Reviews, Top N lists, and other sundry literary stuff.
First and foremost: an uncritical read of this book will leave you feeling cynical and a bit cheated. It ranks up there with E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene 1. It would be very easy to find yourself getting defensive about the material presented in here; especially if you believe humans to be some special […]
Back in June, I posted about my foray into GoodReads. At the time, I simply posted some “short versions of immediate impressions”. I was convinced that my time with GoodReads would be short, that I would quickly grow frustrated with it and move on. In part, I formed this opinion because I dove into it […]
If asked to write the foreword to some 20th anniversary commemorative edition, I would say that Max Barry‘s Jennifer Government is like a bottle of Diet Neal Stephenson served with a twist of Christopher Moore (or perhaps a dash of Tom Robbins?) There is something uncannily similar between Snow Crash and Jennifer Government: in the comic […]
I have been a fan of Iain Banks‘ fiction for a few years now. Ever since reading The Wasp Factory, I have been among those that counted him among the ranks of interesting, inventive, and perhaps even important living novelists. Prior to The Algebraist , I had not read any of Banks’ science fiction. It […]
I would suggest, dear reader, that when considering Consider the Lobster , that you consider it in the same light as David Foster Wallace’s collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 1. Use that book as your frame of reference for style and content and you can place this collection firmly into the […]
Where to begin? I would be willing to say that Max Brooks has given us a “new classic” of zombie literature in World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. The novel is well-structured, is well-paced, and seems so … plausible. And when I say “plausible”, I mean the Brooks has tried to […]
A tightly themed, well executed collection: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse captures our apocalypse fears and fantasies equally well and sometimes even simultaneously. Adams wisely chooses Stephen King’s “The End of the Whole Mess” as an opener and moves into all manner of exciting territory from there. Wastelands is the expected mix of strong (and […]
Two worthy combinations from last month: Oryx and Crake: a psychoanalytic read: her, amputated Repetition is a form of change; who said that? zombie phobia “Search Term Haiku” is a series wherein I examine this site’s log files and construct one or more haiku poems from search terms and phrases that led visitors to the […]
WARNING: elements of my review may be interpreted as spoilers. Proceed with caution. FIRSTLY: If the entirety of Ghostwritten had bristled with the same energy and momentum as the bottom half of the book (i.e., from “Holy Mountain” through to “Night Train”) then my review here would bristle with five stars. That said, I also […]
Take a breath and organize your thoughts, eh? The year is off to an interesting and exciting start in nearly every dimension. Fortunately, most of those dimensions are good. Not all, but certainly enough of them to think optimistically about the big year that is setting up and stretching out before us. More recently… First: […]