In 2007 I read the following books: Code: italics = reread asterisk = new (to me) author (*) bold = my favorites this year exclamation mark = !unfinished strikethrough = never finished, never will Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang (*) The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War by George Hicks (*) Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson Accelerando Charles Stross (*) Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety, by Wendy Kaminer (*) Tatja Grimm’s World by Vernor Vinge The Koreans by Michael Breen (*) Stone by Adam Roberts Sin City …
Category: REVIEWS
More Recent Readings: November/December 2007
People have commented that my discussions of recent listenings, viewings, and readings all bundled together in a single post make for unwieldly linkage, so I’m just going to go on about books here — partly also because November was so busy I watched very little anyway, and will review what I have seen at the end of December instead. Like I said, I was very busy, so my short, short list is as follows: Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2007 was an okay issue. Ted Chiang’s work was, as usual, respectable. This review does “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” …
Duck!
I remember this story fondly! That afternoon in Seattle, reading it over and thinking, “Hey, this is weird…” … in a good way. It’s dark, but sweet, like a chocolate that you never had yourself as a kid, but probably will appreciate more for having waited till adulthood to taste. Eh? Anyway, my classmate and friend Caroline Yoachim‘s lovely short story “Time to Say Goodnight” is online at Fantasy now — it got posted on New Year’s Eve, apparently. Go check it out now, for free. Or I’ll put you in the microwave and something bad will happen to you.
Wanna CD?
See that new block in the sidebar? Yep, I’m flogging CDs for a now long-disbanded rock group. I figure, what the hell, someone might actually want a copy. Better than all that plastic and paper and time and music gone to waste. Not that anyone in the band has seen a red cent for it — though to be fair I don’t know if it ever earned back the studio costs, but then again we’ve never seen numbers either to the best of my knowledge — but there are still CDs of Dabang Band’s Product album available through YesAsia.com. (For …
Dia-Gnosis
I mentioned having tests recently. I’m fine. The gut pain and rib pain seem, says the doctor, to be related to excessive leaning over during that editing project, and too much sitting around in front of my PC with bad, bad posture. Which doesn’t surprise me: other problems have been cropping up too — back problems, tension and even joint pain in one leg and ankle… Time to start exercising. Between Lime, the doctor, and me, there was a strong consensus that it’d be wiser to start with prodigious amounts of walking, and graduate to running later on, when I’m …
Torke
Michael Torke, that is. I usually review music in my horrible, pages-long bimonthly (or less often) catalogues of everything I’ve been reading, watching (films, TV) and listening to. But I just got my Michael Torke boxed set, Ecstatic Collection, and I have to say, it’s pretty damned wonderful. Michael Torke is a composer who was first mentioned to me by David R. Scott, a Canadian composer who was my instructor during my first year of studying composition. I followed up, and really liked what I heard — a strange blend of occasional snatches of pop music, Stravinsky, and good old-fashioned …
On Derrick Jensen
Note: I wrote this a while back. For a while, I was quite impressed with some of Jensen’s rhetoric — and in terms of education, I still apply some of his ideas, though in what I think is a more rigorous and sensible form. But on his endless vilification of “civilization” and “the culture,” I have lost my patience. To take the man seriously is to see the holes in his arguments. He’s no more a hypocrite than most of us — but he is more self-righteous in his hypocrisy. My disenchantment with Derrick Jensen is now utterly complete. I …
Back to Life…
Up for air again. I haven’t posted much of substance lately, and I’m not (really) about to start now. The editing gig I took on has hit that chunk on the exponential curve of increasing involvement where time for sleep begins to erode, where I stop even the minimal amount of tidying I try to remember to do, where I stop cooking or eating properly. This is not nice territory, but the gig is almost done, and the worst of it, I hope, is past. More time for other things, then: too-long-deferred grading, working on drafts, edits, submissions, my column, …
Recent Readings & Stuff, Late August, September & October ’07
Books The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker may not blow away people with some real familiarity with the sorry state of affairs in the human sciences — like a friend who shall remain nameless (unless she wishes to comment here) and who said that the criticisms made in the book were not uncommon among grad students in her department. But in that it encapsulates the argument in a way really easily parsed by nonspecialists, frames it in terms of the harmful effects of Blank Slate-ist denial of inherent human nature, and movingly retaliates against the scummiest of Blank Slate-ists who, …
Free Stuff to Read
Want a chance to win a free copy of Elizabeth Hand’s new book Generation Loss? Enter at: Abebooks Elizabeth Hand Book Contest (Ganked from Der Small Beer/LCRW blognotblog thingy.) While you’re waiting to find out whether you win, check out the wonderful Tina Connolly’s wonderful story “Moon at the Starry Diner.” She wrote this story at Clarion West and after I read it, I started bowing to her — though only when she wasn’t looking — out of both respect and fear. It’s my favorite Tina Connolly story so far, loaded with that bizarre cartoons-on-grownup-drugs quality she does so well, …