Krank & Crankier

posted by Tim Walters @ 9:36 PM

Finished Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos on Sunday. Greene wants to have a breezy style, but doesn't quite pull it off--he uses the Simpsons in most of his examples for no very good reason, and is forever putting really important words in italics, sometimes with exclamation points! That said, there's a lot of good info here, and I feel much more up-to-date on my physics now. Count on me dropping mention of the "Higgs boson" into casual conversation.

Stayed home sick as the proverbial hound yesterday, and read Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett and State Of The Art by Iain M. Banks in between naps. Pratchett, like Wodehouse, is always the same, but always delivers the yuks. Most of non-Culture stories in the Banks collection are fairly slight, but by no means unpleasant, and while I don't think the Culture stories are quite up to the level of his novels--Banks is nothing if not a wide-canvas man--they're certainly worthwhile addenda. Both deal with Culture citizens who have dropped out to live with barbarians (i.e. us), something we don't really see in the novels.