Archive for Books
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...
The other day, I pulled Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, off my unread-books shelf. I decided that I didn't really...
I've somehow for years had the idea that Jack Finney's 1970 novel Time and Again (which I hadn't read) was...
In 2016, I read 172 books; an average of roughly one every two days. Well, okay, when I say “read,”...
I find the whole Mandela Effect thing intriguing. (A group of people remembering something that didn't happen.) Here's one I...