| Books 39-51 |
[Dec. 18th, 2011|12:25 am] |
39. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
40. I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells
41-42. The Unwritten, vols. 1-2 by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
43. Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson
44. Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey
45. Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions by Martin Gardner
46. Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise
47. Castle Waiting by Linda Medley
48. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
49-51. Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, and Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
Made it to 50 books! Hooray. ( Quick reviews follow. ) |
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| Books 30-33: More Hugo Reading |
[Aug. 31st, 2011|12:40 pm] |
30. Feed by Mira Grant
31. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
32-33. Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis
These were the other novels (besides Cryoburn that I read for the Hugo ballot this year. I also started Dervish House by Ian McDonald, but set it down because it didn't engage me very well and I wanted to get on with the rest of the category, but when I have more patience for a slow start I'll go back to it. (Apparently the book really picks up about a third of the way through it; I abandoned it after about a sixth. We'll see.)
My final ballot had Feed at the top, followed by Kingdoms, then Blackout/All Clear, Cryoburn, and Dervish House. Feed was a fantastic, exciting story with a well-developed world, and it made me care about the characters quite a bit. It wasn't the deepest book, but it was more fun than any of the others. Kingdoms was highly imaginative fantasy where the gods were nearly as interesting characters as the mortals, and the slow reveal of one of the major plot points of the book was very nicely done. Blackout/All Clear was in dire need of editing for length, and I really didn't like the direction that it took the series' conception of the time continuum, but it was an entertaining story regardless; I still prefer her other novels in that universe, though. Cryoburn, as I mentioned, was decent enough but really felt like it wasn't living up to the awesomeness of the rest of the series.
I'm now working on a reread of A Song of Ice and Fire; I'm very close to beginning A Dance with Dragons, but I'll write those up as a separate entry. |
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| Books 14-29, etc |
[Jul. 13th, 2011|09:56 pm] |
Books14. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
15-29. The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold (15 novels; various novellas)
Perdido Street Station was pretty entertaining. Mieville's excellent at creating stories deeply soaked in a sense of place without ever making the exposition and description so thick that the story itself drags to a halt. The plot was excellent, the variety of alien people fascinating, and the villains amazingly creepy.
The Vorkosigan Saga, however, is collectively one of the best works of science fiction I've ever read. It's not always highbrow, but it's ridiculously readable, and I think I've found a new inspiration for modeling my own writing on. Punchy plots, entertaining characters that I strongly give a damn about, and plenty of witty banter to go around. Plus, Bujold pulls off the impressive feat of a reasonably realistic depiction of a society evolving, bit by bit, over the course of thirty years. And of course the characters develop over that time as well, and the events in their lives continue to have repercussions that extend past the last page of any given novel. Cryoburn, the most recent entry in the series and one of the nominees for this year's Hugo for Best Novel, was actually one of my least favorite novels of the series - but that merely renders it "rather good" rather than "really great".
In other Hugo nominee news, I gave The Dervish House by Ian McDonald a try, and didn't really get pulled into it, so now I'm on to Feed by Mira Grant. Enjoying that one so far!
TravelingIt's been a crazy month for us. June included a weekend trip down to Portland to visit a friend and continue marathoning Star Trek: TNG; The Game the following weekend, which was a road-rally puzzle hunt that took us from Tacoma to Maple Valley to Redmond to Seattle over the course of around 30 hours and 20-some puzzles; and the first part of a week spent in Ottawa and environs visiting Sora's best friend Pam and Pam's boyfriend Nick. Thankfully, we've got about a month off before we head down to Worldcon...
The GameThis deserves a bit more elaboration, but I can't really do it justice right now. Suffice it to say - several awesome puzzles and only a couple annoying ones; a cast/staff that included some entertaining characters acting out a relatively twisty plot; and nearly 36 hours straight spent awake in a van with five other people, and amazingly still all liking each other at the end. Also, it was themed around the job fair and recruitment process for the World Henchmen Organization, as inspired by Dr. Horrible, which meant lots of villainy to go around! Bwahahahaha.
WeddingsWe're at the start of a nearly year-long wedding season - congratulations, Dawn and Jeremy! Their wedding was simple and beautiful, with as gorgeous a Seattle summer day as an outdoor wedding can possibly hope for.
D&DAfter over a decade since my last time DMing, I'm running a D&D 3.5 game for a few friends; we finished the first module recently. (Yes, I'm still using modules. I said I was out of practice.) The module had a couple poorly written encounters, but the players stepped up with some creative solutions - I think the highlight would have to be the halfling scout jumping onto a troglodyte's back and tying him down with several successful Use Rope checks. Well done, players! |
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| Books 1-13 |
[Apr. 20th, 2011|10:23 pm] |
Haven't been getting a lot of reading done this year, since I've been spending a fair bit of my bus time coding. I think it's short-review time.
1-6. Codex Alera by Jim Butcher
7. Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody by Robert Brockway
8. Shogun by James Clavell
9. Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn by Penny Simkin et al.
10-13. Percy Jackson and the Olympians (books 2-5) by Rick Riordan
Codex Alera: Awesome, epic, Roman-flavored fantasy. Great characters, and a variety of entertaining villains.
EIGtKE: Basically a book-length Cracked.com article about all the possible things that could end humanity.
Shogun: An impressive portrait of Japanese samurai culture, via a heavily fictionalized account of the beginning of the Edo period. 1200 pages long, and well worth it.
PC&N: A comprehensive guide to the baby-making process, with a very slight anti-medical bent - their reasons for the bias are reasonable, but the bias is still distracting at times.
Percy Jackson: The series improved steadily as it went along; I'm glad it stopped being so much of a Harry Potter clone.
Next up, Perdido Street Station. |
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| Tonight, on Anime Club: |
[Feb. 9th, 2011|10:34 pm] |
Our host: "Here, have episode one of Star Driver!"
Star Driver: *flashy lights, explosions, unexplained backstory, and a magical boy driving a robot with a fucking plumed tricorn*
Us: "W. T. ....F."
This show is the crackiest crack that I've ever cracked.
And I want more.
Damn you. |
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| Books 74-76 (goal met!) |
[Dec. 30th, 2010|10:32 pm] |
74. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
75. Variable Star by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson
76. Turing: A Novel of Computation by Christos Papadimitriou
75 was my goal. Hooray!
A Canticle for Leibowitz was technically a reread, as I first read it in my science-fiction literature class in college. But it was definitely worth coming back to, six years later. The ending was a little weird, but after reading some analytical essays afterwards I've at least made a little more sense of it, trying to fit it into Catholic theology...
Variable Star is now among my favorite Heinlein books, but I think that has a lot to do with Robinson's modernization of Heinlein's storytelling. The plot is all Heinlein, even if it ends up just a little more deus-ex-machinistic than I'm used to from him - but Robinson's wordcraft is impressive. The world is rich with well-developed characters and well-considered concepts, and several plot points turn on characters outthinking each other without resorting to idiot-plot weaknesses. I'm definitely going to have to pick up some more of Spider Robinson's work. (I'm sure ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.6) shardavarius can recommend a place to start...
Turing was kind of odd. It's a history of the theory of computation wrapped up in a near-future story about an AI claiming to be Alan Turing and a vague sort of love-quadrangle. It was fun to read, but I was left vaguely unsatisfied even if the plot itself did resolve.
Year-retrospective post coming soon. Or perhaps not. We'll see. |
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| Books 62-73 |
[Dec. 12th, 2010|08:27 pm] |
62-67. Scott Pilgrim (all six volumes) by Bryan Lee O'Malley
68. Star Trek: The Manga by various authors and artists
69-71. Serenity: Those Left Behind, Better Days, and The Shepherd's Tale by Joss Whedon et al
72. The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
73. The User's Guide to the Universe
November doesn't usually leave me with a lot of time for reading, since I spend my time on the bus working on NaNoWriMo, so I decided to catch up on some of my comics reading last month. (The five-minute shuttle trips between the bus station and the office make for good chunks of comic-reading time.)
Scott Pilgrim took on the conceit of "what if life were more like a video game?" pretty awesomely, and the book managed to make me feel sympathetic towards the eponymous character for most of the book even though he doesn't have a lot to recommend him as a person. I liked him as a comic character far more than I would have liked him in real life, at least. But the way the video game tropes were embraced, parodied, and occasionally subverted was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to watching the movie at some point.
The Star Trek manga basically felt like five short TOS episodes, parsed through a manga lens. It was no more and no less than what I was expecting. If something called "Star Trek: The Manga" sounds like something you'd enjoy, I think you will in fact enjoy it. If not? Well, it does what it says on the tin, is all I'm saying.
The Serenity comics seemed like an excellent way to fill in the gaps and plot holes left by Firefly's premature cancellation and the movie Serenity's departure from the TV series' status quo. Sadly, "filler" is pretty much what they end up feeling like. "Those Left Behind" is just an effort to explain what happened between the end of the series and the beginning of the movie, and so it feels like it was written off of a checklist. "Yep, we covered Inara leaving, Book leaving, and the blue-hands getting replaced by an Operative. Time to call it a day." "Better Days" feels like poorly-thought-out Firefly fanfic; despite its transparent attempt to examine the characters' personalities, the climax of the story comes off as extremely unrealistic. "The Shepherd's Tale" was the best of the three, but even so, it ended up cramming what should have been two seasons' worth of slow, occasional exposition about Book's character into a few brief, rushed-feeling scenes. So, I'm pretty disappointed with that.
The Difference Engine, on the other hand, was fantastic. Gibson and Sterling are widely considered to be the fathers of cyberpunk; this novel, written in 1991, likely renders them something like the godfathers of the steampunk movement - and I don't think it's quite been the same since. A ridiculous majority of modern "steampunk" completely forgets about the "punk" aspect of the term, ignoring the anarchy and the oppressed part of society in favor of well-bred ladies and gentlemen up to their elbows in engine grease, seeking swashbuckling adventures. Happily (and unsurprisingly), Gibson and Sterling's transfusion of their cyberpunk sensibilities into the bright morning of the Industrial Revolution works quite well, particularly the concept of information and knowledge being more important than issues of class or birth. |
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| Musings and books |
[Nov. 3rd, 2010|04:06 pm] |
The silver lining to the shit-filled cloudNow that the Republicans have half of Congress, they have to start delivering, or the same wave of populist anger that swept them into the House of Representatives will sweep them right back out again. And I think they're completely incapable of actually getting anything fixed, because the greedy corporations and rich fuckers backing them will actually be better off - in the short term, anyway, but they only count their money three months at a time - if everything stays broken.
Also, the vast majority of Democrats who lost their seats yesterday were of the sort all too willing to give away anything and everything to the Republicans anyway. Here's hoping that in two years we get some people back into the Democratic Party actually capable of fighting for their principles.
NaNoWriMoOn target so far; finished last night at 3651 (against a goal of 3334) and got another 500-some words down on the bus this morning. The story - about a high-schooler's adventures on the competitive math circuit; not autobiographical but definitely drawn in parts from my experience - hasn't actually gotten out of what I intended to be a fairly short prologue set in middle school. It'll come, but it's given me some good ideas for additional plot points, so I'm not too worried right now.
Books57. Trial of Flowers by Jay Lake
58. The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
59. On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony
60. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
61. Triplanetary by E.E. "Doc" Smith
( Discussions of fantasy cities, casual misogyny, emo princes, and space battles. ) |
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| And an addendum... |
[Oct. 28th, 2010|02:07 pm] |
The preceding rant was mostly about national politics, though most of it applies at the state level as well. I have a few words about some of the specific Washington initiatives, though.
( Details ) |
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