The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

Can you imagine this woman, Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is the first person featured in this history of technology - the internet and computers? I read about Lord Byron in the Georgette Heyer Regency novels that I love. He was a famous, romantic novelist. In this book, The Innovators, it sounds as if he married for money and the marriage did not last long. Ada's mother must have disliked Bryon a lot because she had Ada tutored in Math in order to "counteract" any tendencies Ada might have to poetry.

It turned out Ada had a love for the poetry of mathematics and science. I did not know this but it turns out that Steve Jobs always featured an image of the intersection of technology and liberal arts when he gave demos of new products. The book had this intersection as a theme, writing about the many different people who exemplified that intersection, and who built on each others' ideas to develop computers, networking and the internet.

Walter Isaacson wrote a biography of Steve Jobs that was a bestseller, and that I also read. It was great. I was thinking at first to describe The Innovators as a bunch of short biographies. But really, it's a biography of technology.

One of the things that surprised me as I read it was the communal aspect of the technology world. When they said, "Power to the people," they meant it. Or many of them did. Many of the creators and inventors who were a part of the development of technology strongly believed in NOT having a central authority that determined rules and so on. They believed in spreading the control throughout the system, with no one person or entity in charge. There was even an early technology company called "The Love and Grace Company."

The structure of the internet is kind of like a fishnet, with multiple paths from one thing to another. There's a piece of equipment in our server room, and millions of other server rooms, called a "router" because that's truly what it is. It routes the data from place to place. And if one router goes down, the data is routed around it.

I was also surprised by the women featured in the book, who were integral parts of the growth of technology. There were a team of women who did the programming of the huge, early computers. They configured the pathways and plugged the cables in and out to program the computers manually. They were usually very much unacknowledged, but they still loved their work.

There's a story of the "mother of all demos" that early inventors had in order to show others the power of computers. It is mentioned not only in the history itself, as an event and what happened, but often referred to by people who attended it as being a big influence for them. For this demo, 4 women did the programming and worked 24x7. The book recounts how the night before the demo they were all exhausted and even though there was still an unsolved problem, they had to go home and go to bed. One woman woke up at 4am with the solution in her head and she went over to the room at that wee hour in the morning to put in the fix.

But these women were not even invited to the demo. There was a big dinner afterward to celebrate and the women were not included. As the men went off to their dinner, the women walked to their hotels in the cold. Sheesh. However, one of those women was in the Navy, became a brigadier general, and had the longest career of anyone in the Navy.

With my work being in the technology arena, it's not surprising I found the book interesting. But I think people not even as geeky as I am would enjoy it, too. It's about people and how they worked together and alone, how they built on each others' ideas, how ideas came to them, how technology involved, the culture surrounding them -- so much more than just how computers were invented.

I highly recommend it.

Scary Close by Donald Miller

I pre-ordered this book when I read about it coming out. Partly I pre-ordered it because I read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller but also because if you pre-ordered it you got two freebies with it, the ebook of Blue Like Jazz, and a soundtrack of 16 songs that Miller made in honor of the book. The sound track seemed like a fun idea. I just downloaded it and started to play it for the first time.

It turned out, though, that I liked the book more than I'd even expected I would. I kind of devoured it. I have been thinking a lot about how to be more...essential? ...transparent? ...vulnerable? Not sure of the best word. I think of it as "Mavis being Mavis," not trying to be someone or something I'm not, not worrying so much about what other people might think of me or what I say or do.

This book fed right into this line of thinking. Miller wrote about the process of changing himself while falling in love with his now wife, Betsy. It's about relationships and things he learned about how to be good at relationships. It talks a lot about marriage and falling in love, but you can take what he writes about and apply it to any relationship.

When my brother Dan died, as I've written about before, one of the many things I realized was how important relationships are. It was beautiful to see Dan's friends, including co-workers, and family surround him with faithfulness and love. It made me not just realize but start to live with the priority of building good relationships with whoever is in my life. This book is full of thoughts and stories about how to do that.

It's got some helpful kind of self help type of tips, like 5 kinds of manipulation, but I didn't really feel like I was reading a self help book. It felt like Donald Miller was just talking to me about what he went through and learned. He has a friendly style of writing. It never bored me or seemed like a slog.

I think it'd be a good one for my two sons and wife and girlfriend. There are even online courses for pre-marriage, marriage and parenting. Quite a package deal.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Loved, loved, loved it. It inspired me to read 2 more of Robinson's books, Home and Gilead. I'm going to try to write about Gilead later.

Lila is set in Gilead, at least the present-day part of it is. Home, too, is set in the town of Gilead, as is, of course, Gilead. I like it when authors write books that interlace the way these 3 do. There are different main characters, different plots, different times, but it's kind of like catching glimpses of old friends from other books. Barbara Pym does a good job with this, too.

Lila is the name of, and story of, the woman who becomes the wife of Reverend Ames, the main character in Gilead. She's a strange character. She grew up very poor, mostly looked after by a woman named Doll. Doll and Lila lived a kind of hobo life. The book begins when Lila is alone, grown, and staying in an abandoned house in the town of Gilead.

It's been quite a while since I read the book and I had to take a look to remember if the book was written in first person or not. Even though it is not, it kind of felt like you were inside Lila's head, and seeing the unfolding of events from her perspective.

You follow the progression of her relationship with "the Reverend," as she calls him. It is a strange coupling, it seems. They are so different. Yet there is a lot of attraction between them, and they do love each other. Reverend Ames, who knows so much about theology and faith, and who is so much older than Lila, is fascinated by her even though she is so "un-scholarly" compared to him, and kind of "un-eloquent," too. But she's wise. And she loves him, too.

It's hard for me to write about Lila in a way that makes it sound interesting. I'm not sure what to say. Partly, it is such a good book because Marilynne Robinson is such a good writer. It always sounds kind of off-putting to me when someone says they love a book because the writing is so good. It makes me imagine beautiful descriptive passages. They ARE beautiful, but I often start to skim them as I get involved in the story and just want to read for the story, not the writing.

Maybe instead of saying it's so good because of the writing, I could say it's because of Robinson's wonderful way with words. I am all about the story, especially in fiction, and Robinson writes so that I do get into the story. Yet, without making me annoyed by moving away from the story, she fits in flashbacks and passages of inner thoughts.