Booklog
drorzel | August 14, 2010I don't believe the actual book is out yet, but you can get an electronic Advance Reading copy of the Nth Miles Vorkosigan book, Cryoburn already. Kate picked up a copy, and while she hasn't gotten around to it yet, I read it this week while putting SteelyKid to bed.
The book is another "Lord Auditor Vorkosigan" story, with Miles on a mission to Kibou-Dani, a half-terraformed planet with a positive fetish for cryopreservation. A quirk in local laws gives the "cryocorps" that preserve millions of frozen citizens the right to proxy vote for their clients, and control of their property, so they…
drorzel | March 28, 2010Lest you think that the previous couple of posts indicate that I'm just a cranky curmudgeon who doesn't like anything he reads, let me put in a plug for Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll. I read about half of this piecemeal over a couple of months, then finished it on the plane to the March Meeting. Subtitled "An Alternative History of American Popular Music," it meticulously documents the fads and changes of American music over the first two-thirds or so of the 20th Century, and in the process tells a very different story than what you may think you know.
The origin of…
drorzel | February 18, 2010While Adam Roberts was kind of an ass regarding last year's Hugo ballot, the summary of his latest, Yellow Blue Tibia, sounded pretty entertaining to me, and it was on the Locus Recommended Reading list, so I got it out of the library.
The book is presented as the memoir of Konstantin Skvorecky, a Soviet science fiction author who, along with several of his colleagues, was brought in by Stalin in the late 1940's to concoct a story of an alien invasion that could be used to provide a new enemy for the Soviet Union to rally together against. They concoct a story about aliens of pure radiation,…
drorzel | September 27, 2009There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom-- Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble's online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all of the press has been positive, and while it's taken me a while to work my way through the book, that's entirely a function of having a day job and a baby. The book itself is excellent, and kept me reading alter than I should've several times, which is not something I can say about a lot of biographies…
drorzel | September 14, 2009Over at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, they have a nice post about the Darwin movie, which also appears in today's Links Dump, with John Scalzi addressing the putative controversy about the movie's distribution. John's suggestion for how to attract major US distribution-- Will Smith, explosions, and Jennifer Connelly's breasts-- reminded me of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, a movie that figures prominently in Robert Charles Wilson's latest:
Act One was called Homology and it dealt with Darwin's youth. In this Act young Darwin meets the girl with…
drorzel | September 9, 2009One of the odd things about the C-list celebrity life of a semi-pro blogger is that I get a bunch of requests to review books on physics-related topics. Some of these take the form of a book showing up out of the blue, others are preceded by a polite request from the author. Aaron Santos's How Many Licks? is one of the latter, which helps bump it up the list of things to do...
This is a short little book-- 176 pages total-- built around the idea of Fermi Problems, the order-of-magnitude estimates that Enrico Fermi was famous for. The idea is that, with a little basic knowledge and some really…
drorzel | August 30, 2009I finished re-reading Infinite Jest this week. I'm a few weeks ahead of the Infinite Summer crowd, which is a little frustrating, because I really want to see what they say about the later bits, but they won't get there for a while yet.
Anyway, this is a tough book to summarize, because it's both a very large book, and a very expansive one. You could write elevator pitches about it that would put it in a bunch of different genres-- thriller (terrorists and government agents search for a movie that destroys the brain of anybody who watches it), school story (dope-smoking tennis prodigies try…
drorzel | August 23, 2009Jo Walton has a very nice review of Karl Schroeder's Permanence over at Tor.com, which contains a terrific summary of what makes Schroeder great:
The problem with talking about Permanence (2002), or any of Schroeder's work really, is that it's too easy to get caught up in talking about the wonderful ideas and backgrounds and not pay enough attention to the characters and stories. I think Schroeder's one of the best writers to emerge in this century, and his work seems to me to belong to this century, to be using newly discovered science and extrapolating from present technology, not just…
drorzel | June 20, 2009It's been a while since I did a straight-up booklog post here, but most of what I've been reading lately hasn't really demanded one. I picked this up the other day after seeing a pile of them in the front of a Barnes & Noble, though, and it does deserve comment.
Dog On It is a twist on a hard-boiled private eye story: It's narrated by Chet, a former police dog cadet now owned by Bernie Little, a down-on-his-luck private detective in the Southwest somewhere (it's not entirely clear where-- Chet's a little fuzzy on geography). Really, how could I pass up a book by a talking dog.
Obviously,…
drorzel | January 25, 2009Michael Brooks's 13 Things That Don't Make Sense turned up on a lot of "Best science books of 2008" lists, and the concept of a book about scientific anomalies seemed interesting, so I ordered it from Amazon. It's a quick read (a mere 210 pages, and breezily written), but ultimately a frustrating book.
It took me several chapters to pin down what bugged me about the book, but it all became clear when I looked at the back cover flap, and saw that the author is a former editor of New Scientist. The really pretty much sums it up-- in physics circles, New Scientist is known for publishing three…
drorzel | January 13, 2009Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid's Book...
This is a very odd book. It's printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It's too short and simple, though, to have much appeal to significantly older children, aside from the fact that the story is written over the top of 15 absolutely gorgeous reproductions of pictures of astronomical objects.
This is probably one of those objects whose cool appearance is the only real reason for the thing to exist. The pictures really are…
drorzel | December 22, 2008I was up late watching my Giants play the Carolina Panthers (they won in OT-- now you see the importance of Brandon Jacobs), and today is a Baby Day, so I have no deep thoughts to blog. So here are some quick comments on recent reading:
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. This is the concluding volume of the Mistborn trilogy, and reading it confirms that he was the right choice to finish the Wheel of Time. This book takes a huge, complicated plot, and brings all the various pieces together for a satisfying conclusion. He also does a nice job of complicating the set-up from the original…
drorzel | December 8, 2008I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of Competence Fiction), and a pop-science book titled The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Came of Age by Louisa Gilder, because it looked fairly relevant to my own book-in-progress.
Amusingly, my RSS feeds yesterday brought me the latest in a series of posts in which ZapperZ waxes peevish about the book…
drorzel | December 2, 2008This caught my eye at the library yesterday, because it looked like a compact survey of kookery, and I wasn't disappointed. Indeed, it's probably the most blog-like book I've read in quite some time-- bits of the chapters could easily be posted at Orac's place, and nobody would think it odd. The endnotes are even full of URL's, and there is the inevitable blog.
Thompson defines "counterknowledge" on the first page, after listing off a bunch of popular kook theories:
This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact-- packaged so effectively, indeed, that the twenty-first…
drorzel | November 30, 2008I've gotten out of the book-logging habit, but Spaceman Blues is good enough that I feel compelled to write about it. I had heard of the book some time back-- I believe I recall Patrick Nielsen Hayden saying nice things about it at some con or another-- but the packaging didn't really give me a clear idea of what it was like, so I never got around to buying it until Tor offered it as a free e-book. I'll buy a paper copy soon, though, and probably pick up his new book as well.
It's hard to fault the copy writer, though. This is a really difficult book to describe. The promotional site name-…
drorzel | October 5, 2008The best way-- really, the only way-- to sum up David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞ is by quoting a bit from it. This comes from the middle part of the book, after a discussion of Fourier series, in one of the "If You're Interested" digressions from the main discussion:
(IYI There was a similar problem involving Fourier Integrals about which all we have to know is that they're special kinds of 'closed-form' solutions to partial differential equations which, again, Fourier claims work for any arbitrary functions and which do indeed seem to-- work, that is-- being…
drorzel | October 5, 2008Jennifer Ouellette's pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I'm really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I'm going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I've been trying to correct that.
Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the Science21 meeting, but am just getting around to blogging. Longitude is Dava Sobel's bestselling book about English clockmaker John Harrison and his forty-year sturggle to win 20,000 pounds for making a clock capable of keeping time at sea well enough to allow navigation.
This…
drorzel | July 27, 2008Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it's a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton's "Great Discoveries" series (which inexplicably lacks a web page-- get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing is part of the point.
Some time back, there was a "meme" that went through the science side of blogdom asking people to post about their favorite historical scientist. I didn't contribute, mostly because I didn't really have a favorite…
drorzel | July 18, 2008Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician's assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly close to my own age, was all but begging for medical clearance to go back to work. The PA refused to provide it, saying that it was out of the question until next week, when she removed the stitches from the surgery the woman had just had a day or two earlier.
In…
drorzel | July 7, 2008John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I've never gotten around to reading. I've been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read.
Unfortunately, I probably would've been a lot more impressed had I read it when it first came out in 1988. Most of the examples used to illustrate his point that people are generally very bad with numbers are exceedingly familiar. They appear in How to Lie With Statistics, and the recent The Drunkard's…