Three Novels For Programmers

harrisj@nimblecode.com (Jacob Harris) — Fri, 12 May 2006 16:28:00 -0700

A couple weekends ago, I went on a trip up to the People’s Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts. While my wife was at a conference, I spent my time writing, thinking, and catching up with a few old friends from MIT about all the things that have been going on while I’ve been here in New York: changes to campus life, hideous new architecture, notable hacks, and the fact that my beloved dorm of Senior House still seems to be the same merry land of malcontents and eccentrics. We talked about many other things, but I recall most clearly the talk about books.

The common stereotype of computer nerds is that we spend all of our non-technical reading time with noses deep in cheap mass-market science fiction paperbacks featuring lizard men, busty women, and spaceships pointing phallicly towards a planet. But this seems more of a cheap joke than a deep truth; the geeks I know love novels. And so, in an attempt to convince the world that computer people have a special depth, I’m starting my own version of a book meme and naming three notable books along a theme and why I like them. I know this is of course what is known as filler in blog land, but it might be fun anyway. So, first up in my listing is three excellent novels for computer scientists that aren’t science fiction:

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers is a wistful and intriguing book about a writer named “Richard Powers” who returns from a failed life in Holland for a directionless sabbatical at a Midwestern university. While there, he becomes involved with a project in the university’s large Computer Science department to teach an Artificial Intelligence named Helen about art, literature and beauty. The result is an exploration of identity, consciousness and the emotional connections we feel with machines, made the more interesting by the intermingling of the author’s real and fictional personas in the book.

Mefisto by John Banville is a hypnotic retelling of the Faust story from Ireland’s best contemporary writer. The book comprise two symmetric episodes of the life of a main character gifted in mathematics who falls into the orbit of a seductively mysterious man. Equivalences, symbols and symmetry (it’s no coincidence the book begins and ends with the word “chance”) make for some interesting connections without the gimmicky annoyances of more experimental textual structure. Those of the scientific bent may also prefer Banville’s books Kepler and Copernicus.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is a mess of a book. Ostensibly dealing with a mystery about the V-2 rockets at the end of World War II, it becomes a grand descent into some disparate subjects as chemicals, sado-masochism, conditioning, identity, race, and an immortal lightbulb. It might not make complete sense the first time through (or even subsequent times), but it definitely is a dense exercise in style unmatched by any. Besides, any novel that can inspire cool art like this can’t be bad.

What’s the next Three? I don’t know. Maybe poetry for pretentious people or weird books that mix text and pictures. Feel free to do your own or make a suggestion below.

Nimble Code: Three Novels For Programmers

Three Novels For Programmers