The World Science Fiction Conventio, aka WorldCon, (which I swear I will get to someday, like maybe next year since it's in Spokane) is where the Hugo Awards are given out. If you read much F/SF at all you've probably heard of the Hugos -- they're basically the equivalent of the Academy Awards for science fiction and fantasy. There are Hugos for ( Read more... )

Working my way through Neil Stephenson's Anathem. Holy cow. Talk about a demanding read -- mathematics, religion, linguistics, music, philosophy, astronautics, physics, metaphysics, not to mention herbology, cosmology, quantum mechanics, and change-ringing!! This book has it all. For the first hundred pages I floundered along in a daze, feeling ( Read more... )

Agh, agh, agh. How is possible to be reading not one, not two, but THREE books at the same time?? Not to mention breaks for The Economist, Newsweek, The Hedgehog Review, and my local paper. It ought to be impossible. The sheer number of words beating on my skull ought to somehow cancel each other out, or the most interesting ones ought (by the ( Read more... )

...or so Ben Macintrye says in this article in The Guardian. This decline is, he charges, due to our inability to either produce or consume sustained narratives longer than 140 characters, or at best a blog post ( Read more... )

Not content with slogging through Churchill's magnum-opus (or as Baldrick would say, his magnificent octopus), The History of World War II in six doorstoppy volumes (plus vast numbers of appendices -- weighs almost as much as the man himself), I've also started re-reading Stephen King's seven-volume Dark Tower series. I really must be some kind of ( Read more... )

Yesterday AbeBooks posted a summer reading list of the world's best doorstops or, to use a more literary term, "the 15 best single-volume behemoths." From David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to Atlas Shrugged, these are serious bricks; although there are a couple of slackers in the 900s, most are over a thousand pages. On the minus side, you may ( Read more... )