Books
drorzel | July 2, 2009Just a reminder, if you're someone who's eligible to vote for this year's Hugo Awards, the deadline to do so is tomorrow. Of course, you probably already know that-- they sent out reminder emails last night. They want me to vote so badly, in fact, that I got four reminder emails last night, two with my own member number and voting PIN, and two with somebody else's...
I sent my vote in this morning. Once again, this was a year in which there was a huge gap between the category winners and the next-best nominees. It was awkwardly large, in fact-- not quite big enough to put "No Award" second,…
drorzel | July 1, 2009The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I'm not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an online reading group.
I've been reading a bunch of the commentary that's already been posted (see here for an early round-up, and here for the thoughts of a bunch of political bloggers), and I have to admit, I find a lot of it baffling. There's a lot of hating on the footnotes, and while I will admit…
drorzel | June 29, 2009While I've seen him on tv a bunch of times (both on NOVA and on the Comedy Central fake-news shows), I have somehow managed not to read anything by Neil deGrasse Tyson before. I'm not sure how that happened. After his appearance on The Daily show last year, and especially after the Rubik's Cube thing the next day, I figured I needed to read something of his, so I picked up a copy of Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. Kate actually got to it before me (I was working on my own book, and didn't have much time for reading other people's non-fiction), but it's been serving as bedtime…
drorzel | June 28, 2009One of the fun thing about being at home for a weekend is that I get to see a close-up view of the death of the American newspaper. When I was a kid, Binghamton had two daily papers, the Sun-Bulletin and the Evening Press, published in the morning and evening, respectively (bet you couldn't've guessed that). They merged into the Press and Sun-Bulletin in the early 80's, and ave been declining ever since. These days, it takes about fifteen minutes to read the whole thing cover to cover. Twenty on Sunday.
Today's edition, though, includes a story on self-publishing, which is a sad reminder that…
drorzel | June 25, 2009Just a quick reminder post to note that you can win an advance proof copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in one of two ways:
By captioning pictures of the dog with physics apparatus
By writing short poems about dogs and physics
Regarding the last one, I'm thinking of adding a second poetry prize for "Best poem by somebody who isn't the Cuttlefish." So if you've been intimidated by squidly verse, don't be...
Entries for both contests are open through this Sunday, June 28th.
drorzel | June 25, 2009I've been reading a bunch of posts at Infinite summer lately, where they're planning to spend the summer (re)reading David Foster Wallaces most magnum of opuses, Infinite Jest. In a development that surely nobody could see coming, I've decided to spend some of my infinite (hah) free time re-reading it myself.
If you're not familiar with the book, this is not a trivial undertaking. The main text is some thing like 1000 pages, with an additional hundred-odd endnotes. Many of those endnotes are just names of drugs (this makes sense within the book), but a fair number of them contain information…
drorzel | June 23, 2009Kate's Tolkien re-read has reached Rohan, and her latest re-read post includes a reference to a comment I made about Legolas's improbable visual acuity:
Re: Legolas seeing the Riders: I have since been advised by the resident physicist that the size of a pupil is a limiting factor on the resolution possible--if I understood properly, basically it boils down to how much light can come in--and under the laws of physics as we know them, it is not actually physically possible for Legolas to have resolved that level of detail at 5 leagues, regardless of how good his brain is at decoding images or…
drorzel | June 22, 2009
There once was a dog from Niskayuna...
The previous post announced a photo caption contest for a chance to win an advance proof copy of my book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, six(-ish) months before it's available for purchase. I thought I should include something for the less visually inclined, though, and I do have two extra galley proofs, so...
Announcing the Official How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Poetry contest. The idea is simple: write a short poem involving both dogs and physics in one of the usual short verse forms (haiku, limerick, double dactyl, whatever, as long as it has…
drorzel | June 22, 2009
Today is six months to the day from the official release date of my book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It feels like I ought to do something promotion-like to mark this date, and I have a couple of extra bound galley proofs (seen above with Emmy), sooo.....
I hereby announce the first of two contests giving you, the blog reader, a chance to win an uncorrected galley proof copy of the book six months (ish) before you can buy it. The idea is simple: below the fold are two pictures that just cry out for amusing captions of some sort. The person who comes up with the best caption will get…
drorzel | June 22, 2009In a comment to Friday's classical music post, Chris Evo recommended a TED talk by Benjamin Zander that has the goal of convincing his audience that they love classical music:
If you're not able or inclined to watch it, he goes through a Chopin piano piece in detail, and explains how it plays off our expectation of a particular chord sequence. He's a charismatic guy, and it's a great presentation.
It does not, however, convince me that I love classical music.
This isn't a problem that's limited to music, of course. As a general matter, a lot of people confuse lack of enjoyment with lack of…
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 | June 19, 2009Tom Levenson's series about the writing of his Newton and the Counterfeiter continues with a piece on the getting of blurbs for the cover:
Newton and the Counterfeiter (Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound) is by far my best-blurbed book, boasting enthusiastic and generous praise from a very diverse crew of luminaries — (David Bodanis, Junot DÃaz, Timothy Ferris, Brian Greene, Walter Isaacson, Sylvia Nasar, and Neal Stephenson).
This follows, as I wrote last time, a much sparser field of those who promoted my three previous books. How — and why — did I go for this level of long-…
drorzel | June 17, 2009Over at Tor.com, they've unveiled the new Tor.com store, enabling you to buy your books via your favorite SF publisher. It's pretty bare-bones at the moment, so the most worthwhile feature is probably the special picks feature, where they collect together lists of books recommended by their most popular bloggers. Such as, for example, Kate's Lord of the Rings related recommendation list.
In a similar vein, something I only noticed today (via an ad on my own blog) that may have been around for a while is the Seed store, collecting all the books reviewed by the Corporate Masters over the past…
drorzel | June 16, 2009Female Science Professor is revisiting an old topic, namely, the academic novel:
I was thinking about the general topic of academic novels because I was looking for some books to read and was looking through the lists in the links above. And then I wondered: Why do I want to read an academic novel during the summer? Why do I want to read an academic novel at all? What is it that I like about (some of) them?
This seems like a good opportunity to both have a discussion and do some science. There are three steps to the experiment:
Leave a comment here saying what your favorite academic novel is…
drorzel | June 12, 2009Tom Levenson has another post up in his ongoing series about the writing and publishing process of his new book, this one about generating publicity. At this point, he's gone past what I've experienced so far, but this is fortuitously timed, as I got a note from my editor yesterday saying that the bound galleys are in. Woo-hoo!
There will be pictures and so on when I get my copies (probably next week). This seems kind of early-- the book itself won't be out for another six months-- but I assume that the folks at Scribner know what they're doing. Anyway, I eagerly await Tom's next installment…
drorzel | June 11, 2009A little while ago, I griped about the Short Story nominees for this year's Hugo Awards. I've now finished the nominees in the Novella and Novelette categories, so I thought I'd comment on them as well.
As a general matter, I'd just about be willing to contribute money toward a fund to buy supporting memberships for fans who can't generally afford Worldcon, in hopes of getting fewer nominees that suck. Seriously. It only takes 20-ish nominations to get a story on the ballot in one of the short fiction categories, and this would be a worthy project if it meant not having to read another…
drorzel | June 8, 2009Two things that are worth a plug beyond the Links Dump level:
1) Over at the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum wants you to look at pictures of people kissing. This is for Science, so stop giggling, and tell her what you think of the pictures.
2) There's a new blog, Ecocomics, dedicated to exploring the burning questions of how the principles of economics play out in superhero comics. This is both more and less silly than that description makes it sound. If you'd like a participatory entry to parallel Sheril's kissing survey, they're asking readers who's the richest character in comics.
drorzel | June 4, 2009Tom Levenson has another excellent piece in his series on the writing of his forthcoming book on Newton, this one on hitting a wall:
The one bit of history specific to the Newton and the Counterfeiter project came when I hit a wall. I had written about a quarter of the manuscript by the autumn of 2006 - I'd even submitted a chunk of it to the departmental committee pondering my tenure case, which is as those of you in the academy will know, something of a fraught moment.
But as I tried to make the turn out of what was in essence back-story, my account of Newton's life up to the point of his…
drorzel | June 4, 2009When this first came out, I didn't pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn't really think I'd be interested in reading a whole book on the subject.
I saw Jennifer and Diandra on Bloggingheads a little while back, and she made it sound pretty interesting. And then I saw that she was giving a public lecture at DAMOP, and figured it would be good for airplane reading on the way down and back.
The Preface gives a nice description of how she came to write the book:…
drorzel | June 2, 2009I'm eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, as a paid-up member of Anticipation. As such, I got the free packet of nominated works that they put together for the voters, and have started working my way through the short fiction (I've read all the novel nominees that I'm going to). Whether you're eligible to vote or not, you can get links to most of the nominated works here.
I've only read the Short Story nominees so far, and I have to say, I would vote for "No Award" five times if it was a choice between that and "Article of Faith" winning. I really could've sworn that this vein of crap was…