I have wanted to read some of DFW’s stuff ever since sending one of my blog posts through I Write Like and discovering that our styles were statistically similar. Having read this collection of essays, I am rather chuffed at the comparison. Wallace is fond of abbrs and acronyms, and even fonder of footnotes. Sometimes his footnotes have footnotes. Indeed the final essay in the collection takes this parenthetical approach to an extreme of hypertextual absurdity, linking notes with boxes and arrows. Nonetheless his prose is deftly assembled and highly entertaining. Such a shame about his tragic death in 2008.

In today’s tech-saturated world, technology is painted as an end in itself, inevitable, linear and teleogical. Bob Hughes examines inequality through the lens of technology and vice versa. He contrasts technologies developed in more and less equal societies and finds that in unequal societies we tend to develop technologies that amplify inequality, environmental degredation and social atomisation. (Full disclosure: I work for the publisher of The Bleeding Edge, New Internationalist).

I was afraid of this book as a child. There was something about W.Heath-Robinson’s spiky line drawings that freaked the shit out of my infant brain. As with Doctor Who, I can’t see it now. What can I say about this book, it is a kid’s story about a bird kidnapping a baby and the adventures of a wizard-looking guy (Lubin) trying to retrieve said child. The pictures to my adult eye are worth looking at. Clearly I missed out as a kid.