Archive for Books
I have some thoughts that I feel like are connected to each other, but they’re not quite cohering into an essay. So here are some not-quite-cohering thoughts. (Content warning for descriptions of various forms of exoticizing/Othering.) Mary Anne wrote an interesting post recently about (among other things) whether non–Sri Lankans are reading the Sri Lankan […]
I just finished reading/skimming Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Here’s my summary/paraphrase of the book. When I list items in {curly braces}, pick one of the listed items. Spoilers here. Content warning for mention of sex with underage girls. I had no money. I decided to go to {Denver, San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, […]
Books! Free to a good home. Let me know if you want any of these. Also some CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes. (All at the end of this post.) This list contains 100+ more books than the previous list I posted (a couple months ago), so even if you’ve already looked at the other one, […]
My father was a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson. I read the Illuminatus! trilogy in the summer between 8th and 9th grade (it changed my life). All through high school, I would occasionally pick up one of my father’s Wilson books and read some random bit of it, but aside from Illuminatus!, I never […]
Ursula K. Le Guin’s website includes a list of her “major titles,” in several categories. Chaos Golubitsky created a chronological reordering of the novels, story collections, and nonfiction books from that list, and has given me permission to post it here. One complication for anyone looking for a complete-Le Guin-chronology list: this list doesn’t include the poetry, […]
Books! Free to a good home. Let me know if you want any of these. Priority given to locals and to others who I’ll see in person soon (at WisCon or at Swarthmore Alumni Weekend, for example), and to people in the US (for ease of mailing). Haven’t managed to take photos of these, sorry. […]
Am reading Defiance #2: a paperback magazine of the US revolutionary left, published in 1971, edited by Dotson Rader. Pretty interesting stuff. Articles include: Rader’s introduction, which recommends abandoning electoral politics in favor of joining the imminent revolution. A piece by two young white men who were part of the NYC branch of Weatherman (aka […]
I’m reading Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter (1997), for the first time. I’m sorry to say that it’s not quite grabbing me yet, though it’s growing on me as it goes on. (I’m nearly a quarter of the way through it.) But there’s one thing I love about it: the portrayal of the three sisters who […]
Marge Piercy’s 800-page non-sf WWII novel Gone to Soldiers (published in 1987) has been sitting unread on my bookcase for some time. I don’t recall when I bought it, but I’m pretty sure the only reason I did is that I very much liked Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. But anything over about […]
Jen L just posted a comment (on one of my recent Facebook posts) about the difficulty of giving up on a book that one is reading, and I’ve brought up skimming in various conversations with Mary Anne recently, so it occurred to me to write about my approach to skimming in a bit more detail. […]
My which-book-next randomizer led me to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which has been sitting unread on my shelf for years. The back-cover description is intriguing—it says the book is about three editors who have read too many conspiracy theories and who develop one of their own for fun, using “an incredible computer capable of inventing […]
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. […]