junior high school a fire in the mountains above our house threatened to make us evacuate, and my mother sent me to my room to pack, just in case. She warned me that we couldn’t take everything. So I grabbed a brown paper grocery bag and went to my room and into it I placed that which I valued most–my Tolkien books. I had a boxed set of paperback copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (the ones with Tolkien’s own paintings on the front cover and Tolkien’s picture on the back); I might have added one or two others. I don’t remember for sure whether I included the Narnia books or not, but I don’t believe I did.

Then I placed the bag gently in the backseat of my mother’s car. That was it. I was done.

Say what you will about me, it hadn’t even occurred to me to pack clothing.

The October Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line!

To recap: I’ve written and published a novel
on-line. CafePress has a
print-on-demand system set up so that you can self-publish your books
with no upfront costs–instead, they take a cut of each book.
Consequently, I’ve resolved to try publishing my book through CafePress
while spending as little of my own money as possible.

To publish a book through CafePress, you need to provide them with two
things: a PDF file containing the text of your book, suitable for
printing on the appropriate size paper, and image files for the front
cover, back cover, and spine. I’ve chosen to work on the PDF file first,
and in the last installment I settled on LaTeX as
my tool of choice for producing it. (If you’d like to start from the
beginning, you can go here.)

So far, I’ve managed to convert the HTML text of the novel into LaTeX
format and print out the resulting PDF file on letter-sized paper. I had the
resulting manuscript (now there’s a misnomer) comb-bound at Kinko’s, and
gave it to my brother in hopes that he might read it and feel moved to
put together some cover art for me. At the very least it would be a
refreshing change from wine labels.

Here’s what I have left to do:

Persuade LaTeX to typeset my book attractively on 8″x5″ paper (standard
trade paperback size).

• Design the page headers.
• Lay out the front matter (title page, et cetera, et al).
• Possibly get an ISBN number; I don’t know what’s involved there, but
  apparently it’s doable. That would make it theoretically possible to
  list the book at various on-line bookstores.
• Design the cover.

To aid me in the first three of those items, I’ve bought a couple of
books:
LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, and The LaTeX Companion.

My approximate expenses to date:

• The LaTeX books: $100
• The bound manuscript: $5 for the comb binding at Kinko’s, plus
  half-a-ream of inkjet paper.

I know I’ve let myself in for accusations of inconsistency by spending
$100 on books when I could have gotten Adobe Acrobat for that price; but
frankly the books have a longer shelf life, and as Jane says I’d have
spent the money on some kind of books anyway.

In the next installment, I hope to share some nicely formatted front
matter. Stay tuned!

Michael Green is an Anglican priest; he was also one of the speakers at
the Plano
West conference, which is where I bought this book, a detailed study
of the Acts of the Apostles.

Acts is the fifth book of the New Testament; written by St. Luke the
Evangelist, it picks up where Luke’s gospel leaves off, with the events
in Jerusalem in the days and weeks after Christ’s resurrection. Early on
the focus is on St. Peter, but before too long the focus shifts to St.
Paul and remains with him to until the end of the book. All told, the
narrated events span thirty years, thirty years in which the Christian
faith spread from Jerusalem to the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.

Should you ever visit the north of England, go to the city
of York and tour Yorkminster Cathedral. Don’t miss the undercroft.
Renovations there uncovered the remains of two previous churches and a
Roman camp dating back to the New Testament era–and in the Roman camp
they found Christian graffiti. It’s been conjectured that St. Paul
converted some of his Roman guards during one or another of his spells
in prison, and that the poor fellows were shipped off to England as
a result.

Now, consider the distance between Jerusalem and York. Consider that
Christianity spread purely by personal contact and individual persuasion.
Christians were the least of the least in the Roman world; they had no
political power, and no way to coerce belief. I might add, Christianity
continued to spread in this peaceful way, occasionally suffering great
persecution, for over two-and-half-centuries, until finally a Christian
sat on the Roman throne.

One might contrast this peaceful process with the history of Islam,
which was allied with political authority and spread by military force
from its inception. Constantine’s conversion was hailed as a great
deliverance by Eusebius and others, and in the short term they were
certainly correct; with him the intermitten waves of persecution finally
came to an end. But in him the Church found itself to be the partner of
the State, and that’s generally been a bad thing. I support
the separation of Church and State with my whole heart, not because of
the corrosive effect of a state religion on the state but because of the
corrosive effect of political power on my religion.

Anyway, the whole process began in those first thirty years, the thirty
years discussed by Acts. Taking the remarkably quick spread of
Christianity as his starting point, Green asks, “How did it happen? What
were these early Christians like? How did they live? What did they do,
to spread the Good News?” Rather than taking the book of Acts verse by
verse, chapter by chapter, Green takes in the whole book, scrutinizing
these early believers from many different angles, and drawing parallels
with our current practice–and largely, and fairly, to our detriment.

I found it a fascinating book, both as Church history and as a call to
action in the present day. It’s a rich source of ministry ideas and an
inspiration both. It is, however, aimed directly at a Christian
audience; if you’re looking for a general history of the early Christian
era or an introduction to the book of Acts, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

I disabled comments yesterday for the usual reason; I’ve re-enabled them again.

Remember, if you try to post a comment and are unable, you can always mail your comment directly to me.

In our last installment, I looked at OpenOffice and found it wanting (for my
purposes, at least). Today, I’ll talk about a solution I like
better…but first, some history.

Don Knuth is one of the grand old men of the field of computer science.
In the late 1970s, when he was one of the grand young men of the
field of computer science, he began writing a multi-volume tome entitled
The Art of Computer Programming. And when the first volumes came
back from the publisher, young Don was purely disgusted at what he found.

Computer science, at its base, is heavily mathematical, and The Art of
Computer Programming includes vast quantities of mathematical
notation, some of it rather novel. And young Don considered that the
publisher had done a lousy job of typesetting it. Reflecting
further, he decided that the problem was that he didn’t have the right
tools. And so, in classic nerd style, he took a break from working on his
book and developed a typesetting program he called “TeX” (which, by the
way, is pronounced “tech”, not “tecks”). TeX is really, really good at
putting neatly set type on a page; its algorithm for breaking and
justifying lines is the accepted standard. And it’s really, really good
at mathematical typesetting. And on top that, it’s programmable. But
it’s kind of low-level, and it’s tricky to use.

So in 1985 a fellow named Leslie Lamport came along and wrote a package on top of
TeX that he called LaTeX. LaTeX makes TeX easy to use. You write your
document as a plain text file, and indicate the logical structure
(chapter headings, section headings, etc.) with a special mark-up
notation. The result is somewhat
similar to the HTML used to create the page you’re reading (or, rather,
HTML is somewhat like LaTex, since Tim Berners-Lee didn’t invent the
World Wide Web until 1989); but when you process it, what you get is
nicely typeset output. And using TeX is rather like using HTML–you’re
constantly needing to check your work in a browser of some kind.

I used LaTeX quite a bit for about a year back in the late 1980’s, and
really liked it, using it for memos and software documentation both.
Eventually I switched to a different project using different hardware,
and didn’t have TeX readily available to me; after that I languished along with word
processors until I started using HTML in the mid-1990’s. I took to
HTML like a duck to water. HTML’s one defect, as I saw it, was
that it didn’t have a macro language; it was memories of LaTeX that later led
me to remedy that lack with a tool I call Expand. And somehow I never went
back to using LaTeX.

So a couple of weeks ago I started looking into free ways to produce
high-quality PDF output–and ran into an interesting name: “pdflatex”.
LaTeX and PDF together? Interesting! Perhaps, just perhaps…. So I
went looking for a LaTeX system for my PowerBook–and Googled my way into a
maze of twisty little passages, all more or less the same. There are
dozens of slightly different TeX distributions out there, all of them
mostly interoperable, and each with its own documentation on-line–and
mostly that documentation is in PDF. It took me quite a while to figure
out where I was and what I was doing and which version of LaTeX I should
use.

I ended up with two packages, the first of which is Gerben Weirda’s
packaging of TeX-Live. TeX-Live is a TeX/LaTeX distribution augmented
with a vast array of add-on packages; it’s maintained by the TeX User’s Group. Gerben Weirda adds a few
additional packages and a very nice installer. Now, LaTeX is a
command-line tool, which is sometimes convenient and sometimes a
nuisance. So the other package I downloaded is LaTeX “front-end” called
TeXShop.
TeXShop provides a tightly coupled editor and viewer so that you can edit
your document, press a button, and see the freshly typeset output
immediately. It’s pretty spiffy.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so they say. Once I got
TeX-Live and TeXShop installed, was I able to make it do what I need?
The answer is a resounding yes. I spent a couple of evenings reading some
on-line LaTeX tutorials and refreshing my memory. After that, it took me
about an hour to convert the
text of Through
Darkest Zymurgia from its original form (HTML with Expand macros) to
LaTeX format, and there was very little hand-editing involved. I just
wrote a couple of short scripts and let the computer do its thing. And
then all I needed to do to create the PDF file was push a button.

By way of contrast, it took roughly three hours to print the resulting
PDF file on my inkjet printer, so that I could give my brother a copy of
the novel to read. Not too shabby.

There’s still quite a lot to do, of course, before the manuscript is
ready to be uploaded to CafePress.
I’ll talk about that in the next thrilling installment of The Perils of PDF!

So when you’re feeling glum and you need a lift, what do you do? You
look through your library looking for something that’s familiar and fun,
and re-read it. Or, in this case, them.

These are the first three books in the author’s Mageworlds series, which
I’ve reviewed twice before (clicking on the author’s names, above, will take
you to a page that has links to those reviews). They are great fun, if
you like space opera.

Here’s the setup. Beka Rosselin-Metadi is a star-pilot; that’s all she’s
ever wanted to be. She’s also the daughter of Jos Metadi, privateer and
war hero, and of Perada Rosselin, the Domina of Lost Entibor–Entibor
being a planet whose entire surface was turned to slag during said war.
As the Domina-in-waiting, Beka’s life was dominated by politics and court
manners until she ran away from home at age 15 to follow her dream.

Now the Domina has been assassinated, and her father makes her an offer
she can’t refuse: he’ll give her her own ship–and not just any ship, but
his own ship, the armed freighter Warhammer, the ship in which he
did his privateering, the ship in which he led the resistance against the
invasion from the Mageworlds, and (not coincidentally) the ship in which
Beka learned to be a pilot. In return, she has to use her new mobility
to determine who was behind Perada Rosselin’s assassination.
Over the course of the these three books, which form the heart of the
series, Beka does just that, with the help of a large and varied cast
of thoroughly delightful characters. Of course, it’s not as easy as
all that; along the way, she has to cope with a new invasion by the
Mageworlders, who have been languishing in resentment and trade sanctions
since the last war.

The sixth book in the series came out six months or so ago, and has been
sitting on my shelf ever since; I expect that I’ll be getting to it soon.