I finished reading A Dance With Dragons last night (staying up way too late to do so). My verdict: probably on par with A Feast For Crows, which means that it's both a good book and something of a disappointment.

( ”WARNING: Here Be Spoilers )

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Just finished re-reading The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage (later reprinted together as Songs of Earth and Power) by Greg Bear. I first read these books back in my early 20s, and the Infinity Concerto is one of my favorite novels. I think I've read both twice already, although it's been a long time since I read either. In fact, it's been ( Read more... )

Finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy over the weekend. While it doesn't quite fall apart in the third book the way I'd heard, it's... well, yeah, it's not great either. Too many things that happen seem to happen because the author needed them to, and not because they make sense within the context of the story. Ultimately, I was left ( Read more... )

Spent the weekend up in NYC with aquatea. We went down to Washington Square Park, only to discover that it was closed for what looked like major renovations. The hell? That said, the weather was beautiful, and so we spent a lot of time outside taking advantage of it. Also, the subway line that goes to her stop wasn't making any stops between 96th and ( Read more... )

Just finished reading a book entitled Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. As the subtitle says, the book looks at why we need to rationalize and justify mistakes, and why we continue to believe that we were right, even when confronted with evidence that we were wrong. The authors ( Read more... )

This weekend, the running theme was death, horror, and destruction. First, saturday aquatea and I saw Cloverfield. If you can handle lots of shaky-cam, and you like monster movies, I recommend seeing it. The idea behind the film is that you're watching footage of the attack as shot by a regular guy with camcorder, and, ok, you have to buy into the idea ( Read more... )

So I've been reading some things today about the movie The Golden Compass, and about the "His Dark Materials" trilogy which it's a part of. Up until recently, I'd never even heard of the trilogy, and thus knew nothing about it. I was reading today that The Catholic League - a group dedicated to complaining about the latest affront to Christianity ( Read more... )

Started reading this yesterday and pretty much couldn't put it down, which is pretty much why I finished it today. For a Tim Powers novel, that's pretty noteworthy; his novels tend be somewhat dense, and as much as I like his stuff, I generally haven't plowed through his work the same way I do with one of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels. Like ( Read more... )

Saturday morning... well, afternoon, really, I hoped a train up to NYC to hang out my friend Will, the mastermind behind shabot6000. We had dinner at a nearby Mexican place and then hung out at the Tea Lounge in Park Slope. The next day, as it turns out, was the date of the Israeli Independence Day parade, so we went into Manhattan to meet some of ( Read more... )