You gotta find someone who says something like the following interesting: I find almost every novel overwritten and padded. I mean, almost every novel over three-hundred pages, I find, I would have edited—a little bit. I don’t like artificial devices pulling you through [novels] like a dead body on the first page… and hit hasn’t changed much from the nineteenth-century, when you’ve got just about something like a dead body on the first page of every bestseller you’ve got… or a dead body with no face, or a nun! I get tired of what sells, that way. I’m not interested …

I just finished reading Schild’s Ladder, by Greg Egan. What a wonderful, strange novel. It’s philosophical, inventive beyond anything I’ve read in years, and powerful, as well as stuffed full not only of enough advanced science to make my head hurt, but also characters so interesting, believable, and engaging that I savoured every minute I spent reading the book… though, for the sake of my poor brain I had to put it down rather often. It’s a wonderful book full of so many cool science-fictional ideas, and it goes so far beyond space opera that I think it warrants a …

The things some people learn reading Lord of the Rings amazes me. For example, I learned a lot about politics in “naive” localities like Hobbiton—and I do wish they’d included that long epilogue in the film, though I knew they wouldn’t—and the tale of Frodo leaving the world he knew on his quest comforted me, as I read it on the plane over the first time I came to Korea. But what others come up with surprises me even more! For example, someone’s presented an article where, rather convincingly, you can see the book as a dating manual. Ah, book …