If anyone is looking for some last-minute gift ideas for the beloved bookworm(s) in their lives, F_D has a few recommendations to pass along. I’ve picked my top ten reads from ’08 1 and posted them here for you to serve as gift ideas for the avid 2 readers in your lives. The list is […]
Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter 1 Cryptonomicon by Stephenson 2 Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945-1991 by Isaacs and Downing The UFO Phenomenon (Mysteries of the Unknown) by Time-Life Orbiter by Ellis (illustrated by Foran with Stewart) How to Get Happily Published by Appelbaum The New Space Opera edited by Dozois and Straham (Original at Flickr.) Yes, still reading […]
David Foster Wallace – whose memory I trust will live on as one of prodigious talent and unique wit– was found dead in his home by his wife. He was 46. DFW was a hero to me, a young author who moved fluidly with words through our ill landscape of postmodernity. For every grammatical or […]
After reading The Algebraist, I was going to swear off Iain M. Banks for the rest of ’08. But, Ginnie recommended it so highly that I felt it was worth bumping up the list. On the GoodReads.com scale, Look to Windward gets: ★★★ 1 For those nit-picking over the rating: it was close to 4-stars […]
Perhaps it is unfair to George Saunders to review Civil War Land in Bad Decline when Pastoralia was the book that introduced me to him. But that is the order in which they were read and so that is the order in which I evaluate them. That being said, I suspect I may have been […]
In Gun, with Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem gives us science fiction’s worthy successor to Raymond Chandler. Though this is the easy take-home message from nearly every quoted newspaper columnist, book jacket blurb, and miscellaneous reviewer — they also all happen to be right. Even a cursory familiarity with Chandler’s pulp noir will ring through with […]
When You Are Engulfed in Flames is a solid ★★★★ 1 and damn near close to ★★★★★ that we’ll settle for ★★★★½. But then again, I’m a serious Sedaris fiend. Granted, if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you were curious what I thought of the collection. By now, you (dear reader) have already made […]
Imagine for a moment that you go into the up-scale liquor store around the block that is celebrated city-wide for its fabulous wine selection. You’re a bit of a novice when it comes to wine and are a little embarrassed to be here because your wallet is that ballistic nylon stuff and not something truly […]
Mentioned here previously, 365 Tomorrows has become a favorite daily stop on my internet rounds for a little fiction. Since it’s flash fiction that they have there, it’s good for a quick dose of something new. Roughly 600 words and you’ve gotten yourself a refreshing fix of scifi. Admittedly, it can be hit or miss. […]
A fun, rather endearing little novel by Austin Grossman (this is his first), Soon I Will be Invincible offers us a “generic” superhero milieu that does as much to honor its comic book forebears as it does to satirize them. Grossman gives us a real loser of an evil genius (Doctor Impossible, who suffers from “malign hypercognition disorder”) that […]