Books
drorzel | August 23, 2006Over at A Blog Around the Clock, Bora has reposted an old article written in response to a list of "must-read" SF books, in which he sets out to generate his own list. Never one to shy away from excess, he ends up with a nearly complete list of genre novels since about 1890. Steinn points out a few that he missed.
This would be a great point for me to respond with my own list, and rail against the tendency to draw up lists full of books that are historically Important, without considering readability for modern audiences, and all that sort of thing. I'm still being bothered by the "too much…
drorzel | August 13, 2006Not a lot in the Times this week (other than, you know, depressing news about the Middle East), but I did find their piece on couples arguing over audiobooks amusing:
[L]ately an unwitting group has been parachuting into the matrimonial crossfire: authors. As more couples discover how an audio book breaks the monotony of a road trip, writers who once enjoyed sovereignty on respective night tables are now fighting for air time in the family car.
"While I like business books, or nonfiction, or maybe science fiction," said Mr. Wollborg, who rents from Simply Audiobooks, which is set up like…
drorzel | August 13, 2006Well, it's as good a guess at a collective noun for "kerfuffle" as any other...
There have been three moderately heated bloggy controversies that I've been following over the past week, that I haven't commented on. Mostly because I don't really have that much to add to any of the arguments, or at least, not enough to merit a blog post.
I do want to note their existence, though, and maybe by combining them together, it won't feel so much like a pointless fluff post. So if you're dying to know my opinions on the crimes of fanfic, Oliver Stone's casting decisions, or Hooters, click on through to…
drorzel | August 9, 2006Technorati reveals a bunch of responses to my weekend post on genre fiction, and I wanted to at least note a few of them here.
Over at Brad DeLong's, he highlights my comments about story pacing, which sparked some interesting comments. A number of people object that books and movies are too long these days, compared to the past. While there's no denying that many books have swelled, I think that's sort of orthogonal to the sort of pace I was talking about-- you may or may not think that the action advances the plot quickly enough, but there's more happening at any given moment in most modern…
drorzel | August 8, 2006The title is from the Guardian's piece on the Harry Potter convention in Las Vegas (via Bookslut), in which the traditional naive reporter is sent out to be shocked by discovering people in costumes, slash fanfic, and pseudo-academic papers:
Lumos 2006 is not just another conference, it's 'a Harry Potter symposium', and most of the audience aren't academics at all, they're common-or-garden fans, 1,200 of them in total, here for three days' worth of talks, presentations and panels. Dr Blazina's presentation is just one out of a possible six others being held in the same time slot, including '…
drorzel | August 5, 2006Yesterday saw the posting (or at least the arrival on my RSS reader) of two different discussions of the current state of genre fiction. I have issues with both discussions, but reading them together makes for an interesting effect.
First, there's Charlie Stross complaining about the state of SF, and once again lamenting the lack of... something in the SF vein. I'm not entirely clear what it is that he would like to see, other than that it isn't alternate history or werewolf porn-- more on this in a bit. There are various responses and duelling anecdotes in the comments. Over at the Whatever…
drorzel | July 31, 2006There's a comment to the most recent Open Thread at Making Light asking why there isn't more handicapping of the Hugo Awards. The commenter, Kathryn from Sunnyvale, makes reference to a comment on John Scalzi's "Please Vote" thread, that suggested there was a clear favorite in the balloting:
There is a certain book on the short list that had more preorders than the rest of the books had sales combined -- by a factor of 10, most like.
This certain book's author has a fan community that meets up at each Worldcon and throws the biggest and best parties. This year, over 100 members are expected,…
drorzel | July 30, 2006One item I forgot to mention in the previous post: The Times Book Review section today features an article on backlist books and the so-called "Long Tail" exploited by on-line sales. It has some interesting stuff on the business of publishing and the sales of backlist books.
As with the medical story referenced in the previous post, I'd be interested to hear what any of the publishing types out there think of this. As an outsider, it sounds interesting enough, but it could be horribly inaccurate, and I'd never be able to tell.
drorzel | July 25, 2006The New York Times offers a review of several books on science and religion today, including a new screed by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett's book from a little while back, and several books attempting to find common ground between science and religion, by Francis Collins, Owen Gingerish, Joan Roughgarden, and E. O. Wilson. This is probably in the top ten least useful book reviews you'll read this year.
The problem isn't with the subject matter, though I'm sure some at ScienceBlogs will object to the very concept of all save the Dawkins and Dennett. The problem is that they're trying to talk about…
drorzel | July 18, 2006The article about physicists in movies cited previously had one other thing worth commenting on: the fictional portrayal of the practice of science:
All these films illustrate a fundamental pattern for movie science. Rarely is the central scientific concept utterly incorrect, but filmmakers are obviously more interested in creating entertaining stories that sell tickets than in presenting a lesson in elementary physics. They also know that scenes of scientists at a lab bench do not generally make for gripping movie moments. Indeed, the need for drama often pushes the basic scientific idea to…
drorzel | July 17, 2006As you know, Bob, clumsy exposition, particularly in the form of lengthy "infodump" sequences in which large quantities of information are blasted toward the reader in the manner of a shotgun or a firehose, is often held to be one of the hallmarks (or, perhaps, banes) of the SF genre (where "SF" means "speculative fiction," encompassing both "science fiction" and "fantasy"), which is why I was amused to discover the Little Professor (the nom de net of Miriam Burstein) discussing infodumps in Victorian literature, in response to a more general discussion of infodumping by Matthew Cheney,…
drorzel | July 17, 2006We get the Sunday New York Times delivered, because there's something infinitely more civilized about reading an actual paper than sitting at the computer browsing news stories on the Web. The message isn't any different, but the medium makes a difference. Also, I'm more likely to stop to read a story on paper than I am to click on a headline link in a page of links.
What with travel and all, I didn't have as much time as usual last weekend, so the Book Review ended up being set aside, and read this week. Two quick items from reading two weeks of the Times Book Review section back to back:
1…
drorzel | July 14, 2006I was scheduled for a deeply unpleasant medical test yesterday, which I thought was going to leave me lots of time for blogging. yesterday afternoon and this morning. The preliminary test turned out to be so unpleasant (if anybody ever offers to stick a tube through your nose into your stomach, decline politely) that I didn't go through with the test, and, in fact, was kind of wiped out all last night. Hence, yesterday's light blogging, and today's lazy blogging.
One of the controversial things that China Miéville said on the Readercon panels I went to was to sort of dismiss the whole idea…
drorzel | July 11, 2006Having spent the weekend at Readercon, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it's not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses-- in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of the dress-up thing going on. Instead, they're run more like an academic conference, with lots of panel discussions on different topics relating to stuff in the genre. Why this happens is somewhat mystifying, when I stop to think about it, but it's entertaining enough in its way.
Anyway, I went to a handful of panels that…
drorzel | July 11, 2006Having spent the weekend at Readercon, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it's not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses-- in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of the dress-up thing going on. Instead, they're run more like an academic conference, with lots of panel discussions on different topics relating to stuff in the genre. Why this happens is somewhat mystifying, when I stop to think about it, but it's entertaining enough in its way.
Anyway, I went to a handful of panels that…
drorzel | June 15, 2006Via James Nicoll, a new SF Webzine, Helix. Because you don't have enough things to read on the Interweb.
drorzel | June 8, 2006Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll (SF reviewer and walking True Lab Story) is discussing the best novels of the 1990's. He doesn't have the "SF" in there, but it's sort of implicit, because that's what James does.
Keeping up the literary/ pop culture bent of the last couple of weeks (there'll be science stuff soon, but it's the end of the term, and I don't even want to think about physics right at the moment-- it reminds me of the grading I should be doing), I'll post some suggestions after the cut. The list will mostly be SF, because that's the bulk of my reading, but I'll mix in a few…
drorzel | June 7, 2006Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse recommends mystery writers, and touches on something that's always puzzled me about the genre:
Like Symons [Robert Barnard] has largely eschewed the detective series, which is probably has kept his profile lower than it could have been, but there is one recurring character--the english way of death.
I've really never understood why it is that mystery novels always seem to come in series. In fact, it's not unusual to see a debut novel hailed for introducing a series, which always seems sort of premature to me.
Why is that, anyway? That is, why is the…
drorzel | June 6, 2006I've been watching Netflix DVD's of the late, lamented Homicide: Life of the Street lately, and a little while back, I went through the DVED's of the first season of The Wire, which shares some of the same creative team. In particular, both series were based in part on work by David Simon, whose Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets tracked the Homicide unit of the Baltimore Police for a full year.
I've been curious about the book for a while, and finally checked it out of the library a couple of weeks ago. It's a fascinating story in its own right-- Simon had unprecedented access to the…
drorzel | June 5, 2006Kate's come up with a semi-ambitious plan for the summer: She's going to re-read The Lord of the Rings (for the first time since the movies came out), and post chapter-by-chapter thoughts on her LiveJournal. At the moment, she's only gotten through the introductory material and one critical essay, but there's already some interesting discussion in comments.
I've got a little too much on my plate to read along with her (also, she reads a whole lot faster than I do), but if you think this might be interesting, there's a handy index page where updates will be posted as they appear.