Tag: books read 2014

Books I Read in 2014

gordsellar0 Comments

Well, I’m not quite a month late, but almost. Here’s the list of all the books I read in 2014. I’m not writing about magazines, because I’m 99% sure nobody reading this blog cares about that stuff. Heck, I’m not even convinced anyone’s interested in this kind of bookkeping/tabulation stuff, though I’m going to kick it off with a list of my top thirteen books of the year. Why top thirteen? Because… well, why should it be only ten? Here are the thirteen books I read in 2014 that I enjoyed most: 1. Blindsight by Peter Watts. Why in the hell did I wait so long? Usually,  when a …

Continue Reading

November-December Books

gordsellar1 Comment

It looks like it’s been slower around here than it actually has been, in terms of books: I’ve just been reading some big ones, is all. I’ll put ’em beneath the cut, to save space.

Continue Reading

Phadaeng Nang Ai, Translated by Wajuppa Tossa

gordsellar0 Comments

I came to Wajuppa Tossa’s translation of Phadaeng Nang Ai via Bryan Thao Worra’s Demonstra (discussed here, more info here–and it’s even discounted right now, and $7 is a steal!), where it’s mentioned in passing (in an appendix, I think). What got me curious about it (after I looked it up) was the impression I got that it’s basically an epic about a love triangle involving humans and nagas. Not that Worra’s book was my introduction to nagas, of course. AD&D, Indian movies,  and travel in Southeast Asia had previously exposed me to various versions of nagas, from these: … to this film that the inimitable Ritu Chaudhry showed me during …

Continue Reading

Hidden Treasures…

gordsellar0 Comments

Having just finished Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook (which I discussed earlier here, and mentioned in passing here: it’s a big book, so I’d been reading it for a while now) I can say that big chunks of history suddenly make a lot more sense to me. For one thing, the constant fascination with hidden treasure. Basically, a lot of people seemed to think of the world as if it were some kind of Monty Haul D&D campaign: at least in the English speaking world, the idea that there were hidden caches of treasure everywhere was bizarrely common, to the point where treasure hunting was a significant part of …

Continue Reading

Recent Books

gordsellar2 Comments

I’ve been reading a fair bit this year, as far as my standards go. More than usual, anyway. This is everything so far, though, of course, a few of those I gave up on and didn’t finish: I’ve been feeling a little disappointed lately in how so much of the SFF world online is so busy talking about scandals and outrages that we never seem to talk about the books anymore. Short stories, too, but, well, that’s for another post. So I figured: do my bit. Post about what I’ve read lately. Part of why I stopped was because–on some very bad …

Continue Reading

Monk, Amblyopia & All

gordsellar0 Comments

Wanting to check one detail about Monk’s life, I picked up my copy of Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk by Leslie Gourse, and searched… and an hour later, I discovered I’d happily read a big chunk of the book. So far it’s a very balanced treatment, from what I can tell: Gourse doesn’t shy away from the few unpleasant things that come up, but doesn’t dwell on the either. It’s not a particularly musical biography, so far: no analysis of Monk’s music. (There’s more of that in Gabriel Solis’ Monk’s Music, which I’d dive into next if it weren’t …

Continue Reading

Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722)

gordsellar0 Comments

I’ve read a lot the last few months, and not posted much about the novels I’ve finished, but I’ll make an exception for this… and for one nonfiction book on governesses, which I’ll get to later this month. (And a few thoughtful posts on novels I wasn’t crazy about, which… well, they’ll go up eventually, I suppose, if they seem worth it when I revisit them.) Moll Flanders was an enjoyable enough book, once I got past the way novels were written in that time, which is to say, once I got past the lack of any kind of expository description of anything. Sure, Swift does …

Continue Reading

Georgian England, The Developing World, Crime Prevention, and Internet Trolls

gordsellar0 Comments

Life in Georgian London was an alien sort of existence: it’s hard to wrap your head around it, though there is one analogy I’ve discovered for it that neatly says a lot about the things we take for granted… and also suggests something of our future, too. I suspect the unexpected key is this figure: Yes, our old friend… the internet troll.  I’d argue that, among other things, the Internet is pretty invaluable in keeping humanity acquainted with what it’s like to live in a lawless, unpoliced world. Which is the kind of world that people in the 1730s lived …

Continue Reading

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany

gordsellar2 Comments

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a very difficult book to talk about. It’s a challenging book to read, too, but talking about it seems harder than reading it, to me. That’s usually a sign that there’s something worth thinking over, though I am struggling to find a way into discussing it. Certainly, a mere “reader reaction” of the type that one sees all over the internet seems insufficient, for the same reason it strikes one as ridiculous for someone to walk out of a hall where a piece by Mahler or Webern or Stravinsky has just …

Continue Reading

Howard Who? by Howard Waldrop

gordsellar1 Comment

I just finished Howard Who? on Tuesday night, though I first read “The Ugly Chickens” a couple of years ago, and loved it. (My edition is the Peapod Classics one put out by Small Beer Press, pictured at the right.) So of the “slipstream” books I’ve read from Small Beer aren’t really my thing, but this collection was overall really, really good. It’s worth noting, by the way, that this is a Small Beer reprint: the collection was Waldrop’s first, and originally was put out by Doubleday in 1986. It seems so obvious to me that a smaller press could fruitfully …

Continue Reading