Bookses
Anything about books and authors
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Friday, March 18, 2005
Rest In Peace Andre Norton
I hadn’t yet gotten around to noting Andre Norton’s passing the way I did Jack Chalker’s a few weeks ago, in part due to being busy, in part because it’s been so widely noted, and in part because she was never a big author for me.
As far as I know, the only book I have ever read by her, and the only one I own, is Merlin’s Mirror, which was excellent, if somewhat targeted at a pre-adult audience. It’s possible I read other of her works, from my sister or the library, so far back in my youth as to have forgotten. Turns out that book fits in with her heavy interest in Arthurian legend
Here’s a good bio, picture and remembrances if you’d like to learn more.
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Calvin & Hobbes
Jeff reports that the entire run of Calvin & Hobbes is now online, free.
Woohoo! It’s my favorite.
Little Girl Blue, Come Read Your Book…
Amazingly, we are lacking in books so far for the Sadie Unit. She’s so intrigued by them, we should start reading them to her soon. To that end, we’d like to get some board books that will hold up to being grabbed by her muscularness and chomped upon. Plus short books are good for the old wandering attention span.
What really stands out, though, is the lack of a nursery rhymes book. That’s the kind of thing I usually tried to give my nieces and nephews, the oldest one in each family, anyway, for their first Christmas. That and stuffed animals bigger than them. I have fond memories of the book of nursery rhymes in the house when I was a kid, but my memory of the specifics is sketchy.
For the subsequent kids in each family, or if I thought they might already have the nursery rhymes and Grimm’s Fairy Tales (also important), I moved to stuff like Hans Christian Anderson and the complete Winnie The Pooh stories. Not to mention Dr. Seuss, of which Sadie has two, but my sister said not to buy because she had most of them to pass along.
Indeed, the first book I ever attempted to read to Sadie was Green Eggs and Ham, which she tolerated most of before squirming and fussing out of control. That was several weeks ago, when her attention span was shorter.
Speaking of Sadie antics, she did the doll shaking trick to Deb, so now Deb knows exactly what I was talking about. This is where she takes her dolly, holds it out toward you and shakes it enticingly while beaming at you. It’s what we would do to her to attract interest in a new toy or distract her into doing something different. Very cute.
Saturday, February 26, 2005
State of Fear
I finished State of Fear, which I enjoyed tremendously. It’s not like it’s the world’s greatest literature, but it’s an excellent idea for a story, vivid, and says things that needed to be said.
In general, at some times more than others, you can just see it unfolding before you on the big screen. It reads like a movie. To me, anyway. Which is not necessarily a bad thing or a good thing; it just is what it is, and I don’t usually notice that in a book. I’d go see the movie, but I can’t imagine anyone making it.
I’m surprised there was that much uproar over it. The guy is more of an environmentalist than I am. Ultimately he is railing against bad science that is overly influenced by its funding sources, institutions that grow old, stodgy, fixed in their views, and come to exist more to perpetuate themselves than anything, at our tendency toward hubris when we don’t really know diddly, and against the use of fear to control and influence the population.
After finishing it, I find claims that he is anti-science to be all the more laughable. That is people caricaturing themselves and helping to make his points for him.
There weren’t as many footnotes as the buzz had led me to expect. Nor was there was much factual lecture stuff as knowing about the footnotes might have made me fear.
I don’t think I am giving too much away to say that I tremendously enjoyed Ted Bradley’s fate.
A major point one character (our favorite) made, even if it is not a viewpoint Crichton himself is fully behind, was a rather libertarian perspective. Governments control population through keeping them in a state of fear. It was the Cold War for decades. This is in keeping with the notion that there are so many laws and regulations that nobody can fail to break some of them, and it is the guilt and fear of being in violation and being potentially punishable that helps keep the populace firmly in control. Fear leads to firmer power.
Anyway, it’s an excellent read I highly recommend.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Seems A Bit Obsessive…
I have never failed to enjoy the writing of science fiction author James P. Hogan, whom I have also had the pleasure of meeting. The year he was guest of honor at Arisia, it was my suggestion to the original con chair that made it happen.
Probably my favorite of his books, and one of my favorites by anyone, is an alternate history/time travel/World War II adventure called The Proteus Operation.
The other day, around the same time I was suffering and ignoring the compulsion to put all our books in alphabetical order as I looked for something to read next (settling on a Heinlein reread), I figured out that I had three copies of The Proteus Operation.
What the heck?
I have no idea how I ended up with three. I believe I had loaned or misplaced my copy, or maybe decided it was getting ratty, so I bought another. That explains the two sitting on one shelf. I am forever trying to loan it at people because I think it’s Just That Good, so I may also have been thinking I’d always have a loaner that I could afford not to get back.
But the third copy, on another shelf? No idea. Yet I think I bought it from a book dealer at an Arisia in the last year or two, thinking exactly the same “good idea to have a spare” thing. Oops.
By the time we go through all our books and cull out duplicates, we might be able to raise pretty good money selling them off. Heh.
Which will involve ordering all the books alphabetically, which I love to do even though I can usually stop myself. Speaking of obsessive. If nothing else, I tell myself we need at least one more bookcase before that would be practical. The ones we have are already overflowing. To really organize the books ideally requires spare space to leave throughout for when new ones need to be added. Maybe someday…
Monday, February 21, 2005
Belarus and Enemies by Lee Hogan: Not Quite a Review
I finished a book! This doesn’t happen as often as it once did.
A friend loaned me two books by Lee Hogan; Belarus and Enemies. They were very good, and quite different, not just for their Russian flavor. If it says anything about them, I look forward to being able to read the next one when presumably the bigger picture it’s been building toward comes to the fore.
Toward the end, I realized that the style and tone reminded me somewhat of C.J. Cherryh, and someone else whose name now escapes me, perhaps done better. Which implies the books won’t be for everyone.
Some of the technology and ideas are a nice escape from the mundane, if you can call your average science fiction (with a tinge of fantasy) “mundane.”
Anyway, now I have to select something else for bedside reading. I’ve been cruising through the hardcover of State of Fear in the reading room at the same time, so am most of the way through that too. I expect to have more to say on that than I did on Lee Hogan’s books. Which appear to be her first, but are not, as she also writes under another name.
I have a whole stack of possible reading picked out for Deb, but I hadn’t thought about it for me…
Update:
The other author I was thinking of was Iain M. Banks. whose stuff I have never quite decided to really like or not. Based on the two I have read, he has a knack for ambiguous flow of story, if that description makes any sense.
Who?
Am I the only person in the blogosphere who heard (from Deb, in my case) that Hunter S. Thompson died and said “who?”
I recognized it as a “famous name” I had seen somewhere, quite possibly in the context of “famous people named Hunter” in a baby name book or something. But I had no clue who he was.
Guess my unculturedness is showing.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Jack L. Chalker, Rest In Peace
I just received the news of Jack L. Chalker’s passing in the form of an e-mail forwarded from the SMOFS list. It is by no means a surprise, but I am saddened to hear it. One always hopes for a better outcome.
It has also been announced on the health updates page, and on Jack’s news site.
Details have not been fully worked out yet, but the service will be at the Marzullo Chapel on Harford Road in Baltimore. There will be a reception afterward at the Best Western. Arrangements have been made for special rates for people attending the funeral.
I would say that he was best know for his Well World series of books, which ironically I had just put on my mental list of possible upcoming reading for Deb when she finishes what she is on.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
More On The Ayn Rand Centenary
Cox & Forkum have also marked the Ayn Rand Centenary. As they say, in part:
Today it’s often taken for granted that “freedom” is an obvious good. But not everyone longs for and values freedom. Some consider it a moral duty to subjugate others for the sake of some “higher” good, whether for the sake of Allah in the Middle East or for the sake of the “common good” in the West. Freedom cannot be spread abroad nor protected here at home without a moral defense of individualism and capitalism. Ayn Rand provided that defense and many other ideas in her philosophy of Objectivism.
Go see the graphic and read the whole thing. If you are unfamiliar with her, it’s a decent, brief introduction and overview.
Reflecting On Rand
Ian Hamet has posted fascinatingly about today’s hundredth anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth. It sounds like he has read more of her than I have. At least, I haven’t read The Romantic Manifesto, though I believe I eventually got my hands on a copy. I agree with much of what he says, and I, too, fall short of agreeing with her completely. Some of the fanatics struck me the same way, clubby - I’d probably use the word cliquish - if not downright cult-like.
I never went through that phase of hating her as he did. My introduction was through seeing her mentioned many other places. Someone wrote a work - I don’t remember if it was an article or longer, or where it was published - titled It Usually Starts With Ayn Rand. For me it started with Robert Ringer, if I recall correctly, and rapidly moved to Rand.
I had read The Fountainhead first, I forget when. In the fall of 1981 I read 1984. That gave me nightmares, something I was never prone to having before then, and helped tip me into a months long bout of depression. What brought me out of that was reading Atlas Shrugged, even though I couldn’t get all the way through “the speech” until a later reading. I’d absorbed an extrapolated enough to know what the speech was all about anyway, and didn’t need the repeated beatings with a cast iron clue bat it represented.
I found We The Living especially depressing, but a good book, clearly formative and different from the others. I pick on public schools, but my late cousin Wendy say We The Living in my collection, got all excited because she had read it in high school, and borrowed it to read again. How amazing! A public high school in relatively northern Maine was assigning Ayn Rand as reading as little as about 20 years ago. Not bad, showing what communism wrought.
I went through a phase of collecting any of her books I could find, and even reading some of them. One of the clearest indicators of why Rand was needed is represented by one store clerk’s reaction to my asking for The Virtue of Selfishness. Understandable, given the common definition and connotation imbued into the word, but silly in that it’s ultimately what we’re all about, what makes us tick and keeps us alive.
Anyway, go read Ian’s post. It’s better than mine.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Fear of Man
This article, via Glenn, doesn’t surprise me. I am on a mailing list that includes the “Killer B’s”: Benford, Brin, and Bear. It’s on encouraging kids to read, and learn to read, through science fiction, which often is what will get an otherwise bored-with-reading kid hooked. There’s a lot of discussion of teaching ideas and so forth.
Lately it has also included bashing on Michael Crichton over being “anti-science,” not merely with State of Fear (which I have not yet read far, but is intriguing for the first few chapters that set things up), but in general.
Not that I would be surprised if some of the facts cited in Crichton’s book are debatable, but even if not a bonfire of delusion fed by power grabbing conspirators, that we are that responsible for climate change is a pretty haughty assumption for humans to make, given what Mr. Sun can do to climate simply by having a hyperactive billionth or so of a solar lifespan.
UPDATE: Added to today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Code of the Coverup Maker
Seeing all the news from Titan has reminded my of a great James P. Hogan book: Code of the Lifemaker. Looks like there are no sentient robots there after all. Darn. Either that or it’s a conspiracy. A government and industry coverup just like the faked Moon landings and the “proof” that the face on Mars is really just lots of big rock formations that are “natural” and look nothing like a face closer up. Damn government, always trying to mislead and hide the truth from us.
I also found myself thinking of the book recently when I read of work that could eventually lead in the direction of growing from manmade seeds things like houses. That’s a specialy on Titan, where the people are machines and the structures they make are biological. There you go. The government is covering this up so they can pore over and introduce that technology slowly, decades after they first find it, just as they did with computer chip technology gleaned from alien craft, since we’re not advanced or intelligent enough to come up with microprocessor technology on our own as a naturally part of a flow of increasing knowledge and technical advancement.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
State of Power
Varifrank has read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear and reviews it at fascinating length. This just makes me all the more intrigued about reading it when Deb has finished it. I’m not going to quote the review, because you should read it all, except for one point, to note that this is a concept I had thought of:
Much as been made of the “Military Industrial Complex� in our culture, but Mr. Crichton brings out a new idea, the “Political-Legal-Media Complex� where certain agencies are interested in hyping a “State of Fear�.
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Jack L. Chalker
I only just learned that Jack L. Chalker is having a rough time and has been in the hospital for a month. I had the pleasure to meet him in 1991, and he’s quite a character and a nice guy. While I haven’t read any of his stuff recently, I enjoyed several of his books. I hope he pulls through and keeps going for many years to come.
Health updates page
Chalker’s new page
His son Steven’s blog
His wife Eva’s blo
His son Dave’s blog
Thursday, January 06, 2005
A meme-ing we will go…
From Jen, another delightful book meme:
...where you copy the list, then remove from it the names of any authors not in your home library, replacing them with names of authors you have. Boldface the ones you’ve added.
Not surprisingly, there’s some serious list-overlap here:
1. Michael Crichton
2. Thomas Hardy
3. Tom Clancy
4. Jane Austen
5. CS Lewis
6. JRR Tolkien
7. Greg Bear
8. Tom Corcoran
9. Jonathan Kellerman
10. William Shakespeare
Your turn. 
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
I Don’t Know, It’s A Mystery
Jeff Soyer has been blogging up a storm. Must be a New Year’s resolution to post more or something…
I must say, I have never been into reading mysteries. The most significant one I can remember reading are the Brains Benton Mysteries when I was a kid, gifts from my sister. Alas, I have only the sixth one still in my collection. The others long since were lost or destroyed in the course of life.
Anyway, Jeff almost makes me want to run out and read Agatha Christie, with his glowing ode to her books.
Thursday, December 30, 2004
I’d actually planned to blog a bit more…
Now that the holidays are drawing to a close, but since my wonderful, wonderful husband bought me this for Christmas...well, lets just say that a new Crichton takes precedence. Yummy.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Books!
Michael Williams speaks highly of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, having just read the seventh, concluding volume. He compared it to a couple other major series; Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Mitch jumped in, recommending Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series.
I know there are other fans of some of these series out there, and I commented so extensively I thought I would copy it here as well. I said:
I’ve never read the Dark Tower Books. Between you and my nephew, I am now most intrigued. My nephew mentioned it when he opened the Michael Whelan calendar I got him at Noreascon for Christmas.
I couldn’t get into the first Martin book. Maybe someday if I try again… My sister loves those.
I’m a big Wheel of Time fan, but agree on the later books having bogged down. Hopefully he will crank it up as expected in the next one, and come to a grand conclusion in a total of not more than two books after that.
Sword of Truth I like but have mixed feelings about. As Deb observed when she couldn’t make herself finish the second one, it’s boring in places. I didn’t really notice the libertarian overtones, amazingly, until the one I described as Goodkind channeling Ayn Rand, but more entertainingly and concisely, into a fantasy novel. I forget the title, but it’s the one where he makes the statue.
SoT is one of those where I will read the cover blurb, say “eh, whatever” because it sounds uninteresting, then eventually will read it and find it anything from an acceptable read to excellent, but not so compelling that I scramble to get the next volume and read it no matter how bad the cover makes it sound.
I’m afraid that despite Jordan’s failings, I am a Wheel of Time addict who will buy Knife of Dreams within days of its release in hardcover, and read it relatively promptly. I know, they have doctors for that.