Archive for Books
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. […]
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 […]