Friday, May 13, 2011
Friday, May 06, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Friday, April 01, 2011
2011.Book10 - Best Served Cold (Abercrombie)
Very good new-style epic fantasy. Revenge, betrayal, violence, sex, and humour.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
2011.Book9 - Room (Donoghue)
Pretty good. First half's button-pushing thriller. Second half's goal-less fish-out-of-water.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
2011.Book2 - Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes (Watts)
Relentlessly pessimistic short stories. The one about the whales was morbidly hilarious.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Book 45 - A Million Little Pieces (Frey)
Very good addiction recovery story. In retrospect, pretty clearly fictionalized.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Book 42 - An Exaltation of Larks (Reed)
Very good. Not as weird as Jo Walton says. Some excellent ideas. Characters make the wrong choice in the ending. The turtles were right: an eternal infinite universe would be better than single finite universe.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Book 40 - Disciple of the Dog (Bakker)
Very good thriller. But would I like it so much if it wasn't Bakker?
Monday, October 25, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Book 35 - Religion in Four Dimensions (Kaufmann)
Very good. But the promised existential and comparative dimensions are in somewhat short supply. Another essay by Kaufmann had some good stuff along the line of "the Buddhist can free himself of attachment and suffering and achieve a mild benevolence to all, but the Jew can take a tragic path to sacrifice himself for all people"
Book 34 - Stealing Jesus (Bawer)
Pretty good. But Kaufmann might tell Bawer his church of love is a fantasy.
Friday, September 03, 2010
Book 33 - Autobiopsy (Rubens)
Good literary fiction. Like Isherwood, not awesome, but excellent ending.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Book 31 - Well of Ascension (Sanderson)
Good epic fantasy. A little heavy-handed with the emotional plot.
Monday, August 09, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Book 28 - Down There On a Visit (Isherwood)
Very good modern novel. Last part is quite a surprising twist.
Friday, July 02, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Book 22 - The Road Less Travelled (Peck)
Very good self-help. Parapsychology and synchronicity a little hard to swallow
Friday, June 04, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Book 18: A Generous Orthodoxy (McLaren)
Average. The spirit stuff is very weak and disappointing. Like, that's all you get?
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
Book 10 - Guitar (Brookes)
Pretty good history of guitars and some modern boutique guitar-building. Brookes is more interested in guitars than music.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
2010 - 7 - Permanance (Schroeder)
Pretty good SF. Similar universe and ideas to Watts' Blindsight (consciousness rare, though not a disadvantage), but sunny and cheery instead of bleak and hopeless.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
2010 - 2 - The Great Emergence (Tickle)
Awful. Historically ignorant, philosophically incoherent, sociologically fanciful.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Book 49: Pushing Ice (Reynolds)
OK SF. Some cool ideas, but protagonists were annoying power-loving heirarchs.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Friday, October 09, 2009
Book 40: Fugitives of Chaos (Wright)
Good fantasy. In the struggle of art v. ideology, art wins, but ideology pokes its nose in occasionally.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
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