I was out of town most of last week, and when I returned, I had two copies of David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, waiting for me, courtesy of Amazon. I must have been so excited by the prospect of getting it that I ordered it twice, on separate occasions; in any case, I can now take one copy with me, to read while eating lunch at the corner deli, or while waiting for the local bus or subway –while maintaining another copy, safe and pristine, here in my office.

I’ve only gotten through the first chapter, so I can’t write a legitimate review at this point. But I’ve already seen the theme of the book, in the last sentence of the preface: “… information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous.” And the beginning of the first chapter tells us that we’ve been severely constrained by all of our built-in mechanisms for ordering things in the “physical” world, which makes it extremely difficult when we wander into a bookstore without being at all sure which of the 50,000 available books is the one we want to select as a birthday present for Aunt Matilda. “… discovering what you want is at least as important as finding what you know you want,” as Weinberger puts it. And this leads to a statement that I assume he’ll explore in greater depth throughout the book, with regard to all of the non-physical “digital” things in our lives today “… to take full advantage of the digital opportunity … we have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.”

That’s not enough to serve as a full book review, and I apologize for what may seem like extreme haste on my part. But I know, from several other books that I’ve only gotten halfway through at this point, that it may be weeks or even months before I’ve consumed all of David’s new book. If you want a more complete book review, take a look at this one by Cory Doctorow, or this one by Ethan Zuckerman, or this review from Publishers Weekly, or this review from Karen Schneider at the American Library Association — who says, “This is, I repeat, a dangerous book. Ban it, burn it, or take it to heart.”

Or just buy the damn book, read it, and write your own review. I’ll eventually get around to doing just that.