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Anathem (Neal Stephenson): I finished Anathem! Perhaps it will stop eating my brain despite my obvious attraction to the avout lifestyle.
Okay, blurb: depending who you ask, the scientist-monks of Arbre (a world similar to, but not identical to our Earth) have either withdrawn from the world outside their concents or been locked away for everyone's good for a long time. Like, 3700 years long. This is the story of one avout's interactions with the non-avout world. Also, it's a 900 page fight between not-Realist versus not-Nominalist scientific philosophers, and the story of the research/technology/politics interfaces, and - it's pretty mindblowing.
This is a Stephenson novel: all the girls act like Amy Shaftoe. The character development is Boy To Man. The plot is not derailed by infodumps: the infodumps are the plot. Science is awesome. Technology is awesome. Stephenson lost me in the philosophical thickets a couple of times - page after page of abstract reasoning, while I wondered when something would be welded or blown up or buried by magma - so I'm not wholeheartedly recommending this. Parts of it were awesome, like ( the following spoilers. )
Also there is an Anathem wiki. If parallel processing could be directly inputted into world peace, we would live an a golden age of fraternal harmony.
There was the epic Diane Duane binge of November - December '09, encompassing parts of all three Door novels, rereading allseven eight Young Wizard novels, and a pair of Star Trek novels new to me: ( three rambly paragraphs of recap and reaction behind the cut. )
I think what I like about Duane's novels is her people, and her characters' optimism; her worldbuilding is usually fun and hits my "sense of wonder" spot on visuals, but fails when I throw my brain at the structures of good and evil. (I take the bus to work. I have plenty of time to contemplate the nature of morality in genre fiction.) So I enjoy Duane's novels a lot with significant caveats.
I tried to read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense (Suzette Haden Elgin) but found the approaches not particularly useful. It's 2010, not 1988, and some of the concepts carry over, but many of the examples are dated. Tolerance is in, at least superficially, and that influences how people verbally assault each other. I also think I was actually looking for one part "negotiating the workplace" and one part "managing your inherited bad traits: how to not revert under stress, and how to get through mandatory family time without verbal bloodshed", and this is just not that book.
The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Zachary M. Schrag): A scholarly history of DC's heavy-rail public transit system from the perspective of a great partisan. Schrag tries to tell a multidisciplinary story - metro as DC peculiar politics; metro as an example of public transit of a certain era; race and class in DC - and only partially succeeds. Schrag dismisses the Georgetown metro stop as completely false, but dad played the "I was there" card and remembers some fuss. Possibly it was all Washington Post letters to the editor, but the debate - and the fact it's remembered at all - says something about DC.
Fantasy: The Best of the Year (2006) (Ed. Rich Horton): For my own future reference, I am c&p'ing the table of contents from Rich Horton's website. I did indeed read:
( the contents of this collection. )
Okay, I gave up on "The Gist Hunter" three pages in because it had boring, confusing demons not amenable to interruptions and I had a 2 AM metro ride with many other New Year's revelers, but I tried. All of these were okay without hitting anything special; some of the stories that I would call horror-tinged have stuck in unpleasant ways ("Sunbird", "Invisible", "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun"); some of the stories with more worldbuilding made me think more might be okay ("The Secret of Broken Tickers", "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun"), and some were charming or interesting without being deep ("Pip and the Fairies", "On the Blindside", and yes there is a theme there). "Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died" is like Jane Austen fanfic, sometimes with vampires. The only story that moved me deep in my soul was "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", but I'm moved to eviscerate it for retelling the "unfulfilled white man gets the girl and oh, is King of Awesome" story which I loathe. What a waste of good worldbuilding! I want to write 2,000 words of unauthorized homage where the main character loses the girl, isn't king, and turns out to be pretty happy with some variation of middle- to upper-middle class living in Gondwanaland.
Fantasy is my predictable genre: I am unlikely to be deeply moved, but I am likely to be distracted as long as necessary. Horton's '06 Best of collection is a perfect example of this: nothing made me want to seek out more of the same author, but most of it was readable, if not always to my taste.
Numbers game: 16 total finished, 1 unfinished. 6 new, 11 reread; 13 fiction, 3 nonfiction. 1 short story collection.
Okay, blurb: depending who you ask, the scientist-monks of Arbre (a world similar to, but not identical to our Earth) have either withdrawn from the world outside their concents or been locked away for everyone's good for a long time. Like, 3700 years long. This is the story of one avout's interactions with the non-avout world. Also, it's a 900 page fight between not-Realist versus not-Nominalist scientific philosophers, and the story of the research/technology/politics interfaces, and - it's pretty mindblowing.
This is a Stephenson novel: all the girls act like Amy Shaftoe. The character development is Boy To Man. The plot is not derailed by infodumps: the infodumps are the plot. Science is awesome. Technology is awesome. Stephenson lost me in the philosophical thickets a couple of times - page after page of abstract reasoning, while I wondered when something would be welded or blown up or buried by magma - so I'm not wholeheartedly recommending this. Parts of it were awesome, like ( the following spoilers. )
Also there is an Anathem wiki. If parallel processing could be directly inputted into world peace, we would live an a golden age of fraternal harmony.
There was the epic Diane Duane binge of November - December '09, encompassing parts of all three Door novels, rereading all
I think what I like about Duane's novels is her people, and her characters' optimism; her worldbuilding is usually fun and hits my "sense of wonder" spot on visuals, but fails when I throw my brain at the structures of good and evil. (I take the bus to work. I have plenty of time to contemplate the nature of morality in genre fiction.) So I enjoy Duane's novels a lot with significant caveats.
I tried to read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense (Suzette Haden Elgin) but found the approaches not particularly useful. It's 2010, not 1988, and some of the concepts carry over, but many of the examples are dated. Tolerance is in, at least superficially, and that influences how people verbally assault each other. I also think I was actually looking for one part "negotiating the workplace" and one part "managing your inherited bad traits: how to not revert under stress, and how to get through mandatory family time without verbal bloodshed", and this is just not that book.
The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Zachary M. Schrag): A scholarly history of DC's heavy-rail public transit system from the perspective of a great partisan. Schrag tries to tell a multidisciplinary story - metro as DC peculiar politics; metro as an example of public transit of a certain era; race and class in DC - and only partially succeeds. Schrag dismisses the Georgetown metro stop as completely false, but dad played the "I was there" card and remembers some fuss. Possibly it was all Washington Post letters to the editor, but the debate - and the fact it's remembered at all - says something about DC.
Fantasy: The Best of the Year (2006) (Ed. Rich Horton): For my own future reference, I am c&p'ing the table of contents from Rich Horton's website. I did indeed read:
( the contents of this collection. )
Okay, I gave up on "The Gist Hunter" three pages in because it had boring, confusing demons not amenable to interruptions and I had a 2 AM metro ride with many other New Year's revelers, but I tried. All of these were okay without hitting anything special; some of the stories that I would call horror-tinged have stuck in unpleasant ways ("Sunbird", "Invisible", "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun"); some of the stories with more worldbuilding made me think more might be okay ("The Secret of Broken Tickers", "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun"), and some were charming or interesting without being deep ("Pip and the Fairies", "On the Blindside", and yes there is a theme there). "Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died" is like Jane Austen fanfic, sometimes with vampires. The only story that moved me deep in my soul was "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", but I'm moved to eviscerate it for retelling the "unfulfilled white man gets the girl and oh, is King of Awesome" story which I loathe. What a waste of good worldbuilding! I want to write 2,000 words of unauthorized homage where the main character loses the girl, isn't king, and turns out to be pretty happy with some variation of middle- to upper-middle class living in Gondwanaland.
Fantasy is my predictable genre: I am unlikely to be deeply moved, but I am likely to be distracted as long as necessary. Horton's '06 Best of collection is a perfect example of this: nothing made me want to seek out more of the same author, but most of it was readable, if not always to my taste.
Numbers game: 16 total finished, 1 unfinished. 6 new, 11 reread; 13 fiction, 3 nonfiction. 1 short story collection.
