Just a short note to pay homage to a work of the hardest ‘hard’ science fiction I have read in many a moon. Mission of Gravity is that rarest of birds, a gripping adventure story on an almost impossible world, backed by meticulously calculated speculative science. The hero of the book, a wily trading captain …
Category Archives: Books
Monday Book Report: The Devil of Nanking
“Some things are too terrible to be true,” sang Bob Dylan on the album he released September 11, 2001. Fiction was invented—in part—to resolve the paradox, to give emotional body to the merely true, to give life where the recitation of facts and history bathes its subject in a deadening radiation of memory and catalogue. …
400 Books (not really)
Today I finished the 400th book since I began tracking my reading back in 2016. Of course, I generally do not count towards my ‘Books Read’ total those volumes belonging to the Comics & Graphic Novels category, so in my self-approved count, this book is #351. The slim staple-bound almost-a-pamphlet in question is Life on …
Book List: 4th Century, 2nd Quarter
Continuing my ongoing listing of books most recently read, and continuing the practice just lately begun of presenting such listing in convenient (to me) twenty-five (25) book chunks, for reasons touched upon in the first such set (viewable here), I herewith present the most recent twenty-five (25) books read, #326 – #350 in my count …
Monday Book Report – Burning Chrome
The most noticeable thing about William Gibson’s future as seen in his 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome is just how relentlessly shiny it is. Just like the classics of 1930s Science Fiction he pretends to disdain, even the dark underbelly of his future is full of “Gee, whiz!” artifacts that take the observer’s breath …
Monday Book Report: Agnes Grey
In partial fulfillment of the promise I made to read works by the sisters of Charlotte Brontë, and in partial penance for baiting remarks I made purporting to disdain “women writers”, I have just completed Agnes Grey by the lesser Baldwin—I mean Brontë, of course—Anne Brontë, the youngest sibling of the much ballyhooed literary sisterhood. …
Monday Book Report: Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a 170 year-old romance novel in which the protagonists are beautiful only on the inside, their outward unattractiveness being dunned into the reader’s poor brain at every opportunity. I have read only one other author’s romance novels heretofore — by accident (thinking they were mysteries) — and though I should …
Book List: 4th Century, 1st Quarter
I decided both that the actual lists of books read is my favorite part of this tracking nonsense, and that I cannot wait until an entire new century of books has been read before updating you, my impatient readers. Thus, I herewith present the most recent twenty-five (25) books read, #301 – #325 if you’re …
Monday Book Report: Doomsday: The End of the World–A View Through Time
“I Read It So You Don’t Have To” Department Doomsday: The End of the World–A View Through Time by Russell Chandler is a meandering, badly held together set of essays about human ideas and experiences with the end of all things. The book is strongest when it dives into modern Christian apocalyptic thought and history. …
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Monday Book Report: Caligula For President
The Truth Won’t Set You Free Department I follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum to not read books less than a year old for two reasons, and the second is not laziness. Caligula For President proved (in both senses) the second reason, because reading this book now convulses and repulses in a way it could not …
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