I'm so jealous! The main character of the book I'm reading currently just happened to be driving from Naples to Rome at the beginning of the book, actually. It's Chain of Chance by Stanislaw Lem from 1975.
What are ya reading?
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 ljim2000 |
Re: What are ya reading? | ||
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Posts: 4513 (02/02/07 12:20 AM) Audio Ambassador |
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (02/25/07 2:20 AM) Audio Ambassador |
I read Revelation Space as the group book read for the Science Fiction board, and though it was certainly imperfect, I liked it enough to pick up Reynold's second book Chasm City. Liking that one too.
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Nicholas |
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Posts: 6698 (03/02/07 11:43 PM) SARS Incubator |
"They're Made of Meat", short story by Terry Bisson.
Just found out that there's a short film too. Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams. - Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo |
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (03/12/07 11:47 PM) Audio Ambassador |
I'm now onto my third Alastair Reynolds book, Redemption Ark. He really is getting better with each book, so I get the feeling he may be a seriously major author in a few years. He's working wonder with the space opera genre right now.
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criminalenglish |
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Posts: 96 (03/26/07 11:45 PM) |
Lord Byron's Novel by John Crowley, which is about a lost novel by Lord Byron, of course. A Leaven Of Malice, the second volume of the Robertson Davies' Salterton Trilogy, which sees the conceited academic buffoon, Professor Vambrace, dealing with a prank that seems intended to make his family an object of general public ridicule.
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Nicholas |
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Posts: 6698 (03/27/07 8:52 PM) SARS Incubator |
I am just starting to read The House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert. I became rather interested in Florentine history after seeing the Medici family seal all over Florence.
Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams. - Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo |
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criminalenglish |
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Posts: 96 (04/05/07 4:59 AM) |
The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd, Eight Little Piggies by Stephen Jay Gould and I Sold My Soul On Ebay by Hemant Mehta.
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Nicholas |
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Posts: 6698 (05/11/07 10:56 PM) SARS Incubator |
I finally got introduced to Mr. David Sedaris when I read his book of essays, "Me Talk Pretty One Day." I snorted a couple of times on the subway, both failed attempts to suppress my laughter.
 Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams. - Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo |
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (05/12/07 9:16 PM) Audio Ambassador |
I just started reading Pure Blood by the late SF author Mike McQuay. This book, written in 1985 deals with a New York in the future that has been reduced to medieval type society as a result of global warming and rampant genetic engineer experiments gone bad.
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (07/20/07 7:54 PM) Audio Ambassador |
Believe it or not, I'm not read a science fiction book currently. I'm reading ROTTEN: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs; the autobiography of John Lydon. An interesting read about a very intriguing cultural provocateur.
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (07/29/07 10:20 PM) Audio Ambassador |
Well, I'm back to the SF: Alastair Reynolds - Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days. Two excellent novellas set in the Revelation Space universe.
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (09/07/07 10:32 AM) Audio Ambassador |
I just started Green Sky River by Gregory Benford last night. It's dedicated to "Lou Aronica and David Brin two knights of the Sevagram". Started off with action from the get go and a seeming conflict between humans and "mechs" in an interplanetary future that reads a bit like post-apocolypse at first.
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (10/23/07 1:10 AM) Audio Ambassador |
I'm reading Odds Are Murder by Mike McQuay in his science fiction detective Mathew Swain series. Proto-cyberpunk in a futuristic Raymond Chandler style with bio-plague thrown in for fun!
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Nicholas |
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Posts: 6698 (10/24/07 8:50 PM) SARS Incubator |
I'm reading this turn-of-the-century satire on human affairs called "I am a Cat," by Soseki Natsume.
Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams. - Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo |
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (11/12/07 9:37 PM) Audio Ambassador |
I'm about half way through Dhalgren by Samuel Delany currently. I'm liking it a lot and haven't found the mammoth page count or explicit sexual content daunting in the slightest.
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (12/30/07 1:32 AM) Audio Ambassador |
Across the Sea of Suns by Gregory Benford.
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (05/15/08 11:07 PM) Audio Ambassador |
I just finally got around to starting Lord Valentines Castle by Robert Silverberg. Very engaging from the start. It appears we have a science fiction novel that reads like Fantasy in the tradition of such work set by Anne McCaffrey (who is quoted raving about the book within the paperback edition). The planet Marjipoor is apparently vastly large with more than one species of humanoid roaming it, but the technology, after 8,000 years has devolved to the equivalent of our Dark Ages. The book begins with a commoner who's suffered some sort of memory loss who just happens to share the same name with Lord Valentine, the ruler of the gigantic planet.
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Nicholas |
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Posts: 6698 (05/17/08 10:05 AM) SARS Incubator |
Huh. That does sound really fascinating.
After taking quite a few detours into Haruki Murakami's corpus--which I highly recommend--I've finally reached the second half of Richard Dawkin's The Ancestor's Tale. Dawkins is probably the world's premiere evolutionary biologist now, and also one of science's most prominent atheists. I enjoy the science in his book a lot--he takes us back to the beginning of evolutionary time, starting with the evolution of the human species. Unfortunately, he has this bad tendency to sprinkle his prose with frequent jabs at Creationists, which is a serious case of singing to the choir. I mean, seriously. We all get the point already. Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams. - Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo |
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (05/18/08 10:03 PM) Audio Ambassador |
Yeah, I've heard him on the radio. He's one of the last to embrace that perspective so openly, so I guess he feels compelled to shove it down our throats. I just continue to wonder why the concept of a higher power even has to be debated by evolutionary scientists.
I mean, certainly evolution is completely solid grounded science that completely contradicts the literal interpretation of the holy texts of most faiths. Given those texts were written thousands of years ago, and are obviously collections of mythology, I would hope science would do that! However, how that proves that the tradition of morality stemming from much of that mythology isn't valid to modern humanity, or that some form of higher power that can't be so literally nailed down might exist, is purely beyond me. |
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ljim2000 |
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Posts: 4513 (05/26/08 4:06 AM) Audio Ambassador |
I just started Brasyl by Ian McDonald, which won the British Science Fiction Association award and is a Hugo nominee. McDonald's last novel River of Gods was a brilliant near-future look at India and this one seeks to do the same sort of thing with South America's largest and most high tech country.
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