A great disappointment, particularly as it was a “Staff Pick” at my local independent bookstore. The author, Thomas Wheeler, is a screenwriter by trade, and boy does it show. A trivial example: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes a ship to America in order to meet with H.P. Lovecraft. The chapter starting on his arrival is [...]
Penny Arcade today pretty much sums up my opinion of the Amazon Kindle. Share and Enjoy:
I have an aversion to books that are part of a trilogy or other mult-ology. I’m better with series books, like the Discworld novels or the Old Man’s War novels, where each book is complete by itself, and reading the previous books is helpful but not strictly necessary. But when I’m deciding to invest time [...]
Edited: Athenian Abroad kindly pointed out that I referred back to the previous “the sky is falling” report by the NEA, which was issued in 2002. The latest report can be accessed here. The National Endowment for the Arts is supposed to promote the arts, of course, so one is unsurprised to find them arguing [...]
I would have been set to talk about The Janissary Tree, which promises to be a fairly intriguing book, except that I got to page 54 and discovered that pages 55 to 86 are MISSING. This in an autographed copy. I am really not happy about having to exchange a book during the hellacious shopping [...]
I’ve been meaning to read this one forever, as it’s one of the SF Classics. It’s recently been reprinted in paperback. It’s no Iron Dream, but I enjoyed it. It’s one of the novels of the “New Wave” of SF, and it shows; at times the prose is very stream-of-consciousness, hip wordplay, irritating. Jack Barron [...]
Elizabeth May, now the executive director of Sierra Club of Canada, has written a short and highly entertaining book called How to Save the World in Your Spare Time. It’s hard to find the happy medium between dippy, counterproductive overoptimism and defeatist cynicism, but May does it. The book is somewhat slanted towards environmentalism, because [...]