You know what I hate? When I can tell that something in what I’m reading (or seeing) is a reference to something, and I don’t know what that something is. Sometimes it’s an inside joke, but more often it’s a literary reference, or an allusion to some knowledge I don’t have. Most of the time I can spot the reference,… Read more →
Tag: Books
What’s the -philia for books?
…because man I love books. I love the good stories, and I love the well-crafted physical objects as well. Love ’em. So let’s talk about a whole bunch of book-related topics, to give me a book fix. First I’d like to do a little bit of a rant about books as commercial objects. Actually, as I’m intelligent enough to understand… Read more →
And one last time
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential — for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never. —Søren Kierkegaard Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking. —John Maynard Keynes… Read more →
Commonplaces
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. —Edgar Allen Poe Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. —John Locke, Of Reading Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and… Read more →
How about a Saturday Bookish Links roundup?
On my last excursion to Boston, while I sadly did not get to do the Readercon thingRound-the-clock meetings suck. Next job I work only in North American time zones–the global economy can go hang., I did get to pick up a couple of more Centipede Press books that I had directed to my US mail drop (a.k.a. “Matt’s house”): a… Read more →
Well, this should solve a few problems.
The KGB Raffle winners are up. It appears I have won a wormhole. Could this, combined with my recently acquired Mad Scientist goggles, be the beginning of my career as a supervillain? Or, alternately, the beginning of a mildly comic adventure through time and space? Read more →
A Previous Engagement
No blogging today, nothing’s getting between me and the new TaltosIf that made you think of Ann Rice, you’re probably reading the wrong blog. book. I’ve known Steve for quite few years now, but I’ve known Vlad since I was 10 years old–we go waaaay back. And unlike many people I knew when I was ten, I’m always glad to… Read more →
Jaycee
I read a lot of science fiction. I have, since I was a kid–the first novel with no pictures I ever read was A Wrinkle In Time. The first “adult” book I ever read was Foundation. When I was younger I had the opportunity to read a lot of the early short work in the genre. Libraries had a lot… Read more →
Wednesday Bookish Links
I was delighted to find out this week that Emma Bull is writing a sequel to Territory (you might recall I was pretty excited about that one), tentatively titled Claim. Of course, in the interim, I can always get a hit of Shadow Unit. (I think I might have mentioned that once or twice, possibly.) I have made no secret… Read more →
Cool Web Tool: The Awesome Highlighter.
That’s its name. Not that I don’t think it is awesome–I actually kind of do–but I think it’s even funnier that they called it “The Awesome Highlighter“. And it does just what you think, based on the name: you give it an URL, then you highlight parts of the page, and you get a link to your highlighted page that… Read more →
The tabs, they must be closed.
You know the drill–some things that I found worthy of some comment: I quite liked Julie Rehmeyer’s short piece on the math scholars who accidentally solved an astrophysics problem. It’s got all the good stuff: pure math, astrophysics (come on, “gravity lensing” just sounds cool, even without any context), serendipity, and above all a good science journalist doing the writeup,… Read more →
Special Effects courtesy of “physics”.
..and here, ladies and gentlemen, you see the sky over Sayre‘s “lightning farm” as Orannis the Destroyer is freed from his bindings. OK, maybe not, although that’s pretty much exactly how I pictured that in my head. What you’re actually looking at there is the sky over the Chaiten Volcano in Chile. No photoshoppery, the image is directly from the… Read more →
Disappointed
Sigh. I finally got around to reading the Edge of Reason last night. Despite the fact that lots of people on the Internets seem to think this was the wonderful book I was expecting, it just didn’t work for me. The plot was kind of interesting, but the rest of the craft just wasn’t there. The only review I could… Read more →
Sunday night quick book links
As I write this I am watching the Australian movies made from Shane Maloney’s books about Murray Whelan. You may remember that those books were some of the big successes from my first Australian trip, and that I even mentioned the movies when I wrote that stuff up. Well, my usual online sources didn’t make the movies available, but just… Read more →
Friday Night Book Links
I love “give us an obscure favourite” pieces. From this recent one at the Village Voice I can see myself looking for Harold Q. Masur, Dorothy Dunbar, and Don Carpenter. The only guys there I was already familiar with are Harry Stephen Keeler (much touted by a certain popular genre author), Amis (who I am generally less impressed with than… Read more →
