Archive for Books
Some assorted good things: There’s now only one published Joanna Russ story that I don’t have a copy of (and a university library may be sending me that last one soon). And I’m making progress on a couple of Russ-related projects. I’ve been helping the Otherwise Award folks catch up on various tasks and get […]
Some assorted life updates: 15 days after my lower back started hurting, it’s feeling a lot better, though still some pain. (No advice, please.) I now have even more sympathy than usual for those of you whose back issues don’t go away. I posted my first post in the local Buy Nothing group on Facebook, […]
I recently read a 20th-century novel that has, approximately, this overall plot: Someone has invented something that has the potential to transform the world, but short-sighted politicians (and members of the clergy, and other regressive people) want to block the invention. A group of proponents of the new way, including a clear-sighted engineer who always […]
My random-book-picker recently picked a collection of Coleridge verse and prose from my unread-books shelves. It’s a hardcover roughly the size of a mass-market paperback. It’s 350 pages of Coleridge’s writing, plus a hundred pages of notes at the end. But what makes it unusual is that the notes are in Russian. (The verse and […]
Milestone: I’m now down to 250 unread trade paperbacks and hardcovers. Which means I’ve reduced that number by 100 since my Facebook progress post almost exactly a year ago, when it was at 350. And during that time, I added about 5 books to the list (a couple that I had neglected to add before, […]
I feel like a lot of recent portal fantasy has been about the kids’ trauma, either in the fantasy world or, after they come back, in the real world. But I only have a few data points, and I may be overgeneralizing, so I’m curious to hear what y’all think. Does this seem to you […]
I thought that I had read all of Sturgeon’s fiction except for one novel. But it turns out that he wrote five other books that I hadn’t heard of. Three of them are novelizations of movies: The King and Four Queens (1956) Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) The Rare Breed (1966) But […]
I read Parke Godwin’s novel A Truce with Time: A Love Story with Occasional Ghosts in 1990, shortly before my college graduation. (The book had been published in 1988; it was written in 1986, and set in 1979.) What I remember of my reaction to it is that it felt to me more mature than […]
It occurs to me that often, when I’m reading or watching a work of fiction, one part of what I’m doing is essentially like playing the storytelling card game Once Upon a Time in my head. When I play OUaT, at any given moment I usually have a pretty clear path in mind from where […]
I’ve finally finished reading Andrew Brown’s A Brief History of Encyclopaedias. I continued to find it both interesting and annoying all the way through. (It’s less than 120 pages long, but it took me a few days to read it because I kept falling asleep. That’s not the book’s fault; I was inexplicably sleepy all […]
The latest book from my unread-books shelf is Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws, by Manfred Schroeder, which I am currently perusing over lunch. It belonged to my father, so it’s been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to read it for 15+ years. I already knew that it had pretty fractal pictures in it, and […]
I loved Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale when I read it circa 1990, so I was disappointed to later learn that he’s a conservative commentator. His 1996 short book A City in Winter has been sitting on my bookcase for a couple of decades now; part of my delay in reading it has been hesitancy […]