This week’s Reboot column is on The Best of 2600: a Hacker Odyssey:
“That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently: a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant tales, and a novel called Middlemarch, as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast . . .”
There’s something about receiving a parcel from Amazon that takes me back to 19th-century New York. Breaking the seal on a bulk order of books (I’m a sucker for super-saver delivery) makes me feel like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, ready to retire from society to my oak-panelled study with only a smoking jacket and a box of cigars for company. So it was last week, when I unpacked The Best of 2600: a Hacker Odyssey (John Wiley & Sons, £21.99).
You can read the rest here. James has kindly made an RSS feed for Reboot (the NS don’t provide one) for those who want to stay up to date.