Since Accelerando, I’ve been reading, but not as much as I would like. However, I have finished the following books, and will provide short capsule-reviews of them. I’m trying to get away from longish reviews, because, hey, I have mostly better things to do with my time than review books for what is, after all, a very small number of people within the audience of this site who actually are interested in what I think about the books I read. But, at least for the purposes of tracking what I’ve read, I’m going to log my readings here anyway. The …
Category: REVIEWS
Lovecraft.co.kr
Okay, not quite, but it was cool to encounter this Korean blog on which a bunch of Lovecraft-related stuff has been translated to Korean. And, yes, you can see my lamer post in English asking whether the person’s bilingual and whether there’s a significant SF community in Korea that could be hooked up with. :)
The Crazy Piety: Wendy Kaminer’s Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials
For anyone doubting Dawkins’ assertion that religion has a kind of aura around it that makes criticism publicly unacceptable, I think the following book is worth a look: Wendy Kaminer’s Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials. She’s more patient and even polite about religion in many ways, but her analysis is supported by all kinds of facts and details, and with a general mastery of the subject, especially in the American context. It’s nothing much that I didn’t know already, but I’m enjoying seeing it all laid out so clearly and strongly that everything else I’m reading has been set aside for the …
Accelerando, by Charles Stross
Dear Mr. Stross, You are a godlike being, though the ending left me a little disappointed. However, you are still a freaking godlike being. That is all. Sincerely, Mr. Gord
One-Shot Workshops
I won’t be able to make any of these, unfortunately, but you should think about them, if you’re writing SF: Leslie Howle from Clarion West has coordinated a series of one-day writing workshops with Richard Hugo House in Seattle this spring. There are five scheduled: Paul Park on January 28th – Fantastic Places – Making the Unreal Real Connie Willis on February 25th – The Techniques and Tropes of SF Terry Bisson on March 25th – Who Likes Short Shorts Peter Beagle on April 29th – Dialogue Says it All Karen Joy Fowler on May 20 – Soylent Green is …
Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang
This book of short stories and a novella is excellent, mainstream fiction about Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, America in Chinese, Chinese in China (a little), Chinese in Taiwan (a little)… Chang’s introduction for discussion groups suggests it’s a book full of stories about types of hunger and how they consume families, which makes sense given the title, but to me, it felt more like a book full of oblique (and not-so-oblique) ghost stories. At times it felt a little bit, oh, I don’t know, too skillful, but there was definitely something very respectable about how Chang wrote these stories… definitely …
Movies and Reading of Late
I’ve been watching a lot of movies, and reading a little too. First, movies: Death of a President is just weird. Weird, and interesting, and basically all about race post-9-11. Race as in skin color, and race as in hurrying to find someone to punish. I am surprised the film has been released in the US. I am unsurprised to find a lot of Americans angry about it without knowing what it’s even about. I betcha the Bush family is very weirded out by this, though. IT was sad, though perhaps on purpose, that the White House speech writer got …
Tsotsi
This film was recommended by the other foreign professor in my department, who used in a course segment dealing with South Africa. My brief review, as usual crossposted to AllConsuming, is as follows: What happens when a petty thug performs a carjacking and discovers that there was a baby left in the car by the woman he shot? Great movie. I worried for about five seconds that this might turn out to be the South African version of Three Men and a Baby but in fact it turned out to be a brilliant and well-made film about the strange ways …
Europa (1991)
Last night I tried to watch my DVD of Europa, which is a Korean-released DVD. Weirdly, it has no English subtitles, only Korean, and the “Languages” marking on the back cover lists it as an “English” movie. In fact, a lot of the dialogue is in German. I tried to watch it anyway, guessing at what was discussed in German, but finally, after about forty minutes, I gave up. What an annoyance!
Oliver Stone’s Alexander
I do wish Oliver Stone would do things like Natural Born Killers, Platoon… things that he can do. I’m saddened by the fact that nobody told him a film like Alexander was beyond his reach. It turns out to have been, unquestionably so. Oh, wait… the grandiosity, the betrayal by silence of those surrounding him… I get it, dude. Alexander is a kind of mirror reflection of Stone himself. This movie is a self-portrait. Trying to conquer the world with his unique vision. Perhaps he believes the kind of rhetoric he puts in Alexander’s mouth about making an empire to …