Whether it's Bradbury saying something cranky or Rowling saying something saucy, the author's interpretation of their own story or characters is worth no more than any other reader's take-away ( Read more... )

Yesterday's completely unexpected purchase was this edition of Lady Chatterly's Lover, entirely due to its covers and flaps being covered with delightful comics by Chet Brown, a favorite cartoonist whose distinct style bludgeoned me with its surprising presence as I walked past the "Classics" shelf ( Read more... )

I had two very good meetings, in two very different roles - in one I was like arr I am a good leader and in the other I was like arr I am worth what I'm paidBought two books. One is "How to Start a Business in Massachusetts" by O'Neill and Warda. Ha ha, horse before the cart, yes, but it's a smartly written summary and I've already learned a lot. I ( Read more... )

My friend and colleague Zarf (radiotelescope) released his exhaustively researched concordance for John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting, an epic and extremely twisty novel set in alternate-history Renaissance Europe. Z's effort is a sprawling, link-n-anchor-intensive website, just the kind an information geek like me likes to see. It took him months ( Read more... )

After I wrote that last subject line I thought I bet that isn't actually true, and lo.

A background process I didn't realize I had going returned a value yesterday and told me the point at which the last Harry Potter novel soured a little on me, preventing it from being really great. It was when ( Crusher said 'Their DNA is devolving into amino acids!' and then Riker turned into a spider or something. )

Went to a William Gibson reading and signing of his new novel Spook Country at the Brattle yesterday. I often attend readings at SF cons, but it's been a long time since I stood in line for a signing, since I usually don't go for that sort of thing. But what the heck. I bought a book and thanked him for his work, and he thanked me for thanking him ( Read more... )

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It neither exceeded nor fell short of my expectations, he said limply.

I enjoyed it, but not as much as the penultimate volume, which I found to be my favorite of the series. I found myself pushing through to the end largely just to be done with it, and get along with reading all my friends' commentary before it got too stale.

( Bullet list of thoughts, before I read anyone else's (except for a lot of the relevant Making Light thread) )

I have started reading Deathly Hallows, after cthulhia read the same copy in less than 24 hours. It is the third thing down in a stack of SF I am in the middle of reading (within PKD's Eye in the Sky, given to me by Ricky, itself within Dogland, an American magical-realism story that R. Cory was breathless about on Boing Boing a couple weeks ago). So far I ( Read more... )