Category: books

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library thing reprise

I love librarything.com. It’s really cool. I was basically just surfing around over there, trying to find the place where they post their bookpiles, (’cause I just uploaded this one) and ended up in a forum talking about what I’ve been reading lately.

Long story short, I decided it would make a good blog post, and here I am. So here’s what I’m reading lately:

I’m in the last few dozen pages of The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. I’m also in the midst of A Theory of Fun, by Raph Koster. I usually have a non-fiction book I’m just carrying around while I actually read a novel.

When I finish The Amber Spyglass, I intend to start reading Thirteen, by Richard K. Morgan, hopefully tomorrow night.

Other books on the night side stand (ie, ones I’ve started reading, but not yet completed, or just like having near at hand): Astro City: Local Heroes, Kabuki: Metamorphosis, Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman, The Automatic Message, The Making of a Poem, ActionScript for Flash MX, Stardust (The original with illustrations by Charles Vess), Make Magazine: Issue 8, and numerous other individual comic books.

That’s about it.

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The Time Traveler’s Wife

I just finsihed reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffengger. It was extraordinarilly sublime. Imense. Wonderful. Very romantic and heartwarming, while also having an element of action and mystery. In short, it was really, really great. Basically it’s about this guy who gets “unstuck” in time, who time travels without much warning and in much the same way that epileptics have seisures. It’s a brain condition, and in the book there is a doctor who eventually figures out what is different about him. He meets this woman claire who has known him her whole life. In his future, he goes back to visit her many times. In fact, the book is just as much her story as it is his. There are so many poignant unspoken things between these characters, between Henry and Claire that I almost felt it was unrealistic. But they did talk, and about important things, and they fought, but more emphasis was placed on the things they couldn’t tell each other, or didn’t want to. About the future, mostly. The book was very quiet in a way, quite subtle and beautiful, especially when dealing with the more “hard science”-y aspects. It did feel totally like science fiction. The time travel was especially well done, and very internally consistant. I would have liked to have had some more explaination for it, but this was just as good. An explaination might have been lame, really. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book, the unabashed romance tied in quite well with my personal life right now, and it will definitely haunt me–dare I say it? …into the future.

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travel and blog catchup

The trip to japan was awesome. Photos here. Florence and I are still doing great. I’m sure Nate thinks I’ve abandoned him. I can’t even remember the last time I slept at the house. Last night Florence and I saw KR’s show in the fringe, and ran into Nate outside afterwards. It felt like the first time I’d seen him in weeks.

Last weekend Florence and I went down to visit her sister in Chicago. We went to Wizard’s World on Saturday, this giant comic convention, and it was pretty great. I’ve really been reading a lot of comics lately, Runaways and Young Avengers, and Futurama, and Girls… with some x-men thrown in there for good measure. It started with some graphic novels, V for Vendetta and The Watchmen. Florence’s sister Susie has tons of comics, and it was fun looking through her collection. (Mike also has a nice collection, and I haven’t taken nearly enough advantage of it — although I did borrow The Watchmen from him, and some of those x-men.)

On Sunday night, as we were driving back, we got off the freeway at the Wisconsin dells, and decided spontaneously to stay at Kalahari, this water park that I’d heard about because my brother John went there recently. Now I feel bad I didn’t go with him, because it was AWESOME. Florence and I had a really wonderful time going on all the rides together, and it really made the trip something memorable.

I’m reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s super good, chalk full of literary goodness. Also reading Game Plan, The Game Inventor’s Handbook, which is about what it sounds like, although it’s more about publishing games and getting them published than the actual act of inventing them. I’ve been playing a lot of games again, and have come up with this abstract strategy game that uses a bunch of dice in a non-random way. We’ve played it a few times, and it’s gotten some decent comments from everybody. I’ve decided I’m going to get a set of large (1″) dice to play with just for parties and stuff. Email me if you’re interested in the rules. As soon as I think of a decent name for it, I’ll probably post them to board game geek or something. I had this idea that I’d be coming up with new games to use the same dice, and selling a handbook full of them, and I still might do that, but I want to at least give one set of rules away. Plus, none of the other games are as far along in terms of rules and thinking them out as this one. There is one other one that I’d like to try out in the near future… I’ve just got to find time to do it.

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sci-fi sideswipe

I’ve suddenly gotten all excited about books again. I’m on some kind of weird book/game/movie oscillation pattern. This may or may not have been sparked by my finishing the last graphic novel in the sandman series late last week. I put it down, sighed one of those soul-shattering life-altering sighs, and went straight into book-hunting mode looking for the next thing that would fill that aching, gaping void in my consciousness where and unfinished novel need reside.

Then, of course, I skipped over all the novels sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read.

Instead I decided I really want the new Iain M. Banks novel, The Algebraist. But it’s only been released in the UK, so I was going to order it from amazon.co.uk. But then I thought maybe someone locally would have already done the importing for me, and I could buy it from them faster and maybe even cheaper. But if any of them had copies, all the local stores have since sold out. (It was released several months ago, but I just didn’t know it until recently.)

Of course I discovered it isn’t around locally after I jumped the gun and ordered Richard K. Morgan’s new (UK released only) book Woken Furies, which is a sequel to Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, both of which I enjoyed immensely.

Now I have far too many books lined up to start reading, and my amazon order hasn’t even shipped yet.

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Mondo recap

Mondo came and went last weekend, and it was great. Not quite as great, however, as the last madfest. Of course, Madfest is in madison, and much harder to drive to. I have plans to go to another juggling convention in two weeks, the one down in illinois.

I don’t know how I suddenly got “back into” juggling, or even if I ever was “out” of it, but this time of year just happens to be a busy one for juggling conventions, at least in the midwest. (Which seems odd, you’d think we’d want to have them in the summer or something.)

Anyway, I’ve been picking up a few new skills, and my five clubs has improved immensely. I’m also getting pretty close to level five on the unicycle.

One reason mondo may not have felt quite as fun as mad fest was the fact that I was probably coming down with something the whole weekend. This week my body has been drained of all energy, and I’ve mostly just sat around like a lump of fat. Most days it’s all I can do to force myself to eat sometime in the afternoon before laura gets home from work. As a result though, I have been plowing through the sandman comic series, which I borrowed from Delobius’s wife.

Now because I’ve been sick all week, my sleep schedule is all f’d up. For instance, I slept till 1pm today. If I do feel well enough to go into work tomorrow, (I felt a little better today, like maybe the worst of it is behind me) …you can bet I’ll be in late. At least I’ve got forgiving coworkers (who are probably reading this right now wondering if I’m full of shit).

I’m going to upload some new pictures to the TCUC gallery before I got to bed, I think.

(And this is a particularly lame entry, I think… Where are all the big ideas? I watched “No Maps for These Planes” this afternoon, a documentary on William Gibson. It was quite interesting. The part that probably struck me the hardest was how he had at one time been inspired to take all the psychedelic drugs he could get his hands on. I guess I’d never thought of him as all that “out there” or surreal, but his better stuff definitely is, which is probably why I like it so much. That and the sandman comics have definitely put me in a strange sort of introspective mood.)

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top 10 favorite sci-fi books of all time

Jason got me thinking about this list last night, as he’s suppose to make a list for one of his co-workers.

Writing a list like this is damn near impossible. For one thing, I tend not to re-read books. There are far too many out there that I want to read and never get around to–if I re-read a book, it’s a very rare thing. That having been said, I’ve read the top three books in my list at least twice, maybe three times each.

These are all great books, but it was hard for me to decide on some of them. Particularly the ones I’ve only read once. There are some of these authors I had a really hard time deciding which of their books I would list on here. Rucker, Noon, Vonnegut, Gibson. They all have a bunch of really great books out there. Also, there are a lot of really wonderful authors that didn’t make this list… and I feel bad about it. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, David Brin, Connie Willis and Greg Egan would all make a top 20 list for sure.

  1. Snowcrash, Neil Stephenson
  2. Vurt, Jeff Noon
  3. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
  4. Neuromancer, William Gibson
  5. White Light, Rudy Rucker
  6. Feersum Endjinn, Iain M. Banks
  7. Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
  8. Dune, Frank Herbert
  9. A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernon Vinge
  10. As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem

That’s it. Happy holidays!

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turkey down, ham to go

So, what do 20 or 30 relatives who see each other about once a year have in common? Relatively little.

Ha!

Actually, the one thing we seem to all share in abundance is the desire to watch DVDs. Particularly sci-fi DVDs. (I suppose the medium is not really all that important, DVD just happens to be the most convenient format available.) My cousins have a wall-projection TV mounted to the ceiling of their basement, (where all of us minnesota cousins are sleeping for the duration), and the surround sound system down there is pretty kick ass.

Today I have watched: Reign of Fire, Ocean’s Eleven (ok, that was last night before we went to bed), Castaway and Death to Smoochie (which I bought on DVD for $10 at the video store), plus bits and pieces of 2010, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Spy Kids. We didn’t actually watch 2010, because I convinced people that if we were going to watch it, there was a perfectly good DVD downstairs, (and they happened to be surfing the cable channels and stumbled onto it.) We still saw about half an hour of it, in the middle somewhere. Remind me to watch the whole thing sometime.

I should have finished my book instead. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m reading Jeff Noon’s new novel, Falling out of Cars. It’s pretty weird. I love the writing style, but so far the story has gone nowhere, and not very fast at that. The premise is decent, but I’m afraid when all is said and done it may have been a better short story than it has been a novel. I’ll let you know when I finish it.

Oh yeah, and my cousin Rebecca has a couple of blogs. I haven’t pried the URLs out of her yet, but she’s got one on blogger and one on LiveJournal. I mentioned movable type, and she at least knew what it was. We have yet to sit down at a computer togetherÂ…

I read this popular science article about vole monogamy this afternoon. It’s interesting. Makes me wish we were that simplistic. Hell, maybe we are, and all the speculative stuff at the end of the article is just hot air. (That was kinda what I thought it was as soon as they stopped talking about voles, so who knows?) Now I just need to get my hands on some liquid oxytocinÂ…

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We’re living in this incredible flux.

We’re living in this incredible flux. This book I read, some really dumbass science-fiction psychology focused book–Cyteen–was constantly talking about how we live in flux. How our minds are full of contradictions, and that causes us to “flux” which really just meant let our emotions control our actions. I don’t think lack of thought automatically means we’re acting based on our emotions. I’m not even sure the book meant this. I’m getting what the book was saying and what I’m trying to say all mixed up. It’s not important about the book. It’s one of those epic things that’s far too long to forget. I wish it had been much shorter (like 400 pages shorter) and I’d have already forgotten all about it.

Anyway, I feel moody today. In flux. Maybe it’s the moon. Maybe it’s the stars. Probably it’s just my weird sleep patterns that end up getting in the way of work and my schedule for the day.

I bought the new Freddy Fresh album. It’s grand. Good-ole techno. Hard beats and catchy loops that go on for probably too long. It’s his first american release, and I’ve got one of his imports (the one with the fatboy slim remix on it) and I think this is better.

I’m gonna go take a shower, and wash away the moody sleep-eye residue. Water falls different on my head now. It doesn’t run down my hair. If there’s anything I miss about my hair, it was the way the hot water sorta soked into it slowly, moving it’s way down my back like a snake or something. Now the water is just there, instantly, and it slides off my head just as fast, heating my scalp for only so long.

I recommend everyone go from having really long hair to shaving their head once in their life. It’s like you’re a new person, only you’re still the same. And everyone comments about it, even people you don’t talk to that often. (or, as was the case yesterday, people you never talk to–a waitress at a bar I go to two or three times a month with co-workers came up to me and made some comment.)

The response to the change so far has been very positive. I don’t have any weird lumps on my head or anything. I look tougher now, I guess, and my ear-rings stick out more, which I think is good. I’ve always wanted to look more punk, without actually doing anything terribly drastic. OK, so I guess shaving my head is kinda darastic. Maybe. Really, I’m just afraid Yami is going to never speak to me now. (And, as predicted–not here–she hasn’t really been writing me since she got back to caltech. So I wouldn’t even notice a difference… not that I’m bitter. ;)