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 …
Tag: Lunar New Year Readings (2005-06)
Lunar New Year Reads, Book #31: A Draft of XXX Cantos
Ezra Pound is one of the modern masters of poetry. Ezra Pound was a dismal failure. Ezra Pound was a genius. Ezra Pound was a madman. These readings of the man, or readings of the man from his Cantos, I can understand. I can understand each of them, collectively as well as individually, and I can even affirm them collectively as well as individually. You might say that Ezra Pound transformed poetry forever, and I would not be inclined to disagree with you. On the other hand, you might be inclined to say he inflicted terrible wounds on poetry and …
Lunar New Year Reads # 29 & #30
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 …
The Almost Finished And Barely Begun Books — Reading AND Writing Of Late
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 …
Lunar New Year Reads, Book 28: The X President
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.