haunting of tramcar 105 [book review]

A mix of steampunk and urban magic in a enlightened 1912 Cairo sounded like a good prolegomena and I bought P. Djèli Clark’s The haunting of tram car 015 on this basis. As it happens, this is actually a novella of 123 pages building on the same universe as a previous work of the author, A dead djinn in Cairo, which however is even shorter and only available as a Kindle book… I really enjoyed the short read and its description of an alternate Cairo that is competing with Paris and London, thanks to the advantage brought by the supernatural powers of djinns. (And apparently also gaining the independence Egypt could not secure under the British protectorate.) The English suffragettes have also their counterparts in Egypt and the country is about to decide about women right to vote. The story itself is nice if not stratospheric, with mostly well-drawn characters and good dialogues. (The core of the plot relies on smuggling sweets from Armenia, though, a rather weak link.) As in an earlier order, the book itself was not properly printed, with a vertical white band of erased characters on most odd pages, presumably another illustration of the shortcomings of the  print-on-demand principle. (Which means that I sent the book back to Amazon rather than leaving it in the common room.)

severe testing or severe sabotage? [not a book review]

Last week, I received this new book of Deborah Mayo, which I was looking forward reading and annotating!, but thrice alas, the book had been sabotaged: except for the preface and acknowledgements, the entire book is printed upside down [a minor issue since the entire book is concerned] and with some part of the text cut on each side [a few letters each time but enough to make reading a chore!]. I am thus waiting for a tested copy of the book to start reading it in earnest!

 

Typos sorted, at last!

After posting so many entries about typos in my books (making you wonder how there could be any text left!) and postponing their classification for so long, I decided on Saturday afternoon to collect those entries into a comprehensive pdf document that should be more useful for readers. I incidentally noticed that my book web-page had not been updated for the publication of Méthodes de Monte-Carlo avec R two months ago and did update it… I am obviously more than grateful to all those who contacted me, either thru the Og or by email to point out those numerous typos. As the Wheel had started rolling (or weaving), I took the opportunity to clean the original LaTeX files as well, including Introducing Monte Carlo methods with R. Since this is a print-on-demand edition, the changes should be immediate.