Stephen Baxter is one of those writers whose work I don’t actually know very well, but what I know of, I enjoy immensely. This is the fourth novel written or co-written by him that I have read, and the conclusion to a series I’ve downright admired, the Manifold Series. Manifold is a series of books dealing with different answers to the Fermi Paradox, which is based upon this question: if indeed the requisite materials and conditions for life as, indeed, as common as they seem to be in our universe, why do we not see evidence of life everywhere we …

Technically speaking, only one of the two books was a Lunar New Year read, the other was a study, and was a book I studied off-and-on for more than a year. Still, as I completed it this year, I am including it in my log of books for purposes of memory, and of interest. 한국어 1, Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. 1993. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. 1962. Book #29: 한국어 1 (Korean Level 1), Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. 1993. On the face of it, it seems a little pathetic that at the close of my fourth …

This “Lunar New Year” thing took a big hit when I started studying The Cantos with those guys at work. No more do I have spare hours to read through two or three books in a couple of weeks and post about them. These days, the spare time that isn’t taken up by other projects, and working on lesson plans, gets devoted to studying the Cantos in increasingly more detail, which is strange considering that the more I study the poems, the more I consider their author a kind of madman. In any case, I have only completed one book …

Book #28: The X President, by Philip Baruth. You know, I’m crazy about time travel novels. There was a time when I hated them. No, wait, I despised and reviled them. And then I saw what Connie Willis did with the genre, in works like The Doomsday Book, and To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Fire Watch, and I changed my mind. Time travel stories, I decided, could be damned fine reading. It’s important I note that, before I discuss my dissatisfactions with this book, along with the things I liked.

My CD-burner drive is about to be replaced by a DVD-burner. There’s a lot of crap on my hard disk, and I’d like to clear it off, but the machine is not cooperating, and I can’t quite tell whether it’s a hardware problem—just a faulty drive finally having given out—or a bigger problem with the whole system. However, since I did get the thing to burn a few CDs via USB on an old external burner, I am guessing it’s the drive that’s messed up, and gambling that a DVD-burner will work without my having to reinstall Windows prior to …

As promised, a few more books I’ve torn through during my holidays: Book #22: War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches edited by Kevin J. Anderson. I admit it. After seeing the horrendous Spielberg film, I wanted to reread the original novel, but of course, my HG Wells omnibus was in my apartment in Korea. However, I was pleased to dig out this anthology, to which I hadn’t given a single thought in years, and dug into it. After the first story, it was a done deal: I knew I was bringing the anthology back to Korea with me. Now, not …

It’s holiday-time, which also means it’s heavy-reading time for me. I’ve been devouring books, which is a good thing because I have a lot of them and I’d feel a bit funny not reading them. In fact, looking through my boxes of books at my parents’ home, I felt a bit sad seeing so many books I’d owned for years and never actually read. Well, having hauled back at least 40 kilograms of books, probably 45 kilos, I have no excuse to say, “But there’s nothing I want to read right now…” I have almost all the books in my …

Well, back at my parents’ place, I’ve been reading a lot. I mean, this is my holiday, and what do you know, I’ve got about 13 boxes of books that I haven’t seen in a few years all gathered in the garage. There are also five boxes missing, including a box of my old compositions— almost all of the music I ever wrote has been officially lost and seems gone for good, though I am happy to say most of my extant juvenilia made it here safe and sound—the stories I wrote in elementary school made it, but not my …