Archive for Books
Update on David Levithan gendered-pronoun issue: As I may have mentioned here a while back, I was startled and a little dismayed when I read the author note at the beginning of Levithan’s Six Earlier Days (prequel to Every Day), which used the word “his” in referring to the nongendered protagonist, whose name is A. […]
The completist in me loves single-volume “complete works of [author]” books. The bargain hunter in me loves anthologies that include dozens of stories and hundreds of pages. The reader in me gets exhausted even looking at books that thick, and goes off to read something else, or play video games. This dynamic has been true […]
For the past couple years, I’ve been engaged in a project to get through my shelves of unread books. Some of them I’m reading, some I’m skimming, some I’m glancing at and immediately putting on the giveaway list. At this point, I’m down to fewer than 150 unread mass-market paperbacks. My progress has slowed considerably […]
Here are some recurring themes and tropes that seem to me to be a lot more prominent than usual in this year’s Hugo-nominated fiction. (For some of these items, by “a lot more prominent” I just mean featured in two of the nominated works; but in those cases, I feel like even two is more […]
I think I’ve now read nearly all of Joanna Russ’s published fiction. A couple of people who haven’t read her work have recently asked me for recommendations for starting points, so here’s an attempt to provide some. As with my Delany-starting-points post from last year, I’m dividing this into categories, depending on what you’re interested […]
In 2016, I finally read/skimmed A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I had known the general story all my life—I think I first encountered it in a Classics Illustrated version at an early age—but had never read the book itself. For others who haven’t read it: I feel like basically the book is a […]
Anthony Burgess on the fact that Kubrick left out the denouement of the British version of A Clockwork Orange from the movie: People wrote to me about this—indeed much of my later life has been expended on Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustration of intention—while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask […]
There are lots of things I love about ebooks, including their portability and their searchability. But one of the things I love most about them is their highlightability. I’ve never had any desire to mark up paper books. I’m one of those people with a deeply rooted sense that books should be kept inviolate; I […]
Didn’t sleep much or well on Friday night, I think mostly because I stayed up way too late reading and playing iOS games. Hung out with Karen and Pär and Jeremiah during the day on Saturday, mostly playing Terraforming Mars, which has become one of my favorite boardgames. Then came home to help Kam move […]
I started this project with about 350 unread mass-market paperbacks on my bookshelves, and I bought about 30 more shortly...
I've just started reading both Norman Spinrad's 1980 Songs from the Stars (first chapters set in a post-apocalypse quasi-ecotopia in...
In the past couple years, there've been about three times when I've had occasion to suggest starting points for reading...