Good Free Reads

Stories are an important part of life. Not only are they entertaining, but they can effect your life if you let them. A good story will not only spark your imagination, but will give you new pespectives about the world. Of course, there are a lot of times where stories just take too long to read. I had a friend who brought books to work to read which he never ended up liking. It took months to finish each book and along the way my friend would lose interest. Good short stories would be way better for short bursts of reading, so I suggested some to him and he seemed to enjoy them a lot more. It worked well. And so I'll share with the internet in general.

The following is a list of online stories (that probably don't justify this really long introduction.) Although a bit on the computer geeky side, these are all stories that I think are especially good reads (which is why I wanted to share them.) They are all free, excellent quick reads that focus on ideas and characters rather than visualization and are located on fairly unsuspicious urls. In other words, they're ideal for fun short break or lunch time reading. If you know of anything else you think I should add to this list, please please please e-mail me. ^_^


Stories

(1) Orson Scott Card
Without doubt, Orson Scott Card is my favorite author. At his website, many short stories are provided. Here are my favorites.
   (a) Atlantis

It's very long and takes a bit before it's interesting, but it's really good once it does. If you've read Pastwatch, you might think you already read this... but you haven't, keep reading.

   (b) Ender's Game

If you like the book and haven't read this, I think it's still worthwhile. If you haven't heard of Ender's Game... after reading this, I'm sure you'll want to pick up the full novel.

   (c) Homeless in Hell

It's a Christmas story about an interesting interpretation of Hell and Santa Clause.

   (d) Missed

It's kinda on the sad side about a guy coping with death, please keep that in mind. Quite short though. One short break's worth.

   (e) Prior Restraint

This is a pretty interesting story, but I can't say anything about it without kind of ruining it.

(2) Neal Stephenson
   (a) Jipi and the Paranoid Chip

Lots of very cool ideas, flow of thoughts, and character interaction. As with Neal Stephenson's stuff, it has an abrupt ending.

   (b) The Great Simolean Caper

Interesting, it touches upon some of his normal themes. Smart characters, cool capers. Ending isn't as abrupt as normal, I think.

(3) Wizardry
Rick Cook wrote a series that blends fantasy with programming. Sound strange? It really isn't that strange and it's actually really quite cool. If you don't like fantasy or programming... then... maybe you should keep away. The first two novels (of five) were made free. They're the best ones anyways, in my opinion. These novels are pretty short, but it should still take a few hours to get through them. Maybe a week of lunches alone.

(4) Suzumiya Haruhi no Yutsu
This is a translation of a series of Japanese light novels. Some chapters are long, but it's not difficult at all to find constant good stopping points. This story is about a normal high school guy trying to deal with a very eccentric classmate who seems to unknowingly control the world and a bunch of supernatural people drawn to her. It's a comedy, mostly. Wiki for more information, but if you like Japanese comics/animation then this is an excellent find. There's also an anime of this series.

(5) Densha Otoko original posts
Umm... this is the black sheep of the list. It's not really a story, although it does tell a story. It's an organized, edited version of a forum thread that chronicles the relationship between an otaku (japanese super geek) at the thread asking for help and a non-otaku woman he had helped. It's pretty fun to read though... a very geeky romance story. Also, a Japanese drama came out of this (also called Densha Otoko), and it's pretty funny.

(6) The Book and the Sword
A great Chinese story to complement the Japanese stories. While the book is very long, the story arcs in the book are actually very episodic and pretty short. The Book and the Sword is a kung fu novel by Jin Yong and it's a really fun read.

(7) The Last Question
I can't really say I like Asimov's writing. I mean, I like his ideas and I do understand why he's important to sci-fi, but I don't like his writing style and so I rarely have fun reading his stuff. The ideas carry this story pretty well though. Since this was a pretty well thought out story, very famous, and a very quick read I decided to list it here. Passes the time on a very slow day, at the very least.


Essays

The following is a list of my favorite online essays. Any programmer and many non-programmers should find many excellent reads in this list. What's here deals primarily with introductions to ideas, examples of thought flows, productivity boosters, and springboards to interesting topics. While some are technical, they don't delve very deeply into the actual technology, instead giving you enough information to decide if you want to devote the time to really learn the topic. With all that said, here's the list. All good reads. If you know of anything else you think I should add to this list, please please please e-mail me. ^_^

(1) Orson Scott Card
Yep, my favorite author again. In addition to novels, he also does a lot of reviews and world commentaries on his web site. I find them interesting, even if I don't agree with everything that he says. These essays were carefully chosen by me as the ones that were the most interesting and thought-provoking to me. Read more of them if you'd like, as most of them are quite interesting.
   (a) Why Making Choices is So Hard

This is the first of OSC's essays that resonated with me. This talks about making choices.

   (b) Freakonomics

A review of Freakonomics, which is an interesting book. It also takes an example from the book and expands upon it, reaching another theory. I like seeing people's thoughts flow and this essay has a lot of very nice examples of thinking about cause and effect, as well as morality.

   (c) Weapons of Mass Destruction

This one provides interesting thoughts about what makes a weapon a WMD as well as some commentary about how OSC thinks the balance in the world works.

   (d) Taking Animals Seriously

This one is very interesting. It contains a lot of ideas about how people think, as well as how different people see the world. It does this by focusing on an autistic author who has devoted her life to making animal slaughterhouses more humane.

(2) Steve Yegge's Essay Collection
Link to his current blog
Steve Yegge writes a lot. His writings made me begin to really improve my programming and they constantly cause me to evaluate the way I think about things. That's why I believe these are very important. I think every programmer should read these because after reading, whether or not you agree, you will have thought a lot. Especially the fresher programmers, like me. Plus, they're pretty entertaining and he says funny stuff. I chose to list my favorite essays. Narrowing them down is difficult since I found it very worthwhile reading them all.
   (a) Tour De Babel
   (b) You Should Write Blogs
   (c) Five Essential Phone Screen Questions
   (d) Practicing Programming
   (e) Saving Time
   (f) Practical Magic

(3) In the Beginning, there was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson
In the End, I find this horribly long, boring in places, and a little out of date. But since I didn't grow up during the era, I ended up learning a huge amount from this. Some of the ideas are interesting, especially if you're pretty new computers. If you really enjoyed this, Mother Earth Mother Board is freely available too. This is another monstrously long essay... it might as well be a novel. It's about Neal Stephenson following FLAG, a global undersea fiber optic cable. He comments a lot about the history and politics around FLAG, as well as about his surroundings. But some spots are way too slow for me.

(4) Joel on Software: Best Software Writing
Essay Links for Best Software Writing
Archive Links
Joel on Software is one of those famous blogs with lots of entries worth reading. I can't think of anything in particular, except maybe this post. He released a compilation of what he felt were the best programming related essays of the year 2005. They really are some of the best software essays. Plus he talked about what makes writing good. The second link I've provided gives links to all the essays he chose. The last link is to his archives for his major blog entries. You may as well just start with the first essay there and work your way down.

(5) Random Tech Essays
   (a) 10 Question, 8 Programmers

This was a very interesting interview. 10 questions which 8 well-known programmers answer. Very, very interesting and a very cool idea. Everyone aspiring to be a good programmer should give this a read because it's good to know how those among "the best" view the field.

   (b) Lisp for Imperative Programmers

This is an introduction to functional programming where the reader is assumed to know only about procedural programming. Anyways, if you're a purely procedural programmer (C, Java, Ruby, etc..) and wanted to know what functional programming was all about, I can't think of any better read than this.

   (c) The Best 46 Free Utilities

This is a list of what the author considers the best windows free utilities for various tasks. I like his suggestions and this is the first place I will go if I want to find a new tool. Hey, it's kind of like an essay.

   (d) Programming Rock Solid Code

This is an interesting piece about the work environment of a place that must write the code to launch and run a multi-billion dollar shuttle.

   (e) No Silver Bullet

A classic CS essay about programming tools and languages.