I just noticed this odd fact. Computer programmer seems to be the the new default job for aspiring novelists. The number two bestseller on the Times fiction list this morning is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. It was number one a week or two ago,thanks in part to it's choice as an Oprah Pick, and has been on the list for 18 weeks. This is Wroblewski's first novel. He's 48, and has been a software engineer for 25 years. His techie resume, which you can read here, is pretty hardcore. He says that writing software "teaches you a lot about building big intellectual structures and keeping them in your head, trying to figure out how they work, and understanding that they can work in one area and break in another. It's a good discipline for writing novels." What's funny is that he's
not the first literary writer I've run into this past year with a tech background. Austin Grossman's great first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, came out in paperback this year. (Wired reviewed it here.) Austin used to be a video game designer. Then there's Karl Iagnemma, whose first novel, The Expeditions, came out in January. He's a robotics researcher at MIT. And, of ocurse, the godfather of techie novelists is Neal Stephenson, whose Anathem is also on the bestseller list right now. (Wired profiled him last month.) Stephenson, need I remind you, knows how to
program, and once wrote a small book called, In the Beginning ... was the Command Line. Okay, so what does this mean? I have no idea. There was a period when every lawyer seemed to have an unfinished legal thriller in his briefcase. And years ago, future literary geniuses worked in advertising (Joseph Heller, Don Delillo, Salman Rushdie, Oscar Hijuelos, Peter Carey). Now the Ken Cosgroves of the world are computer geeks. Is it an economic thing? Or has the nature of literature changed?
Reading List
Barcelona by Robert Hughes
Read while visiting Barcelona for the first time this fall. Hughes always writes like a dream. (Don't believe me? Check out his books on modern art, on Australia, on fishing...) Jennifer was reading Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and between us, we couldn't have been in better hands. The biography of a city is a genre I'm fascinated by. Can you write about a city as if it were a person, discovering its psychology and soul through its history? Short answer: Yes. Barcelona is exhibit A.The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen
I read Matthiessen's 1972 classic (originally a series of New Yorker pieces) while hiking and camping in Tanzania this summer. As I read his account of travels in East Africa a generation ago, I realized that, at times, I was in the exact same spot he was writing about. It's a classic of nature writing, deservedly so.Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul Theroux
This is the travel book I read after returning from a two week trip to East Africa. Surely, it's the necessary antidote to the tourist tendency to over-romanticize the African landscape while ignoring the dysfunctional political and economic side of things. Theroux lived in Africa during the 60s, a time of great optimism, and is revisiting four decades later. He finds everything worse.The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
A sublimely readable thriller set in Sweden. It features the unlikeliest pair of hero-investigators: a middle-aged male journalist and a 25-year-old female computer hacker. What's not to like? There are two more in the series, and the Larsson juggernaut, though already at full throttle in Europe, is still building here. Part of the author's developing legend centers on his sudden death at age 50, just after delivering all three manuscripts to his publisher. This month's Vanity Fair (Dec, 2009) speculates about foul play.Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
Professor Lessig's arguments should be familiar to Wired readers (he's a longtime contributor), but they still need to be made more familiar to everyone else. How many times does he have to explain the fact that technology has changed the rules, that antiquated copyright laws (or worse, draconian new copyright laws) are stifling creativity and holding back cultural and economic progress? This is essential reading for policy makers.Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Busi- ness by Jeff Howe
What started as a piece in Wired last year is about to be the big business book of the Fall. Watch for it at the end of August.Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking by Charles Seife
Seife is one of our favorite science writers (he also wrote Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea and Decoding the Universe). He's back in October with a hugely entertaining history of the follies and frauds surrounding the century-long search for cold fusion.There's a talk with Seife in issue 16.10.Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson's first novel since The Baroque Cycle hits stores September 9th. He's one of the few people ever to grace Wired's cover twice, and he's written for us too. I've just started this 900-page doorstop, and I'm definitely in for the long haul. Steven Levy profiles Neal in the 16.9 issue of Wired.
