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 …
Tag: books read 2007
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” …
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, …
Watched/Read/Listened: July 16th to August 13th
First off, I’m writing this in pieces, as I complete each book, so that my comments about each aren’t based on hazy recollections of a month past or more. BOOKS: Blameless in Abaddon by James Morrow I’ve been a fan of James Morrow’s writing for years now, since I read, by chance, his novel Only Begotten Daughter back in my undergrad days. Since then, I’ve read Bible Stories for Adults, This is the Way the World Ends, and Towing Jehovah, the latter of which is the book to which Blameless in Abaddon is the sequel. Morrow’s made a name for …