Just finished Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.   This is a Great Michigan Read selection from the Michigan Humanities Council, so there were lots of copies at my local library.  Emily is a good writer, her prose described as understated in the wiki for this novel.  There's also a certain nostalgia and melancholy that she evokes that works ( Read more... )

Sarah and I read the twelve stories in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to each other out loud.   The characters have this way of talking that can be a bit of a challenge to read outloud, they end up sounding a bit like Yoda ( Read more... )

There and Back Again is nominally a science fiction novel by Pat Murphy, and her imaginary friend Max Merriwell.  What it really is: a retelling of the Hobbit in space.   It's silly and fun, almost seems like an experiment by the author, and turned out so well she decided to have it published.  While Pat got some of the oddity of traveling near the ( Read more... )

PZ Myers is a cantankerous biologist who has become famous for defending atheism, debating various religious figures and regularly doling out criticism on his blog Pharyngula.    Last I was reading the publishers of a conservative (and free) rag at his university were accusing him of stealing their papers, because some twit thought he smelled ( Read more... )

S picked up Existence by David Brin from our local library for me.   There's at least a book's worth of future prediction and another of examination of the "where's the aliens" Drake equation in this 550 page monster.   The plot starts with an astronaut finding an alien artifact and moves on to explore near future Earth and it's reaction to the ( Read more... )

Decided to track the books I read to 2013 and post brief reviews.  What I finished in January.

Across Realtime is actually a two book omnibus that are loosely bound together by one character who by the second book is very very old.   First book, the Peace War is set in the near future in which a device is created that can trap a section of the ( Read more... )

Finished two audio books recently.   Listened to Treasure Island.  I greatly enjoyed this one.  The reader did a good job.   I hadn't realized just how much of the plot was ripped off by Yellowbeard.  There was no mention of rape in Treasure Island, though, and the jokes about rape are one of things I found unappealing in the movie.

I see from ( Read more... )

Librivox is a great resource for free audio books.   I love the volunteers for reading public domain works.

I recently listened to a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories.  I like Lovecraft, but after listening to a bunch of his public domain stories I could come up with a computer program to generate them.

He liked the words monstrous, gruesome, ( Read more... )

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan is a real eye opener.   Through mainly biographical information, Egan tells the story of the Dust Bowl through the eyes of the people who lived it.

I learned the main causes of the Dust Bowl (land mismanagement) and some of the things the country, namely FDR's government, tried fix the situation.    Lots of ( Read more... )

I seem to have switched my reading habit for a listening habit lately.  I can listen to a story while doing my strolls during work breaks, and at the gym.   And its easier to listen to a story while eating lunch than reading one.

I just finished Metatropolis, which I believe is only available on audio download at this time.   I liked both the ( Read more... )