I needed some light reading so I checked this one out of the library. Fun!

Around Thrial, a star a million light-years away from any other ( Read more... )

I finished rereading Vernor Vinge's "Zones of Thought" which is a short story, The Blabber (1988) and two big novels, A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and A Deepness in the Sky (1999). The others are computer age space opera set 40,000 years ahead of our present era, but A Deepness in the Sky is something altogether other, even though it has deep ( Read more... )

After many recommendations, we've begun watching season one of The Wire. For those of you who don't know this is a police drama from HBO by David Simon. Simon explains in the commentary that he and his writing partner Ed Burns wanted to explore the theme of institutional betrayal. The first season follows two sets of characters: One set in a gang ( Read more... )

I was reading about cell phone novels on metafilter and the idea intrigues me in the abstract but I can't say what it is exactly I like about it. Perhaps it's just some kind of ADHD resonance.

Recently someone recommended Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World to me. This evening I picked it up at the store and started ( Read more... )

Elaine Radford's Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman

Localroger's Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat

John Kessel's Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality

A few years back I started getting ideas for a sci-fi novel: a picaresque romp around a post-human solar system as I imagined might come about in about 200 years.

This weekend I finished Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix (actually Schismatrix Plus which includes the short stories written in the same setting). I've had the distressing feeling since I ( Read more... )

After almost half a year I have to bring back The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature by Philip Ball (blog). I'm glad that someone else is interested in this book and this subject. I'm sad that I'm parting with it. I finished reading it a while back but I really wanted to finish going back over it listing all the interesting things in ( Read more... )

I just finished reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I first learned about Taleb some years ago in Malcolm Gladwell's profile of him called: Blowing Up. On Taleb's home page he links to many other articles about him, but he distances ( Read more... )

Many years ago I saw the movie Blade Runner and I liked it. I read the book it was based on: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and I liked it.

Maybe a year or two later, I watched the movie again. I didn't like it. I wasn't sure what I liked about it in the first place. I read the book again and I found I didn't like it either ( Read more... )

A while back a few of you put up your summer reading lists and now I'm going to. Except that, while looking back I kept seeing how almost all the books I've read informed each other. There's all sorts of little trends of themes and subject matter. I had to reach back to the last twelve months to find a book that seemed to set things off.

There's a ( Read more... )