Category: Books

As I’ve finished reading all the books written by Haruki Murakami, I’ve started reading books written by Ryu Murakami. Their names are similar but both authors are very different. Ryu Murakami is also very popular in Japan but he is not very known outside of Japan, he has written more than 20 books and is also a movie director, producer and screenwriter. Maybe one of his most known films outside of Japan is Audition.

I have specially enjoyed 69, “In Coin Locker Babies” and “Exodus in the Hopeful Country”. “69” is a light novel but it really makes you get into the life of high school students in a small city in Kyushu during the year 1969. “In Coin Locker Babies” is the masterpiece of Ryu Murakami, it tells the story of two kids that are abandoned inside the lockers in a Tokyo subway station in the 70s. It is a book that has influenced many other authors, like for example, the creators of the video game franchise Silent Hill, who have said they have been inspired by some aspects of “In Coin Locker Babies”. A movie based on the book will be released next year.

“Exodus in the Hopeful Country” is a novel about the change and revolution that began in Japan caused by the hacker community in Tokyo. The funny thing is that one of the characters in the book is Joi Ito, a living person and one of my bosses. It is not a coincidence, Joi Ito and Ryu Murakami are friends. If you still haven’t read any book by Ryu Murakami I recommend you 69 or “In Coin Locker Babies”.

Ryu Murakami on the left reviewing some designs for one of his books at my company’s office.

Pictures taken by Joi Ito.

Just finished reading Business Stripped Bare the last book written by Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin. The book is more than autobiography, it shows how his personality helped him to built one of the biggest fortunes in the world and enabled him to do stuff like this:

The book is pretty good in general but the most interesting chapter is the one that explains how they built the “Virgin” brand, how they have been really careful about reputation, quality and public image when launching new products/services/companies. These are some paragraphs and sentences from the book that I liked:

So one afternoon in the pub, I said to our team: “Let’s do it ourselves. Let’s set up our own record company and release Mike Oldfield as one of our first LPs on our own Virgin Record label.” Everyone thought I’d had one glass too many.

Enterpreneurship is business’s beating heart. Entrepeurneurship isn’t about capital; it’s about ideas.

What you’re bad at actually doesn’t interest people, and it certainly shouldn’t interest you. However accomplished you become in life, the things you are bad at will always outnumber the things your’re good at. So don’t let your limits knock your self-confidence. Put them to one side and push yourself towards your strengths.

In business, as in life, all that matters is that you do something positive.

One of our parties got a little out of hand and the local paper declared on its front page that it had become an orgy, in which drunk young people coupled indiscriminately in the nightclub car park. Good luck to them, I thought: since outside it was minus ten degrees with a foot of snow. Accurate or not, this nonsense was better than a full-page recruitment advert – the following week we were inundated with people wanting to work at Virgin Mobile!

I phoned Freddie Laker and he told me I didn’t need to buy a plane – that wasn’t the way it was done. He explained that the banks bought the planes in a deal with either Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed or McDonnell Douglas, and the airlines leased the planes, guaranteeing to pay monthly fees. I put in a lot of the legwork to find out all I could about starting an airline. We registered the name Virgin Atlantic and submitted our application for the slots. The I found the Boeing telephone number through international directory enquiries. The actual conversation still makes me laugh. I remember calling Seattle and asking to be put through to the senior vice president of sales. “Hello, this is Richard Branson from Virgin here and I’m interested in acquiring a secondhand 747,’ I said in my politest English accent.
The guy at the other end said: “What does your company actually do?”
“Well,” I said, “we put our bands like the Sex Pistols, Boy George and the Rolling Stones.”
“Oh. Really? What did you say your company was called? Virgin?”
He took my details. And jokingly said at the end of our conversation: “With a name like Virgin, as long as your airline goes the whole way, we’ll consider selling you a plane!”

Enjoy your life, you only get one.

I’ve read many Neal Stephenson books, but I think Snow Crash, the last one I read is the best Neal Stephenson book ever. I think it is much better than Cryptonomicon, even though it is not so well known.

It is a SF book published in 1992, and what it is interesting is that in the novel Neal introduces many new concepts and ideas that became REAL during the last years. For example, the concept and word “avatar” started to be used after Snow Crash used it for the first time. Also the concept of “Metaverse” as a virtual world where avatars can interact is very well detailed in the novel. The word “Metaverse” did not become widely used but many of the characteristics of the Metaverse explained in the novel were implemented later on in video games like Ultima Online, Second Life or WOW. If fact the designers of Second Life recognized having been deeply inspired by Snow Crash.

Another thing I liked about the novel is the protagonist, his name is “Hiro Protagonist”, he is a hacker and he always carries a katana with him (Mmm, this sounds familiar to me). This is Hiro Protagonists’s presentation at the beginning of the book:

“Last of the freelance hackers
Greatest sword fighter in the world
Stringer, Central Intelligence Corporation
Specializing in software-related intel
(music, movies & microcode) ”

Some other paragraphs from the book that I liked:

“No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words -very unusual”

I didn’t know that Sumerian was an agglutinative tongue like Japanese.

“I thought the Hebrews were monotheists. How could they worship Asherah?”
“Monolatrists. They did not deny the existense of other gods. But they were only supposed to worship Yahweh. Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh.

I learned what monolatrism means, before I had no idea.

“Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue.”

You can order Snow Crash from Amazon, if you like SF you will love this book.