Music: Iphigenie en Tauride (Gluck; Gardiner recording). For some reason this opera stole my heart, even though my French really isn't good enough to understand what they're saying, and I don't really like any other Gluck as much. I think a large part is the Gardiner recording being just so... orchestral; the orchestra is practically another ( Read more... )

First, as a general public service announcement, I have been told that Lev Grossman is the brother of the sculptor mathematician Bathsheba Grossman, who I can without reservation say kicks total butt. Did I mention she is a mathematics sculptor? Swoon ( Read more... )

Still finishing up books from 2009...

I was complaining to D several weeks ago that the last time I read a math book for fun was probably back in high school. D listened, thought a bit, and said, "You know, you should try Prime ObsessionYup, he was absolutely right. This book is made of complete awesome, and I was totally addicted to it, reading ( Read more... )

I almost didn't read this. Something about the title made me think, oh, I don't know, that it would be about an American teaching about sexual freedom. Or something. Anyway, it didn't sound appealing. And I tend to get annoyed with books without quotation marks. But then it totally captivated me, from almost the very first. It is about literature, ( Read more... )

In ascending order of interest to me.

The Company (KJ Parker): So I really liked, or at least was terribly fascinated by, Parker's Engineer trilogy. This stand-alone was... ennh. It was vaguely interesting, I guess, but predictable and not particularly twisty (The Engineer trilogy, while the entire arc was perhaps predictable, was definitely ( Read more... )

A Great and Terrible Beauty (Libba Bray) - This book was hilarious to me because it was Dead Poets Society, only with girls and magic instead of boys and poetry. And when I say this, I don't mean it had some of the same themes, I mean it was pretty much exactly the same; it's like the author watched Dead Poets Society, took notes, changed the ( Read more... )

Via ase. Okay, Dawn (and the two sequels) blew me away. Just. This is some extraordinary SF -- humans (or what's left of them) are conquered by an alien race. Only it's not that simple. The humans might think it is. The aliens are really alien and don't look at it that way (and indeed are both much more ruthless than most humans, and much more ( Read more... )

For a while there I wasn't really feeling up to reading much meaty. I was in fact craving trashy-but-not-completely-badly-written novels. My usual go-to for that is to reread Judith Krantz's Mistral's Daughter, which has oodles of trashy romance, not to mention three generations of gorgeous professional-model red-haired Mary Sues. It's not even ( Read more... )

Via nolly. This was really interesting. How to deal with verbal attacks. In particular, the idea is that a verbal attack contains underlying implicit suppositions, and defending against the wrong thing can get you into trouble and escalate the confrontation instead of defusing it. A lot of the tips she gives I had already had some experience with from ( Read more... )

...Yeah, I have a backlog of posts... these date back from first trimester, in fact. These are sorted by how much I enjoyed them (from most to least):

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Wilhelm) - I've been on a Wilhelm kick recently. This one started slow but I thought was a strong book, though the science is... um... a little suspect. (I get the ( Read more... )