Booklog
drorzel | November 26, 2006I've been woefully behind on the booklog for a long, long time now, but we'll take a lazy post-Thanksgiving Sunday morning to catch up on a few of the more notable books in the backlog. These comments won't be in any particular order, and, in fact, will start with the most recently read of the lot, Schrödinger's Ball by Adam Felber.
The cover of this one has a certain chick-lit look, at least from a distance, but I picked it up anyway, for a number of reasons. For one thing, the title does tend to catch the eye, if you're a physicist. I also recognized the name "Adam Felber" from blogdom. And…
drorzel | October 10, 2006Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics is probably the hot physics book of the year. Granted, that's not saying very much, relative to whatever Oprah's reading this week, but it's led to no end of discussion among physics types. And also, frequently, the spectacle of people with Ph.D.'s squabbling like children, so reviewing it is a subject that I approach with some trepidation.
I'm coming to this late enough that it's hard to talk about the book without also talking about the various responses to the book. I'll do my best to split that material off into a separate post (if I post it at all),…
drorzel | September 30, 2006The Onion's AV Club review of Chuck Klosterman's Chuck Klosterman IV came across my RSS feeds the other day, and reminded me that I haven't actually booklogged it. That's a glaring omission, as a quote from it was the basis for the third most viewed post on this weblog to date.
The book is subtitled "A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas." The "Dangerous Ideas" part has already been covered in the problematic quote bit above, said ideas showing up here in the form of fourteen essays originally for various magazines (with cute/ clever little "hyoptheticals" as introductions for each…
drorzel | September 24, 2006When Brandon Sanderson's debut novel, Elantris first appeared on store shelves, I was tempted to buy it. It had a lot of things going for it: good review quotes, a striking cover, an interesting description, and it's published by Tor, who are usually pretty reliable. I couldn't quite figure out, though, whether it was the first book in a series or not, and I'd really rather not commit to another long fantasy series if it can be avoided.
The paperback edition helpfully addresses this in the back cover copy:
"Elantris delightfully proves that a great complete fantasy story can still be told in…
drorzel | September 20, 2006Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a "you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut" sort of way. Obviously, she hasn't read The Republican War on Science, or she'd understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically endorsed John Kerry in 2004.
(Full comments below the fold.)
I didn't read this book when it first came out because I'm a scientist and I follow the news, and I figured I already knew the story. Why buy a book to make myself depressed? I generally buy books to make…
drorzel | September 16, 2006Scott Westerfeld's new YA novel The Last Days is a sequel to his earlier Peeps, so technically, it's a book about teenage vampires. Only really it's a book about a bunch of misfit kids forming a band and trying to make it big. While the Vampire Apocalypse happens around them.
In Peeps, we learn of the existence of a parasite that infects humans, and gives them vampire-like abilities (strength, speed, heightened senses) and some of the drawbacks of classic vampirism (things they used to love become anathema to them). The story there alternates with sections describing the actions of freaky…
drorzel | September 16, 2006The booklog post on Scott Westerfeld's The Last Days got to be long enough that I wanted to split it just to keep it from eating the front page. Which would sort of preclude using the extended entry field for spoiler protetction, so here's the stuff with the spoilers. Don't read the rest of this before you read the book.
As I said in the non-spoiler review, one of the strongest points of this book is the character voices. There are lots of nice little touches in there, like the way Zahler isn't as dim as the others think, or the fact that Moz is making the money to pay alana Ray by playing…
drorzel | September 12, 2006The two most talked-about books in physics this year are probably a pair of anti-sting-theory books, Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, which shares a name with Jacques Distler's favorite weblog. I got review copies of both, but Not Even Wrong arrived first (thanks, Peter), and gets to be the first one reviewed.
Of course, I'm coming to the game kind of late, as lots of other high-profile physics bloggers have already posted their reviews, and various magazine reviews have been out for months. Peter has collected a bunch of links in various posts. I don't…
drorzel | September 5, 2006The passing of Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin in a freak accident while diving with stingrays (and not while sticking his thumb of the butt of some exotic and venomous creature) has made a big splash in blogdom. I was never a fan of his shows, so I don't have anything specific to say about him, but he seems to have been very good at getting people interested in rare and interesting wildlife, and it's always sad to lose someone like that.
As a tribute of sorts, I'll bump Douglas Adams's wildlife book Last Chance to See up in the booklog queue. The concept here was vaguely similar, though not…
drorzel | September 4, 2006Speaking of "Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions," some time back, I read Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, but never got around to booklogging it. In many ways, it's similar to the Asher book, though, so I might as well take care of it today.
This is the first of a series of books following the exploits of Takeshi Kovacs, who may or may not be a UN Special Envoy (it's a little unclear to me what his exact status is). He's an unpleasant fellow with a lot of blood on his hands, who has been hired to investigate a murder.
Of course, as in any private-eye novel, things quickly turn out…
drorzel | September 4, 2006Neal Asher is one of those authors who's big in the UK, but not so much in the US. He gets talked about a fair bit, but it's only fairly recently that I've started seeing his stuff in stores here. He's been on the list of authors I mean to check out for a while, and I finally got around to picking up Gridlinked, which was the earliest book they had of the loosely connected Polity series.
The capsule review is "Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions." This book offers pretty much all the special-effects sequences you would expect from a Culture novel, with none of the literary games.
Ian…
drorzel | August 29, 2006Tim Powers is one of those authors who has carved out a niche for himself telling a particular type of story, sort of like Guy Gavriel Kay with his pseudo-historical fantasy novels. In Powers's case, the niche might be summarized as "supernatural secret history." His best novels are set in something that's more or less the real world, but with a twist. There are ghosts and spirits and poorly-understood magic in the world, and famous scientists and inventors and politicians turn out to be deeply involved in the supernatural underground.
His latest, Three Days to Never fits right in with…
drorzel | August 22, 2006Opinions differ about Vernor Vinge's latest book, Rainbows End (the apostrophe was intentionally left blank), and mostly seem to be correlated with how people approached the book. For example, Mike Kozlowski approached it from the standpoint that it's a new Vinge book, and thus expected to be as good as A Deepness in the Sky, and found it "disappointingly okay".
I, on the other handed, looked at the jacket copy and said "It's a Singularity book, it'll probably suck," and was quite pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed this quite a bit, actually, and it might be the best Singularity book I've read…
drorzel | August 16, 2006Sarah Monette, aka truepenny is somebody that Kate knows from LiveJournal, so when her first novel, Melusine was published, Kate bought it right away. Weirdly, though, I got around to reading it before she did (thanks to positive reviews of the sequel in Locus, and in spite of the dreadful cover), and then went directly on to the recently-released sequel, The Virtu. Thus, the combined booklog entry.
Melusine is a major city in a fantasy world, of the sort parodied by Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork, full of run-down neighborhoods, crime, and riff-raff, and ruled by an elite group of wizards in the…
drorzel | August 14, 2006When I switched over the ScienceBlogs, I did so intending to keep my booklog separate. In the last several months, though, the book log has been languishing, in large part because I feel obliged to keep up the quantity and quality of the posts here. Which means that I end up not writing booklog entries because that would take time away from writing ScienceBlogs posts, and I don't have time to do both.
So, I'm going to face facts, and just move the booklog posts over here. This also offers the advantage of allowing spoiler cuts (the current set-up for the book log does not), which is nice. So…