Jinn of Quality and Risk

Non-fiction:

• What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been Robert Cowley (Editor)
• The Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff
• Looking out for #1, Robert J. Ringer
• L'aventure grecque, Pierre Lévêque
• The Snow Geese, William Fiennes
• Travels in Nepal: the sequestered kingdom, Charlie Pye-Smith

But it was mostly fiction this year:

• The Sacketts saga, by Louis L'Amour (yes, I plunged into his stories for the first time):
  • Jubal Sackett
  • Sackett's Land
  • To The Far Blue Mountains
  • The Warrior's Path
  • Ride The River
  • The Daybreakers
• Amphigorey Too, Edward Gorey
• Then lots more Western stories by Louis L'Amour:
  • Mojave Crossing
  • Lando
  • Mustang Man
  • The Lonely Men
  • Treasure Mountain
  • Ride The Dark Trail
  • The Sackett Brand
  • The Sky-Liners
  • The Mountain Valley War
• Blue Horizon, Wilbur Smith
• A Painted House, John Grisham
• The King of Tort, John Grisham
• The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, Neal Stephenson
• The Rustlers of West Fork, Louis L'Amour
• The Secret History, Donna Tartt
• The Hammer of Eden, Ken Follett
• Code to Zero, Ken Follett

See also:

• The beauty of Nepal, and the ugliness of international aid (2003-Dec-10)
• The King of Torts (2003-Feb-20)
• Jubal Sackett (2003-Jan-27)
• The Rage and The Pride (2003-Jan-27)

You can now buy one terabyte external storage for less than $1200, roughly the price of a decent notebook computer. Note that this kind of TB-sized storage space will be commonplace in notebooks by 2009. Sufficient to carry the equivalent of the Library of Congress around, and more. What else would you want to have with you at all times? detailed city maps? yellow pages for the whole planet? your entire music library? all of your photo albums? the Internet Movie Database? the ten most recently released movies? and who will provide your personal, local search engine?

See also:

• Measuring electronic storage, with binary or decimal units? (2003-Feb-26)
• Ultrasmall data storage (2003-Feb-20)
• The memory of sounds (2003-Feb-18)
• Available: 250 GB hard disks (2003-Jan-22)