The Hobbit Hole

This is an amazing book. You should read it. I really can’t do it justice, and the Amazon reviews are pretty much spot on. Still, I will say that it was 700 pages of sheer delight.

I’ve read that the book is considered fantasy, though it would more precisely be considered “fantastic historical fiction.” It reads as a period piece similar in prose to Dickens or Jane Austen. The piece feels accurate to our perceptions of the period the book takes place in.

Not only does it accomplish that much, but it introduces the concept of “English magic”, a powerful supernatural force available presumably only in England because of its adjacency to Faerie and other planes (Hell mostly, though Heaven is mentioned). I say only in England, not because it is exclusive to England in its location, but noone besides Englishmen (of both sexes) seem to be able to practice it. The entire concept is so well written and intertwined in the period that you almost begin to believe that it had once existed.

The protagonists and victims are portrayed exactly. There is no mystery in them, which is a good thing. You understand them, even if you may not relate to them. I would have liked more insight into the main villain though. He was hard to understand, though that might have been intentional. Otherworldly beings aren’t human, hence their strangeness.

Most delightfully, it leaves enough unfinished to believe that a sequel is forthcoming.

But the book is almost 800 pages long. As I mentioned, it’s 700 pages of sheer delight. Not everything flows perfectly, notably the ending. The ending seems tied together too conveniently, though some of the ways problems were resolved were rather clever.

My last complaint with the book would be magic itself. It would have been nice to have more insight into how and why it worked. Perhaps this is just the engineer in me talking, but it seemed that remarkable feats were often very easy, and simple things were difficult. Easy to believe, but hard to just accept without some rationale. I sorely hope that someone develops an RPG system in this milieu, just to see it codified.

Interesting read about the computer book market at O’Reilly.

Ruby seems to be really taking off. Gives me another good excuse to learn the language more in depth. It’s still not too late for me to change my mind from Lisp. Just kidding. As nice as Ruby is, it has horrible performance, which may not be a big deal for a server based language, but for consumer oriented applications, it is a big deal. Lisp has quite good performance for a dynamic language, thank you very much.

Still, it wouldn’t be bad to familiarize myself more with it and Ruby on Rails. I do like a lot of Rails. I have more problems with Ruby than with Rails. For instance, blocks… They’re like pseudo first class functions. They can be promoted to functions. So why aren’t they just functions to begin with?

And the keyword parameters/dictionary hack. It makes it such that if you have to put a dictionary in your parameter list, you can’t use the hack. Why not just make real keyword parameters?

Of course, these aren’t deal breakers. I’m not a big fan of self in Python, but I’ve used it for years. There’s more than one thing I dislike about Lisp too.